Yesterday we explained how it is the case that the Clintons’ own the State Department and the Justice Department.

They also, it seems, own about half the population of the US.

Put them back in the White House and they will own all the government  agencies  – already corrupted by Obama – and the whole country.

The way Putin owns Russia.

The way the Castros own Cuba.

The way Maduro owns Venezuela.

We hear pundits  on TV saying that after four years, or after eight years, a Republican president could be elected who would … whatever.

No. The Democratic Party is out to destroy Republicanism forever. If there are elections ever again they will be of candidates from the same – the Democratic – party. Saying anything in support of Republicanism will be deemed hate speech. And the First  Amendment will be amended by a Democrat-packed Supreme Court to EXCEPT “hate speech”. Speaking against man-made global warming, or  Islam, or the Clintons will land you in prison, just as speaking against anything EU officials don’t want you to speak against, such as themselves, or Islam, can land Europeans in prison now.

America will abandon the magnificent concept on which it was founded: the idea of liberty. It is reverting to an old-world pattern of control, not by law but by tyrants – the Clintons and their chosen successors .

It’s a reversion to intolerance. There will be Courts of Inquisition to punish heresy, and the punishments will become more severe as time goes on.

We hear pundits say that historians “in 20, 30, 40 years time” will have access to documents now kept from the public, and the sins of the Clintons and the whole Obama gang will be revealed as criminal.

No. The Clintons will see to it that all such records are permanently destroyed. There will be no more objective historians. Maybe in an aeon or two, archeologists will dig up evidence of a once-free America, find a buried copy of the Constitution,  and wonder why the 21st century population discarded it, and abandoned the best system ever devised for human happiness and progress.

There will be no more innovation; no more discovery; no more true science; nothing that has not been authorized by the dear leaders.

Everyone – except the dear leaders and their henchmen – will be poorer. Much poorer. There will be shortages of necessary goods. Even actual famine. As in Venezuela now.

Very possibly, soon after the Clintons, will come the dictatorship by the Muslim Brotherhood. They will buy the country from the Clintons for a sum greater than the present national debt. And the Clintons will happily sell. Even if they have also to convert to Islam.

Will Hillary have to wear a burkha over the pantsuit? No. The Clintons will never suffer any unpleasant consequences of their life in crime.

They are the greatest criminal duo of all time.

And they’ll be happy to share America with its enemies, both at home and abroad. Because while the Clintons will own America, various foreign tyrannies will own them.

We are not alone in predicting this.

Here’s a mild expression of the same foresight from Fox News:

BILL HEMMER: Did the Clinton Foundation on behalf of Bill Clinton use connections to the State Department under Hillary Clinton to gain favor? Yes or no.

LARRY KLAYMAN (founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch): Absolutely, I mean this is a modus operandi of Mrs. Clinton and Bill Clinton. On Tuesday, Judicial Watch released emails that appear to show Clinton Foundation donors had influenced Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state. The danger is our government is for sale. The danger is these individuals who made contributions to the Clinton Foundation own the Clintons. They will call in the favors if she is president of the United States – as they did in the 90’s when the Chinese were involved with the Clintons. They helped finance their campaign for reelection. This is nothing new. The Clintons are perhaps the most corrupt couple – I call them the Bonnie and Clyde of American politics – ever to have occupied the White House and now they want to do it again. The United States is at great risk.

If the Clintons gain the White House in November, the United States, as it has been from its inception until very recently, is lost and gone.

It is bad that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is corrupt. It is worse that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is corrupt. But worst of all is the corruption of the Department of Justice.

When the government agency in charge of seeing that the rule of law is enforced gives up that responsibility, and takes upon itself instead to protect law-breakers and assist corruption, the rule of law is at an end.

Under the Obama administration, that is what has happened. The Department of Justice, first headed by Eric Holder who made it his solemn duty to protect black law-breakers, and subsequently by Loretta Lynch who is manifestly the obedient servant of the corrupt Clintons, is now nothing but a tool of the Democratic Party dictatorship.

Mike Adams, who sadly expects Crooked Hillary Clinton to be the next president of the United States but hopes that she might be impeached, writes at Townhall:

[Hillary] Clinton is guilty of more serious crimes than those of her husband prior to his impeachment. Next year she will have been placed in office by accepting a series of bribes – some of which have been funneled through her private “charitable” foundation and illegally used to fund her campaign for the presidency. If that is not an impeachable offense then no offense is impeachable.

None of this should come as a surprise. The Clintons began accepting bribes from corporations long before Bill even got out of office. In May of 1999, bankruptcy attorney William Brandt gave $1 million to the Clinton Presidential Library. Three months later, the Clinton Justice Department dropped charges against him for lying under oath about illegal lobbying of federal officials. The same year Anheuser-Busch kicked in $1 million after the Clinton administration dropped a bid to regulate beer advertisements aimed at minors.

It only got worse the following year when Denise Rich paid three bribes to the Clintons in exchange for the pardon of her husband Marc Rich. One bribe was $100,000 to Hillary’s 2000 Senate campaign. Another was $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library. A final bribe was for $1 million to the Democratic Party. Rich was pardoned on Clinton’s last day in office.

Things have only gotten worse since Hillary became the Secretary of State. The Clinton Foundation has been collecting money from foreign-owned businesses …  The foundation has also failed to disclose millions of dollars of gifts (bribes) from foreign entities seeking Hillary’s help to approve of transactions with serious national security implications. Speaking of serious national security implications, it is interesting to observe the change in policy toward India since Bill left office in 2001. India had never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and was hit with sanctions for refusing to do so. India attempted to have those sanctions lifted by having Indian entities with a direct financial interest in lifting the sanctions pay Bill Clinton large speaking fees. Indians who could legally do so also made donations to Hillary’s senate and presidential campaigns. Additionally, millions were poured directly into the Clinton Foundation. After the bribes were deposited, Bill and Hillary went to work lifting the sanctions that Bill had imposed as president.

The activities of the Clinton Foundation deserve heightened scrutiny because foreign governments cannot contribute to American political campaigns. But they can donate to a “charity” like the foundation. They are also allowed to pay exorbitant fees for speeches. Americans of all political persuasions should be troubled by the fact that corporations benefiting from State Department actions while Hillary was Secretary of State have funded Clinton speeches. Notably, affiliates of companies funding Clinton speeches have been the direct recipients of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars. Predictably, the Clintons never disclosed any of the obvious conflicts of interests.

After the initial years following Bill Clinton’s presidency, his income from speeches started to dwindle. Then, when Hillary became Secretary of State in 2009 his high-paying overseas speeches suddenly started to increase in frequency. Of the thirteen speeches Bill Clinton has given for over half a million dollars, eleven occurred when his wife was Secretary of State.

Nigeria, which is one of the most corrupt nations on the planet, has been one of the biggest moneymakers for Bill Clinton. In his first eight years out of office, Bill never spoke in Nigeria. After Hillary became Secretary of State, Bill pulled in two of his top three speeches ever ($700,000 each) speaking in Nigeria.

Despite its record of corruption, Hillary granted Nigeria a waiver so it could continue to receive US assistance.  This is despite the fact that in 2006 $1 million from a poverty alleviation fund was funneled into an organization run by Nduka Obaigbena in order to bring Beyonce to Nigeria. Obaigbena is also the alleged underwriter of Bill Clinton’s $700,000 speeches.

Clinton benefactor Gilbert Chagoury has been implicated in numerous bribery and corruption schemes in Nigeria. He has built a financial empire with the help of Sani Abacha, a Nigerian dictator whose time in office was known for brutality, bribery, and corruption. Abacha is also tied to Mark Rich who helped obtain oil assets in Nigeria and sell them for the benefit of General Abacha. During the same time frame, Abacha funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign assistance into European bank accounts.

Chagoury also funneled money into the 1996 Clinton reelection campaign and to the Democratic National Committee. He donated nearly half a million dollars to a voter registration group tied to the DNC. Even the Washington Post had the good sense to recognize that it was done to curry favor with the Clinton administration on behalf of the Abacha dictatorship.

In 2000, Chagoury was convicted in Switzerland of money laundering and of “aiding a criminal organization in connection with billions of dollars stolen from Nigeria”. Since his conviction he has donated millions to the Clinton Foundation. In 2009, after Hillary became Secretary of State, he pledged a whopping billion dollars to the Clintons

Every story of the Clintons’ corruption – of which there are many, though none can ever be complete – requires a mention of their hypocrisy. 

Mike Adam duly recalls:

In December of 2009, Hillary Clinton gave a speech as a part of “International Anti-Corruption Day”, in which she praised the work of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in combatting bribery. In fact, she would go on to chair the group two years later. This is the same woman who began her political career with a controversy over turning a $1000 investment in cattle futures into $100,000. Throughout her career, the biggest payments into her coffers have not come from countries like England and Germany. They have flowed from nations rife with corruption and bribery. Nonetheless, in 2012 Hillary stated that fighting corruption is an “integral part of national security” adding that “our credibility depends on practicing what we preach”. She even said that bribery is “morally wrong – and far too common”. 

Indeed. Screwing your country with bribes is far more serious than screwing your intern with cigars. Let the [impeachment] proceedings begin.

But they won’t begin, of course. Even if the Republicans retain their majorities in the House and the Senate, it is very unlikely that they will dare to impeach Hillary Clinton. 

Why? Because everyone accepts now that the Clintons are above the law.  

And the Department of Justice is owned by them.

Matthew Vadum writes at Front Page:

The highly politicized Department of Justice swatted down pesky FBI requests to investigate the Clinton Foundation earlier this year, CNN reported yesterday.

CNN buried the lede, as it frequently does on news stories that make Democrats look bad. The online version bears the innocuous-sounding headline, “Newly released Clinton emails shed light on relationship between State Dept. and Clinton Foundation.”

It is not until the 25^th paragraph that the article states that an unidentified law enforcement official gave CNN a heads-up earlier this year. As the probe of Clinton’s private email servers was ramping up “several FBI field offices approached the Justice Department asking to open a case regarding the relationship between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation”. 

At that time, the article continues, the Justice Department “declined because it had looked into allegations surrounding the Clinton Foundation around a year earlier and found there wasn’t sufficient evidence to open a case”.

Not even enough evidence to look into the foundation’s affairs?

Not more than a year after the publication of Peter Schweizer’s blockbuster book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, opened the floodgates for investigative reporters to dig into the matter. …

Lawyers have told me there is already a strong legal case against Mrs. Clinton. The fact that she destroyed email evidence – evidence subject to a congressional subpoena, no less — is already evidence in itself that she obstructed justice through spoliation of evidence. Spoliation means you can take as evidence the fact that evidence has been destroyed. Courts are entitled to draw spoliation inferences and convict an accused person on that basis alone.

The only reason FBI Director James Comey didn’t recommend she be prosecuted is because, well, he lacks a spine and he’s corrupt. He said there was no evidence of Clinton’s “efforts to obstruct justice”,  a requirement that does not actually appear in the Espionage Act.

Evidence of corruption at the Clinton Foundation is everywhere, yet CNN and much of the mainstream media are still doing everything they can to ignore, misrepresent, or downplay the questionable things Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton did through the foundation.

The congenitally corrupt Clintons created their private email system to frustrate Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requesters, shield Hillary’s correspondence from congressional oversight, and steer money to their corrupt foundation, which, amazingly enough, still enjoys tax-exempt status.

These illegal, insecure private email servers Clinton used while at the State Department are at the heart of the scandal over her mishandling of an Islamic terrorist attack in militant-infested Benghazi, Libya on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 that left four Americans, including U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens, dead. Even now, four years after the assault, the Obama administration has failed to provide an autopsy report about Stevens who was initially reported to have been ritualistically sodomized before being murdered by Muslim terrorists.

Every few days Judicial Watch has been releasing emails obtained under FoIA that may ultimately lead to evidence of political interference at the highest levels that provided cover for the anticipatory presidential bribe processing vehicle known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. …

May lead to … ? No. As long as there is a Democrat in the White House there will be no prosecution of the Clintons.

But Hillary Clinton is intent on finding cause to prosecute Trump “for corruption”!

A high-profile watchdog group controlled by Hillary Clinton ally David Brock is demanding the IRS investigate Donald Trump’s personal foundation for allegedly aiding his presidential campaign.

The call by CREW, or Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, has to be the most obvious political hit job of this election cycle.

CREW is a member of what some in the conservative think tank community call the “Brocktopus”, that is, the network of groups the disgraced former journalist runs, which spends oodles of money defending all things Clinton. An admitted serial liar, Brock’s empire of sleaze also includes “conservative misinformation” watchdog Media Matters for America, pro-Hillary disaster-control spin site Correct the Record, and American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC that promotes Hillary and attacks her critics.

CREW executive director Noah Bookbinder asked the IRS to investigate the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a tiny nonprofit founded by Trump decades ago to give away profits from his book, The Art of the Deal.

How the foundation, which ranked 4,347th in the FoundationSearch “Top Foundations by Assets for the state of New York” list would help the Trump campaign isn’t clear. “The Trump Foundation has no full-time staff, and gave away just $591,000 in 2014 — the last year for which records are available,” the Washington Post reports. …

Even if the IRS takes up this piddling little case not much is likely to come of it. It’s a political stunt by CREW, a nakedly partisan group under the boot of one of Hillary’s biggest backers.

It’s the wheeling and dealing Clinton Foundation with its involvement in billion-dollar transactions, its ties to shady figures, and the debt it owes to the unsavory governments of countries around the world that needs to be properly and thoroughly examined.

But as it won’t be examined, because (we repeat) the misnamed Department of Justice is owned by the Clintons –

Should those of us give up hope, who –

• Want to live under the rule of law, with nobody being above it?
• Value, above all else, individual freedom protected by the law?
• Want government to be the servant, not the master, of the people?

If Hillary Clinton is elected to the presidency, then the answer to that question is YES.

Two people, Miriam Shaded and Leszek Samborski, discuss what to do to save Poland – and Europe – from Islamization.

They both see the necessity of dealing vigorously with a great evil. The woman talks the better sense.

(Click on the cc for the English translation)

… that still stinks like diarrhea.

Mark Steyn expostulates about the Clinton Foundation.

Right on the nail as always, Pat Condell blames Europe’s ruling politicians, and above all Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, for turning Europe into a battlefield of jihad. He sees all-out war coming. We do too. He reminds the indigenous peoples of the continent that they still have the power to save their countries by voting those politicians out. Just as the British people voted to take their country out of the corrupt tyranny called the European Union.

Americans also need to heed his message. In this context, Hillary Clinton is the potential Angela Merkel of the the United States. She has announced that she wants a 500 percent increase in the number of Muslim “refugees” coming into America from the Middle East. She must not be given the power to do to America what Merkel has done to Europe.

Wikileaks has leaked another scandalous revelation about Hillary Clinton, which she will shrug off. And the mainstream media will probably make light of it or entirely ignore it.

The Free Thought Project reports:

Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, claimed during the Democratic National Convention (DNC) that, “We have more material related to the Hillary Clinton campaign.”

Staying true to their word, WikiLeaks … dropped another bomb on the Clinton campaign – one so damaging it will almost surely be ignored by the mainstream media.

The latest revelation by the whistleblower organization reveals Hillary Clinton was a director of, and received over $100,000 from, French industrial giant Lafarge, which was recently exposed as secretly sponsoring the Islamic State for profit. These latest revelations expose the deep relationship between Hillary Clinton and Lafarge — a company proven to be working with and funding ISIS. …

Documents obtained by several journalistic investigations reveal that Lafarge has paid taxes to the terror group to operate its cement plant in Syria, and even bought Isis oil for years…

Lafarge also has close ties to Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton … [The company was] a regular donor to the Clinton Foundation.

During her connection to Lafarge, the firm was implicated in facilitating a CIA-backed covert arms export network to Saddam Hussein.

Among its earliest benefactors was former First Lady and current presidential hopeful, Hillary Clinton. From 1990 to 1992, Clinton served on Lafarge’s Board of Directors. Under her tenure, Lafarge’s Ohio subsidiary was caught burning hazardous waste to fuel cement plants. Clinton defended the decision at the time.

Then just before her husband, Bill Clinton, was elected president in 1992, Lafarge was fined $1.8 million by the Environmental Protection Agency for these pollution violations. Hillary Clinton had left the board of Lafarge in spring, just after her husband won the Democrat nomination. A year later, under Bill’s presidency, the Clinton administration reduced Lafarge’s EPA fine to less than $600,000.

This type of quid-pro-quo is found to be common throughout the whole of the political apparatus in the U.S. However, it has become a specialty of the Clintons, a la the Clinton Foundation/State Department pay for play schemes …

In the late 1980s … Hillary Clinton was connected to Lafarge when the firm was involved in facilitating CIA support for Saddam Hussein’s secret weapons program.

The American Spectator report from November 1996 cited sources confirming that Hillary Clinton did legal work for Lafarge in the late 1980s before she became a director. The report also claimed that Lafarge’s US subsidiary:

… provided key services for the covert arms export network that supplied Saddam Hussein. To prevent exposure of that secret supply line, and collateral damage to Hillary Clinton – who joined Lafarge board in 1990, just as the arms pipeline was being shut down … the Justice Department was told to bury the investigation … But investigators from other US government agencies who worked on the case say they were “waved of”’ whenever they got too close to exposing the direct involvement of the intelligence community in the arms export scheme.

Lafarge remains close to the Clintons to this day. In 2013, Lafarge’s Executive Vice President for Operations, Eric Olson, was a ‘featured attendee’ at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting.

The company is a regular donor to the Clinton Foundation – the firm’s up to $100,000 donation was listed in its annual donor list for 2015. Lafarge is also listed again as a donor to the Clinton Foundation for the first quarter of 2016. 

Lafarge “pays taxes” to ISIS, and buys oil from ISIS. It donates large sums to the Clintons. Whichever way you turn it, Hillary Clinton is at present the beneficiary of Lafarge’s dealings with ISIS.

[Hat-tip Thierry Dudreuilh]

The Democrats want felons to have the vote because they’re sure that criminal types will vote for them.

What that says about their party, they don’t seem to care.

They want to import jihadis because they too will vote Democratic. Until, that is, they take over the government of the country one day. But that can never happen as long as someone as experienced and qualified and skilled as, say, Hillary Clinton heads the executive branch. So they believe.

Jihadis? Actual, potential and would-be jihadis, yes.

This is from PowerLine, by Scott Johnson:

Minnesota’s large and ever increasing Somali population is the ultimate protected minority in our left-wing utopia. The Somalis are black. The Somalis are Muslim. The Somalis vote Democratic. Enough said.

This past fall Governor Mark Dayton instructed “white, B-plus, Minnesota-born citizens” to suppress their qualms about immigrant resettlement in Minnesota. If they can’t, they should “find another state”, he advised. …

The Somalis may be retrograde in their treatment of women and their related attitudes toward them. They may not share the liberal faith in homosexuality and abortion. They may have problematic enthusiasms in other respects. But we generally agree not to look too closely, or to avert our eyes.

We don’t even have a handle on how large the community is. The official estimate (there is no official number) is something like 40,000, but the United States Attorney’s Office here used an estimate of 100,000 in its formal written agreement with Somali Community leaders to undertake the so-called Building Community Resilience program. …

In Minneapolis the Somali community has become a coveted voting bloc. When I sat down with (Republican) Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek for an interview late last year, Stanek bristled when I asked him about security issues raised by the Somali community. Why was I doing that? I referred to the House report recognizing Minnesota’s contribution of 26 percent of the American fighters joining ISIS. “I just came from an FBI briefing this morning,” Stanek said. “They told me we’re 20 percent.”

Not too bad, then?

I was referring to the September report of the House Homeland Security Committee task force on combating terrorist and foreign fighter travel. According to the report, Minnesota leads the country in contributing foreign fighters to ISIS. Reviewing the public cases of 58 Americans who had joined or attempted to join ISIS, the task force found that 26 percent of them came from Minnesota. When it comes to exports to ISIS and ISIS wannabes, we’re number one.

This is not a recent development. The Somali community has required the intense scrutiny of law enforcement for the past 10 years. The Department of Justice acknowledges that since 2006, “overseas terror organizations” have targeted Twin Cities residents to join al Shabaab (an al Qaeda-allied group in Somalia) and ISIS. Over nearly ten years ending in 2015, the FBI’s Operation Rhino targeted al Shabaab recruiting in Minnesota and resulted in the indictment of some 20 individuals.

Since 2013, according to the Department of Justice, ISIS has targeted “Twin Cities residents” (i.e., Somalis). The Minneapolis division of the FBI and local law enforcement authorities devote substantial resources to deterring and interrupting the recruitment of Minnesota Somalis.

In a presentation to Minnesota’s National Security Society that I attended in November, FBI Minneapolis chief division counsel Kyle Loven conveyed the impression that his office is devoting substantial resources to terrorism-related issues. “We have four national security squads working this thing,” he said.

One could see just about every element of the issue raised by the continuing Somali influx to Minnesota in the terrorism trial that concluded on June 3 with convictions against the three defendants contesting charges against them. …

Donald Trump has noticed the Somalis of Minnesota.

On Friday Donald Trump took up the case of the Somali influx (to both Minnesota and Maine) on the campaign trail. The Star Tribune’s Mila Koumpilova rises to the defense of the Somali community in the supposed news article “Trump’s comments about Minnesota Somalis met with outrage, satisfaction.” …

Follow the link and read the article, here. It is a chilling example of the Left’s deliberate blindness to the Islamic threat that is now the chief problem of our time.

Trump referred to the security threat raised by the Minnesota’s Somali community. Here Koumpilova wasn’t entirely sure what Trump was talking about: “Trump appeared to be alluding to the recent convictions of nine young Somali-Americans in what the FBI described as a plot to leave the country and join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in Syria.”

Could be!

As far as the Obama administration is concerned, there is no “security threat” raised by the Minnesota’s Somali community. They are the most trustworthy, loyal, patriotic Americans you could find anywhere. So much so, they can be entrusted with knowing how security is ensured at an international airport. 

They must be so trusted to prevent their feelings being hurt, you see?

Judicial Watch reports:

The Obama administration gave Somali Muslims behind-the-scenes tours at a major U.S. airportafter the group complained to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson about feeling harassed and profiled, government records obtained by Judicial Watch reveal.

The special security tours not offered to any other group occurred at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport after Department of Homeland Security (DHS) roundtable meetings with local Somali leaders to obtain feedback for “modifications to practices that would allow for operations to be more culturally sensitive”. 

On at least two occasions — December 18, 2014 and February 18, 2015 — federal authorities granted the unprecedented excursions of the facility’s sterile and secure areas, according to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) records obtained by Judicial Watch.

The DHS agency that conducted the expeditions, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), provided the Muslim participants with “an in-depth, on-site tour and discussion of CBP’s airport, including both inbound and outbound passenger processing”, the TSA files state. Besides multiple roundtable meetings between CBP and Somali community leaders including imams, the records show that a luncheon and “cultural exchange and educational brief” also took place between December 2014 and February 2015 so that attendees could ask about the agency’s “specific practices” at the airport.

The roundtable events and airport tours were organized by Abdirizak Farah, who is identified in the records as a policy advisor in the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL). …

The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is the nation’s 17th busiest in terms of passenger traffic, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). It gets more than 35 million passengers annually and nearly 200,000 metric tons of freight.

The region has a large Somali Muslim community and Somalia is a terrorist nation that’s largely controlled by the extremist group Al Shabaab. In June three Somali-American pals from Minneapolis were convicted by a federal jury of conspiring to commit murder in Syria on behalf of the terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and to provide material support to the designated foreign terrorist organization. Six of their buddies pleaded guilty and one was charged in absentia, presumed dead in Syria. Back in 2013 a mainstream news outlet reported that the Al Qaeda affiliate that terrorized a Kenyan shopping center and murdered scores of innocent people included Somalis from Minnesota. Among them was 22-year-old Ahmed Mohamed Isse of St. Paul and 24-year-old Abdifatah Osman Keenadiid of Minneapolis.

The FBI and Congress have launched probes into the radicalization of the Somali American community in Minnesota. Al Shabaab recruits young men in local mosques and ships them off to train and fight in Somalia. Last fall the area’s largest newspaper published a story confirming that Minnesota leads the nation in the number of people who have left or sought to leave the country to fight with terrorists aligned with ISIS. An attorney who attended the June trial of the convicted Somali-Minnesotans explains in a newspaper column that the broader terrorist ring consists of young first-or-second-generation Somali-Americans who freely took advantage of educational and employment opportunities in the Twin Cities. Their social lives centered on local mosques, they supplemented their education with Islamic studies, are observant Muslims and want to live under the caliphate declared by ISIS.

“They yearned to wage jihad and to die as Islamic martyrs,” the column states, adding that “they hate the U.S.”.

Many of them traveled through Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport while pursuing terrorist causes.

So everyone else who travels through that airport can feel perfectly safe.

… played on the American people by the Obama administration.

A State Department spokesman cannot contain his laughter at the idea that they are “transparent” and “democratic”:

What will the $400 million in cash, paid illegally by Obama to ransom American hostages held by Iran, be used for and by whom?

Dan Calabrese writes at Canada Free Press:

The entity within Iran that will likely use the cash is one Obama would rather you didn’t know about:  There is principally one entity within the Iranian government that has need of untraceable funds. That entity is the Quds Force — the branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps focused particularly on furthering the regime’s goals world-wide by supporting and conducting terrorism.

This is the entity, for example, that was tied to the foiled plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., in 2011, as well as to the successful plot to blow up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994.

Notably, there is a federal statute that bars the transfer of “monetary instruments” — cash or its equivalent in bearer instruments—with the intent to promote “specified unlawful activity.” That term is defined to include a crime of violence or use of an explosive against a foreign country, a category that would include terrorism.

Proving intent is always difficult, but federal law recognizes that conscious avoidance of knowledge can be enough. So, for example, the person who transfers a firearm to a known bank robber need not be told directly that the weapon will be used in a bank robbery in order to be held responsible when it is—particularly if he took steps to conceal the transfer.

As it happens, though, there is more than one reason why no one in the administration will be prosecuted for consciously avoiding knowledge of how this cash likely will be used, and thereby violating the anti-money-laundering statute — even with proof that the cash was transported in an unmarked plane. For one thing, the law applies only to transfers to or from the territory of the U.S. This transfer occurred entirely abroad.  In addition, there is a legal doctrine that bars the application of criminal statutes to government activity in furtherance of legitimate government business, unless those statutes are clearly meant to apply to such activity. So, for example, the driver of a firetruck cannot be held liable for speeding on his way to a fire.

The cash transfer here was said to have been arranged in furtherance of conducting the foreign relations of the U.S. The conduct of foreign relations is entirely an executive function. Those involved in this transfer would have the benefit of that doctrine.

So delivering a haul of cash to the mad mullahs in an unmarked plane is fine because, while illegal for anyone else to do, it’s just like the fire engine driver speeding to a fire. He has to do it! See how much the one is just like the other? …

No. The fire engine driver is an employee carrying out orders. Obama gives the orders.

The Obama Administration’s entire approach to Iran has been driven by a conceit both Obama and John Kerry share, which is the belief that the U.S. would never have gotten so crosswise with Iran if only truly great, expert diplomats had been on the job. Like, ahem, them. I will never forget Kerry’s haughty declaration about himself during the first debate with President Bush in 2004. Talking about how one deals with foreign leaders, Kerry insisted, “I know how to do this!”

Oh. Does he? All he’s done in dealing with Iran is give them everything they want in exchange for a bad and completely unenforceable deal that everyone can see will turn Iran into a nuclear power.

We’ve had problems with Iran because Iran is a terrorist state that attacks us and our allies, not because our diplomats have been too mean to the mullahs.

And now Obama and Kerry are turning a blind eye to the fact that they just bankrolled more terrorist activity. Because it takes a truly great diplomat, I guess, to understand what a great idea that is.

Yes. It seems to us most probable that Obama was less intent on freeing hostages than on getting cash to Iran. To help Iran! Because sanctions were making it hard for Iran to get hold of foreign currency. Which it needs to fund terrorism abroad.

But is Obama actually keen on getting Islamic terrorism funded? Or is he just endlessly trying to get Iran to love him? And if it is the latter – why?

Are there possible explanations we haven’t thought of?

Paying ransom for captured citizens is one of the worst things a government can do.

It obviously launches a lucrative industry, signaling that it will be profitable to go on capturing them wherever they may be found.

Obama paid a $400 million cash ransom for the release of American hostages held in Iran. It’s against the law, but such a triviality never bothered Obama. He tried to hide the transaction by sending Swiss francs and Euros packed in wooden crates in an unmarked cargo plane to Tehran. The American hostages were released.

Now more have been taken, of course.

When rumbled, the crooked administration came up with a cock-and-bull story about the money being a debt owed to Iran since the days of the Shah.

From the WSJ by Jay Solomon and Carol E. Lee:

The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.

Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.

As usual, the administration lies to the American people, insisting that there is no connection between the money and the hostage release. Instead:

The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The settlement, which resolved claims before an international tribunal in The Hague, also coincided with the formal implementation that same weekend of the landmark nuclear agreement reached between Tehran, the U.S. and other global powers the summer before.

“With the nuclear deal done, prisoners released, the time was right to resolve this dispute as well,” President Barack Obama said at the White House on Jan. 17 — without disclosing the $400 million cash payment.

Senior U.S. officials denied any link between the payment and the prisoner exchange. They say the way the various strands came together simultaneously was coincidental, not the result of any quid pro quo.

“As we’ve made clear, the negotiations over the settlement of an outstanding claim… were completely separate from the discussions about returning our American citizens home,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said. …

Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and a fierce foe of the Iran nuclear deal, accused President Barack Obama of paying “a $1.7 billion ransom to the ayatollahs for U.S. hostages.”

“This break with longstanding U.S. policy put a price on the head of Americans, and has led Iran to continue its illegal seizures” of Americans, he said.

Since the cash shipment, the intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guard has arrested two more Iranian-Americans. …

At the time of the prisoner release, Secretary of State John Kerry and the White House portrayed it as a diplomatic breakthrough. Mr. Kerry cited the importance of “the relationships forged and the diplomatic channels unlocked over the course of the nuclear talks”. …

Iranian press reports have quoted senior Iranian defense officials describing the cash as a ransom payment. …

The $400 million was paid in foreign currency because any transaction with Iran in U.S. dollars is illegal under U.S. law. Sanctions also complicate Tehran’s access to global banks.

According to the New York Post, there is proof that the administration is lying about there being “no link between the payment and the prisoner exchange”:

One of the American hostages who was released the day the United States sent $400 million to Iran said his plane to freedom was not allowed to take off until “another plane” arrived in Tehran, according to a report.

Pastor Saeed Abedini, who was among four Americans released this past Jan. 17, told Fox Business he wound up waiting for an extended time for the second plane to reach the Iranian capital and was never told why the arriving aircraft was so important.

“I just remember the night at the airport sitting for hours and hours there, and I asked police, ‘Why are you not letting us go?’ ” Abedini said. “He said, ‘We are waiting for another plane so if that plane doesn’t come, we never let you go.’ ”

The WSJ report concludes:

Revolutionary Guard commanders boasted at the time that the Americans had succumbed to Iranian pressure. “Taking this much money back was in return for the release of the American spies,” said Gen. Mohammad Reza Naghdi, commander of the Guard’s Basij militia, on state media.

Among the Americans currently being held are an energy executive named Siamak Namazi and his 80-year old father, Baqer, according to U.S. and Iranian officials. Iran’s judiciary spokesman last month confirmed Tehran had arrested the third American, believed to be a San Diego resident named Reza “Robin” Shahini.

Friends and family of the Namazis believe the Iranians are seeking to increase their leverage to force another prisoner exchange or cash payment in the final six months of the Obama administration. Mr. Kerry and other U.S. officials have been raising their case with Iranian diplomats, U.S. officials say.

Iranian officials have demanded in recent weeks the U.S. return $2 billion in Iranian funds that were frozen in New York in 2009. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the money should be given to victims of Iranian-sponsored terror attacks.

Members of Congress are seeking to pass legislation preventing the Obama administration from making any further cash payments to Iran. One of the bills requires for the White House to make public the details of its $1.7 billion transfer to Iran.

“President Obama’s … payment to Iran in January, which we now know will fund Iran’s military expansion, is an appalling example of executive branch governance,” said Sen. James Lankford (R., Okla.), who co-wrote the bill. “Subsidizing Iran’s military is perhaps the worst use of taxpayer dollars ever by an American president.”

The only surprise is that Obama did something – though very much the wrong thing – to get American captives freed. Why? That’s the deeper mystery, the answer to which we may never know.

(Is one of the released hostages related, or closely connected, to one of Obama’s henchmen? To John Kerry, for instance? A good investigative journalist is needed to find out.)