Archive for the ‘Intel’ Category

After this morning’s House Intel Committee meeting, it’s impossible to think that Democrats will be able to defend Committee Chairman Adam Schiff much longer.

The article opens by saying “Every Republican on the House Intelligence Committee is calling on Chairman Adam Schiff to resign Thursday, accusing the California Democrat of weaving a ‘demonstrably false’ narrative of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and ‘undermining’ the credibility of the panel.”

Literally, for years, Chairman Schiff insisted that he’d seen proof that President Trump had colluded with Russians during the 2016 election. After Mike Conaway read the GOP letter, Schiff responded “A visibly emotional Schiff, who did not know this broadside from Republicans was coming, had a strident response. At times raising his voice, he listed a litany of known and controversial interactions between the Trump campaign and Russia – including Donald Trump Jr.’s involvement in the Trump Tower meeting and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s sharing of polling data with a Russian associate. “You might think it’s OK,” Schiff said. ‘I don’t.'”

Actually, Mr. Schiff does think it’s ok — if Democrats are employing those tactics. If he thought these things were wrong, why didn’t Schiff present legislation making President Trump’s actions illegal? As chairman of a powerful committee, that legislation, at minimum, would get a hearing. Most likely, that legislation would pass the House.

At this point, there’s no reason to think this isn’t just a stunt. Watch this video and tell me he wasn’t playing to the cameras:

Speaker Pelosi issued this preposterous statement in defense of Schiff:

I’d love to know what type of drugs Ms. Pelosi is taking because they must be powerful if she thinks that a liar like Schiff is a patriot.

If I were king for a day, one of the things high on my to-do list would be to officially end the fishing expeditions investigations into Russian collusion. I’d finish them because they’re a waste of time. I’d finish them because senators of both parties have admitted that, after a 9-month-long fishing expeditions investigation, they still haven’t found a single piece of evidence that shows President Trump colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Greg Jarrett’s article highlights the fact that “Senators Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Joe Manchin (D-WV), have said they have seen no evidence of Trump- Russian collaboration. Both sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee.” Jarrett then adds that “even more compelling are the statements of senior Obama administration intelligence officials who were privy to all the information gathered by both the FBI and the alphabet soup of intel agencies which began investigating the matter more than a year ago. Take a gander at what they have said. James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, has twice confirmed that he has seen no evidence of collusion. As the basis for his conclusion, he cited reports from the NSA, FBI and CIA. John Brennan, the former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has said the same thing –no sign of ‘collusion.’ And then there is James Comey. When asked if Clapper’s assessment was correct, the fired FBI Director testified that Clapper was ‘right,’ there is no known evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians.”

At this point, it’s pretty clear that Mueller won’t find anything. He won’t because there’s nothing to find on the Trump-Russian collusion topic. It’s time to wrap that up rather than continue to waste taxpayers’ money on a fishing expedition.

Let’s be honest, too. If nobody has proof that Trump and Putin colluded to steal the election from Hillary after 9 months of looking, it doesn’t exist. Let’s remember that the NSA, the FBI and the CIA haven’t found proof of Trump-Putin collusion. If that trio can’t find proof of it, then it doesn’t exist. There’s a better chance that I’ll see the Northern Lights on a foggy night than finding proof of collusion.

This was underscored by the Senate Intelligence Committee when it disclosed that it had conducted in excess of 100 interviews over 250 hours, held 11 open hearings, produced more than 4,000 pages of transcripts, and reviewed some 100,000 documents. Every intel official who drafted the report on Russian election meddling was interviewed, as were all relevant Obama administration officials.

That sounds pretty thorough. If these professional investigators didn’t find anything, it doesn’t exist.

If this article is telling the truth, some Obama administration officials likely will be facing substantial jail time.

Circa News is reporting that “More than 5 percent, or one out of every 20 searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa.”

Further, Circa quotes a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court document that said “Since 2011, NSA’s minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collections under Section 702,” the unsealed court ruling declared. “The Oct. 26, 2016 notice informed the court that NSA analysts had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.”

This video is stunning:

Eventually, the FISA Court got so frustrated with the Obama administration that it rebuked them. It’s clear that Obama administration officials should be worried about their legal exposure. This time, Susan Rice’s testimony won’t be off-the-record. This time, it’ll be under penalty of perjury.

Let’s just say I’m thankful I’m not facing Ms. Rice’s situation.

Technorati: NSA, FISA, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Classified Documents, Barack Obama, Susan Rice, Spying, Grand Jury

According to Wikipedia, Karen Finney is a time-tested veteran of high profile campaigns. Among other tours of duty, “Finney served four years as the spokesperson and Director of Communications at the Democratic National Committee.” Later, “Finney joined Media Matters as a senior fellow and consultant” on November 25, 2014. Ms. Finney isn’t a centrist Democrat by anyone’s stretch of the imagination.

Last night, Ms. Finney appeared on The Kelly File. SIDENOTE: Shannon Bream sat in for Ms. Kelly last night. During the interview, Ms. Finney stuck to the DNC’s script, saying “In addition to the briefing that the electors are asking for, all of this information at some point should be made public, to the American people. We are the greatest democracy on the face of the planet. We need to know if the Russians are trying to infiltrate our government in these nefarious ways. I mean, our brave men and women in our intelligence agencies and who serve in uniform, they fight to give us this type of information and to uncover these sorts of things, and I think their next commander-in-chief, Mr. Trump, owes it to them, not to just dismiss them out-of-hand … Again, if the electors are suggesting that part of their constitutional responsibility is they want to hear a briefing so that they can feel confident…”

Democrats are desperately trying to convince the public that getting a briefing is part of the electors’ responsibilities. It isn’t part of the electors’ responsibility. This is what Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution says their responsibility is:

Article II
Section 1. The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

The Congress may determine the Time of choosing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.

As electors, what the intel community thinks about Russian hacking and causing mayhem is immaterial. As electors, their responsibility is to cast their vote for the candidate that gathered the most votes in the state. Period.

As citizens, though, they have the responsibility of demanding that their government protect against cybercrimes. Ms. Finney didn’t hold the Obama administration’s feet to the fire. She didn’t live up to the standard that she’s advocating for now. I might say that that’s hypocritical but I won’t. Instead, I’ll say that she’s exercising her right to be a partisan who’s more interested in being a good Democrat than she’s interested in being an American patriot first.

First, Jim Comey tilted the election to Trump. Next, it was fake news. After that, it was the electoral college gave Trump the victory. Now, it’s supposedly the Russians who are giving Trump the victory. I’d ask Democrats when they’ll admit that Mrs. Clinton lost because a) she was the status quo candidate, b) she ran a crappy campaign and c) an overwhelming majority of people think that the Obama administration was taking the country in the wrong direction.

Technorati: Electoral College, Electors, Constitution, Article II, Section 1, Intelligence Briefing, Karen Finney, Media Matters, John Podesta, Clinton Foundation, Democrats, Election 2016

Dianne Feinstein’s op-ed is a tortured attempt to rationalize the Democrats’ last attempt to throw mud at President Bush. It’s time to expose Sen. Feinstein’s tortured logic.

In the wake of 9/11, we were desperate to bring those responsible for the brutal attacks to justice. But even that urgency did not justify torture. The United States must be held to a higher standard than our enemies, yet some of our actions did not clear that bar.

When people’s lives are at stake, every tactic must be on the table. Protecting people’s lives must always be a higher priority than living up to an imaginary international standard for polite societies. What Sen. Feinstein and the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee just said is that protecting people is less important than living up to an imaginary international image.

Thank God the president’s oath doesn’t give him that luxury. His oath is to protect the United States. Period.

Thankfully, Ralph Peters’ op-ed sets Sen. Feinstein and the Democrats serving on the Senate Intelligence Committee straight:

As for those supposedly horrendous actions taken by CIA personnel to convince blood-encrusted terrorists that cooperation might be the wisest course, they may have been harsh, but the times and our enemies were and are immeasurably harsher. But torture? What the Islamic State and its ilk do to their captives is torture. They shrink from nothing. We shrink from the thought of a terrorist gasping for breath.

Harsh interrogation techniques don’t equal torture. Any nation that’s squeamish about making life a living hell for terrorists won’t live a peaceful existence. Democrats insist that ‘we’re better than that.’ Here’s a question for Sen. Feinstein and her fellow Democrats: What’s better than protecting American lives?

Here’s how Col. Peters took Sen. Feinstein and the Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats to the woodshed:

Senator Feinstein and her supporters argue that the American people have a “right to know,” but they don’t know the American people. Living too long in a bubble with fellow members of the cultural elite, they have no sense of how the average American feels about terrorists who fly passenger aircraft into skyscrapers or who gleefully behead innocent captives in video clips.

Far from being mortified by water-boarding or sleep deprivation (for working Americans sleep deprivation is a normal state of affairs from holding down two jobs and multiple shifts to feed their families during the Reign of Obama), the folks I know back home in the Pennsylvania coal towns would skin terrorists alive then get out the salt shaker. My people weren’t upset by water-boarding. They were upset—infuriated—by the collapse of the Twin Towers and the deaths of 3,000 Americans.

The Pennsylvanians Col. Peters described in his op-ed are clear-thinking people living in the real world. These Pennsylvanians have their priorities straight. As I said earlier, protecting people’s lives must always be America’s highest priority. Sen. Feinstein and the other Democrats serving on the Intelligence Committee apparently think that we’re living in a peaceful world. When barbarians with a seventh century mindset attacked the United States, they gave the United States permission to be more barbaric than the terrorists were. (Think fighting fire with fire or all’s fair in love and war.)

It’s time for the Democrats to recognize that the barbarians haven’t stopped thinking barbaric thoughts. They’ve changed tactics but they’re still just as barbaric as al-Qa’ida was. That’s just the cold, hard truth.

It’s time for President Obama, Secretary Clinton, CIA Director Petraeus and Defense Secretary Panetta to be grilled extensively on their decisions, or lack thereof, during the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2012. I don’t want this hearing to be about a ton of peripheral topics. Citizen journalists will sort through Susan Rice’s and Jay Carney’s spin.

This shouldn’t even be about President Obama attending a Vegas fundraiser the day after the terrorist attacks. Again, that’s something citizen journalists can sort through. Here are the things this hearing must be about:

1. Who was the first senior administration official to get real time reports from the consulate the day of the terrorist attack? Did this senior administration official report this immediately to President Obama? If not, why not?
2. When did President Obama’s national security team first tell him about the terrorist attack? Was this during his afternoon meeting with Defense Secretary Panetta the day of the terrorist attack?
3. During his meeting with Secretary Panetta, did President Obama order Panetta to send troops to protect the diplomatic staff in Benghazi? If he didn’t order protection for these American patriots during his meeting with Secretary Panetta, did President Obama order military support later in the day? If not, why not?
4. Secretary Panetta said that he didn’t send troops in because they didn’t know what they’d be jumping into. Mike Baker dispelled that myth by saying the CIA and military are receiving a “glut of information” in real time from the CIA, specifically the Global Response Staff. Did Secretary Panetta recommend to President Obama that the military jump into the firefight/terrorist attack? If he did, what was President Obama’s response? If he didn’t, why didn’t he make that recommendation?
5. When did Charlene Lamb first tell Hillary Clinton about the terrorist attack? When she was told about the terrorist attack, did Ms. Clinton immediately contact President Obama? If not, why not? If she did, what time was it that she contacted him?
6. President Obama was the only person with the constitutional authority to order troop deployments during an act of war. Terrorist attacks on American consulates are without question acts of war. Did he order spec-ops troops to be deployed to Benghazi to protect the diplomats from the terrorist attack? If he didn’t, why didn’t he?

These hearings need to start with focusing in on a single subject so the American people get a detailed understanding of President Obama’s national security team operations and his decisions to protect or not protect Christopher Stevens and his diplomatic staff.

Once that base of information is established and the American people understand President Obama’s failings, then the hearings can expand into other areas. Until then, they must stay focused.
Tags: Benghazi Terrorist Attacks, President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, Democrat Politicians, David Petraeus, Delta Force, CIA, Charlene Lamb, State Department, Christopher Stevens, Ty Woods, Sean Smith, Glenn Doherty, Patriots, Jay Carney, Susan Rice, Spinmeisters

Tonight’s debate wasn’t the substantive debate that conservatives were hoping for. When Vice President Biden rolled his eyes the first time, I wondered if that was a signal for what was ahead. It was.

Let’s be clear about this. Vice President Biden was the aggressor tonight. That’s almost automatically a sign of who won the debate. Tonight was the exception to that rule.

It isn’t that I think Paul Ryan won tonight’s debate, though he showed he’s more than capable of being a heartbeat away from the presidency. It’s that Joe Biden was consistently dismissive of Ryan.

There’s no question that the MSNBC crowd is ecstatic tonight. If I got a sawbuck for each of their internal and external fistpumps, I’d have enough to pay for a lavish month-long vacation in the Carribbean. There’s equally no question that Vice President Biden’s antics turned off independents and women. This video of Greta van Susteren interviewing Brit Hume says everything:

Vice President Biden didn’t just turn off Brit Hume and Greta van Susteren. He turned off Chris Wallace, too:

That’s only part of Vice President Biden’s problem. When asked about additional security forces for the Benghazi Consulate, Vice President Biden said that the administration didn’t know about requests for additional security. That’s a bald-faced lie according Wednesday’s testimony:

“We weren’t told they wanted more security. We did not know they wanted more security there,” Biden said.

First, this administration’s insistence that they didn’t know about the requests is frightening. Either the administration is lying about not knowing or they weren’t interested in the security conditions at a consulate in a growing terrorist hotspot.

If Vice President Biden wants us to believe that this administration didn’t pay attention to the escalating terrorist threats near the consulate, then he’s asking us to believe that they don’t pay attention to growing terrorist threats around the world.

That’s frightening.

The good news for Democrats about tonight’s debate is that it fired up the progressive base. The bad news is it turned off the other 70+ percent of the voters.

Tags: Joe Biden, The Base, Red Meat, MSNBC, Arrogance, Condescension, Benghazi, Terrorist Attack, Democrats, Paul Ryan, Debate, GOP, Brit Hume, Chris Wallace, Greta van Susteren, Election 2012

This afternoon’s hearing on the terrorist attacks to the Benghazi Consulate have been explosive. One such exchange happened between Rep. Raul Labrador, (R-ID), and Patrick Kennedy, the Undersecretary of State for Administration. Here’s the transcript of that exchange:

REP. LABRADOR: Ambassador Kennedy, you said that, if any administration official, including any career official, had been on television on Sunday, Sept. 16, they would have said what Ambassador Rice said. The information she had from the intelligence community — I see how specific you’re being — from the intelligence community — is the same information that I had at that point. Can you explain to me how it was that, on Sept. 12, you told congressional aides that you thought it was a terrorist attack?
AMBASSADOR KENNEDY: Congressman, I told them that because that was my personal opinion and that I also believed that, because of the nature of it and the lethality of it, that it was a complex attack.
REP. LABRADOR: So how can you sit here today and say that the following day, you had an idea that it was a terrorist attack, and you have said that you aren’t a security expert, how can you claim today that you would have said the same thing as Ambassador Rice said?

This is explosive because it’s telling us this administration used Clintonesque wording to spin the terrorist attack into a simple impromptu uprising, something it clearly wasn’t.

Lt. Col. Andy Wood and Eric Nordstrom, both security experts, said security experts knew almost instantly that this was a terrorist attack. The question then turns from why Ambassador Rice relied on the narrowest, Clintonian spin rather than telling the nation that this was a terrorist attack.

The most obvious reason Ambassador Rice didn’t say that was because that didn’t the storyline Democrats spent a week in Charlotte creating. At their convention, speaker after speaker said that we couldn’t trust Gov. Romney on national security, that President Obama had lots of national security experience and a lengthy list of national security accomplishments.

This terrorist attack happened just days after the Democratic National Convention. It would’ve demolished Vice President Biden’s line that “bin Laden is dead and GM is alive.”

The truth is that bin Laden is dead but al-Qa’ida and other terrorist organizations are regrouping. The Benghazi attack is proof of that. Another truth is that President Bush’s strategy of taking the fight to the terrorists is the only strategy that’s capable of stopping terrorist attacks long before they’re set into operation.

President Obama won’t admit it but that’s the truth.

What’s apparent from the hearing is that security experts like Mr. Nordstrom and Lt. Col. Wood painted a dramatically different picture of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Benghazi Consulate than did the political appointees in the State Department.

Tags: Congressional Oversight, Eric Nordstrom, Andy Wood, Security Experts, Patrick Kennedy, State Department, Diplomat, Terrorist Attack, Benghazi, bin Laden, al-Qa’ida, President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Coverup, Joe Biden, Democrats, Election 2012

Each Monday on America Live with Megyn Kelly, Brad Blakeman, an assistant to GWB, debates Dick Harpootlian, the chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party. For the most part, Harpootlian is an inoffensive buffoon. This afternoon, that changed during a debate about why the terrorist attack on the Benghazi Consulate succeeded. First, here’s a little background into what’s caused the latest stir:

Lt. Col. Andy Wood participated in this interview with CBS national security correspondent Cheryl Attkinson:

It’s stunning and disheartening to hear Lt. Col. Wood say that he felt like they were asking them “to play the piano with 2 fingers.”

That clip was the introduction to an explosive debate, including this exchange between Mr. Harpootlian and Mr. Blakeman:

BLAKEMAN: You guys don’t want the American people to know the truth. You just want to ride this out and hope that the American people will pay attention to something else when this administration was either grossly incompetent or willfully lying to the American people. And now it’s substantiated by an American military person…
HARPOOTLIAN: We don’t know what his (LT. Col. Wood) axe is to grind, Brad. All I’m saying is why scour this days before an election…
BLAKEMAN: Because the American people deserve answers…
HARPOOTLIAN: Oh, the American people. The American people don’t want an answer.

Remember that Harpootlian is the dirtbag that compared Gov. Nikki Haley to Hitler’s mistress.

It’s disgusting that Mr. Harpootlian would argue that “the American people don’t want” an explanation for why President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ignored Ambassador Christopher Stevens’ repeated requests to beef up security before the anniversary of 9/11.

Arguing that the American people aren’t interested in this administration’s weakening the Benghazi Consulate’s security isn’t stupid. It’s their attempt to hide the fact that this administration’s decisions led directly to the deaths of 4 Americans, including the U.S. ambassador.

As the campaign heads into the home stretch, President Obama’s questionable decisions are coming home to roost. His decisions have needlessly gotten high-ranking officials killed, including the first American ambassador killed since 1979.

Tags: Investigation, Benghazi, Terrorist Attacks, Lt. Col. Andy Wood, Whistleblower, 60 Minutes, Media, President Obama, Hillary Clinton, National Security, Dick Harpootlian, Eva Braun, Democrats, Election 2012

When Susan Rice appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, she talked about the ongoing FBI investigation:

Videotape; September 16, 2012

SUSAN RICE (U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations): Let me tell you the best information we have at present. First of all, there’s an FBI investigation which is ongoing. And we look to that investigation to give us the definitive word as to what transpired. But putting together the best information that we have available to us today, our current assessment is that what happened in Benghazi was in fact initially a spontaneous reaction to what have just transpired hours before in Cairo, almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, which were prompted of course by the video.

Like this administration’s other lies about the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Benghazi consulate, the ongoing FBI investigation has been exposed a myth:

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland confirms to the Post that “Everybody who was in Benghazi and posted there has been withdrawn,” adding that she knew of no other American officials in the region who’d be able to investigate the assault.

This administration’s decision not to send a team of FBI investigators looks weak to the terrorists:

“I don’t know why the Americans don’t come here,” Wissam Bin Hamid, commander of the Libyan Shield Brigade, tells the Times. Bin Hamid says his militia came under sustained attack while helping defend a second American compound on Sept. 11, but now with no aid, Benghazi is being transformed into a ghost town, he tells the paper.

“Maybe they are afraid,” bin Hamid adds, offering a possible explanation for why the United States has ceased any on-the-ground investigation.

This administration’s paper tiger streak is showing. Their administration’s decision not to investigate doesn’t mean we don’t know that this was a terrorist attack. It doesn’t mean we don’t know that this administration didn’t adequately fortify the Benghazi consulate. It simply means that we have proof that this administration knows that their reaction to the terrorist attack isn’t playing well with the American people.

On Monday, the Post reported that the main compound used by American diplomats in Benghazi was unguarded and heavily looted, and The Atlantic Wire reports that “the FBI has still not been able to visit the compound, set up any operations in the city or even interview any witnesses who were present during the terrorist attack.”

It’s shameful that CNN conducted a more thorough investigation than the FBI was allowed to conduct. It’s important to remember that they were the ones that found Ambassador Stevens’ diary in the compound.

What’s worse is that this administration is repeating the last 2 weeks worth of lies over again:

Carney said that “embassy security is a matter that is in the purview of the State Department,” and noted that “Secretary Clinton instituted an accountability review that is underway as we speak” while the investigation of the attack itself is being conducted by the FBI.

I repeat: there isn’t an FBI investigation. I hate invoking President Reagan at a time like this but “there they go again.” First Amb. Rice talks about an ongoing FBI investigation. Then Jay Carney talks about the ongoing FBI investigation. The last time we noticed that pattern was after Ms. Rice said that the terrorist attack was really a reaction to a movie trailer nobody had seen.

It’s time the American people spoke out and demanded that the Obama administration start telling the truth. Whether you’re a liberal’s liberal like Pat Caddell or a conservative’s conservative like Jason Chaffetz or somewhere in between, it isn’t acceptable for any administration to lie to We The People.

What’s most troubling is that this administration isn’t telling little white lies about a nothing matter. They’re intentionally misleading We The People about a deadly terrorist attack that should’ve been prevented.

Another troubling pattern about this story is this administration’s unwillingness to call terrorists terrorists:

About the list of security issues, Carney said it was a “known fact that Libya is in transition” and that in the eastern part of Libya in particular there are militant groups and “a great number of armed individuals and militias.”

At times, I wonder if this administration thinks saying the word terrorist will lead to a deadly pox on the US. They’ve certainly avoided using that word like it was toxic.

Tags: Coverup, President Obama, Susan Rice, Jay Carney, FBI, Investigation, Benghazi, al-Qaeda, Terrorists, 9/11, Security, State Department, Hillary Clinton, Democrats, Election 2012