Why does the State Department work against the United States?

Its treachery even extends to giving tax-payers’ money to assist George Soros’s campaign to destroy democracy in every part of the world his poisonous claws can reach.

(While it complains about Russian interference in American politics.)

We quote from a publication by Judicial Watch: Exposing the Deep State (September 2017).

First example of the State Department partnering with George Soros, in Albania:

In a March 14, 2017 letter to Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, six U.S. Senators … called on the secretary to investigate the relations between USAID and the Soros Foundations and how U.S. tax dollars are being used by the State Department and the USAID to support left-of-center political groups who seek to impose left-leaning policies in countries such as Macedonia and Albania. …

Soros’s association with the State Department in Albania goes back at least to 2011 when Soros urged Hillary Clinton [then secretary of state] to take action over recent demonstrations in the capital Tirana.  Fox news  reported on August 17, 2016 that:

Newly leaked emails and other files from billionaire George Soros’s web of organizations are shedding light on  [his]  extensive influence in political and diplomatic affairs.

One email chain shows [he] … personally wrote then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, urging intervention in Albania’s political unrest. Within days, an envoy he recommended was dispatched to the region.

In May 2016, USAID announced that it was providing $9million for its “Justice for All” project in Albania …

Second example, in Macedonia:

In February [2017], Judicial Watch reported:

The U.S. government has quietly spent millions of tax payer dollars to destabilize the democratically elected center-right government in Macedonia by colluding with … George Soros … Barack Obama’s U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia, Jess L. Baily, has worked behind the scenes with Soros’s [misnamed] Open Society Foundation to funnel large sums of American dollars for the cause, constituting an interference of the U.S. Ambassador in domestic political affairs in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.  …

The Open Society Foundation has established and funded dozens of leftwing nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Macedonia to overthrow the conservative government.  … The groups organize youth movements, create influential media outlets and organize violent protests to undermine the institutions and policies implemented by the government. One of Soros’s groups funded the translation and publication of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals …   a tactical manual of subversion … Thanks to Obama’s ambassador, who has not been replaced by President Trump, Uncle Sam keeps the money flowing so the groups can continue operating and recruiting, sources in Macedonia and the U.S. confirm.

Why is this tolerated by the Trump administration?

The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), formerly led by Nigel Farage, recently held an election for a new leader. The candidate who should have been elected is Anne Marie Waters, who is against the EU, and against the Islamization of Britain. Instead, a lack-luster candidate, Henry Bolton, with little known support, was somehow finagled into winning.

Amazingly, Nigel Farage opposed Anne Marie Waters and continues to support Henry Bolton!

In this video, Tommy Robinson, patriot and spokesman for millions of Britons ignored by successive governments (not “far-right”, not a neo-Nazi, not a racist) protests the election and what has happened to UKIP; predicts its demise; stresses the importance of combating the Islamic jihad; and challenges Nigel Farage, whom he had much admired, with highly justified indignation:

https://youtu.be/fSlYrebwACE 

Yes! These are picture of a West Point cadet who has repeatedly and publicly expressed his hatred of  the Army and his country, was guilty of numerous misdemeanors, treated his superior officers with rude contempt – yet was allowed to go on wearing the uniform he despised, to graduate as a soldier in the US Army and become a commissioned officer.

The Daily Caller reports:

The Army officer who outed himself as a radical Marxist had been reported back in 2015 for publishing inappropriate and outright anti-American views online, according to a scathing report obtained by The Daily Caller.

So what? The Army didn’t care.

The report gave details on 2nd Lt. Spenser Rapone’s insubordination at the U.S. Military Academy and out-of-regulations online activity. Rapone graduated almost two years later in 2016.

Then – “Rapone made the news last week for his pro-communism tweets during the #VetsForKaepernick social media craze.”

Oh, gosh! The scandal was out! Only then did the Army swing into action.

West Point’s Public Affairs office quickly released a statement last week condemning Rapone’s actions, saying that they “in no way reflect the values of the U.S. Military Academy or the U.S.  Army … Second Lieutenant Rapone’s chain of command is aware of his actions and is looking into the matter”.

They are going to “look into the matter” which came to their attention in 2015.

The statement leaves readers with the idea that Rapone’s chain of command (and indeed the academy at large) was unaware of his radicalism and frequent Uniform Code of Military Justice violations. [But] it turns out a senior officer reported Rapone to his chain of command nearly two years ago.

In a social media post that concerned retired Army Lt. Col. Robert Heffington, an Academy history professor at the time, Rapone wrote, “F*ck this country and its false freedom.”

In November 2015, after being removed from his Ranger battalion for violating standards, Rapone was a cadet in his final year at the academy. According to the report obtained by TheDC, after the latest in a series of incidents involving Rapone’s penchant for insubordination, Heffington became aware of Rapone’s radical leftist activity on social media and notified the cadet’s chain of command.

“From his various online rantings and posts, it appears that DCT Rapone is an avowed Marxist, which is completely out of line with the values of this nation and its Army,” Heffington said in a sworn statement. “Moreover, CDT Rapone’s posts indicate that he hates West Point, the U.S. Army, and indeed this country. One post dated 16 November 2015 states, ‘F*ck this country and its false freedom.’ He also … even implicitly justifies the actions of ISIS and blames the United States for terrorist attacks.”

Heffington concluded in his report, “I cannot reconcile the image of a first class cadet at West Point with the things he has posted online for the world to see. To me, these are red flags that cannot be ignored, and I fail to see how this individual can possibly graduate and become a commissioned officer in six months.”

The same day he wrote this report, Heffington contacted then-cadet Rapone’s training, advising, and counseling officer. The officer was disgusted, but not shocked, Heffington said.

“Unfortunately, I’m not surprised,” the officer said, according to Heffington.

This reaction is merely one of many indications that Rapone’s activism, radical views and immature opposition to authority were well known around the academy — and especially obvious to his chain of command. According to a former head of the Military History and International History divisions at the U.S. Military Academy, Rapone’s plebe year history professor also reported him to the chain of command.

Heffington characterized Rapone as routinely “going out of his way to flout authority”. 

In one incident described in the report, the lieutenant colonel confronted Rapone when he heard yelling in a professor’s office. The cadet reportedly answered in a “loud and extremely disrespectful tone,” “Sir, you don’t have the right to use my honor against me!”

Rapone — a supposedly brilliant cadet, according to his mentor, Professor Rasheed Hosein of the History Department — responded with a childish tantrum: “Sir, this isn’t fair! You’re just putting me on blast!”

One has to wonder what Professor Rasheed Hosein taught Spenser Rapone.

Heffington notes in his report that he told Rapone he did not understand what “putting someone on blast” meant, a rare comedic moment in an otherwise infuriating account. Rapone’s response, that he felt “singled out” is puzzling when one considers the lengths to which the cadet went in order to cast himself as a righteous nonconformist.

In fact, Rapone had singled himself out during his confrontation with Heffington, being in civilian clothes in an academic building (a violation of regulations), by refusing to stand when a superior officer entered the room (a breach of military protocol), and by refusing to answer a superior officer’s direct question regarding who had been yelling (refusal to obey a lawful order).

Most incredibly, Rapone had the gall to respond with righteous indignation.

“He seemed to look at me with nothing but contempt and hatred, no matter what I said or how I tried to reason with him to show him how wrong he was,” Heffington said in his 2015 report.

Multiple other sources contend that Rapone willfully put his anti-capitalist, anti-military and anti-American views on display for the world to see, both in person and over social media. Two recent academy graduates, when reached for comment, suggested that Rapone’s reputation at the academy preceded him. Although they did not personally know Rapone, they stated that they were aware of his radical leftist views and his rebellious reputation long before his activism hit the news this September.

On social media, Rapone’s account (including his Instagram, with the handle “punkproletarian”) abound with praise of communist leaders, interspersed with scathing criticism of his nation, its military and even his chain of command.

Rapone’s rantings unequivocally condemn what he refers to as the military’s “brutally hierarchical rank structure,” and he deems Defense Secretary Mattis “the most vile f*ck in the current administration”. 

This 2015 report unambiguously states that Rapone’s vehement anti-American views and his obsessive insubordination made him a dangerous liability to this nation’s military. Its author urged his chain of command not to allow then-cadet Rapone to commission as an officer. And, according to Heffington, every officer he spoke to agreed with this conclusion.

So why wasn’t he kicked out of West Point?

The conservative columnist Kurt Schlichter comments at Townhall:

It gives me no pleasure to have to wonder whether the Army I served in both in active and reserve status for close to 28 years is broken. And it’s not just the Army.  The Marines and the Special Ops community, well, they seem to be holding on to the standards the rest have forgotten, but the Navy and the Air Force – they’re broken too. Our military – in terms of strategy, equipment, and leadership, is in crisis. American troops will die if we don’t fix it.

Hell, they already have.

We have a Navy that can’t even sail its few remaining ships without running into giant cargo vessels. …

It is, in fact, a disgrace. Our sailors, the precious young men and women we commissioned officers are charged with leading and protecting, are dying because our officer corps tolerates incompetence. One collision is an accident. Two is a lifestyle.

And yeah, they’ve fired some admirals, and that’s a good start, but the problem is a cultural rot, not just one ‘ed-up command. The Navy focused on things besides its mission – “to maintain, train and equip combat-ready Naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression and maintaining freedom of the seas” – and in the last few months that misplaced focus has killed 17 sailors and taken two major vessels out of action in the Western Pacific at the very moment we are on the edge of war.

Did you know several senior Navy officers are being or have been charged for corruption? Corruption. Graft. Bribes. Hookers. Senior leaders, and they’re scumbugs – criminal scumbags. But hey, the Army has its problems too. General Petraeus…sheesh, what a punch in the gut it was to see him use the Army values as a latrine. Then there was the 82^nd Airborne general court martialed for using his billet to build himself a sex harem. And how about the colonel who played games with contracts and ditched his wife to marry an Iraqi chick – the Army was so upset he got a reprimand and to keep his pension. No jail time.

Let me say that again. No jail time. Yeah, that would totally have happened to a sergeant who did the same thing, according to several high-ranking unicorns in the Judge Advocate Office.

Want to know what generals and admirals don’t get in trouble for? Failing to win wars.

The military senior leadership has turned into a fraternity, where they cover up for each other and make sure everyone graduates with a gentleman’s “C”. And it’s not even a fun fraternity – the senior leadership is painfully politically correct, parroting all the right buzzwords and received wisdom of our failed ruling caste. Many of these people are courageous on the battlefield – they’ll happily charge a Taliban warrior wielding an AK-47. But they quake in their boots back home in the face of an enemy they don’t understand and that can destroy their careers – the Social Justice Warrior.

That’s why you don’t see them saying what every damn one of them knows is true – that women, despite their heart and commitment, are a net liability in ground combat units, that trans troops are an expensive distraction and damaging to morale, and that the insane focus on “diversity” programs sucks up priceless training time and fuels, rather than quells, discord in the ranks.

But they don’t dare object. That’d be risky. And these are the senior leaders who we will allow to lead our sons and daughters in battle if Korea goes hot. How’s your confidence level?

And we have now reached the pinnacle of the military’s moral bankruptcy with the revelation that one Second Lieutenant Spenser Rapone is a communist. Not like a wannabe communist, not like a routine college-years liberal dummy, but a full-on, dictatorship-of-the-proletariat communist.

While at West Point.

Yeah, and the Academy knew. The chain of command knew what this guy was, because he told them (Army alumni have done the job the MSM, which probably sympathizes with this idiot, has failed to do, digging up plenty about him and putting it out on social media). But the Academy let this creep slide through anyway.

They let a guy who unequivocally stated his hatred for this country get a security clearance. … Then they gave Rapone a commission as a United States Army officer.

And they did it knowing who he was, because in the leftist-loving environment Obama created, they were terrified to throw the bum out on his Marx.

Hell, he felt comfortable enough to post this all on social media, and the Army chain of command didn’t act until we outside the military made a stink and it had to do something.

You’ve seen the photo of this disgrace wearing a Che t-shirt under his uniform and showing it off. Question: Who took the photo? He was with other cadets so some other cadet saw it and did nothing – doesn’t West Point have an honor code, or is honor now a microaggression? Imagine how interested CNN and the Democrats would suddenly be if his undergarment icon was Hitler, or even Robert E. Lee, instead of the racist, gay-murdering dorm room darling of the campus commies.

“But, he has a right to express his…”

No, he doesn’t.

A United States officer cannot be a communist, or a Nazi, or a jihadist. These vile allegiances are incompatible with military service, and we are under no moral obligation to enter into a suicide pact by letting these vermin into our officer corps. Haven’t enough people died, like at Fort Hood, because the chain of command was too cowardly to risk getting called jihadiphobic to get rid of an insider threat?

Apparently not. …

But the real story isn’t this one loser. It’s not even the other losers who knew what he was and said and did nothing. It’s the chain of command.

We need to know exactly what the faculty and staff at West Point knew about Comrade Cadet Rapone’s treachery. If they did know – and I bet we will find out that he was counseled in writing about it – every officer from his first line supervisor to the USMA Superintendent must be relieved and reprimanded. West Point is supposed to be the heart of the Army, but we may find that, after the pernicious influence of Obama and his ilk, it won’t even take its own side in a fight.

This is a symptom of a bigger disease. The Army, and the military in general, has lost its way.

Fortunately, we [now] have a president who actually loves America …

So will the US military switch its allegiance back to the United States?

Why did President Trump appoint H. R. McMaster to head the National Security Council?

President Tump wants to “drain the swamp” – the agencies and bureaucracies of government filled with anti-American, pro-Islam, pro-illegal-immigration, pro-Iran, globalist, anti-Israel, Leftist denizens who had their heyday, glorying in the slime of treachery, under the Obama administration.

But then he goes and appoints H. R. McMaster?

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

Derek Harvey was a man who saw things coming. He had warned of Al Qaeda when most chose to ignore it. He had seen the Sunni insurgency rising when most chose to deny it.

The former Army colonel had made his reputation by learning the lay of the land. In Iraq that meant sleeping on mud floors and digging into documents to figure out where the threat was coming from.

It was hard to imagine anyone better qualified to serve as President Trump’s top Middle East adviser at the National Security Council than a man who had been on the ground in Iraq and who had seen it all.

Just like in Iraq, Harvey began digging at the NSC. He came up with a list of Obama holdovers who were leaking to the press. McMaster, the new head of the NSC, refused to fire any of them.

McMaster had a different list of people he wanted to fire. It was easy to make the list. Harvey was on it.

All you had to do was name Islamic terrorism as the problem and oppose the Iran Deal. If you came in with Flynn, you would be out. If you were loyal to Trump, your days were numbered.

And if you warned about Obama holdovers undermining the new administration, you were a target.

One of McMaster’s first acts at the NSC was to ban any mention of “Obama holdovers.”

Not only did the McMaster coup purge Harvey, who had assembled the holdover list, but his biggest target was Ezra Watnick-Cohen, who had exposed the eavesdropping on Trump officials by Obama personnel.

Ezra Watnick-Cohen had provided proof of the Obama surveillance to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. McMaster, however, was desperately working to fire him and replace him with Linda Weissgold.

McMaster’s choice to replace Watnick-Cohen was the woman who helped draft the Benghazi talking points which blamed the Islamic terrorist attack on a video protest.

After protests by Bannon and Kushner, President Trump overruled McMaster. Watnick-Cohen stayed. For a while. Now Ezra Watnick-Cohen has been fired anyway.

According to the media, Watnick-Cohen was guilty of “anti-Muslim fervor” and “hardline views”.  And there’s no room for anyone telling the truth about Islamic terrorism at McMaster’s NSC.

McMaster had even demanded that President Trump refrain from telling the truth about Islamic terrorism.

Another of his targets was Rich Higgins, who had written a memo warning of the role of the left in undermining counterterrorism. Higgins had served as a director for strategic planning at the NSC. He had warned in plain language about the threat of Islamic terrorism, of Sharia law, of the Hijrah colonization by Islamic migrants, of the Muslim Brotherhood, and of its alliance with the left as strategic threats.

Higgins had stood by Trump during the Khizr Khan attacks. And he had written a memo warning that “the left is aligned with Islamist organizations at local, national, and international levels” and that “they operate in social media, television, the 24-hour news cycle in all media and are entrenched at the upper levels of the bureaucracies”. ”

Like Harvey and Ezra Watnick-Cohen, Higgins had warned of an enemy within. And paid the price.

McMaster’s cronies had allegedly used the NSC’s email system to track down the source of the memo. The left and its useful idiots were indeed entrenched at the upper level of the bureaucracy.

Higgins was fired.

Like Harvey and Watnick-Cohen, Higgins had also become too dangerous to the Obama holdovers. Harvey had assembled a list of names and a plan to dismantle the Iranian nuclear deal. Watnick-Cohen had dug into the Obama surveillance of Trump officials. And Higgins had sought to declassify Presidential Study Directive 11. PSD-11 was the secret blueprint of Obama’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Pete Hoekstra, the former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, linked PSD-11 to the rise of ISIS and called for its declassification.

Replacing Harvey is Michael Bell. When the Washington Post needed someone to badmouth Dr. [Sebastian] Gorka, they turned to Bell: the former chancellor of the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University.  Bell suggested that Dr. Gorka was an uneven scholar. And Dr. Gorka was accused of failing to incorporate other perspectives on Islam.

The pattern has never been hard to spot.

McMaster forced out K.T. McFarland from her role as Deputy National Security Advisor. Slotted in was Dina Habib-Powell.

McFarland was an Oxford and Cambridge grad who had worked at the Pentagon for the Reagan administration. Dina Habib-Powell had no national security background. She was an Egyptian-American immigrant and former Bush gatekeeper whose pals included Huma Abedin and Valerie Jarrett. …

K.T. McFarland had written, “Global Islamist jihad is at war with all of Western civilization.”

It’s not hard to see why McMaster pushed out McFarland and elevated Habib-Powell. …

But that is typical of the McMaster revamp of the NSC. It’s populated by swamp creatures who oppose the positions that President Trump ran on. And who are doing everything possible to undermine them.

President Trump promised a reset from Obama’s anti-Israel policies. McMaster picked Kris Bauman as the NSC’s point man on Israel. Bauman had defended Islamic terrorists and blamed Israel for the violence. He had urged pressure on Israel as the solution. Ideas like that fit in at McMaster’s NSC.

Meanwhile Derek Harvey, who had tried to halt Obama’s $221 million terror funding prize to the Palestinian Authority, was forced out. …

When Adam Lovinger urged that “more attention be given to the threat of Iran and Islamic extremism,” his security clearance was revoked.  Robin Townley was forced out in the same way.

Meanwhile, McMaster sent a letter to Susan Rice, Obama’s former National Security Adviser, assuring her that the NSC would work with her to “allow you access to classified information.” He claimed that Rice’s continued access to classified information is “consistent with the national security interests of the United States.”

Why does Susan Rice, who is alleged to have participated in the Obama eavesdropping on Trump people, need access to classified information? What national security purpose is served by it?

The same national security purpose that is served by McMaster’s purge of anyone at the NSC who dares to name Islamic terrorism, who wants a tougher stance on Iran, and who asks tough questions.

And the purge of reformers and original thinkers is only beginning.

The latest reports say that McMaster has a list of enemies who will be ousted from the NSC. And when that is done, the NSC will be a purely Obama-Bush operation. The consensus will be that the Iran Deal must stay, that Islam has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, that we need to find ways to work with the aspirations of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that Israel must make concessions to terrorists.

If you loved the foreign policy that brought us 9/11, ISIS, and billions in funding to terrorists from Syria to Libya to the West Bank, you won’t be able to get enough of McMaster’s brand new NSC.

And neither will America’s enemies.

The swamp is overflowing. The National Security Council is becoming a national security threat. 

Caroline Glick writes on her Facebook page:

The Israel angle on McMaster’s purge of Trump loyalists from the National Security Council is that all of these people are pro-Israel and oppose the Iran nuclear deal, positions that Trump holds.

McMaster in contrast is deeply hostile to Israel and to Trump. According to senior officials aware of his behavior, he constantly refers to Israel as the occupying power and insists falsely and constantly that a country named Palestine existed where Israel is located until 1948 when it was destroyed by the Jews.

Many of you will remember that a few days before Trump’s visit to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his advisers were blindsided when the Americans suddenly told them that no Israeli official was allowed to accompany Trump to the Western Wall. What hasn’t been reported is that it was McMaster who pressured Trump to agree not to let Netanyahu accompany him to the Western Wall. At the time, I and other reporters were led to believe that this was the decision of rogue anti-Israel officers at the US consulate in Jerusalem. But it wasn’t. It was McMaster. And even that, it works out wasn’t sufficient for McMaster. He pressured Trump to cancel his visit to the Wall and only visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial — ala the Islamists who insist that the only reason Israel exists is European guilt over the Holocaust. …

The thing I can’t get my arms around in all of this is why in the world this guy hasn’t been fired. Mike Flynn was fired essentially for nothing. He was fired because he didn’t tell the Vice President everything that transpired in a phone conversation he had with the Russian ambassador. … Flynn had the conversation when he was on a 72 hour vacation with his wife after the election in the Caribbean and could barely hear because the reception was so bad. He found himself flooded with calls and had no one with him except his wife.
And for this he was fired.

McMaster disagrees with and actively undermines Trump’s agenda on just about every salient issue on his agenda.

He fires all of Trump’s loyalists and replaces them with Trump’s opponents, like Kris Bauman, an Israel hater and Hamas supporter who McMaster hired to work on the Israel-Palestinian desk. …

And he not only is remaining at his desk. He is given the freedom to fire Trump’s most loyal foreign policy advisers from the National Security Council.

One source claims that Trump’s political advisers are afraid of how it will look if he fires another national security adviser. But that makes no sense. Trump is being attacked for everything and nothing. Who cares if he gets attacked for doing something that will actually help him to succeed in office? Why should fear of media criticism play a role here or anywhere for this president and this administration?

Finally, there is the issue of how McMaster got there in the first place. Trump interviewed McMaster at Mara Lago for a half an hour. He was under terrible pressure after firing Flynn to find someone.

And who recommended McMaster? You won’t believe this.

Senator John McCain.

That’s right. The NSA got his job on the basis of a recommendation from the man who just saved Obamacare.

Obviously, at this point, Trump has nothing to lose by angering McCain. …

If McMaster isn’t fired after all that he has done and all that he will do, we’re all going to have to reconsider Trump’s foreign policy.

Because if after everything he has done, and everything that he will certainly do to undermine Trump’s stated foreign policy agenda, it will no longer be possible to believe that exiting the nuclear deal or supporting the US alliance with Israel and standing with US allies against US foes — not to mention draining Washington’s cesspool – are Trump’s policies.

How can they be when Trump stands with a man who opposes all of them and proves his opposition by among other things, firing Trump’s advisers who share Trump’s agenda.

BUT  …

An article by James Carafano of the (powerful and usually admirable) Heritage Foundation contradicts all this; and so contradicts the entire conservative – and President Trump approving – ethos of the Heritage Foundation itself:

For months, there have been reports of strong disagreements in the White House.

There’s nothing wrong with that. In our view, that’s often the best way tough decisions get made.

In national security adviser H.R. McMaster, the president has a leader of the National Security Council who has made a career of fighting for national security interests that involve very real sacrifice.

McMaster is someone who can make the tough calls. He is the right leader for a tough, determined president who only wants the best for the American people.

Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. But this can’t be done alone.

Here are five reasons why we think the president is already on the right track with his team.

1. When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

What’s wrong with demanding winning policies and not accepting anything less? Grit and resolve were elements of character that used to be admired in Washington.

The recently released film Dunkirk resonated with many Americans for a reason. It’s not just fine filmmaking. It is a reflection of what we see in ourselve — the strength and resilience to persevere.

McMaster gets that. Throughout his career, he has worked for leaders who demanded more — and he delivered. He will do so for this president.

2. Politics end at the water’s edge.

If anything has plagued the White House’s national security and foreign policy decision-making over the past eight years, it’s that tough decisions got filtered through a political lens that put politics before the needs of the nation.

In the toughest times, the toughest presidents — Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan — never did that.

Likewise, the instincts of President Donald Trump’s team are to put the nation’s needs ahead of politics. Such instincts are the glue that helps hold this National Security Council staff together.

McMaster shares their instincts, and that is how he leads his staff.

3. There is war to be won.

America is at war with al-Qaeda, its affiliates, and the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. It faces daunting challenges from Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, and transnational criminal networks.

It’s time to settle on a team and get on with the business of winning. Now is not the time to make big changes in the national security and foreign policy team.

4. Count on character.

When it comes to national security, Trump’s Cabinet officials — as well as his vice president, chief of staff, director of national intelligence, CIA director, new FBI director, and senior officials at the National Security Council — all share a core of character, competence, and the capacity for critical thinking and decision-making.

These are the essence of strategic leadership. They are the building blocks of a great team of leaders. No one exemplifies those traits more than McMaster.

5. Leadership is a team sport.

What makes a foreign policy and national security team great is the capacity to work together in trust and confidence — regardless of the degree of difficulty or disagreements. McMaster is a team builder, not a divider or splitter.

There should be tough, tense moments in the White House. A president is ill served by yes men, and the country is ill served by a president who doesn’t demand the very best for the American people.

The finest steel comes from the hottest fire. The president and his team have an opportunity to prove this axiom is as valid as ever.

The White House needs to deliver a solid, actionable plan in Afghanistan that leaves no quarter for ISIS and al-Qaeda; that shows Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India, and the Taliban that we are winners, not quitters; and honors the sacrifices made by our military after 9/11.

We need a team that will consistently show resolve in the face of Russian aggression, patience and determination in the Middle East, support for allies in Europe and Latin America, and staying power in Asia.

In these tasks, the president will find no more a selfless servant than McMaster.

James Carafano is WRONG.

His article, in addition to being mostly bombast, is a piece of sycophancy worthy of Obama’s media toadies.

“A president is ill served by yes men “?  He’s  even worse served by no men – men who want to reverse the president’s foreign policies.

‘The finest steel comes from the hottest fire” – and the ashes of a president’s foreign policy come from any fire it’s consigned to.

McMaster must go! 

… gravely endangering national security.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, erstwhile chairperson of the Democratic National Committee, employed Imran Awan, a Hezbollah-connected Muslim from Pakistan, as her information technology aide. She only fired him this week, the day after he was arrested at an airport just before boarding a plane to Lahore last Monday (July 24, 2017).

From Conservative HQ by George Rasley:

Imran Awan, the House Democrat’s information technology staffer … has been apprehended at Dulles Airport trying to flee to his native Pakistan. …

FBI agents seized smashed computer hard drives from the home of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s information technology (IT) administrator …

Yet another crook associated with the gang was welcomed by Democrats to deal with their political secrets:

And it is very interesting how the car dealership’s finances were strangely interwoven with those of the U.S. House of Representatives. A car-dealing associate who was owed money by the brothers, Rao Abbas, also a Muslim, was placed on the congressional payroll.

Abbas is listed as the IT professional for former Democratic Representative Patrick Murphy, a then-member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and its Subcommittee on Department of Defense, Intelligence and Overhead Architecture and (irony alert) Subcommittee on the NSA and Cybersecurity.

Their lender of funds, Dr. Ali Al-Attar was also a crook and a link to Hezbollah:

Philip Giraldi, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, wrote that Dr. Ali Al-Attar “was observed in Beirut, Lebanon conversing with a Hezbollah official” in 2012–shortly after the loan was made. …

In  2009, his medical license was suspended by Maryland for separate instances of billing patients and insurance companies for unneeded services.

While practicing medicine in Maryland and Virginia he allegedly defrauded Medicare, Medicaid and insurance companies by billing for non-existent medical procedures. The FBI raided his offices in 2009 and the Department of Health and Human Services sued his business partner in 2011.

In November 2010, the Maryland State Board of Physicians brought charges of “unprofessional conduct in the practice of medicine and failure to cooperate in a lawful investigation”.

Attar was indicted in March 2012 on separate tax fraud charges after the IRS and FBI found he used multiple bank accounts to hide income. He fled back to Iraq to avoid prison …

The Awan brothers worked for more than 30 House and Senate Democrats, as well as Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. The substantial scandal has raised questions about who may have been passed data which the Awans had access to, given Pakistan’s history of collaborating with a number of foreign countries that have demonstrated past willingness to influence U.S. politics.

But here’s where it gets scary.

Gets scary? We are already spooked, and now dig our nails into our palms:

These Muslim staffer’s services were so important to the Democrats, that on March 22, 2016, eight Democrat members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence issued a letter, requesting that their staffers be granted access to Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI). Of those that signed the letter were representatives Jackie Speier (CA) and Andre Carson (IN), the second Muslim in Congress, both of whom employed the Awan brothers.

The brothers were also employed by members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, such as: Jackie Speier (D-CA), Andre Carson (D-IN), Joaquín Castro (D-TX), Lois Frankel (D-FL), Robin Kelly (D-IL), and Ted Lieu (D-CA).

Lieu has since openly called for leaks by members of President Trump’s administration despite the fact that he may until recently have been under surveillance by a foreign entity …

It’s the old story: the Left accuses the Right of whatever wrongs they are themselves committing. Their accusations are a sure sign of their own guilt.

One bombshell that has been all but ignored by the main stream media is that Imran Awan had access to Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s iPad password, meaning that the brothers also had direct access to the notorious DNC emails.

Why has none of this made the front page of The Washington Post, New York Times or the lead segment of the ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN evening news? ..

We know why. Those “news” reporters will cover up any and every crime committed by the the Democratic Party.

The House of Representatives, and especially the Capitol Police whose job is generally viewed as protecting Members from embarrassment, not counter-espionage, cannot be trusted to conduct a full and politics-free investigation of this national security disaster.

It is time this investigation moves beyond bank fraud and laptop theft to became a national security investigation with the FBI and counterintelligence agencies replacing the politics-tainted Capitol Police as the lead agency investigating how House Democrats handed over the backdoor to the House computer network to a Hezbollah and ISI connected cell that was paid some $5 million by the US government and then laundered the money through a car dealership and a crooked Iranian doctor.

Maybe when the FBI finishes looking for evidence that President Trump  – did what? – danced on a bed in a Russian hotel with Vladimir Putin and a bunch of micturating whores or something like that while the two of them plotted to make Hillary Clinton lose the election last November, they will get round to looking into this HUGE POLITICAL SCANDAL.

.

.

Imran Awan with a Democrat friend

Was there collusion between the Obama administration and the Kremlin to entrap members of Donald Trump’s family and campaign team ?

John Solomon and Jonathan Easley write at The Hill:

The Russian lawyer who penetrated Donald Trump’s inner circle was initially cleared into the United States by the Justice Department under “extraordinary circumstances” before she embarked on a lobbying campaign last year that ensnared the president’s eldest son, members of Congress, journalists and State Department officials, according to court and Justice Department documents and interviews.

This revelation means it was the Obama Justice Department that enabled the newest and most intriguing figure in the Russia-Trump investigation to enter the country without a visa.

Just five days after meeting in June 2016 at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr., presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and then Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Moscow attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya showed up in Washington in the front row of a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Russia policy, video footage of the hearing shows.

She also engaged in a pro-Russia lobbying campaign and attended an event at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., where Russian supporters showed a movie that challenged the underpinnings of the U.S. human rights law known as the Magnitsky Act, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has reviled and tried to reverse.

The Magnitsky Act imposed financial and other sanctions on Russia for alleged human rights violations connected to the death of a Russian lawyer who claimed to uncover fraud during Putin’s reign. Russia retaliated after the law was passed in 2012 by suspending Americans’ ability to adopt Russian children.

At least five congressional staffers and State Department officials attended that movie showing, according to a Foreign Agent Registration Act complaint filed with the Justice Department about Veselnitskaya’s efforts.

And Veselnitskaya also attended a dinner with the chairman of the House subcommittee overseeing Russia policy, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) and roughly 20 other guests at a dinner club frequented by Republicans.

In an interview with The Hill on Wednesday, Rohrabacher said, “There was a dinner at the Capitol Hill Club here with about 20 people. I think I was the only congressman there. They were talking about the Magnitsky case. But that wasn’t just the topic. There was a lot of other things going on. So I think she was there, but I don’t remember any type of conversation with her between us. But I understand she was at the table.”

Rohrabacher said he believed Veselnitskaya and her U.S. colleagues, which included former Rep. Ronald Dellums (D-Calif.), were lobbying other lawmakers to reverse the Magnitsky Act and restore the ability of Americans to adopt Russian children that Moscow had suspended.

“I don’t think this was very heavily lobbied at all compared with the other issues we deal with,” he said.

As for his former congressional colleague Dellums, Rohrabacher said he recalled having a conversation about the Magnitsky Act and the adoption issue: “Ron and I like each other … I have to believe he was a hired lobbyist but I don’t know.”

Veselnitskaya did not return a call seeking comment Wednesday at her Moscow office. Dellums also did not return a call to his office seeking comment.

But in an interview with NBC News earlier this week, Veselnitskaya acknowledged her contacts with Trump Jr. and in Washington were part of a lobbying campaign to get members of Congress and American political figures to see “the real circumstances behind the Magnitsky Act”.

That work was a far cry from the narrow reason the U.S. government initially gave for allowing Veselnitskaya into the U.S. in late 2015, according to federal court records.

The Moscow lawyer had been turned down for a visa to enter the U.S. lawfully but then was granted special immigration parole by then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch for the limited purpose of helping a company owned by Russian businessman Denis Katsyv, her client, defend itself against a Justice Department asset forfeiture case in federal court in New York City.

During a court hearing in early January 2016, as Veselnitskaya’s permission to stay in the country was about to expire, federal prosecutors described how rare the grant of parole immigration was as Veselnitskaya pleaded for more time to remain in the United States.

“In October the government bypassed 
the normal visa process and gave a type of extraordinary 
permission to enter the country called immigration parole,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Monteleoni explained to the judge during a hearing on Jan. 6, 2016.

“That’s a discretionary act that the statute allows the attorney general to do in extraordinary circumstances. In this case, we 
did that so that Mr. Katsyv could testify. And we made the 
further accommodation of allowing his Russian lawyer into the 
country to assist,” he added.

The prosecutor said the Justice Department was willing to allow the Russian lawyer to enter the United States again as the trial in the case approached so she could help prepare and attend the proceedings.

The court record indicates the presiding judge asked the Justice Department to extend Veselnitskaya’s immigration parole another week until he decided motions in the case. There are no other records in the court file indicating what happened with that request or how Veselnitskaya appeared in the country later that spring.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in New York confirmed Wednesday to The Hill that it let Veselnitskaya into the country on a grant of immigration parole from October 2015 to early January 2016.

Justice Department and State Department officials could not immediately explain how the Russian lawyer was still in the country in June for the meeting with Trump Jr. and the events in Washington.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has demanded the U.S. government provide him all records on how Veselnitskaya entered and traveled in the U.S., a request that could shed additional light on her activities.

Interviews with a half dozen Americans who came in contact with Veselnitskaya or monitored her U.S. activities in 2016 make clear that one of her primary goals was to see if the Congress and/or other political leaders would be interested in repealing the 2012 Magnitsky Act punishing Russia or at least ensure the Magnitsky name would not be used on a new law working its way through Congress in 2016 to punish human rights violators across the globe.

“There’s zero doubt that she and her U.S. colleagues were lobbying to repeal Magnitsky or at least ensure his name was removed from the global law Congress was considering,” said U.S. businessman William Browder, who was the main proponent for the Magnitsky Act and who filed a FARA complaint against Veselnitskaya, Dellums and other U.S. officials, claiming they should have registered as foreign agent lobbyists because of the work.

The 2012 law punished Russia for the prison death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow lawyer and accountant who U.S. authorities allege uncovered a massive $230 million money laundering scheme involving Russian government officials that hurt U.S. companies.

Magnitsky became a cause celeb in the United States after his mysterious death in a Russian prison, but Russian officials have disputed his version of events and in 2011 posthumously convicted him of fraud in Russia.

It is that alternate theory of the Magnitsky fraud cause that Veselnitskaya and her U.S. allies tried to get into the hands of American officials, including Rohrabacher, the Trump team and other leaders.

Browder’s complaint, which alleges that Washington lobbyists working with Veselnitskaya failed to register as foreign agents, is still pending at the Justice Department. It identified several events in Washington that Veselnitskaya and her allies attended or staged in June 2016.

All of them occurred in the days immediately after the Russian lawyer used a music promoter friend to get an audience June 9 with Trump Jr. promising dirt on then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton but instead using the meeting to talk about Magnitsky and the adoption issue, according to Trump Jr. and Veselnitskaya.

On June 13, 2016, Veselnitskaya attended the screening of an anti-Magnitsky movie at the Newseum, which drew a handful of congressional staffers and State Department officials, according to Browder’s complaint.

The next day, she appeared in the front row of a hearing chaired by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.), sitting right behind a former U.S. ambassador who testified on the future of U.S-Russia policy.

Rohrabacher said he recalled around the same time a conversation with Dellums about Magnitsky and the adoption issue and then attending a dinner that included Veselnitskaya at the Capitol Hill Club with about 20 people.

Sources close to the lobbying effort to rename the Magnitsky Act, conducted over the summer of 2016, said it fizzled after only a month or two. They described Veselnitskaya, who does not speak English, as a mysterious and shadowy figure. They said they were confused as to whether she had an official role in the lobbying campaign, although she was present for several meetings.

The sources also described their interactions with Veselnitskaya in the same way that Trump Jr. did. They claimed not to know who she worked for or what her motives were.

“Natalia didn’t speak a word of English,” said one source. “Don’t let anyone tell you this was a sophisticated lobbying effort. It was the least professional campaign I’ve ever seen. If she’s the cream of the Moscow intelligence community then we have nothing to worry about.

*

Update:

Kristina Wong reports at Breitbart that the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, who asked to meet with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in June 2016, and did so for 20 minutes, had worked for years with Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS. That was the firm that produced the lying, absurd, and now entirely discredited dossier it made up for the Democrats to use against Donald Trump.

Plot after plot was laid to establish a connection between Donald Trump and Russia. One after another they have failed.

Meanwhile the very real collusion between the Democrats and Russians, and the treacherous sale of US uranium deposits to Russia that Hillary Clinton accepted bribes to permit when she was secretary of state, are apparently being disregarded by the Trump administration. Why?

While the Left is accusing President Trump of “collusion” with the Russian government, implying that he is a traitor to his country – without an iota of evidence – his predecessor is actually organizing sedition, not only with the campaign of smears and lies, but by stirring up violent rebellion.

A  booklet by Matthew Vadum titled OVERTHROW! Barack Obama’s Treacherous War on President Trump!*, just published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, describes how Barack Obama is leading a campaign to “resist” and overthrow the democratically elected president of the United States.

Vadum points out that this is unprecedented.

“American presidents do not stay behind in Washington, D.C., to undermine their successors.”

But Barack Obama does.

Obama is now using his two tax-exempt nonprofits, Organizing for Action (OfA) and the Barack Obama Foundation, to preserve his perverse legacy. With its large budget, OfA … has wide influence in setting the anti-Trump agenda for the activist Left. …

Organizing for Action  runs a project called the Community Organizing Institute (COI) which it says partners “with progressive groups and organizations to educate, engage, and collaborate”.

Matthew Vadum states bluntly what it does:

At COI you can learn how to spark riots, get arrested to make a political statement, organize lynch mobs and voter fraud on a massive scale, intimidate and shake down corporations, blackmail lenders, race-bait public officials and businesses into submission, smear and terrorize your opponents, shield illegal aliens from law enforcement, lead squatters to invade foreclosed homes, encourage welfare fraud, and use tax dollars to promote cockamamie  social-engineering schemes. 

All of which has been done – the times and places of such actions are given – and will continue to be done.

With the Left there is no such thing as nonviolent protest. The goal is chaos. The Left wants to stir things up so violently that it leads to a radical transformation of America.

And that, the author says – with ample evidence to support his assertion – is the goal of Barack Obama’s shadow government.

*Available at $3.00 each from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, PO Box 55089, Sherman Oaks, CA 91499-1964

email: [email protected]

A Canadian Muslim goes to Afghanistan, joins Canada’s enemy al-Qaeda, fights against Canadian and US forces, kills a US serviceman – and no, he is not punished as a traitor. He is awarded $10.5 million of Canadian tax-payers’ money.  

The Globe And Mail (Canada) reports:

The Trudeau government is poised to offer an apology and a $10-million compensation package to former child soldier Omar Khadr for abuses he suffered while detained in the U.S. military prison for captured and suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 2010 that the actions of federal officials who participated in U.S. interrogations of Mr. Khadr had offended “the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects”.

The court said the action of the Canadian government had violated the former child soldier’s rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and deprived him of fundamental principles of justice.

A federal insider said the announcement of an official apology and compensation is expected this week.

Mr. Khadr’s lawyer, Dennis Edney, has been seeking a formal apology from the United States and from the Trudeau government for the alleged abuse and neglect of Mr. Khadr while he was in the prison. …

Mr. Khadr was captured in Afghanistan at the age of 15 in 2002, following a shootout with U.S. troops where he was badly wounded – blinded by shrapnel in one eye and with fist-sized exit wounds in his shoulder and chest.

He was accused of throwing a grenade that killed U.S. army medic Christopher Speer in the firefight and was sent to the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay.

Mr. Khadr, now 30, spent more than 10 years in U.S. and Canadian custody, much of that time in the Guantanamo Bay detention centre. Once the youngest detainee in Guantanamo, he was transferred to Canada in 2012 after accepting a plea deal.

Mr. Edney has said his client was treated abysmally even though he was a child soldier and his body shattered from wounds. U.S. interrogators subjected him to sleep deprivation and solitary confinement.

Mr. Edney said Mr. Khadr was coerced into fighting by his father, Ahmed Said Khadr – a top al-Qaeda operative until he was killed in a gunfight with Pakistani troops in 2003.

In March, Mr. Khadr underwent a 19-hour operation in an Edmonton hospital to repair his shoulder, which was severely damaged during the firefight with U.S soldiers.

“Nobody advocated for his health whatsoever. Even when he came back to Canada, I raised all those issues with the Correctional Services and of course [former prime minister Stephen] Harper was not interested in hearing anything like that,” Mr. Edney said in an interview last March.

Mr. Khadr was freed on bail in May, 2015, and released under the supervision of Mr. Edney

He said he would “prove to [Canadians] that I’m a good person”.

The International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group and Lawyer’s Rights Watch Canada have concluded that Canada contravened its obligations under the Conventions against Torture by failing to prevent and investigate what happened to Mr. Khadr in Guantanamo Bay.

What do the near relatives of Mr. Khadr’s murdered victim, Christopher Speer, think about this, we wonder. Are they to be paid compensation too?

This report from the Hamilton Spectator (Canada), answers that question:

“When a Canadian soldier is injured in battle, the government provides a disability award up to a maximum of $360,000,” Conservative MP Michelle Rempel said in a tweet. “Despite this, the current government is willing to provide $10 million to a convicted terrorist.”

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation started an online petition aimed at Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was in Ireland, deploring the deal one source said was signed last week.

“This is offensive to many Canadians,” the petition states. “Canadians should not be forced to pay millions of dollars to a killer.”

Social media exploded with denunciation of the agreement, which sources said would see the government pay Khadr $10.5 million — part of which would go to his lawyers — and the justice and public safety ministers formally apologize to him.

Posters used words such as “disgraceful”, some called for the Canadian citizen to be kicked out of the country, while others argued the money should go to the family of Chris Speer, the U.S. special forces soldier Khadr is alleged to have killed in 2002.

“Most Canadians’ thoughts would be with Christopher Speer’s widow and family, who are reliving their terrible ordeal once again because of the actions of the Canadian government this time,” said Tony Clement, another Conservative MP.

The Toronto-born Khadr, 30, pleaded guilty to five war crimes before a much maligned military commission in 2010. He has claimed — with some evidence — his American captors tortured him. …

Speer’s widow Tabitha Speer and retired American sergeant Layne Morris, who was blinded by a grenade at the Afghan compound, won a default US$134.2 million in damages against Khadr in Utah in 2015. Canadian experts called it unlikely the judgment could be enforced.

Neither Speer nor Morris returned calls seeking comment, but Morris’s wife had only one word when told of the deal: “Wow.”

In 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Canadian intelligence officials had obtained evidence from Khadr under “oppressive circumstances”, such as sleep deprivation during interrogations at Guantanamo Bay in 2003, and shared the evidence with U.S agents and prosecutors.

“Such as sleep deprivation”? What else? Anything else? Is sleep deprivation torture? It is certainly miserable and debilitating, but nothing very bad in comparison with the horrifying torture that al-Qaeda inflicts on its captives. See here and here.

Was this justice, or was it a political decision?

*

Update:

Andrew Lawton writes at Global News (Canada):

Every terrorist in the country will soon be lining up at the trough for a $10.5 million cheque.

Such is apparently the fate awaiting enemies of Canada according to the country’s own government, as seen in the settlement of a lawsuit by Omar Khadr, the man who confessed that at age 15 he threw the grenade that killed American army medic Christopher Speer in Afghanistan.

Khadr’s actions in the 2002 firefight that killed Speer have not been tested in court in Canada, and his American appeal is not yet complete. He has not been exonerated — he’s simply out on bail. Despite his Canadian citizenship, we must not forget that Khadr was an enemy combatant. Despite recanting his confession of killing Speer (he now says he doesn’t know whether he did it), Khadr was undeniably on the battlefield, and is also on video constructing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) — technology responsible for the deaths of 97 Canadians.

Whether Khadr’s devices killed any of them we’ll never know, but he was making deadly weapons. Surely he didn’t think it was simply an al-Qaida arts and crafts project.

For the last 15 years, Khadr has tried to hide behind protections of his Canadian identity despite fighting for the enemy in the most literal sense. If Canadians won’t accept the legitimacy of the American military tribunal, let’s litigate this on our own soil. He should be treated as a defector and charged with treason — an offense without a statute of limitations, I’d remind Canada’s attorney general.

Canada’s criminal code says anyone who “assists an enemy at war with Canada, or any armed forces against whom Canadian Forces are engaged in hostilities, whether or not a state of war exists between Canada and the country whose forces they are” is guilty of high treason, which carries a life sentence.

Canada’s mission in Afghanistan began in October of 2001, making the United States’ enemies our own as well.

Yet Khadr received a red carpet welcome when he was released from custody in 2015.

He’s not a hero, nor is he a victim. But the misinformation about this case doesn’t stop there.

Contrary to claims circulating this week, the multimillion-dollar deal was not ordered by the Supreme Court or any other level. It was brokered behind closed doors by Khadr’s lawyers and government officials. …

Khadr’s supporters see him as a “child soldier” and liken the military tribunal that convicted him to a kangaroo court.

According to testimony from lawyer Howard Anglin, speaking before the House of Commons’ international human rights subcommittee in 2008, Khadr was not a child soldier under international law, and his military tribunal was conducted in accordance with Geneva Convention standards.

Anglin cited a claim from Khadr’s own former military lawyer, Lt.-Cmdr. William Kuebler, that no law or treaty prevents prosecution of minors for war crimes. …

However, these legal arguments appear to take backseat to the emotional ones driving the narrative that Khadr is a victim of tragedy, rather than a perpetrator of it.

“No one reading this can say, with certainty, that his or her life would have turned out different from Omar Khadr’s if he or she was raised as he was,” said Jonathan Kay in a CBC column.

I agree that upbringing shapes much of one’s existence, but we must still be accountable for our own actions. We didn’t afford the benefit of the doubt to Nazi war criminals whose conduct could be linked to indoctrination, nor should we have.

Khadr’s father, Ahmed, was in Osama bin Laden’s inner circle. His older sister, Zaynab, has publicly praised bin Laden. His mother said in a CBC interview some years back that Canadians should wish their sons were as “brave” as hers.

If Khadr isn’t his father’s son, why has he not distanced himself from the family that set him up for failure?

Khadr was mature enough to know the consequences of his actions. I just wish the same could be said of the federal government.

(Hat-tip for the Global News link to Mike Watson, our Facebook commenter)

The Left has been trying for a long time now to substitute their own version of what is happening in America and the world for what is actually happening. The Democrats, now a far left party, stepped up the attempt when Donald Trump was elected president. They had been so sure they would win the 2016 election that their failure seems to them to be impossible, a terrible mistake of the cosmos, a breakdown of the laws of the universe. They knew that one of their own – the corrupt Hillary Clinton – would be the next president, so their multitude of deceits would continue to be covered up and their devious plots implemented. Oh, what a shock they got when rude Reality brought Donald Trump to power!

They still refuse to accept the fact that Donald Trump is president. Something must be done to rectify the cosmic error. New fictions are required. So wild stories of Trump perfidies spring out of newspapers and TV screens.

But it is insane to believe that a false description of reality can replace the Real.

Reality goes on accruing its consequences, and sooner or later the truth bursts through the lies.

This week the devious plot – involving a total fiction without a trace of a fact to give it any credibility whatsoever – invented to frame President Trump as a traitor selling out his country to Russia, has been burst open.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

The past few days have seen several interesting developments on the supposed Trump/Russia scandal. But instead of causing further damage to President Trump, they’re making the entire story look like a multilayered smear campaign by Trump’s enemies.

Over the weekend, the New York Post reported that the firm behind the infamous Trump dossier — Fusion GPS — has been stonewalling the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has been trying to get information on who paid the firm to produce it and how it was used by government officials.

It has been publicly known since at least early January that Fusion GPS was behind the discredited dossier, which claimed that Russia had backmailable information on Trump, and that it was a notorious opposition research firm that was often enlisted to dig up dirt on Republicans, including a 2012 smear campaign against a donor to Mitt Romney’s campaign.

As the Post notes, one of the Fusion’s founders, Peter Fritsch, contributed “at least $1,000 to the Hillary Victory Fund and the Hillary for America campaign”.

The Post story has sparked renewed interest in this dossier, most of which has been discredited, but which appears to be serving as a “road map” to various investigations.

That was strike one against the anti-Trump conspiracy mongers.

Strike two happened Sunday [June 25, 2017] when an internal memo from CNN Money’s executive editor Rich Barbieri leaked. The memo told reporters: “No one should publish any content involving Russia without coming to me or (VP of Premium Content Video) Jason (Farkas) first. … No exception.”

That memo came after CNN was forced to retract a story it had posted on its website claiming that Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci was under investigation for ties to Russia. Turns out the story — based on a single anonymous source — was false. CNN pulled the story and apologized to Scaramucci.

This wasn’t the first Russia-related story pushed by the mainstream press that turned out to be exaggerated or false, but it was the most embarrassing one to date. And it showcased what many suspected — that Trump-hating reporters and editors had dropped all pretense of journalistic professionalism in order to peddle [made up] dirt on Trump.

Here is Project Veritas’s video of a CNN producer confessing to the lie:

Was there no collusion at all by Somebody with Russia?

What does Reality say?

Then, on Sunday, the Obama administration started to come under attack. That got started by, of all places, the Washington Post, which offered a detailed account of how the administration knew about Russia’s efforts to influence the election months before the polls opened, but did nothing about it.

Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN over the weekend that “the Obama administration should have done more when it became clear that not only was Russia intervening, but it was being directed at the highest levels of the Kremlin”.

On Monday, Trump amped the story up, tweeting that Obama “colluded or obstructed” with the Clinton campaign by downplaying Russia because he assumed Clinton would win.

Time is bringing him his revenge.

Note what is missing from all these stories — any evidence that Trump had anything to do with Russia’s efforts. Given that this yearlong investigation has turned up nothing, we’d argue that it’s time for [“special counselor”] Robert Mueller and congressional investigators to start looking at whether the Obama administration broke any laws in its attempt to destroy the Trump presidency before it got started.

How can President Trump do the job he was elected to do when almost all the personnel in almost all the government agencies are working against him? 

So vast a treasonous plot will not be easy to destroy.

The State Department, almost entirely staffed by subversives it would seem, is surely the worst. It is Treason’s HQ: a huge powerful machine that has been striving for years to help the globalist internationalists realize their dream of world government. When they achieve it – and victory was in sight until American voters went and put Donald Trump in the White House – the Great Redistribution will be carried out. That is the consummation of all that Dame History has been working towards since she emerged from the primeval dark. The wealth –  that they say morally belongs to everyone regardless of who made it – will be spread nice and evenly over all the peoples of the earth. (After the ruling globalist internationalists have taken a generously fair share for themselves, of course.)

The elaborate plot to bring about world government, and its horrifying good works, is to be achieved through the creation of fear. Fear that the earth is burning up and only the UN’s global warming experts can save the planet and the human race.

This is from the Washington Times, by Ben Wolfgang:

Newly released documents show just how badly the State Department wanted to get the U.S. into — and now to remain a party to — the Paris climate agreement that President Trump opposed in his campaign.

As Mr. Trump meets next week with other world leaders at the Group of Seven summit, the emails and cables underscore how the Obama administration’s State Department consulted with outside liberal groups and other allies to push the deal across the finish line.

The documents were released after legal prodding by Chris Horner, a lawyer and a senior fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, amid an ongoing fight inside the administration over whether to exit the deal, which commits the U.S. to significant greenhouse gas emissions reductions over the next decade.

Some of the emails show the State Department laying the groundwork for the responsibility of overseeing U.S. participation in the deal — political power that could be lost if the agreement is scrapped.

“We are happy to be able to contribute to advancing the administration’s climate agenda, and now that we [are] staffing up with expertise, we are eager to get the ball rolling on some specific work that will be relevant for you,” Rodney Ludema, a chief economist at the State Department, wrote in a February 2015 email to Todd Stern, the Obama administration’s lead climate negotiator.

In other messages, officials discuss possible economic repercussions of the deal to European countries, acknowledging that U.S. involvement is necessary to make the entire deal work. The cable focuses on how European nations are banking on the U.S. to make a similarly ambitious emissions commitment.

An exit from Paris would negate much of the State Department’s work in 2014 and 2015, both in preparing the U.S. side of the agreement and negotiating with other nations to get them on board.

“Certain sectors are concerned that too much leadership on emissions reductions could cost Europe jobs,” one cable reads in part. “While Germany is lobbying other member states to get in line with 2030 targets, a German industry group is warning that if the rest of the world does not join Europe in agreeing to substantial reductions in emissions, the European industries could face ‘billions’ in losses.” …

Critics charge that the documents, along with the broader fact that the department by all accounts is leading the pro-Paris charge inside the administration, show that State Department officials believe that remaining a part of the treaty will preserve their power and influence.

“State focuses on what’s best for State. Will their lives be enriched or made more difficult by having to advance and defend the new administration’s stated policy? Less money, no massive expansion of a climate diplomatic corps? Then undermine adoption of the policy,” Mr. Horner said.

“State is largely populated by those whose worldview embraces such gestures advancing an agenda in the name of global salvationism,” he said. “President Trump should view State’s input here with great suspicion, taking note of its record on this matter.”

While other top administration officials — including Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry — also favor remaining a part of the Paris deal, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson has been among the most outspoken in favor of maintaining a U.S. seat at the table.

At a meeting of Arctic nations last week, Mr. Tillerson signed an agreement that trumpeted the Paris climate pact and stressed the importance of addressing climate change. Still, he made clear that the administration has not made a decision how to proceed.

Mr. Trump originally promised a decision before the G-7 meeting, but the timetable was pushed back amid continued debate inside the White House.

“We are appreciative that each of you has an important point of view,” the secretary of state said at last week’s Arctic conference. “We are going to make the right decision for the United States.”

Top leaders in the business community, including Mr. Tillerson’s former company, Exxon Mobil Corp., also have been pressuring Mr. Trump to remain a part of the deal.

Sources familiar with the internal White House debate say the president has been swayed by the near-unanimous support for the pact among leading CEOs.

But critics, such as Environmental Protection Agency Director Scott Pruitt, have argued that the U.S. has put itself at a major economic disadvantage with the terms to which the Obama administration agreed in the Paris deal.

Scott Pruitt was an excellent choice to head and change (and dissolve?) the vicious EPA.

But there are traitors in the White House too.