Did Fake News Lose the Vietnam War?

William J. Luti   Wall Street Journal Jan. 3o, 2018

Journalists wrongly portrayed the Tet Offensive as a U.S. defeat and never corrected the record.

A female Viet Cong fighter wields an antitank weapon, 1968. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Seemingly out of nowhere, a shock wave hit South Vietnam on Jan. 30, 1968. In a coordinated assault unprecedented in ferocity and scale, more than 100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers stormed out of their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. They went on to attack more than 100 towns and cities across South Vietnam.

The following 77 days changed the course of the Vietnam War. The American people were bombarded with a nightly stream of devastating television and daily print reporting. Yet what they saw was so at odds with the reality on the ground that many Vietnam veterans believe truth itself was under attack.

The Tet Offensive had ambitious objectives: cause a mass uprising against the government, collapse the South Vietnamese Army, and inflict mass casualties on U.S. forces. The men in the Hanoi Politburo—knowing the war’s real center of gravity was in Washington —hoped the attack ultimately would sap the American people’s will to fight.

A key component of this strategy was terror. Thousands of South Vietnamese government officials, schoolteachers, doctors, missionaries and ordinary civilians—especially in Hue City—were rounded up and executed in an act of butchery not often seen on the battlefield.

Despite their ferocity, by most objective military standards, the communists achieved none of their goals. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces held fast, regrouped and fought back. By late March they had achieved a decisive victory over the communist forces. Hanoi wouldn’t be able to mount another full-scale invasion of South Vietnam until the 1972 Easter offensive.

But in living rooms across America, the nightly news described an overwhelming American defeat. The late Washington Post Saigon correspondent Peter Braestrup later concluded the event marked a major failure in the history of American journalism.

Braestrup, in “Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington” (1977), attributed this portrayal to television’s showbiz tradition. TV news editors put little premium on breadth of coverage, fact-finding or context.

The TV correspondent, Braestrup wrote, like the anchorman back home, had to pose on camera with authority. He had to maintain a dominant appearance while telling viewers more than he knew or could know. The commentary was thematic and highly speculative; it seemed preoccupied with network producers’ insatiable appetite for “impact.”

Braestrup criticized print media with equal vigor.

 The great bulk of wire-service output used by U.S. newspapers did not come from eyewitness accounts. Rather, he wrote, it was passed on from second- or third-hand sources reprocessed several times over.

He was stridently critical of “interpretive reporting,” in which editors allowed reporters to write under the rubric of “news analysis” and “commentary.” This, he asserts, produced “pervasive distortions” and a “disaster image.” The misinformation, fixed in the minds of the American people, played a role in shifting public opinion against the war.

“At Tet,” Braestrup assessed, “the press shouted that the patient was dying, then weeks later began to whisper that he somehow seemed to be recovering—whispers apparently not heard amid the clamorous domestic reaction to the initial shouts.”

Braestrup suggested that the press committed journalistic malpractice by taking sides against the Johnson administration and not correcting the record once the fog of the battle had lifted. These hasty assumptions and judgments, he documented, “were simply allowed to stand.”

Braestrup’s exhaustive analysis remains controversial. His friend and colleague at the Washington Post, the late Don Oberdorfer, attributed the erosion of public support to the credibility of the Johnson administration. The president’s office regularly issued rosy pronouncements at odds with the tactical ebb and flow on the battlefield.

But even to this day it’s difficult to find fault with Braestrup’s concluding insight: The professional obligation of journalists in a free society is to stay calm and get the story straight. It is not, as Walter Lippmann admonished, to conflate “truth” with the assembly and processing of a commodity called “news.”

Mr. Luti is a retired career naval officer and former special assistant to President George W. Bush for defense policy and strategy.

Appeared in the January 30, 2018, print edition.

The Steele Dossier Fits the Kremlin Playbook

Daniel Hoffman  Wall Street Journal

Jan. 28, 2018 

Mr. Hoffman, a retired chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency who served in the former Soviet Union, is vice president of SPG, a political consulting group in Washington.

The likely objective was to undermine Republicans, Democrats—and American democracy.

When the “Steele dossier” was first published a year ago, it looked like a bombshell. The document, drawn up by the British ex-spy Christopher Steele, contained salacious allegations against President Trump and suggested that Russia had helped him win the 2016 election. No one has been able to corroborate its charges, but Democrats continue to see the dossier as a road map for impeaching Mr. Trump. Republicans, on the other hand, point out that it was created as opposition research, leading them to see it as an elaborate partisan ploy.

There is a third possibility, namely that the dossier was part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot targeting both parties and America’s political process. This is what seems most likely to me, having spent much of my 30-year government career, including with the CIA, observing Soviet and then Russian intelligence operations. If there is one thing I have learned, it’s that Vladimir Putin continues in the Soviet tradition of using disinformation and espionage as foreign-policy tools.

There are three reasons the Kremlin would have detected Mr. Steele’s information gathering and seen an opportunity to intervene. First, Mr. Steele did not travel to Russia to acquire his information and instead relied on intermediaries. That is a weak link, since Russia’s internal police service, the FSB, devotes significant technical and human resources to blanket surveillance of Western private citizens and government officials, with a particular focus on uncovering their Russian contacts.

Second, Mr. Steele was an especially likely target for such surveillance given that he had retired from MI-6, the British spy agency, after serving in Moscow. Russians are fond of saying that there is no such thing as a “former” intelligence officer. The FSB would have had its eye on him.

Third, the Kremlin successfully hacked into the Democratic National Committee. Emails there could have tipped it off that the Clinton campaign was collecting information on Mr. Trump’s dealings in Russia.

Illustration: David Klein

If the FSB did discover that Mr. Steele was poking around for information, it hardly could have resisted using the gravitas of a retired MI-6 agent to plant false information. After hacking the DNC and senior Democratic officials, Russian intelligence chose to pass the information to WikiLeaks, most likely to capitalize on that group’s “self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity,” according to a 2017 report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Simultaneously the Kremlin was conducting influence operations on Facebook and other social-media sites.

The pattern of such Russian operations is to sprinkle false information, designed to degrade the enemy’s social and political infrastructure, among true statements that enhance the veracity of the overall report. In 2009 the FSB wanted to soil the reputation of a U.S. diplomat responsible for reporting on human rights. So it fabricated a video, in part using real surveillance footage of the diplomat, that purported to show him with a prostitute in Moscow.

Similarly, some of the information in the Steele dossier is true. Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, did travel to Moscow in the summer of 2016. But he insists that the secret meetings the dossier alleges never happened. This is exactly what you’d expect if the Kremlin followed its usual playbook: accurate basic facts provided as bait to convince Americans that the fake info is real.

Mr. Trump repeatedly criticized the “rigged system” working against his campaign, but his victories in the primaries and the general election blunted this narrative. The FSB probably believed that Mrs. Clinton would win the election, and that once the dossier became public Mr. Trump would vociferously argue that she had played dirty. Thus the dossier would have had dual benefits: The salacious portions would undermine the Republican candidate, and then his attacks would delegitimize the eventual Democratic administration. The 2017 ODNI report says that pro-Russia bloggers even prepared an election-night Twitter campaign, #DemocracyRIP, designed to question the election’s validity after a Clinton victory.

That is not how events unfolded, but Russia still appears to have enjoyed a major return on its 2016 election meddling. For more than a year, Democrats and Republicans have traded charges of collusion, obstruction and conspiracy. Rather than serve Russia’s interests with increasingly intense partisan bickering, everyone should focus on the common enemy: Mr. Putin and his nefarious attempt to undermine America’s political system.

One credible response would be to pass a bipartisan bill such as the one introduced by Sens. Marco Rubio and Chris Van Hollen that would punish Moscow if intelligence concludes Russia interferes in future elections. Meanwhile, the Trump administration should shine a brighter spotlight on the Kremlin’s espionage and covert-influence operations against the U.S.

Special counsel Robert Mueller should be able to lift the veil on whether the Steele dossier was, as I suspect, a tool of Russia’s espionage. Mr. Steele has reportedly revealed details about his sources to Mr. Mueller, who has also been conducting interviews to determine which parts of the dossier are true and which are false.

Russia considers the U.S. an existential threat to its national security, not because of a military threat—which Mr. Putin purposely exaggerates—but because Western ideals of liberty, freedom and democracy have the power to break his regime’s grip on the country. Americans must enhance their understanding of Mr. Putin’s strategy and tactics better to defend against the Kremlin’s relentless propaganda. 

Otherwise the Steele dossier controversy will continue to be a victory for Mr. Putin and a loss for our democracy.

Mr. Hoffman, a retired chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency who served in the former Soviet Union, is vice president of SPG, a political consulting group in Washington.

Fusion’s Russian Dirty Work

The Editorial Board  Wall Street Journal

Jan. 28, 2018

How the firm sought to discredit an anti-Kremlin activist.

Media defenders of Fusion GPS and the FBI are criticizing as friends of the Kremlin anyone who dares raise questions about their behavior during the 2016 campaign. You almost have to admire their loyalty to sources, if not to readers. We’ll wait for the evidence, thanks, including the memo that the House Intelligence Committee understandably wants to make public.

Meantime, regarding Russia, the recent Congressional testimony by Fusion founder Glenn Simpson deserves more attention—specifically for what it reveals about Fusion’s campaign against Bill Browder, the human-rights and anti-Kremlin activist.

Mr. Browder hired Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky to investigate a 2007 Russian raid on Mr. Browder’s investment company. Magnitsky ultimately exposed a financial fraud perpetrated by corrupt officials and the mafia. Russia responded by arresting Magnitsky and keeping him in pre-trial detention for 358 days, where he was tortured and denied vital medical care. He was found dead on a cell floor in 2009.

Magnitsky and his lawyers meticulously documented his abuse while in prison. His evidence was affirmed by multiple governments and outside organizations, including U.S. prosecutors. In a rare instance of bipartisanship, Congress in 2012 passed the Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned individuals involved in Magnitsky’s death and other Russian rights abusers.

Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by banning U.S. adoptions of Russian children. The Kremlin then embarked on a disinformation campaign against Mr. Browder and Magnitsky, claiming they had defrauded the Kremlin and lied about abuse. A Russian filmmaker produced a “documentary” that spread the Kremlin lies.

Fusion was hired in 2014 to flog this Russian propaganda to help a Russian company named Prevezon that was the focus of a federal civil money-laundering case tied to the fraud Magnitsky uncovered. (Prevezon ultimately settled with the U.S. government for $5.9 million, without admitting wrongdoing.) In his Senate testimony Mr. Simpson embraced his role as a Kremlin megaphone, confirming that he sought to question Mr. Browder’s “credibility” and hound him with subpoenas, chasing him in public places and digging through his business records.

He accuses Mr. Browder of an elaborate scheme (albeit without evidence) to defraud the poor Kremlin and of engaging in “unsupported wild allegations.” He complains about Mr. Browder’s refusal to answer questions from Prevezon (which is run by the son of a Putin crony). And he explains that he planted information about Mr. Browder’s “activities in Russia” and his “history of tax avoidance” with U.S. media.

Mr. Simpson also speaks up for Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-linked lawyer who worked for Prevezon and has headed the Russian lobbying campaign to repeal the Magnitsky Act. Recall that Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner have been roundly and rightly criticized for meeting with Ms. Veselnitskaya in June 2016.

Yet Mr. Simpson accuses the Justice Department of interfering with her visa “to inhibit her from collaborating with us on the case.” He admits to knowing she and others were engaged in anti-Magnitsky lobbying in Washington and that he helped get the anti-Browder documentary attention in Washington, D.C.

All of this goes to the question of Mr. Simpson’s credibility and that of the Christopher Steele dossier he commissioned. Mr. Simpson in a recent op-ed claims he was motivated to protect the U.S. against a Russian “attack” and by his worry that Donald Trump was willing to engage with a “notoriously corrupt police state.”

Yet Mr. Simpson admits to abetting one of the uglier Russian disinformation campaigns of recent years. Asked by investigators if he understood he was helping Mr. Putin, Mr. Simpson said it had been “presented” to him that he was working for a “successful real estate investor.” He admits to knowing Ms. Veselnitskaya had worked for Russia’s government but guesses that she was “not like a big political player in the Kremlin.”

Mr. Simpson was doing this Kremlin dirty work at the same time he was working with Mr. Steele to compile the Steele dossier. He says he didn’t share information about the dossier with Ms. Veselnitskaya or other Russians but he can’t guarantee there was a “Chinese wall of separation” at his firm between the cases.

All of this is worth keeping in mind the next time you hear defenders say Fusion was merely a patriotic outfit trying to protect America from the Kremlin. Mr. Simpson admits that Fusion was paid to spread Kremlin disinformation to smear a critic and change U.S. law. Who was really serving Mr. Putin’s interests?

Fake news? This New York Times headline has nothing to do with the story and the story is speculative, at best:

Secret Memo Hints at a New Republican Target: Rod Rosenstein

By NICHOLAS FANDOS, ADAM GOLDMAN and SHARON LaFRANIERE

 New York Times JAN. 28, 2018 

WASHINGTON — A secret, highly contentious Republican memo reveals that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein approved an application to extend surveillance of a former Trump campaign associate shortly after taking office last spring, according to three people familiar with it.

The renewal shows that the Justice Department under President Trump saw reason to believe that the associate, Carter Page, was acting as a Russian agent. But the reference to Mr. Rosenstein’s actions in the memo — a much-disputed document that paints the investigation into Russian election meddling as tainted from the start — indicates that Republicans may be moving to seize on his role as they seek to undermine the inquiry.

The memo’s primary contention is that F.B.I. and Justice Department officials failed to adequately explain to an intelligence court judge in initially seeking a warrant for surveillance of Mr. Page that they were relying in part on research by an investigator, Christopher Steele, that had been financed by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Democrats who have read the document say Republicans have cherry-picked facts to create a misleading and dangerous narrative. But in their efforts to discredit the inquiry, Republicans could potentially use Mr. Rosenstein’s decision to approve the renewal to suggest that he failed to properly vet a highly sensitive application for a warrant to spy on Mr. Page, who served as a Trump foreign policy adviser until September 2016.

A handful of senior Justice Department officials can approve an application to the secret surveillance court, but in practice that responsibility often falls to the deputy attorney general. No information has publicly emerged that the Justice Department or the F.B.I. did anything improper while seeking the surveillance warrant involving Mr. Page.

Mr. Trump has long been mistrustful of Mr. Rosenstein, the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, who appointed the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and now oversees his investigation into Mr. Trump’s campaign and possible obstruction of justice by the president. Mr. Trump considered firing Mr. Rosenstein last summer. Instead, he ordered Mr. Mueller to be fired, then backed down after the White House counsel refused to carry out the order, The New York Times reported last week.

Mr. Trump is now again telling associates that he is frustrated with Mr. Rosenstein, according to one official familiar with the conversations.

It is difficult to judge whether Republicans’ criticism of the surveillance has merit. Although House members have been allowed to view the Republican memo in a secure setting, both that memo and a Democratic one in rebuttal remain shrouded in secrecy. And the applications to obtain and renew the warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are even more closely held. Only a small handful of members of Congress and staff members have reviewed them.

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, whose staff wrote the memo, could vote as early as Monday, using an obscure House rule, to declassify its contents and make it available to the public. Mr. Trump would have five days to try to block their effort, potentially setting up a high-stakes standoff between the president and his Justice Department, which opposes its immediate release.

The White House has made clear to the Justice Department in recent days that it wants the Republican memo to be made public. Asked about the issue on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Marc Short, the White House’s head of legislative affairs, said that if the memo outlined serious concerns, “the American people should know that.”

But Stephen E. Boyd, an assistant attorney general, warned in a letter last week to the committee’s chairman, Representative Devin Nunes of California, that it would be “extraordinarily reckless” to release a memo drawing on classified information without official review and pleaded with the committee to consult the Justice Department. He said the department was “unaware of any wrongdoing related to the FISA process.”

To obtain the warrant involving Mr. Page, the government needed to show probable cause that he was acting as an agent of Russia. Once investigators get approval from the Justice Department for a warrant, prosecutors take it to a surveillance court judge, who decides whether to approve it.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment, and a spokesman for Mr. Nunes did not reply to requests for comment. The people familiar with the contents of the memo spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details remained secret.

A White House spokesman, Hogan Gidley, said in a statement: “The president has been clear publicly and privately that he wants absolute transparency throughout this process. Based on numerous news reports, top officials at the F.B.I. have engaged in conduct that shows bias against President Trump and bias for Hillary Clinton. While President Trump has the utmost respect and support for the rank-and-file members of the F.B.I., the anti-Trump bias at the top levels that appear to have existed is troubling.”

Mr. Page, a former Moscow-based investment banker who later founded an investment company in New York, had been on the F.B.I.’s radar for years. In 2013, an investigation revealed that a Russian spy had tried to recruit him. Mr. Page was never charged with any wrongdoing, and he denied that he would ever have cooperated with Russian intelligence officials.

But a trip Mr. Page took to Russia in July 2016 while working on Mr. Trump’s campaign caught the bureau’s attention again, and American law enforcement officials began conducting surveillance on him in the fall of 2016, shortly after he left the campaign. It is unclear what they learned about Mr. Page between then and when they sought the order’s renewal roughly six months later. It is also unknown whether the surveillance court granted the extension.

The renewal effort came in the late spring, sometime after the Senate confirmed Mr. Rosenstein as the Justice Department’s No. 2 official in late April. Around that time, following Mr. Trump’s firing of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director in May, Mr. Rosenstein appointed Mr. Mueller, a former head of the bureau, to take over the department’s Russia investigation. Mr. Rosenstein is overseeing the inquiry because Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself.

Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, who is close to Mr. Trump and House Republicans, signaled interest in Mr. Rosenstein this month as news of the memo’s existence first circulated, asking on air if Mr. Rosenstein had played a role in extending the surveillance. “I’m very interested about Rod Rosenstein in all of this,” he said.

In a speech on Friday in Norfolk, Va., Mr. Sessions appeared to wade into the debate. Without mentioning the Republican memo, he said that federal investigations must be free of bias, and that he would not condone “a culture of defensiveness.” While unfair criticism should be rebutted, he added, “it can never be that this department conceals errors when they occur.”

 HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE… DUELING MEMOS

In short, our editorial position is simple. We completely stay out of this until the dust settles.

 Although, one of our staff members has viewed a working draft of the “Republican memo” and believes that it very accurately reflects the underlying evidence, we will have no comment either before or after its release.

 We, assume that Republican memo will be released sometime this week.   

The DOJ objection to its  release makes no sense. The security officers  servicing the committee can be counted upon to scrub out any classified information relating to sources and/or methodology. Any DOJ scrub would be purely political CYA.

 To counter what would be expected to be very distressed public reaction to the revelations, ranking  member  Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Wednesday that the Democrats’ memo will “[expose] the misleading character of the Republicans’ document.”

Unfortunately, Representative Adam Schiff has proved to be a partisan, unreliable source. Our editorial policy has been not to publicize any of the statements made by Representative  Schiff  since many of his innuendos  later proved to be misleading and/or   false.

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 In short, our editorial position is simple. We completely stay out of this until the dust settles.

Dueling House Intelligence memos could be released as early as next week

Kelly CohenJan 27, 2018, 12:01 AM

The House Intelligence Committee could vote as early as next week to release two dueling classified memos: one that Republicans say details surveillance abuses by the federal government and one that Democrats say corrects the inaccurate GOP memo.

A committee source told the Washington Examiner that votes could happen in the coming days, including a vote on a four-page memo put together by Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif.

There are 13 GOP members on the committee and nine Democrats. It appears at least a majority of Republicans want the Nunes memo to be released, despite a warning from the Department of Justice not to do so.

The GOP memo allegedly summarizes the results of an investigation into abuses by the Justice Department and FBI in its use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, wrote in a letter to Nunes earlier this week that releasing it would be “extraordinarily reckless."

“Agencies that are under investigation by congressional committees don’t typically get access to the committees’ investigative documents about them, and it’s no surprise these agencies don’t want the abuses we’ve found to be made public," said Jack Langer, a spokesman for Nunes, in response to Boyd's letter.

Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department have been allowed to see the Nunes memo, and only select lawmakers have been granted permission by Nunes to view it in the House’s safe space. But many of the Republicans who've seen it say it contains explosive evidence of flaws within the intelligence community and should be released.

Meanwhile, Democrats on the committee are poised to release their own memo in response to the GOP-led one and could vote on that release as early as Monday.

Ranking Member Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Wednesday that the Democrats’ memo will “[expose] the misleading character of the Republicans’ document.”

“With this latest gambit, however, the majority seeks to selectively and misleadingly characterize classified information in an effort to protect the president at any cost,” Schiff said in a statement. “Regrettably, it has been necessary for Committee Democrats to draft our own memorandum, setting out the relevant facts and exposing the misleading character of the Republicans’ document so that members of the House are not left with an erroneous impression of the dedicated professionals at the FBI and DOJ.”

Schiff said he will move to make the Democrat-compiled memorandum available to the full House in the classified House spaces.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about if it is concerned about the Schiff memo.

Dick Morris: McCain’s Revenge – How He Helped Set Up Trump

By Dick Morris    January 25, 2018 

https://www.westernjournal.com/dick-morris-mccains-revenge-how-he-helped-set-up-trump/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=deepsix&utm_content=2018-01-25&utm_campaign=can

It all started at an elite conference on national security in Halifax, Nova Scotia, immediately after the U.S. election. Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, one of the featured speakers, had traveled there with former State Department Assistant Secretary David Kramer, one of his top aides. Kramer was an unabashed Trump hater who publicly criticized Trump’s positions on the Ukraine and Russia.

At the conference, McCain and Kramer were approached by Sir Andrew Wood, a highly respected former U.K. Ambassador to Russia who was secretly affiliated with Orbis Business Intelligence, the firm founded by Dossier author Christopher Steele.

Wood told the Americans about the Steele dossier. Although he claimed that he had never seen it and that he did not have a copy, Sir Andrew knew an awful lot about the outlandish claims in the document. (Court records later showed that he worked with Steele and was fully aware of the dossier.) Woods purportedly told McCain that he was concerned that Trump might be vulnerable to blackmail.

What followed was a cloak and dagger strategy, worthy of James Bond, to get the Dossier to McCain.

Wood called Steele and asked him to arrange a meeting with Kramer. At the same time, Kramer called Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, the co-author of the Dossier. Soon a plan was hatched.

Several weeks later, Kramer flew to Heathrow. He was instructed to go to the Baggage Claim area and look for a man reading the Financial Times. Once he approached the man, they exchanged pre-arranged code words.

The man behind the newspaper was former MI6 British spy, Christopher Steele, the dossier co-author. Together, they traveled to Steele’s home, where they reviewed the Dossier and spoke to Simpson about sending it by encrypted email.

Simpson then delivered the document to Kramer, who gave it to McCain, who subsequently handed it to then-FBI Director James Comey.

While the Dossier was a total fabrication and lie, its lineage, as it passed from hand to hand, endowed it with a credibility it did not deserve. Steele, whose record as a spy in Russia and his subsequent work for the FBI in the international soccer scandal gave him credibility. Then it went to McCain, whose prestige further enhanced the seriously flawed document. Then Comey handed it to President Barack Obama, endowing it with further credentials. And, finally, as a document that had been shown to the president by the FBI, it was sufficiently rehabilitated to be published.

And that’s how the Dossier emerged into public view.

Before McCain agreed to play the middleman, the Dossier’s authors at Fusion GPS had been gnashing their teeth in frustration at their inability to get major media in the U.S. to cover their document.   It was unverifiable and filled with flaws; no U.S. outlet would touch it.

The Dossier, for example, purported to chronicle a meeting that never happened between Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and top Russian intelligence officers in Prague. But Cohen has never been to Prague. It named two Russians as the hackers who invaded the Democratic Committee’s files. But one was in the prison in the Gulag serving a 40-year sentence for pedophilia with no access to a phone or computer. The other was a millionaire in Cypress with no connection to Russia. And, finally, it discussed how Trump had watched as two hookers peed on a bed in his Moscow hotel room. That also never happened.

Why did the Dossier authors choose McCain to do their dirty work?

Sir Andrew had cultivated a relationship with McCain and Kramer as they shared the podium at several anti-Russian and pro-Ukraine conferences. He was likely aware of the highly publicized feud between McCain and Trump, and realizing that, as a Republican, McCain could draw attention to the Dossier and invest it with credibility, he decided to broach the subject to McCain. The senator responded with alacrity and agreed to be the middleman in conveying the Dossier to Comey and thence to Obama.

Why would a Republican senator turn on a Republican president and pass information that was so wrong and misleading?

Trump and McCain had been feuding ever since candidate Trump demeaned the senator’s outstanding war record.

Shockingly, he put McCain down, saying, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Disgusting as the put down was, it has kindled massive animosity between Trump and McCain.

Now, McCain got his revenge. Coming from a man — Trump — who had never served in the military, the comment was unforgivable. But, in politics, revenge is a dish best served cold, so McCain bided his time until he could get even. The assignment to bring the Dossier into public view offered an ideal opportunity.

Even though the Dossier has been exposed as a total lie, it led to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special prosecutor and has haunted the Trump White House ever since.

John McCain got his revenge. Now Comey had a legitimate excuse to seriously consider the dossier and to pass it to Obama, congressional leaders, and possibly the media.

That’s how the whole Russian collusion investigation started.

NOTE: John McCain has denied leaking the Dossier to the press. David Kramer quietly left his position at the McCain Foundation and has asked a federal court to seal his testimony. MY OPINION: It was likely Kramer who leaked the dossier.

Dick Morris is a former adviser to President Bill Clinton as well as a political author, pollster and consultant. His most recent book, “Rogue Spooks,” was written with his wife, Eileen McGann

What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right

By Karin McQuillan  American Thinker  1-17-18

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/01/what_i_learned_in_peace_corps_in_africa_trump_is_right.html

Three weeks after college, I flew to Senegal, West Africa, to run a community center in a rural town.  Life was placid, with no danger, except to your health.  That danger was considerable, because it was, in the words of the Peace Corps doctor, "a fecalized environment."

In plain English: s--- is everywhere.  People defecate on the open ground, and the feces is blown with the dust – onto you, your clothes, your food, the water.  He warned us the first day of training: do not even touch water.  Human feces carries parasites that bore through your skin and cause organ failure.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is no better than a third-world country.  Or would teach two generations of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it are racism.

Last time I was in Paris, I saw a beautiful African woman in a grand boubou have her child defecate on the sidewalk next to Notre Dame Cathedral.  The French police officer, ten steps from her, turned his head not to see.

I have seen.  I am not turning my head and pretending unpleasant things are not true.

Senegal was not a hellhole.  Very poor people can lead happy, meaningful lives in their own cultures' terms.  But they are not our terms.  The excrement is the least of it.  Our basic ideas of human relations, right and wrong, are incompatible.

As a twenty-one-year-old starting out in the Peace Corps, I loved Senegal.  In fact, I was euphoric.  I quickly made friends and had an adopted family.  I relished the feeling of the brotherhood of man.  People were open, willing to share their lives and, after they knew you, their innermost thoughts.

The longer I lived there, the more I understood: it became blindingly obvious that the Senegalese are not the same as us.  The truths we hold to be self-evident are not evident to the Senegalese.  How could they be?  Their reality is totally different.  You can't understand anything in Senegal using American terms.

Take something as basic as family.  Family was a few hundred people, extending out to second and third cousins.  All the men in one generation were called "father."  Senegalese are Muslim, with up to four wives.  Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty.  (I witnessed this, at what I thought was going to be a nice coming-of-age ceremony, like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.)  Sex, I was told, did not include kissing.  Love and friendship in marriage were Western ideas.  Fidelity was not a thing.  Married women would have sex for a few cents to have cash for the market.

What I did witness every day was that women were worked half to death.  Wives raised the food and fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their co-wives.  Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees.

Yet family was crucial to people there in a way Americans cannot comprehend.

The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown.  The value system was the exact opposite.  You were supposed to steal everything you can to give to your own relatives.  There are some Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system.  They fail.

We hear a lot about the kleptocratic elites of Africa.  The kleptocracy extends through the whole society.  My town had a medical clinic donated by international agencies.  The medicine was stolen by the medical workers and sold to the local store.  If you were sick and didn't have money, drop dead.  That was normal.

So here in the States, when we discovered that my 98-year-old father's Muslim health aide from Nigeria had stolen his clothes and wasn't bathing him, I wasn't surprised.  It was familiar.

In Senegal, corruption ruled, from top to bottom.  Go to the post office, and the clerk would name an outrageous price for a stamp.  After paying the bribe, you still didn't know it if it would be mailed or thrown out.  That was normal.

One of my most vivid memories was from the clinic.  One day, as the wait grew hotter in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from the medical aides – who were chatting in the shade of a mango tree instead of working – collapsed to the ground.  They turned their heads so as not to see her and kept talking.  She lay there in the dirt.  Callousness to the sick was normal.

Americans think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  It's not.  It seems natural to us because we live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture.

We think the Protestant work ethic is universal.  It's not.  My town was full of young men doing nothing.  They were waiting for a government job.  There was no private enterprise.  Private business was not illegal, just impossible, given the nightmare of a third-world bureaucratic kleptocracy.  It is also incompatible with Senegalese insistence on taking care of relatives.

All the little stores in Senegal were owned by Mauritanians.  If a Senegalese wanted to run a little store, he'd go to another country.  The reason?  Your friends and relatives would ask you for stuff for free, and you would have to say yes.  End of your business.  You are not allowed to be a selfish individual and say no to relatives.  The result: Everyone has nothing.

The more I worked there and visited government officials doing absolutely nothing, the more I realized that no one in Senegal had the idea that a job means work.  A job is something given to you by a relative.  It provides the place where you steal everything to give back to your family.

I couldn't wait to get home.  So why would I want to bring Africa here?  Non-Westerners do not magically become American by arriving on our shores with a visa.

For the rest of my life, I enjoyed the greatest gift of the Peace Corps: I love and treasure America more than ever.  I take seriously my responsibility to defend our culture and our country and pass on the American heritage to the next generation.

African problems are made worse by our aid efforts.  Senegal is full of smart, capable people.  They will eventually solve their own country's problems.  They will do it on their terms, not ours.  The solution is not to bring Africans here.

We are lectured by Democrats that we must privilege third-world immigration by the hundred million with chain migration.  They tell us we must end America as a white, Western, Judeo-Christian, capitalist nation – to prove we are not racist.  I don't need to prove a thing.  Leftists want open borders because they resent whites, resent Western achievements, and hate America.  They want to destroy America as we know it.

As President Trump asked, why would we do that?

We have the right to choose what kind of country to live in.  I was happy to donate a year of my life as a young woman to help the poor Senegalese.  I am not willing to donate my country. 

James Comey’s Ethics Class

The Editorial Board  Wall Street Journal  1-22-18

Some advice on questions to discuss and speakers to invite.

The College of William & Mary in Virginia announced last week that James Comey will teach a course on “ethical leadership” starting this autumn. The former FBI director would not have been our first choice for such an assignment, but upon reflection maybe his experience as a federal prosecutor, deputy attorney general and FBI director is ideal for the task.

Mr. Comey said in a statement accompanying the news that “ethical leaders lead by seeing above the short term, above the urgent or the partisan, and with a higher loyalty to lasting values, most importantly the truth.” In that spirit, here are some suggestions on how Mr. Comey can structure his course to help students confront these profound questions.

Week One case study: The FBI is investigating a presidential candidate for mishandling classified emails as Secretary of State. The director decides on his own to violate Justice Department rules and exonerate that candidate in a public statement to the media, letting an aide replace the legally potent phrase “grossly negligent” in a draft of his statement with “extremely careless” in the final version.

Students will examine when a public official can choose to ignore rules and standards of conduct for what he considers to be higher purposes. Required reading: Former Deputy Attorney General and federal Judge Laurence Silberman’s February 2017 speech to the Columbia Law School chapter of the Federalist Society.

Breakout session topic: Having exonerated that candidate, the FBI director intervenes in the campaign again only days before Election Day, saying new evidence has required him to reopen the email case. Two days before the polls open he says that the new evidence turned out to be nothing of consequence. Was the FBI director protecting the rule of law, or his own reputation?

Ethical guides Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner will visit each breakout session to steer the discussions. (Thanks to the federal prison system for letting Mr. Weiner appear by video from Federal Medical Center Devens.)

Week Two: Amid the post-Enron political frenzy, a prosecutor indicts an investment banker not on bank-related charges but on obstruction of justice based on a snippet of an ambiguous email. The first trial ends in a hung jury but the prosecutor wins on the second try only to be overturned by an appellate court.

Students will explore the ethical demands of prosecutorial discretion. Guest lecturer: Frank Quattrone.

Week Three: FBI director Robert Mueller and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York are convinced that the man behind the 2001 anthrax mail attacks is a government virologist. They spend years pursuing him and destroying his reputation through the media, only to concede years later that they had fingered the wrong man.

Students will examine the ethics of trial-by-media and the risks to the fair administration of justice from prosecutors who ignore contrary evidence. Visiting scholars: Nicholas Kristof and Steven Jay Hatfill.

Week Four: A deputy attorney general handpicks a personal friend and godfather to one of his children, Patrick Fitzgerald, as a special counsel to investigate who leaked the name of CIA official Valerie Plame. Within days Mr. Fitzgerald learns that the leaker was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a fact he then keeps secret for years.

Instead of closing the case, the deputy AG expands Mr. Fitzgerald’s mandate. After a three-year investigation that turns up nothing new, Mr. Fitzgerald indicts a White House aide for perjury to salvage something from the effort. Reporter Judith Miller, whom Mr. Fitzgerald sent to jail for 85 days to force her testimony that was crucial in convicting the White House official, later says she testified falsely after Mr. Fitzgerald withheld crucial information from her.

Students will consider the ethics of special counsels without effective supervision, and whether Mr. Fitzgerald showed loyalty to lasting values and the truth by keeping the name of the leaker secret from the public and President George W. Bush. Special guest (invited): Scooter Libby.

We can think of many other ripe areas for ethical exploration across Mr. Comey’s long career, but this should get him off to a compelling start. If Mr. Comey decides to go in a different direction from our advice, perhaps an enterprising student can raise the issues here during discussion periods.