Trump and Biden’s Iran Envoy Were Both Accused of Mishandling Classified Information

By Daniel Greenfield July 05, 2023  @ Sultan Knish Blog 

Last year, the FBI conducted a raid of former President Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago.  Biden’s Justice Department bypassed normal protocol for the raid, sidelined the FBI’s Miami Field Office, refused to assign a U.S. Attorney’s Office and pressured the FBI to go forward.

Next year, the Biden administration encountered an internal case of one of its top officials mishandling classified information. The mishandling of classified information on Iran, the linchpin of the Trump indictment, didn’t just hit any Biden official, but its special envoy for Iran.

Even as the Justice Department moved full speed ahead with targeting Trump, the State Department was aware that Rob Malley, Biden’s special envoy for Iran, was being investigated for mishandling classified information. Despite that, Malley remained on the job and apparently retained his access to classified information until his security clearance was pulled this spring.

Under investigation and with his security clearance suspended, Malley still officially remained the special envoy for Iran even though secretly he was no longer able to conduct some of his duties. Only at the end of June when the story broke, did the State Department switch from calling Malley the envoy to Iran to finally stating that, “Rob Malley is on leave.”

Within 6 months, the FBI had gone from a criminal investigation of Trump to a raid. It seems to have taken nearly that long for Malley just to be put on leave and it appears that he would still be named as the special envoy for Iran if the story of the investigation had not come out.

In one of the most awkward moments in an administration whose press conferences are full of them, State Department spokesman Matt Miller blurted out that he had “no comment” on Rob Malley’s status before assuring reporters that he was still the special envoy. And then Miller had to announce that Malley was on leave and his second in command was carrying on.

Prior to that, the State Department had offered misleading answers such as, “the Department of State, the Special Envoy for Iran, and his team remain deeply engaged on the formulation and implementation of US Iran Policy” while refusing to name who the actual envoy was.

The State Department had gone to great lengths to cover up the status of one of its top figures involved in an issue of major national security who was being investigated by the FBI. Not only did it not disclose that Malley no longer had access to classified information and had been forced to step away from some duties, but it actively obstructed reporters from learning about it.

The State Department’s official site, as of this writing, still names Malley as the special envoy. The Twitter account and other official State Department messaging accounts still carry Malley’s name. Had the story not come out from Iran dissident sources, we still would not know about it.

The surprise is not that Malley’s security clearance was suspended, it’s that he ever had it in the first place.

Robert Malley is the son of Simon Malley: a key figure in the Egyptian Communist Party and an adviser to terrorist leader Yasser Arafat. During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama was forced to boot Robert Malley over his meetings with Hamas on behalf of George Soros’ International Crisis Group. Once in office, Obama brought Malley back and named him to a succession of top positions even though Iranian opposition groups and pro-Israel activists warned that Malley was sympathetic to Iran’s terror regime and working against America.

Malley helped negotiate the deal that allowed Iran to continue developing its nuclear program while having sanctions lifted on the terror state. After Trump won, Malley rejoined the Soros ICG and was accused of conducting backchannel talks with Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif to undermine the Trump administration in violation of the Logan Act. While Gen. Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, was investigated for violations of the Logan Act for lobbying foreign officials in support of a resolution on Israel at the UN, Obama officials like Kerry and Malley never faced an investigation over alleged Logan Act violations aimed against America and Israel.

Biden brought in Malley as the special envoy for Iran despite not only all of this history, but also the fact that his son, Blaise Malley, was working for the Quincy Institute run and funded by key figures in the pro-Iran movement, as well as George Soros. Trita Parsi, Quincy’s executive VP, a dual Iranian-Swedish national, founded the National Iranian American Council, described by Iranian dissidents as the ‘Iran Lobby’ which has been accused of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Robert Malley has spent his time as special envoy for Iran offering to give the Islamic terror regime anything it wants. America was “prepared to get back into the deal as soon as possible – as soon as Iran is”, he had pleaded. Iranian dissidents have held protests calling for Malley to be fired, condemned him and warned that he is working for Iran, not America.

The Biden administration was well aware that Robert Malley was not just another official. He was a political extremist who had been accused of inappropriate ties to enemy nations and terror groups for decades, whose father had been expelled from France, whose son was working for an outpost of the Iran Lobby, and yet an investigation into mishandling classified information was not only slow walked, but covered up to an almost criminal degree.

The State Department misled Americans and reporters about the status of its special envoy for Iran. And in the process it also effectively misled much of the world which has been monitoring the failed attempt by the Biden administration to restart the Iran Deal. Including potentially Israel. After a week in which the Biden administration had accused Israel of ‘leaking’ information about its plans to implement a non-binding ‘temporary’ deal with Iran, which was actually being leaked by Iranian sources, it has been caught covering up the misconduct of its Iran envoy.

The Biden administration’s coverup of its Iran envoy mishandling classified information is in sharp contrast to its purported concern over Trump’s handling of classified information on Iran.

An administration genuinely concerned with national security, especially when it comes to Iran, would never have appointed Malley as an envoy for Iran. Appointing someone with his history and connections to any national security position showed a total disregard for national security. Covering up for him reveals the scope of the State Department’s complicity in Malley’s actions.

As a New York Times story notes, “Mr. Malley is a boyhood friend of Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken; the two attended the same high school in Paris when their families were living in France.” Beyond Blinken, Malley was embedded in the system by the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations. He is part of a larger network of pro-Iran and anti-American officials within the State Department and the larger ‘blob’ of think tanks, activists, lobbyists, reporters and foreign agents that calls the shots on foreign policy. Malley’s alleged sin is theirs.

The treatment of Trump does not reflect a concern for the sanctity of classified information, but is motivated solely by targeting the political opposition.

When you have the wrong political views, the FBI will knock on your door even if you’re the former president of the United States. And if you have the right political views, even if you’ve been a walking security risk for two decades, the State Department will cover for you and you’ll be able to keep your title even while being investigated for mishandling classified information.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles.  Thank you for reading.

Elon Musk says this unknown government agency is the worst for censorship

Leah Barkoukis February 07, 2023 

Twitter chief Elon Musk named what he believes is the worst offender in government censorship and it’s an agency most Americans have likely never heard of before.  The Department of State’s Global Engagement Center is a “threat to our democracy,” Musk said on Monday.  He pointed to independent journalist Matt Taibbi's report from January 3 to explain why. In the 12th installment of the Twitter Files, Taibbi called the GEC the “fledgling analytic/intelligence arms of the State Department” and said it took a Russian disinformation report to media and flagged certain accounts as “Russian personas and proxies” based on a dubious list of criteria.

He goes on to detail how the GEC wanted to “insert themselves” into content moderation on the social media site. ..........To Read More...

Watchdog Rips State Dept. Decision to Give Nigeria, India a Pass on Religious Freedom, Again

Patrick Goodenough | December 5, 2022, Tags: 

 

The State Department’s decision to exclude Nigeria and India from a blacklist of countries where severe religious persecution is occurring has drawn a sharp rebuke from a statutory watchdog, which called the decision “inexplicable.”

In its second set of annual “country of particular concern” (CPC) designations under the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), the Biden State Department overruled the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recommendations on Nigeria and India.

“There is no justification for the State Department’s failure to recognize Nigeria or India as egregious violators of religious freedom, as they each clearly meet the legal standards for designation as CPCs,” said the commission’s chair Nury Turkel. 

He noted that the State Department’s own annual report on international religious freedom, published last June, included “numerous examples of particularly severe religious freedom violations in Nigeria and India.”...........To Read More.....

• State Dept. Explains Omission of India and Nigeria as Countries of Concern for Religious Freedom Violations

My Take - I guess all those dead bodies don't count in their assessment? 

EXC: Joe Biden's State Dept Halted a Trump-Era Crisis Response Plan Aimed at Avoiding Benghazi-Style Evacuations Just MONTHS Before Taliban Takeover.

August 18, 2021 Raheem J. Kassam

 

Joe Biden’s State Department moved to cancel a critical State Department program aimed at providing swift and safe evacuations of Americans out of crisis zones just months prior to the fall of Kabul, The National Pulse can exclusively reveal.

The “Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau” – which was designed to handle medical, diplomatic, and logistical support concerning Americans overseas was paused by Antony Blinken’s State Department earlier this year. Notification was officially signed just months before the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. 

“SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED,” an official State Department document from the Biden State Department begins, before outlining the following move the quash the Trump-era funding for the new bureau.

The document is from the desk of Deputy Secretary of State Brian P. McKeon, confirmed in March by the United States Senate........To Read More.....

New York Times ‘Disturbed’ by US Flags-But Bemedaled by Fidel Castro

Humberto Fontova Jun 12, 2021

“I was on Long Island this weekend visiting a really dear friend, and I was really disturbed. I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with explicatives [sic] against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases just dozens of American flags, which is also just disturbing… (New York Times Editorial Board member Mara Gay, June 8.)

“To our American friend (New York Times reporter) Herbert Matthews with gratitude. Without your help, and without the help of the New York Times, the Revolution in Cuba would never have been,” said a beaming Fidel Castro while pinning a specially minted medal on the smitten New York Times reporter at the Cuban embassy in Washington D.C. April, 1959. A week earlier the KGB asset whose lifelong obsession was the destruction of the U.S. made a special visit to the New York Times offices in New York to express the same unbounded appreciation.

If the above sounds too outrageous to be true—I invite you to study the photographic evidence of the ceremony here.

But who (familiar with Cuban history) can blame Castro? In fact, after getting their man firmly ensconced into power, they went above and beyond the call of duty by 9as we’ll see in a minute, relentlessly libeling anyone who dared speak the truth about the KGB-asset they boosted to power.   

Starting in 1957, for instance, The New York Times devoted itself to assuring readers (which included influential State Department and CIA honchos) that — unlike what those Cuban deplorables were frantically warning the CIA and U.S. State Department about — the Castro regime was in fact antiseptically free of the slightest communist taint, just as they already believed.

“Fidel Castro (who at the time led a KGB-sponsored terrorist group in Cuba known as the July 26^th movement) has strong ideas of liberty, democracy and social justice. This amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic, and therefore anti-communist,” declared Herbert Matthews of the NYT, Feb. 1957.

Two years later, with a Cuban version of Poland’s Katyn massacre in full swing (and directed by the same Soviets for the same reason), The New York Times's veritable Herbert Matthews double-downed:

 “This is not a Communist revolution in any sense of the term. Fidel Castro is not only not a Communist, he is decidedly anti-Communist.” 

In fact, vengeance, much less justice, had nothing to do with the Communist bloodbath The New York Times was trying to camouflage. Che's murderous method in La Cabana fortress in 1959 was exactly Stalin's murderous method in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Like Stalin's Great Terror against his own officer corps a few years earlier, Che's firing squad marathons were a perfectly rational and cold-blooded exercise that served their purpose ideally. This bloodbath decapitated — literally and figuratively — the first ranks of Cuba's Contras. This is Bolshevik takeover 101, amigos.

Arthur Gardner and Earl Smith were the two U.S. ambassadors to Cuba who warned about Castro’s covert Communism (and thus lost their jobs.) In 1960 they testified under oath to the Media/State Department collusion and campaign that brought Castro to power:

Senator DODD: "You have been quoted, Mr. Gardner, as referring to, "Castro worship" in the State Department in 1957. ... you are quoted as saying you fought all the time with the State Department over whether Castro merited the support or friendship of the United States. Would you explain...."

Mr. GARDNER: "I feel it very strongly, that the State Department was influenced, first, by those stories by (the New York Times') Herbert Matthews, and soon (support for Castro) became kind of a fetish with them."

Senator DODD: (in preparation for his post) your successor as Ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith was actually (sent by his State Dept. superiors) to be briefed by New York Times' Herbert Matthews?"

Mr. GARDNER: "Yes, that is right."

Senator EASTLAND: "Mr Smith, you had been warning the State Department that Castro was a Marxist?"

Mr. SMITH: "Yes, sir...."

Senator EASTLAND: "Would you say that the American Government then, including all of its agencies, was largely responsible for bringing Castro to power?"

Mr. SMITH: "The State Department played a large part in bringing Castro to power. The press, and other Government agencies (CIA), members of Congress are also responsible..”

One day in May 1959, only five months after the triumph of Castro’s New York Times-celebrated “anti-communist” revolution, Castro’s own Air Force Chief, Major Pedro Diaz-Lanz, told his friend Eddie Ferrer, “I’ve got to tell the Americans and the world what’s going on here and start the fight against these communists. Everybody seems asleep!”

A week later Diaz-Lanz resigned his post and declared publicly that Castro’s civilian government was a hollow sham, nothing but a front (maintained with the then-invaluable assistance of the New York Times) for Soviet-trained communists who were running the show behind the scenes, especially in the crucial functions of the military and police. Diaz-Lanz then bundled his wife and kids onto a small boat and escaped to Miami just ahead of a firing squad.

After weeks of frantically knocking on doors and hoarse from phone calls, Diaz-Lanz finally appeared at a public hearing before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. The date was July 14, 1959. 

Mr. SOURWINE (Chief Counsel): “Is Castro friendly to the United States?”

Major DIAZ: “No.”

Mr. SOURWINE: “But Fidel Castro has said on many occasions [as dutifully transcribed and transmitted by the New York Times] that he is friendly to the United States. You are saying that this is not true?”

Major DIAZ. “He is lying.”

Mr. SOURWINE: “You are completely sure that Fidel Castro is what?”

Major DIAZ: “That Fidel Castro is a communist. Also, I’m prepared because the communists have a well-known system of trying to destroy the reputations of anyone who disagrees with them.”

The following day Castro put his fingers to his mouth, blew a whistle and The New York Times scurried to duty:

“In Cuba there are no communists in positions of control,” stressed their reporter Herbert Matthews in a fresh article. “The accusations of Major Pedro Diaz- Lanz are rejected by everybody.”

But as Diaz-Lanz warned, when outing communists, their denial is only half the story. The truth-teller must also be defamed. Castro whistled again.

“Sources (obviously Castro and his henchmen) tell me that Major Diaz-Lanz was removed from his office for incompetence, extravagance and nepotism,” added Herbert Matthews in his front page New York Times article on July, 16 1959 (the very day following Diaz-Lanz’s testimony!)

Only screenwriter Rod Serling could do justice to something so tragically Twilight-Zonish:

“Imagine if you will:  …trying to alert the leaders of the world’s most powerful nation boasting the most lavishly-funded intelligence agency in human history employing the most highly-educated officials and analysts–imagine trying to convince such people that their most resolute and powerful enemies have secretly set up a base right under their nose, only 90 miles away. You were Fidel Castro’s personal pilot and head of his Revolutionary Air Force so you saw the evidence with your own eyes. Alas media “experts” on the matter who wield enormous influence over the diplomatic and intelligence services of the world’s most powerful nation—of the world’s recognized guardian against Soviet imperialism--quickly mobilize. Soon your condition differs little from that of Kevin McCarthy in the original 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'…”

Biden Unveils Policy Honoring Osama bin Laden’s Old Friend

Daniel Greenfield   March 11, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Secretary of State Antony Blinken began his confirmation hearing by reciting a family history of antisemitism. A month later he unveiled a ban named in the memory of an antisemite.

“Jamal Khashoggi paid with his life to express his beliefs,” Blinken claimed.

Those beliefs that Khashoggi gave his life for included his contention that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were real, and that Jews were deceivers with no connection to Israel. It also included the Muslim Brotherhood member’s support for the Hamas war against Israel.

Last October, Biden falsely claimed that the world was “mourning Khashoggi’s death and echoing his call for people everywhere to exercise their universal rights in freedom.”

Jamal Khashoggi didn’t believe in universal rights or freedom. He believed in the absolute supremacy of Islam. He died in the service of two Islamist regimes, Qatar and Turkey, that have built their foreign policy around supporting Islamist terror and the suppression of human rights.

In conversations with American diplomats, he claimed that most Saudis supported Osama bin Laden because they hated America, and came out against education for women.

Osama bin Laden, Khashoggi’s old friend, also “paid with his life” for some similar beliefs.

Blinken's remarks on what he and the Biden administration have dubbed the 'Khashoggi Ban" targeting some of the Qatari agent’s alleged killers, called him a journalist, while neglecting to mention that Khashoggi got his start in ‘journalism’ through Adel Batterjee, whom the Treasury Department had at one time listed as one of “the world’s foremost terrorist financiers”.

In Afghanistan, Khashoggi churned out Jihadist propaganda with titles like “Arab Mujahadeen in Afghanistan II: Exemplifies the Unity of Islamic Ummah”, “Arab Youths Fight Shoulder to Shoulder with Mujahadeen" and "Arab Veterans of Afghanistan Lead New Islamic Holy War".

Who were these Arab youths?

“Khashoggi showed me a photo published in the English language paper Arab News, in 1988. It depicted him inside Afghanistan, standing with a tall, young, Kalashnikov-wielding Saudi named Usama Bin Laden,” Barnett Rubin wrote in Afghanistan from the Cold War through the War on Terror.

That wasn’t accidental. Jamal Khashoggi and Osama bin Laden were good friends.

“We were hoping to establish an Islamic state anywhere,” Khashoggi reminisced about their time together in the Muslim Brotherhood. “We believed that the first one would lead to another, and that would have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.”

That came from Lawrence Wright’s epochal book, The Looming Tower. In Thomas Hegghammer's Jihad in Saudi Arabia, he noted that, "Bin Ladin and Azzam actively encouraged and facilitated the visit of Saudi journalists such as Jamal Khashoggi to Afghanistan."

That’s a reference to Abdullah Azzam, a founder of Al Qaeda, known also as the Father of the Global Jihad. In Peter Bergen's, The Osama Bin Laden I Know, Khashoggi describes becoming an "activist" in "political Islam", meeting Azzam, and having Osama bin Laden invite him to Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden, Khashoggi wrote, "decided to contribute his experience and capabilities to the Mujhadeen". He glorifies Osama, quoting his boasts and praises, and contacts his mother.

The media knew all along who and what Jamal Khashoggi was. He made no real secret of it. The leading journalists writing about the origins of Al Qaeda invariably brushed up against Khashoggi, often using him as a source because of his ties to Osama bin Laden.

The reinvention of Khashoggi into the Horst Wessel of the Democrat foreign policy establishment didn’t happen because the media didn’t know his track record.

Jamal Khashoggi was a member of the violently antisemitic Muslim Brotherhood, who at the time of his death was planting columns from Qatar, a state sponsor of the Brotherhood, in the Washington Post. Now, Khashoggi is the subject of his very own government policy.

That policy comes courtesy of the Biden administration.

In October, Biden had claimed that, “Jamal’s death will not be in vain, and we owe it to his memory to fight for a more just and free world.” A just and free world is the last thing that Khashoggi would have wanted. But Biden is fighting for the kind of world he did want.

The Biden administration picked Iran over the Saudis in Yemen, he picked the old Saudi establishment that Khashoggi was associated with over its reformist crown prince who had favored rights for women, and he’s moving to pressure Egypt over the Muslim Brotherhood.

Much as Blinken monetized a family history of antisemitism in support of an antisemite.

These policies that will deprive millions of human rights are being done in the name of human rights even if it’s only the human rights of Osama bin Laden’s old friend who has since gone to join him in whatever Islamic paradise of virgins that Jihadists believe awaits them in the afterlife .

While the Biden administration erects its Khashoggi Ban, it’s working to tear down the Taylor Force Act. Unlike the Khashoggi Ban, the Taylor Force Act was passed by Congress.

Taylor Force had been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and had served at Fort Hood in the year of the infamous Islamic terrorist attack on the base, but was killed in Israel as a civilian.

The American veteran was murdered by Bashar Masalha, an Islamic terrorist who received a hero’s funeral and was praised by the Palestinian Authority.

“The Martyr Bashar Masalha returned from Qalqilya to his village Hajja in a procession,” PA TV gushed, describing the burial of a terrorist who had murdered an American as a “national wedding” in which he was “embraced by the soil of his homeland as a Martyr.”

In response to the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to stop funding terrorism, the Taylor Force Act attempted to cut off foreign aid to the terrorist entity. While the Trump administration took the Taylor Force Act and other laws preventing the government from funding Islamic terrorists, the Biden administration is working to bypass it and send money to the terrorists killing Jews.

Secretary of State Blinken, fresh from describing the travails of his ancestors who suffered pogroms and genocide, would like to go back to paying Islamic terrorists to kill Jews.

And Americans in general, like Taylor Force.

Meanwhile, the Khashoggi Ban will make Osama bin Laden’s friend an official martyr, not of Al Qaeda, but of the Biden administration.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Biden’s New Asst Sec of State Worked for Islamic Terror State That Funds Hamas

“I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada.” 

Wed Feb 3, 2021Daniel Greenfield  96

 “I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada,” Hady Amr wrote a year after September 11, discussing his work as the national coordinator of the anti-Israel Middle East Justice Network. Biden has now chosen Amr as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israel-Palestine.  "I have news for every Israeli," Amr ranted in one column written after Sheikh Salah Shahada, the head of Hamas' Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was taken out by an Israeli air strike.  Amr warned that Arabs "now have televisions, and they will never, never forget what the Israeli people, the Israeli military and Israeli democracy have done to Palestinian children. And there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders of innocents."

He also threatened Americans that "we too shouldn't be shocked when our military assistance to Israel and our security council vetoes that keep on protecting Israel come back to haunt us"  The future State Department official was making these threats less than a year after 9/11...........To Read More...

 

Is This a Joke? That's Who Biden's State Department Spox Declared Was Our Greatest National Security Threat?

  Matt Vespa | @mvespa Feb 03, 2021

The Biden administration sure knows how to pick top folks with regards to articulating the foreign policy of this White House. I’m kidding of course. If these are the people getting key communications positions, then we’re in serious trouble. It’s no shocker that Uncle Joe is a hard-core liberal and will govern as such. 

Look at his legislative action items, his staff, his picks—they’re all the moves of the lefty. We knew this from the get-go. For the suburban voter who was simply too lazy to ready up about this, well—you own it. 

Take Jalina Porter, who has recently accepted a position as a deputy spokesperson for the State Department. Oh, and she thinks that the greatest national security threat we face isn’t from radical Islamic terror groups, white nationalists, Trump supporters, or even climate change. It’s the police (via Washington Free Beacon):............To Read More......

 

 

 

New Docs Show State Dept. Knew About Hillary Clinton's Secret Email Account

By Judicial Watch —— Bio and Archives--October 11, 2019

New Docs Show State Dept. Knew About Hillary Clinton's Secret Email Account By Judicial Watch --American Politics, News, Opinion Join Judicial Watch’s Ramona Cotca for an in-depth update on the progress which Judicial Watch has made in the legal battle to obtain documents related to the private Clinton email server from the State Department. New documents obtained by Judicial Watch from the State Department reveal the extent to which high ranking department officials were aware of then-Secretary Clinton’s use of a private server.........To Read More.....

The Kiev Connection: Have the Democrats opened Pandora’s box with successful demand for investigation of foreign influence on the 2016 election?

March 21, 2019 By Thomas Lifson 

 

Democrats may regret their years of hyperventilation over allegations of foreign "collusion" to influence a presidential election. In what amounts to slow-motion political jujitsu, the nefarious acts attributed to the Trump campaign may end up being applied to the Obama administration and Hillary campaign. A formal criminal investigation already is being launched overseas, making an American counterpart investigation awkward to suppress.

Anyone who has paid attention to the genesis of the Mueller investigation understands that it was opposition research paid for by the Democratic Party and Hillary presidential campaign and corrupt senior officials at the FBI that sparked the appointment of the special counsel. But new information developed by John Solomon of The Hill suggests that there was indeed an effort by a foreign government to influence the 2016 election, and that it was the government of Ukraine attempting to sway voters in Hillary's favor. ................

Keep in mind that there are many other potential sources of evidence for turning the Democrats' efforts to rid themselves of President Trump by investigation against them.  President Trump can de-classify and release the FISA warrants that appear to have concealed relevant facts from the Court — a criminal offense — and other information about the corruption at the FBI.

My assumption all along has been that as the most successful reality TV producer in the history of the medium, Donald Trump is managing the "story arc" for maximum effect on the 2020 electorate. Finally, at long last, we may be seeing the third act of this drama begin............... To Read More....

Trump Makes the Elites Pessimistic on Foreign Trade. Good.

March 3, 2019 By Peter Skurkiss

A gloom has settled over the American elite on trade and foreign policy. This is good news. Here's why.

The dark clouds started forming during the presidency of Barack Obama. Even though, in a number of ways, Obama was anti-American, forever apologizing for this country and its achievements, his foreign policy was not exactly a globalist's delight. Obama's appointment of the ineffectual Hillary Clinton as secretary of state was a raw political move. When she left, Obama offered John F. Kerry as a sop to the foreign policy blob. Even though Obama was behind international initiatives like the Iran nuclear weapons deal, the Paris Climate Accord, and the overthrow of Gaddafi, overall, he oversaw a retreat, albeit slowly, from the post-WWII consensus.

The 2016 election was a shock to the foreign service community. Hillary was their ideal candidate. In her, the boys from Foggy Bottom knew they could lead the "world's smartest woman" around by the nose with flattery and faux bowing and scraping. Donald Trump, however, was their worst nightmare. This barbarian was uncontrollable and threatened to upend the world as they know it. And worse still, on a personal note, since winning the presidency, Trump has frozen out a great many of his pre-election critics from the plumb government positions they crave.  The inbred blob is infected with groupthink.........Yes, naked self-interest motivates many in the blob.  To think otherwise is to deny human nature to its members...............To Read More..........

The Clinton Dossier

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 0 Comments Thursday, February 15, 2018 @ Sultan Knish Blog

There were many damning revelations in the Nunes memo released by a House Intelligence Committee vote. But the most damning of them all doesn’t raise questions about process, but about motive.

The memo told us that the FISA application would not have happened without the Steele dossier. The document known as the Steele dossier was a work product of the Clinton campaign. Not only was Christopher Steele, the former British intel agent who purportedly produced the document, working for an organization hired by the Clinton campaign, but he shared a memo with the FBI from Cody Shearer, a Clinton operative, listing some of the same allegations as the ones in his dossier. That memo has raised questions about whether Steele had been doing original research or just dressing up a smear by Shearer.

A redacted memo by Senate Judiciary Committee members Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham also states that there was a second Steele memo based on information that Steele had received from the State Department and which had been passed along by "a friend of the Clintons." Victoria Nuland, a Clinton protégé and top State Department official who helped cover up the Benghazi attack, recently went on a media tour in which she revealed that Steele had passed along his material to State.

Shearer and Nuland are both Clinton associates. Under President Clinton, Nuland had been Strobe Talbott’s Chief of Staff. Shearer was Strobe Talbott’s brother-in-law and his connection to the Clintons.

Not only was the Steele dossier a work product of the Clinton campaign, but the State Department, which had been run by Hillary Clinton and staffed by many of her loyalists at the top, had been used to route information to Steele from the Clintons, and then route information back from Steele. Clintonworld had not only paid for the Steele dossier, but influenced its content and passed it around.

Calling it the Steele dossier is a mistake. It’s the Clinton dossier. At best, it’s the Clinton-Steele dossier.

The media’s counterattack against the Nunes memo rests on the argument that while the FISA applications didn’t mention that Steele was working for the Clinton campaign, they admitted that the dossier had a political origin. Media apologists and Never Trumpers have acted as if an admission of political origin to the FISA court is some sort of rebuttal of the Nunes memo. It obviously isn’t.

There’s a world of difference between admitting that the dossier came from a “political” source or that it came from the campaign of his greatest political opponent who was obsessed with destroying him.

The media apologists and Never Trumpers have churned out echo chamber articles claiming that courts routinely evaluate evidence from biased and tainted sources. If so, then why not tell the court?

If admitting the truth wouldn’t have made a different, then why not admit the truth?

Defenders of the investigation frequently invoke national security. But there was no intelligence need to protect the Clinton campaign. Keeping Steele anonymous might have protected a source. But keeping the Clinton campaign anonymous wasn’t a defense against the Russians, but against the Republicans.

There were only two reasons to withhold the information about the origins of the Clinton-Steele dossier.

1. Fear that the court would have viewed the Clinton origins of the dossier as disqualifying.

2. Concern about exposing the Clinton campaign’s funding of the dossier.

There’s no question that the origins of the Clinton-Steele dossier were being concealed. If they were being concealed to fool the court, then the whole process was tainted. But such things have been known to happen. The truly damning possibility here is that it wasn’t the court they were concealing it from.

Either the DOJ and FBI deliberately misled the court. Or they were colluding with the Clinton campaign.

The Nunes and Grassley/Graham memos both make it clear that Steele was playing a double game, acting as an FBI source while spreading the Clinton dossier through the media. And the FBI chose to ignore these abuses until it could no longer do so. The double game was criminal and political.

Steele was spreading the Clinton dossier through the media to taint Trump politically. But he was also working with the FBI to go after Trump with a criminal investigation. The information was withheld by the DOJ so as not to expose the fact that his paymasters were actually in the Clinton campaign.

Were the DOJ and the FBI covering up the origins of the Clinton-Steele dossier to protect the criminal investigation or the political campaign? The refusal to crack down on Steele’s media leaks (not to mention the plethora of leaks coming from within the FBI and DOJ) suggest that it was the latter or both.

Admitting a political origin on the FISA application suggests they were less worried about the court than about the public exposure of their actions. And that’s the situation that they find themselves in now.

The Clinton campaign had taken great care to conceal its ownership of the Clinton-Steele dossier. Having a law fire hire a smear firm which then hired a British former intel agent in another country indicates that the campaign was spending a lot of time and money trying to cover its tracks. It wouldn’t have needed to work so hard just to protect the distribution of opposition research to the media.

There was never any shortage of reporters eager to cooperate with Clinton officials. Would the same insider media that allowed the DNC to review articles and ask for changes have really refused to keep the origins of the Clinton-Steele dossier a secret? Even if the reporters who were briefed by Steele didn’t know that he was working for the Clinton campaign, they could have guessed it from their contacts.

Concealing the origins of the Clinton-Steele dossier wasn’t necessary for opposition research. And that means that the dossier had always been intended to serve as the basis for a criminal investigation. Even before he wrote a single word, Christopher Steele had been hired to generate a criminal investigation.

The eavesdropping and the Mueller investigation aren’t unintended outcomes, as the apologists want us to believe, that a zealous Steele triggered by passing the information to the government.

It had always been the intended outcome before Christopher Steele even officially came on board.

But because the campaign was underway, the dossier was a double game. Spreading it through the media acted as classic opposition research while routing it through the DOJ generated an investigation. And the Clinton campaign used Steele to do both. His Fusion GPS handlers ferried him from briefing reporters to briefing the FBI. And the FBI was obligated to keep his secret the way that the media did.

Short of an email hack, there’s no way to get at what a reporter knows. The Los Angeles Times still has Obama’s Khalidi tape locked up. The recent release of a photo of Obama posing with Farrakhan which had been kept locked up for over a decade, and the media’s subsequent refusal to report on it, shows just how impermeable the media’s black wall of silence is. But that’s not true of government agencies.

Government agencies have to respond to orders from the President, queries from members of Congress and even requests from the public. The investigation of the Clinton-Steele dossier was met with stonewalling at every step of the way, but it is yielding results that would be impossible in the media.

The origin of the dossier was omitted to conceal it from conservative activists and politicians.

Would telling the truth about the origins of the Clinton-Steele dossier to the FISA court have been disastrous? Let’s take the word of the media apologists and Never Trumpers who insist that the court would have shrugged. And considering the inclusion of a Yahoo News article (also allegedly generated by Steele), that’s entirely possible. The court was stacked with Obama appointees. The acts of judicial activism that defied the law to undermine Trump have gutted the credibility of the Federal judiciary.

But if the DOJ and FBI weren’t hiding the truth from the judge, they were hiding it from everyone else. They were protecting the dual media smear campaign run by Fusion GPS which was parading Steele in front of selected insider reporters. And they were protecting the public perception of the investigation. If everything had gone as planned, bias might have been suspected, but never proven.

The real question about the concealment of the origins of the Clinton-Steele dossier isn’t whether disclosing it on the FISA application would changed the outcome. That’s a serious legal question that may have a major impact on those who failed to disclose it and on the investigation even if the court response would have been the same. But the real question is, what was the motive for concealing it?

Why did the leadership in the DOJ and the FBI cover up the role of the Clinton campaign? They weren’t protecting intelligence or sources. They covered it up to protect their political allies.

The omission of the origins of the Clinton-Steele dossier is an admission of guilt. It shows that these were not the routine abuses that can occur in an investigation, but that the investigation was politically motivated. A cover-up reveals not only a crime, but the motive for which the crime was committed.

The missing information is evidence of the collusion between the DOJ and the Clintons.

 

The Clinton Dossier

Exposing the collusion between the DOJ and the Clintons.
 

February 7, 2018  Daniel Greenfield  4 

There were many damning revelations in the Nunes memo released by a House Intelligence Committee vote. But the most damning of them all doesn’t raise questions about process, but about motive.

The memo told us that the FISA application would not have happened without the Steele dossier. The document known as the Steele dossier was a work product of the Clinton campaign. Not only was Christopher Steele, the former British intel agent who purportedly produced the document, working for an organization hired by the Clinton campaign, but he shared a memo with the FBI from Cody Shearer, a Clinton operative, listing some of the same allegations as the ones in his dossier.  That memo has raised questions about whether Steele had been doing original research or just dressing up a smear by Shearer.

A redacted memo by Senate Judiciary Committee members Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham also states that there was a second Steele memo based on information that Steele had received from the State Department and which had been passed along by "a friend of the Clintons." Victoria Nuland, a Clinton protégé and top State Department official who helped cover up the Benghazi attack, recently went on a media tour in which she revealed that Steele had passed along his material to State.............

There’s no question that the origins of the Clinton-Steele dossier were being concealed. If they were being concealed to fool the court, then the whole process was tainted...........Either the DOJ and FBI deliberately misled the court. Or they were colluding with the Clinton campaign...........Why did the leadership in the DOJ and the FBI cover up the role of the Clinton campaign? They weren’t protecting intelligence or sources. They covered it up to protect their political allies. ............To Read More....

My Take - Notice a new name and a new player in this saga?   I've never heard of Victoria Nuland before this, and now she has become part of this story, and that trend will continue.  As time goes by, and this conspiracy unravels we're going to find there were a lot players in this game - all small potaotes - all potentially facing jail time.  What's that mean?  That means someone is going to sing!   

The one who breaks ranks first to squeal on the big players will be the one who gets the biggest break.  The mob calls them "rats", but one thing about rats - they're survivors and these rats are not capable of surviving in prison, and they know it.  They're not going down with the ship in order for the leaders of this corrupt cabal to sit high and dry, and I include not only the Clintons, I include Obama in this group. 

Before long  the lowest tier personnel will start singing to save themsleves, and we're going to see the second and third tier in this conspiracy come into focus. People like Lynch, McCabe, Comey, Sally Yates, Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes and Strzok and his mistress start singing.  And then only the top will be left - and if there's any real justice in the justice system - they'll go to jail. 

Breaking! Court to Review Clinton Emails Over Objections from State Department and Justice Department

By Onan Coca September 28, 2017

Judicial Watch announced today that a federal judge will begin reviewing the redacted material from emails discussing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s wrongheaded use of iPads and iPhones while she was leading the State Department. The Judge has also ordered the State Department to file an affidavit explaining why they shouldn’t have to search for new Clinton emails that have been recovered in recent months.

In doing this, the court has obviously rejected arguments by the Trump administration’s State and Justice Departments. The question is… why have the State Department and the Justice Department continued to cover for Hillary Clinton?...........Hillary Clinton belongs in prison for the way that she routinely mishandled classified information, now we just need to find a Trump administration official brave enough to see justice done......To Read More.....

Trumping the State Department

Reining in the budget and activities of this bloated bureaucracy is essential

Scot Faulkner

President Trump’s budgetary assault on the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is long overdue. He is forcing a rethinking that will benefit America and the world.

The State Department is one of the most bloated of federal bureaucracies. Front line consular officers, many just starting their careers at State, actually help Americans abroad. However, there are also countless “Hallway Ambassadors” who aimlessly roam from irrelevant meeting to obscure policy forum, killing time and our tax dollars.

Legions of these taxpayer funded drones fill the State Department. Some are reemployed retirees who travel to overseas missions conducting “inspections” to justify their additional salaries.

The American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) is to the State Department what the Teacher Unions are to public education. It exists to protect tenure and to prevent any accountability or reduction among the State Department drones.

The Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance (AVC) is a uniquely harmful part of State. This Bureau’s main mission has been to create photo ops of treaty signings. The arms control treaties have usually been unenforceable with sworn enemies of America. The Bureau’s agreements with the Soviet Union undermined U.S. security. Its bureaucrats developed elaborate procedures for justifying the minimizing or overlooking of blatant treaty violations. They are using this same play book for the Iranian Nuclear deal.

Headquarters waste and dysfunction are just the beginning of State Department ineffectiveness. In the mid-1980’s, I viewed State Department field operations personally while serving as Director of the U.S. Peace Corps in Malawi.

The most egregious problem was the un-American culture that permeates career Foreign Service Officers. Except for toasting America at the July 4th Embassy party each year, being pro-American is viewed as unprofessional. Long serving Americans would advise me that rising above nationalism and acting “world wise” was the mark of a seasoned diplomat.

Not only did these U.S. foreign bureaucrats avoid Americanism, they avoided the host country. The Embassy team members spent their business and recreational time with diplomats from the other Embassies and with European expatriates living in Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital city. Their only sojourns outside the capital were to Salima, the lakeside resort, or to the Ambassador’s vacation home on the Zomba Plateau.

As Country Director, I eliminated the chauffer-driven luxury car used by my predecessor and reallocated the chauffer to other duties. At the wheel of a Nissan Patrol, I spent the majority of my time in the field with my seventy-five volunteers. This meant absorbing in depth knowledge of Malawi and its people.

State Department versus reality was proven many times over. The most blatant was the 1985 fuel shortage. Malawi was land-locked. The Mozambique Civil War closed off its closest ports. A problematic network of rail lines brought goods, including gasoline, to Malawi via South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia. My volunteers told me a Zimbabwean labor dispute was going to cause a five week disruption of fuel to Malawi. I dutifully reported this to the Embassy Team. They scoffed, assuring me that their British friend running Mobil-Malawi was telling them no disruption would occur. I directed my staff to begin stockpiling gasoline.

The disruption occurred. The Embassy team kept dismissing my reports and telling themselves the disruption would be short-lived. By week four, the Embassy motor pool was without fuel. Staff was delivering messages via bicycle. By week five, the Ambassador asked to purchase fuel from the Peace Corps, which had remained fully operational.

The Embassy was blind-sided on an even more important issue. Air Malawi announced it was going to purchase a new fleet of passenger jets along with a comprehensive parts and maintenance agreement. At this point the State Department replaced the Embassy’s Commercial Attaché with a Hispanic who could barely speak English. Instead of sending this person to Spanish-speaking Equatorial Guinea, they posted him to the most Anglophile country in Africa. He was miserable and totally ineffective.

Alternatively, the German Ambassador moved about Malawi’s 28 regions, equaling my zeal for the field. When Boeing’s sales team arrived they were given a proper, but cool reception. The Fokker team arrived to a hero’s welcome and the multi-million dollar deal was signed shortly thereafter. American business lost a huge contract.

USAID has spent over $1 trillion on overseas projects since its founding in 1961. Empty buildings and rusting tractors are silent testaments to its failures. What funds were not diverted to corrupt government officials went for unsustainable efforts, driven more by academic theories than practicality.

State Department and USAID need a fundamental review and a day of reckoning. This is fertile territory for President Trump and Secretary Tillerson to implant business principles and common sense.  

Scot Faulkner served as the first Chief Administrative Officer of the U.S. House of Representatives and on Reagan’s White House Staff. He advises global corporations and governments on strategic change and leadership.

(Editor's Note:  Emphasis added by me. RK)

Zone of Reality: Castro Notes

By Rich Kozlovich

I realized today that we have a clear theme for this week's posts.

"There is No Such Thing as a Conspiracy Week!"

For years one of my favorite lines has been; "everything really IS a conspiracy!" Natually I get rolled eyes, snickers and outright laughter...and that's from my friends. That's ok, because as the years have gone by...I'm quoted by those friends. Anyone who believes there is no such thing as a conspiracy hasn't ever read a history book and is completely clueless about what is actually going on in the world.

I have been posting past works by Mr. Fontova's every day. I posted one this morning, but I didn't realize there was a new one. Here is his latest work on this subject. After reading this please tell me there isn't any such thing as a conspiracy! That will make everyone feel sooooo much better. It will be a lie of course, ...but then.... when has that ever stopped a conspiracy?

Could Breitbart, Limbaugh and the New Media Have Saved Cuba By Vetting Fidel Castro And His MSM Champions?
By Humberto Fontova

"In all essentials, Castro's battle for Cuba was a media public relations campaign, fought in New York and Washington." (Paul Johnson, Modern Times......"It would be a great mistake even to intimate that Castro's Cuba has any real prospect of becoming a Soviet satellite." (Walter Lippmann, Washington Post July, 1959)

Arthur Gardner and Earl Smith were the two U.S. ambassadors to Cuba who warned about Castro’s covert Communism (and thus lost their jobs.) In 1960 they testified under oath to the Media/State Department collusion and campaign that brought Castro to power:……..

Senator Dodd: (in preparation for his post) your successor as Ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith was actually (sent by his State Dept. superiors) to be briefed by New York Times' Herbert Matthews?
Mr. GARDNER. "Yes, that is right."

Senator Eastland: "Mr Smith, you had been warning the State Department that Castro was a Marxist?'
Mr. Smith: "Yes, sir....

Senator Eastland: "Would you say that the American Government then, including all of its agencies, was largely responsible for bringing Castro to power?"

Mr Smith: "The State Department played a large part in bringing Castro to power. The press, and other Government agencies (CIA), members of Congress are also responsible..”