Saturday, July 28, 2018

The Contradictions of the Russian Interference Claim

By Alexander G. Markovsky, AMERICAN THINKER  7-28-18

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/the_contradictions_of_the_russian_interference_claim.html



Procurator-General of the Soviet Union Roman Rudenko, who presided over a wave of trials and executions during Stalin’s terror, used to say that “the most important thing during an investigation is not to implicate ourselves.”

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and special counsel Robert Mueller were obviously unaware of Rudenko’s professional dictum when they indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers. According to the indictment, the Russians had interfered in the 2016 presidential election by hacking Democratic political organizations and releasing troves of stolen files in an effort to aid the Donald Trump campaign.

The indictment has no law enforcement value; it is strictly political move designed to offer evidence of Russian meddling in the elections and therefore provide more weight to the Mueller investigation based on the questionable anti-Trump dossier.

And yet, it would be absurd and impolitic for Putin to support Trump. The Clintons were in Putin’s pocket, they sold him 20% of American uranium production. In the process, according to the FBI, the Russian officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion, and money laundering and “routed” a hundred fifty million dollars to the Clinton Foundation in an attempt to influence the deal. During the same period, Bill Clinton was making obscene fees for speaking engagements in Moscow. The Clintons and Putin had been partners in business or crime, whichever one prefers, during her tenure as Secretary of State. So, why would Putin dump his reliable partner for Trump, whose chances to be elected were close to zero?

On July 2015, the Atlantic wrote, “Donald Trump will not be the 45th president of the United States. Nor the 46th, nor any other number you might name. The chance of his winning nomination and election is exactly zero.”

The Washington Post: “The election is in 15 days. And the electoral map just keeps looking grimmer and grimmer for Donald Trump.” No one expected Donald Trump to win, probably including Donald Trump.

Moreover, Hillary subordinated many of her policies to Russian interests. Contrary to Trump, who was a proponent of energy independence, Hillary was a strong opponent of hydrocarbons; she planned to shut down coal production and curb oil and gas production in this country. Those policies would result in the sharp rise of oil and gas prices, which would greatly benefit Russia.

Hillary was an architect of the “Reset Button Policy” which gave Putin a free ride as regards his international adventures. Trump, on the other hand, was going to substantially increase American military power to maintain its world dominant position. Hence, whether it is economically or geopolitically, Trump was not good news for Putin.

Against this background, the infamous anti-Trump dossier should be viewed as a political tool taken directly from the centuries-old manual of the Russian statecraft.
The Washington Post has confirmed this assertion: “the Fusion GPS dossier relied on senior Russian government officials for much of the dirt it compiled, including a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure and a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.”

Now the Russians who helped the Democrats cook up the anti-Trump phony dossier are accused of hacking DNC computers for the purpose of getting Trump elected. This contradiction should repudiate any accusation of the Russian hacking because those two actions serve mutually exclusive objectives. Putin could not be complicit in opposing and supporting Trump during the same election cycle.

Incidentally, this election hacking is not a new event. Foreigners have been regularly hacking U.S. government computers, stealing confidential information, personal data of government employees and other secret government documents. By virtue of the indictment, Mueller inadvertently exposed a pathetic frailty of the FBI, CIA and the other 16 intelligence agencies going back for decades.

Why it is different this time? This time the hackers have done CNN’s job — “kept them honest” and exposed rampant corruption within the DNC and the U.S. government.

Mueller’s investigation became an effort to divert attention from the scope of corruption to the hackers. It also provides comfort to the Democrats — blaming an outside influence as the only politically acceptable alibi for their defeat. Impelled by conviction, Mueller is neglecting logic and defies common sense in order to implement of what the FBI disgraced agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page called an “insurance policy” against Trump.

We probably will never know who hacked the DNC computers and whether the revelations of the DNC’s offenses affected the outcome of the elections. But what we do know is that the truth is a pillar of our democracy. The truest test of democracy is accepting the truth regardless of its origin. Whoever made the DNC emails public provided a great service to this nation, helping the electorate make an informed decision. This is the truth, which the Democrats cannot accept.


Alexander Markovsky is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and author of Anatomy of a Bolshevik and Liberal Bolshevism: America Did Not Defeat Communism, She Adopted It.

JOE CIRINCIONE: BACK CHANNEL FINANCIER FOR IRGC WORLDWIDE TERROR OPERATIONS



JOE CIRINCIONE, the man who pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars from Ben Rhodes Junior to plant false information and pretended research in the media to support the Obama Iranian deal is now championing providing additional resources to  the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to conduct their worldwide terror campaign.https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html




The same Senators who tried to wreck the Iran anti-nuclear accord are now trying to wreck European efforts to preserve it. Wrong then, wrong now.


Devin Nunes, Washington’s Public Enemy No. 1

What did the FBI do in the 2016 campaign? The head of the House inquiry on what he has found—and questions still unanswered.

Kimberley A. StrasselJuly 27, 2018 6:14 p.m. ET

It’s 105 degrees as I stand with Rep. Devin Nunes on his family’s dairy farm. Mr. Nunes has been feeling even more heat in Washington, where as chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence he has labored to unearth the truth about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s activities during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. Thanks in large part to his work, we now know that the FBI used informants against Donald Trump’s campaign, that it obtained surveillance warrants based on opposition research conducted for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and that after the election Obama administration officials “unmasked” and monitored the incoming team.

Mr. Nunes’s efforts have provoked extraordinary partisan and institutional fury in Washington—across the aisle, in the FBI and other law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, in the media. “On any given day there are dozens of attacks, each one wilder in its claims,” he says. Why does he keep at it? “First of all, because it’s my job. This is a basic congressional investigation, and we follow the facts,” he says. The “bigger picture,” he adds, is that in “a lot of the bad and problematic countries” that Intelligence Committee members investigate, “this is what they do there. There is a political party that controls the intelligence agencies, controls the media, all to ensure that party stays in power. If we get to that here, we no longer have a functioning republic. We can’t let that happen.”

Mr. Nunes, 44, was elected to Congress in 2002 from Central California. He joined the Intelligence Committee in 2011 and delved into the statutes, standards and norms that underpin U.S. spying. That taught him to look for “red flags,” information or events that don’t feel right and indicate a deeper problem. He noticed some soon after the 2016 election.

The first: Immediately after joining the Trump transition team, Mr. Nunes faced an onslaught of left-wing claims that he might be in cahoots with Vladimir Putin. It started on social media, though within months outlets such as MSNBC were openly asking if he was a “Russian agent.” “I’ve been a Russia hawk going way back,” he says. “I was the one who only six months earlier had called the Obama administration’s failure to understand Putin’s plans and intentions the largest intelligence failure since 9/11. So these attacks, surreal—big red flag.”

Mr. Nunes would later come to believe the accusations marked the beginning of a deliberate campaign by Obama officials and the intelligence community to discredit him and sideline him from any oversight effort. “This was November. We, Republicans, still didn’t know about the FBI’s Trump investigation. But they did,” he says. “There was concern I’d figure it out, so they had to get rid of me.”

A second red flag: the sudden rush by a small group of Obama officials to produce a new intelligence assessment two weeks before President Trump’s inauguration, claiming the Russians had acted in 2016 specifically to elect Mr. Trump. “Nobody disagrees the Russians were trying to muddy up Hillary Clinton. Because everyone on the planet believed—including the Russians—she was going to win,” Mr. Nunes says. So it “made no sense” that the Obama administration was “working so hard to make the flip argument—to say ‘Oh, no, no: This was all about electing Trump.’ ” The effort began to make more sense once that rushed intelligence assessment grew into a central premise behind the theory that Mr. Trump’s campaign had colluded with the Russians.

January 2017 also brought then-FBI Director James Comey’s acknowledgment to Congress—the public found out later—that the bureau had been conducting a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign since the previous summer, and that Mr. Comey had actively concealed the probe from Congress. Months earlier, when Mr. Nunes had seen media stories alluding to a Trump investigation, he’d dismissed them. “We’re supposed to get briefed,” he says. “Plus, I was thinking: ‘Comey, FBI, they’re good people and would never do this in an election. Nah.’ ”

When the facts came out, Mr. Nunes was stunned by the form the investigation took. For years he had been central in updating the laws governing surveillance, metadata collection and so forth. “I would never have conceived of FBI using our counterintelligence capabilities to target a political campaign. If it had crossed any of our minds, I can guarantee we’d have specifically written, ‘Don’t do that,’ ” when crafting legislation, he says. “Counterintelligence is looking at people trying to steal our nation’s secrets or working with terrorists. This if anything would be a criminal matter.”

Then there was the Christopher Steele dossier, prepared for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign by the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS. Top congressional Republicans got a January 2017 briefing about the document, which Mr. Comey later described as “salacious and unverified.” Mr. Nunes remembers Mr. Comey making one other claim. “He said Republicans paid for it. Not true.” Mr. Nunes recalls. “If they had informed us Hillary Clinton and Democrats paid for that dossier, I can guarantee you that Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan would have laughed and walked out of that meeting.” The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website funded by hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, had earlier hired Fusion GPS to do research on Mr. Trump, but the Beacon’s editors have said that assignment did not overlap with the dossier.

All these red flags were more than enough to justify a congressional investigation, yet Mr. Nunes says his sleuthing triggered a new effort to prevent one. He had been troubled in January 2017 when newspapers published leaked conversations between Mike Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, and the Russian ambassador. The leak, Mr. Nunes says, involved “very technical collection, nearly the exact readouts.” It violated strict statutory rules against “unmasking”—revealing the identities of Americans who are picked up talking to foreigners who are under U.S. intelligence surveillance.

Around the time of the Flynn leak, Mr. Nunes received tips that far more unmasking had taken place. His sources gave him specific document numbers to prove it. Viewing them required Mr. Nunes to travel in March to a secure reading room on White House grounds, a visit his critics would then spin into a false claim that he was secretly working with Mr. Trump’s inner circle. They also asserted that his unmasking revelations amounted to an unlawful disclosure of classified information.

That prompted a House Ethics Committee investigation. In April 2017, Mr. Nunes stepped aside temporarily from the Russia-collusion piece of his inquiry, conveniently for those who wished to forestall its progress. Not until December did the Ethics Committee clear Mr. Nunes. “We found out later,” he says, “that four of the five Democrats on that committee had called for me to be removed before this even got rolling.”

Meantime, the Intelligence Committee continued the Russia-collusion probe without Mr. Nunes. In October 2017 news finally became public that the Steele dossier had been paid for by the Clinton campaign. This raised the question of how much the FBI had relied on opposition research for its warrant applications, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to spy on onetime Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Throughout the fall, the Justice Department refused to comply with Intel Committee subpoenas for key dossier and FISA documents.

By the end of the year, Mr. Nunes was facing off with the Justice Department, which was given a Jan. 3, 2018, deadline to comply with Congress’s demands for information. The New York Times quoted unnamed government officials who claimed the Russia investigation had hinged not on the dossier but on a conversation with another low-level Trump aide, George Papadopoulos. The next day, the Washington Post ran a story asserting—falsely, Mr. Nunes insists—that even his Republican colleagues had lost confidence in him. “So, a leak about how the dossier doesn’t matter after all, and another saying I’m out there alone,” he says. “And right then DOJ and FBI suddenly demand a private meeting with the speaker, where they try to convince him to make me stand down. All this is not a coincidence.”

But Mr. Ryan backed Mr. Nunes, and the Justice Department produced the documents. The result was the Nunes memo, released to the public in February, which reported that the Steele dossier had in fact “formed an essential part of the Carter Page FISA application”—and that the FBI had failed to inform the FISA court of the document’s partisan provenance. “We kept the memo to four pages,” Mr. Nunes says. “We wanted it clean. And we thought: That’s it, it’s over. The American public now knows that they were using dirt to investigate a political campaign, a U.S. citizen, and everyone will acknowledge the scandal.” That isn’t what happened. Instead, “Democrats put out their own memo, the media attacked us more, and the FBI and DOJ continue to obfuscate.”

It got worse. This spring Mr. Nunes obtained information showing the FBI had used informants to gather intelligence on the Trump camp. The Justice Department is still playing hide-and-seek with documents. “We still don’t know how many informants were run before July 31, 2016”—the official open of the counterintelligence investigation—“and how much they were paid. That’s the big outstanding question,” he says. Mr. Nunes adds that the department and the FBI haven’t done anything about the unmaskings or taken action against the Flynn leakers—because, in his view, “they are too busy working with Democrats to cover all this up.”

He and his committee colleagues in June sent a letter asking Mr. Trump to declassify at least 20 pages of the FISA application. Mr. Nunes says they are critical: “If people think using the Clinton dirt to get a FISA is bad, what else that’s in that application is even worse.”

Mr. Nunes has harsh words for his adversaries. How, he asks, can his committee’s Democrats, who spent years “worrying about privacy and civil liberties,” be so blasĂ© about unmaskings, surveillance of U.S. citizens, and intelligence leaks? On the FBI: “I’m not the one that used an unverified dossier to get a FISA warrant,” Mr. Nunes says. “I’m not the one who obstructed a congressional investigation. I’m not the one who lied and said Republicans paid for the dossier. I’m just one of a few people in a position to get to the bottom of it.” And on the press: “Today’s media is corrupt. It’s chosen a side. But it’s also making itself irrelevant. The sooner Republicans understand that, the better.”

His big worry is that Republicans are running out of time before the midterm elections, yet there are dozens of witnesses still to interview. “But this was always the DOJ/FBI plan,” he says. “They are slow-rolling, because they are wishing and betting the Republicans lose the House.”

Still, he believes the probe has yielded enough information to chart a path for reform: “We need more restrictions on what you can use FISAs for, and more restrictions on unmaskings. And we need real penalties for those who violate the rules.” He says his investigation has also illuminated “the flaws in the powers of oversight, which Congress need to reinstate for itself.”

Mostly, Mr. Nunes feels it has been important to tell the story. “There are going to be two histories written here. The fiction version will come from an entire party, and former and even current intelligence heads, and the media, who will continue trying to cover up what they did,” he says. “It’s our job, unfortunately, to write the nonfiction.”

Ms. Strassel writes the Journal’s Potomac Watch column.

Friday, July 27, 2018

Human shields and other tactics of Israel's enemies

Retired Gen. Michael Hostage,[ USAF,  former commander of U.S. Air Combat Command] and Retired Lt. Gen. Richard Natonski, [USMC,  former commander of U.S. Marine Corps Forces Command]. 

Rising tensions in Gaza and Syria make it seem only a matter of when, not if major hostilities will renew between Israel and one or more of its neighbors. In any conflict, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran know their most potent weapon is to intentionally and illegally put civilians in harm’s way, and then conduct an information campaign hypocritically blaming Israel for the ensuing casualties.

Facing similar threats, the United States should recognize this difficult situation faced by Israel, preempt such deceitful moral and specious legal arguments by its adversaries, and defend its ally’s commitment to lawful self-defense.

In recent weeks and months, Israel has been subjected to repeated indiscriminate incendiary and rocket attacks from Gaza that have devastated Israeli farmland and targeted populated areas. These attacks have increased in scale, with hundreds of rockets being fired into Israel from Gaza recently in the most intense battle since the 2014 Gaza Conflict. The Israel Defense Forces are prepared for a major operation against Hamas if these attacks do not cease.

At the same time, Israel’s northern border is also heating up. Iranian-backed forces have mounted an assault on rebel forces in southwestern Syria that could bring them to the Golan Heights and Israel’s doorstep. Already, Iran and its partners are making clear their hostile intentions, recently launching another unmanned aerial vehicle from Syria into Israel. Further Iranian entrenchment could force Israel to respond more proactively to defend its borders.

In any of these potential conflicts, Israel will be confronted with an adversary that routinely and deliberately violates the law of armed conflict by employing human shields and targeting civilians. During the “right of return” marches in Gaza this spring, Hamas used nonviolent protesters to shield terrorists that were firing grenades and small arms at Israeli soldiers. This is the latest adaptation of Hamas’ preferred illicit tactic of firing rockets at Israeli civilians from Gazan homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools.

With Iranian help, and right under the noses of U.N. peacekeepers, Hezbollah similarly stockpiles its massive arsenal of 130,000 rockets and missiles in civilian sites, with the ultimate intention of using them to overwhelm Israel’s defenses and rain down death and destruction on its population centers.

Whether hidden among or aimed at civilians, these illegal placements of arms caches and weapons systems create incredibly complex and dangerous environments for the IDF. Yet, Israel conducts operations with appropriate and admirable restraint, including recently when its largest airstrikes since 2014 took out Hamas military posts responsible for attacks on Israeli civilians.

As part of a delegation organized by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America to Israel this spring, we gained a firsthand appreciation for the professionalism and commitment to LOAC at the core of the IDF’s planning and conduct of operations. We believe this will continue to be true, even in looming conflicts that will place unprecedented operational demands on the IDF to conduct major offensive actions before its enemies can overwhelm Israel’s defenses.

Yet, Israel’s adherence to the law under such demanding conditions is not the story the global public likely will hear. For example, Hamas has proven very adept at information operations to distort actual events. During the protests in Gaza earlier this year, much of the international media blatantly misrepresented events on the ground by ignoring Hamas’ unlawful use of human shields, while accusing the IDF of targeting “unarmed protestors” and giving Gaza its biggest “pummeling” since 2014.

Indeed, this manipulation of the media and public sympathy is the most potent tool in the arsenal of Israel’s enemies. Unable to match it militarily, adversaries seek to discredit and delegitimize Israel by depicting its soldiers as war criminals, even as Hamas, Hezbollah, and others intentionally put civilians in harm’s way.

As former operational commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, we appreciate that these challenges confronting Israel – enemies seeking to deliberately exploit LOAC while delegitimizing their law-abiding opponent – are strikingly similar to those faced by the U.S. in its conflicts across the Middle East. The tactics these terrorists use to undermine and weaken Israel could easily be turned against U.S. forces the next time they are called on to conduct combat operations.

It is imperative that American policymakers, opinion leaders, and the press separate fact from fiction when it comes to Israel’s fight against terror. In recognition of the similar challenges we will likely face in the future, the U.S. must support Israel’s right and commitment to lawful self-defense in the media, the United Nations, and the halls of power in Washington.

By understanding and shedding public light on the methods currently being pursued by Iran, its proxies, and Hamas, the U.S. hopefully can spur understanding and even possibly action to forestall the unnecessary harm to civilians such tactics will most certainly produce.


Retired Gen. Michael Hostage, USAF, is former commander of U.S. Air Combat Command. Retired Lt. Gen. Richard Natonski, USMC, is former commander of U.S. Marine Corps Forces Command. 
The Other Russian Meddling…Democrats howl about Putin’s offenses, but not in Latin America

Wall Street  Journal 7-22-18

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-other-russian-meddling-1532290196?mod=djemME

Americans are rightly upset over President Trump’s obsequiousness toward Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. The former KGB agent heads a gangster government, and Mr. Trump should have stood up to him.

On the other hand, Democrats’ moralizing Helsinki hysteria is phony. They’re upset with Mr. Putin’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election because Hillary Clinton lost. When it comes to Russian expansionism in the Western Hemisphere and the Kremlin’s abysmal human-rights record, the American left mostly looks the other way.

Democratic ballyhooing over Mr. Putin’s habit of jailing and sometimes killing his political and media opponents is especially rich. Russia’s longstanding ally Cuba has an even worse civil-liberties record. Yet when President Obama unconditionally reshaped U.S. policy to please Cuban dictator RaĂşl Castro, his party cheered. Mr. Obama even trotted off to a baseball game in Havana with the Cuban mob boss. Democrats cheered some more.

Advocates of the Obama Cuba policy argue that Havana poses no threat to U.S. interests. But if regional security, stability and economic growth matter, that is demonstrably false. Sixty years after Castro came to power, Cuba, with strong backing from the Kremlin, still underwrites tyranny in Central and South America.

Venezuela is Exhibit A. And now there is blood-soaked Nicaragua, where Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno RodrĂ­guez arrived on Thursday to celebrate the 39th anniversary of the Sandinista rebel victory over dictator Anastasio Somoza.

Daniel Ortega, legendary leader of the Marxist Sandinistas—longtime heroes of Democratic politicians such as former Secretary of State John Kerry, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, to name a few—is at war with his own people. Since April, when university students began peacefully protesting Mr. Ortega’s decade-plus consolidation of power, national police and pro-government militias have cut down some 350 Nicaraguans. Many have been murdered by sniper fire. Others have been shot at close range.

This state terrorism is copied from Venezuela’s military dictatorship, which has flattened its student-led opposition. In both cases a youth movement believed that its commitment to truth and freedom gave it the undisputed moral high ground. In both cases the dictatorship unleashed paramilitary forces to crush them. In both cases students met with jackboots, nighttime raids on their homes, torture and prison.

Both authoritarian regimes are born of the same ideology, and have the same progenitors: Havana and Moscow. Cuba has been instrumental in suffocating dissent in Venezuela by infiltrating the military, academic institutions and media. Now Castro’s regime, together with Caracas, is aiding Mr. Ortega. Students arrested and tortured in Nicaragua have reported hearing Venezuelan and Cuban accents in clandestine jails.

Outside help for intelligence-gathering, paramilitary training and weaponry also comes from beyond Latin America. Clearly, some of it comes directly or indirectly from Moscow. Around 2005, Mr. Putin began rekindling Russia’s warm economic and military relations with Cuba. He also has re-engaged with Nicaragua.

As I noted in a July 8 column, the Interior Ministry of Russia recently completed a multistory “Police Training” center in Managua. Mr. Ortega says it is for counternarcotics work. That’s laughable given Russia’s closeness with narco-states such as Venezuela. A more likely purpose is repressing dissidents so Mr. Ortega can retain power.

In a June 2016 essay for a Central Intelligence Agency peer-reviewed quarterly, Robert Vickers examined Nicaragua’s Cold War history and its current relationship with Russia. Mr. Vickers reminded readers of an airfield 60 kilometers north of Managua called Punta Huete. “It was constructed in the early 1980s—soon after the leftist Sandinista regime took power—with Soviet funds and Cuban technical assistance,” Mr. Vickers wrote. Its exceedingly long runway was designed to accommodate heavy bombers.

The airfield wasn’t finished during the Cold War, and the project sat idle after the Soviet collapse and during the eclipse of Mr. Ortega in the 1990s. But when he returned to power in 2007, the Moscow-Managua axis was restored. Punta Huete was completed in 2010 with, according to Mr. Vickers, “Russian financial assistance.” Russia recently donated two Antonov military transport planes to Nicaragua. It sold Mr. Ortega 50 T-72 tanks in 2016. To what end? One wonders.

Geopolitical and defense analyst W. Alejandro Sánchez discussed the Nicaragua-Russia relationship in the Sept. 25, 2017, issue of National Interest, observing that today “Russia’s most stable and closest friend in the region is arguably Nicaragua.”


Mr. Trump should call Mr. Putin on all this. Meanwhile, if Democrats want their outrage over Russian meddling to be credible, a little concern about the mounting body count in Nicaragua is a good place to start.

Thursday, July 26, 2018

DID THE RUSSIANS HACK THE DNC TO HELP THE LEFT TAKE OVER THE DEMOCRATS?
By  Daniel Greenfield, July 23, 2018:

The Russia conspiracy theory hinges on the single creaky claim that the Democratic National Committee hacks were a Russian plot to elect Trump. The theory and all its illegitimate stepchildren, including Robert Mueller and his infinitely expanding corps of prosecutors, lives or dies by the DNC hacks.

Trying to elect Trump by releasing damaging insider information from the DNC never made any sense. The DNC was already a dysfunctional organization that was being run by the Clinton campaign. Undermining its leadership had little impact on the election, but a great deal on control of the DNC.

There has never been any evidence that the DNC hacks swung the election. The vast majority of people never even heard of them. Only a handful of political insiders and watchers, already deeply and unpersuadably committed to one side or another, could name the contents of a single email.

When you want to understand the motive of a crime, follow the money. See who benefited from it, not casually, but deeply and significantly enough to justify the effort and risk of undertaking it.

The hacks targeted Clinton allies and sought to undermine their influence within the Democrat Party.

Russiagate’s fervent conspiracy theorists spin an unlikely scenario in which Moscow had picked Trump early on, and then abandoned him in a crowded field against 16 candidates, while assuming that he would naturally triumph. Instead of leaking Jeb Bush’s campaign emails or Marco Rubio’s, they bided their time and waited to release Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s and John Podesta’s emails.

That’s not a plan to help Trump win. It is a plan to take over the DNC.

Let’s look at what the Russians were actually doing during the election. They had set up fake Facebook sites aimed at the left on issues ranging from Black Lives Matter to the pipeline protests. That is not the behavior of a foreign intelligence operation that wanted Trump to win and the left to lose. Instead the Russians appeared to have allied with the left to push the Democrats even further to the left.

Targeting the DNC’s infrastructure also pushed the Democrats further to the left. The email hacks and leaks didn’t elect Trump, but did shake up the DNC. Bernie Sanders reemerged as the figurehead of a leftist movement to take over the DNC. Bernie’s boy, Keith Ellison, claimed the No. 2 spot at the DNC. And Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez, the left’s current crush, is the latest triumph for that machine.

The socialist left were the biggest beneficiaries of the DNC hacks. The stolen emails confirmed claims by the Bernie campaign that the process had been rigged against them. It justified their campaign to clean up the mess by taking over the DNC while wiping out key Democrats who had been opposed to them.

The left was also the political movement with the richest and deepest connections to Russian intelligence. The media claims that Putin and his old KGB comrades are the natural allies of the right, but the alliance between the far left and Russian intelligence agencies dates back almost a century.

Bernie Sanders honeymooned in the USSR. It’s hard to find a Marxist dictatorship backed by Russia that the elderly socialist hasn’t praised and supported at the expense of our national interests. Bernie praised Castro, he supported the Sandinistas, and his foreign policy was little more than a KGB wish list.

Certainly Russian intelligence services would have been aware of Bernie Sanders as a political sympathizer and maintained a file on him. On a visit to the Soviet Union, he would have interacted with KGB personnel or those reporting to them: as was true of any important foreign visitor at the time.
Is it really farfetched to believe that a lefty politician, who had a history of visiting
 and supporting Communist and Marxist countries, and their agendas, didn’t receive some support from Moscow?

The political movement that Bernie Sanders emerged from was notorious for its Russian ties.

As Discover the Networks notes, Sanders had worked as an organizer for the United Packinghouse Workers Union (UPWU) which was under investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for its Communist ties. An article in Class Struggle magazine described UPWU as one of the “communist led or influenced unions”. Sanders had also spent time at a pro-Soviet Kibbutz.

While the media pursued Trump over his ties to Russian businessmen, Bernie had direct ties to organizations controlled directly or indirectly by Russian intelligence agencies.

Bernie flew a Soviet flag outside his office. As Paul Sperry noted, “Sanders addressed the national conference of the US Peace Council — a known front for the Communist Party USA, whose members swore an oath not only to the Soviet Union but to ‘the triumph of Soviet power in the US.’”

Given all this, is it really implausible that the Russians were trying to help Bernie Sanders?

The media made a great deal out of a memo by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll factory, allegedly claiming, “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump–we support them.)” This memo likely had more to do with the Agency’s objective of blending in on the left and the right to embed pro-Russian content than with Moscow’s larger political objectives, but the media quickly skips over the Sanders part of that memo while treating the Trump part as damning.

But if the Russians were trying to back a politician, would Trump or Bernie have been their choice?

Trump favors a strong foreign policy based on our national interests. Bernie boasts of opposing our national interests. Trump wants a strong America; Bernie wants an international socialist alliance.

But the Russians didn’t believe they could rig an election. They wouldn’t have believed that they could make Bernie president or even a presidential nominee. However they may have rightly thought that they could push the Democrats further to the left and boost their political allies within the DNC.

The Democrat hacks did little for Trump, but they gave Bernie a shot at taking over the DNC.

If we assume that Russia’s project was well-planned, proportional and successful, which considering the track record of their operations in this country is a sensible assumption, then that is what happened.

The post-election Dems are obsessed with Russia, but they’ve also moved further to the left. And, regardless of the rhetoric, the Russians spent generations building up ties with the American left.

Whether it’s Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein or any of the other socialists, the DNC hacks weakened the Democrat establishment and strengthened a movement that Russia once used as its hand puppet.

The Democrats have made plenty of cracks about Trump as a “Manchurian Candidate”. But the movie’s Manchurian candidate was publicly opposed to Russia while secretly benefiting from Russian election interference. That doesn’t describe Trump. It could describe Bernie Sanders. Or many others on the left.

Jill Stein, who initially cashed in by raising money for an election recount, fell afoul of Russiagate and is using recount cash to pay for the legal expenses of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian election interference. The money is going to the Partnership for Civil Justice, part of the International Action Center, and allegedly a front for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party.


The left has been crying, “Russia” and “Treason” on every network and in every newspaper. It might want to consider what a real investigation of its ties to Russian intelligence agencies will turn up.
Russianism—Trump’s critics need a scapegoat to explain why they haven’t managed to vanquish him.

Victor Davis Hanson  NATIONAL REVIEW July 24, 2018 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/russianism-democrat-scapegoating-over-trump-victory-and-presidency/


Russianism is a psychological malady in which furor at Donald Trump’s election victory and presidency — and the ensuing depression resulting from the inability to abort it — finds release through fixation on Russia.

‘Extremely vigorous in our outreach’
The recent orthodox progressive and Democratic view of Russia — until the appearance of Donald Trump — was largely what it had been throughout the Cold War: one of empathy for Russia and understanding of its dilemmas, and shame over supposed right-wing American paranoia over a bogus “Russian bear.”

Obama’s 2009 reset was birthed as a correction to George W. Bush’s modest sanctions against the Putin government for going into Ossetia. What then followed during the Obama administration was the embarrassing red reset-button rhetoric that was usually couched in anti-Bush-administration snark.

Or, as Hillary Clinton put it:

We believe that there are a lot of challenges and threats that we have inherited that we have to address. But there are also opportunities, and we are being extremely vigorous in our outreach. Because we’re testing waters, we’re determining what is possible. We’re turning new pages and resetting buttons.

Then we witnessed a “turning new pages” effort by the Obama administration to downplay Russian aggression and emphasize its own new creative outreach to Putin. They thought the Russian strongman would be charmed by humanitarian sanctimoniousness and the hope-and-change charisma of Barack Obama. Instead, Putin, true to character, saw weakness accompanied by pious sermonizing. That is always a fatal combination when dealing with a brute. And so, Putin proceeded to gather up his easy pickings.

What variously ensued was the inadvertent hot-mic offer of quid pro quo collusion with Putin by President Obama when he was up for reelection. Obama more than fulfilled this promise when, in early 2013 — after Putin’s 2012 hiatus in aggression — he cancelled the final phase of missile defense based in Eastern Europe. There was the iconic but cheap attack on candidate Mitt Romney for supposedly being obsessed with Russia as a geopolitical enemy. The Obama administration showed indifference to the absorption of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. There was also not much anger over prior Russian cyberattacks on the United States. In October 2016, Obama offered a haughty, flat-out dismissal of the notion that Russia could change the way people vote in any election:

There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America’s elections, there’s no evidence that that has happened in the past or that it will happen this time.

His optimism was apparently predicated on his certainty that Hillary Clinton would win and that a defeated and humiliated Donald Trump should not post facto “whine” about losing.

Hillary Clinton was instrumental in persuading the U.S. government to green-light sales of American uranium to Putin-connected companies. It is surely not a coincidence that Russian interests paid Bill Clinton a $500,000 honorarium for a single speaking gig in Moscow, shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, and that pro-Putin Russians gave multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation. Such largesse was never repeated after 2016, when the market value of the Clinton brand crashed after 16 years of more-than-market returns. We forget that Democratic arch-fund-raiser and lobbyist Tony Podesta also received generous fees from Russians, who presumed that his brother (top Clinton aide John Podesta) would soon be part of the new Clinton administration.

Obama refused to arm the Ukrainians and his green-energy, anti-fracking policies played right into Russian oil interests. His defense cuts contributed to NATO laxity. Secretary of State John Kerry invited Putin into the Middle East after a 40-year hiatus. It proved a pathetic effort to get the Obama administration off the hook of enforcing the very ultimatum — the now infamous red line — that it had issued to the genocidal Assad government, and it might well have convinced Putin that annexing former Soviet territory would likewise have few consequences. In sum, according to the protocols of contemporary progressive hysteria and an unhinged media, all of the above, if done by the Trump administration, would have been redefined as impeachment-worthy collusion — or far worse.

Collusion Envy
Robert Mueller was tasked with investigating Russian collusion in the 2016 election. He was supposed to find proof that Trump campaign officials deliberately collaborated with Russian agents to subvert the election and thereby achieve through foreign subterfuge what they could not secure through votes.

Yet that mandate was jettisoned just weeks after Mueller began, apparently once his lawyers sensed what Peter Strzok (soon to be on his investigatory team) already knew when he had texted Lisa Page, “There’s no big there there” —an impression that both James Comey and James Clapper later shared when they confessed that they had no evidence of Russian collusion.

After a year and a half, Mueller so far has been reduced to indicting some Russians operatives for cyber crimes and a few former Trump officials on charges that have had nothing to do with collusion.

But out of the Mueller conundrum and congressional investigations arose damning information that Obama national-security officials illegally unmasked and leaked to the press the names of those surveilled. In addition, DOJ and FBI officials deliberately misled either gullible or partisan FISA court judges to obtain surveillance warrants on American citizens, on the basis of an unverified dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

Discredited FBI officials lied to federal investigators. The former FBI director leaked confidential memos written on FBI time on FBI devices, and he probably worked with CIA Director John Brennan (who had previously lied twice under oath to the United States Congress) to monitor the Trump campaign, including but not limited to implanting government informants among Trump employees.

In other words, once Mueller deviated from his original mandate in order to search for wrongdoing anywhere he could find it, he was obligated to look at the acts of illegality committed by those in the Obama NSC, FBI, CIA, and DOJ, all in connection with thwarting the Trump campaign. He did not do so because his “dream” or “all-star” legal team was overwhelmingly composed of either Democratic partisans and donors to the Clinton campaign, or biased zealots such as Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, or those with prior affinities with Hillary Clinton or her employees and supporters. Again, Strzok’s own texts reveal his assumption that taking up Mueller on his offer to join the investigative team could be a career enhancer if it were to lead to Trump’s impeachment.

In sum, Russian collusion is a 2016 election construct. The hysteria over it serves a palliative for hatred of a presidency that so far cannot be stopped before 2020. Had Hillary Clinton won the election as experts assured the nation she would, there would be no Mueller investigation, either of Trump or of wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton. Now-fired or reassigned FBI grandees like Andrew McCabe or Peter Strzok and DOJ officials such as Bruce Ohr would have thrived. If anything, embracing conflicts of interest and bias to successfully warp an election would be seen as a sacrifice to be rewarded, not culpability to be punished.

The Russian Wickerman
As for Russia itself, it is as much an enemy or friend of the U.S. as is China. But its espionage campaign against the U.S. pales in scope and resources to that of the Chinese. Russia’s aggressions along its borders do not match China’s intimidation of neighbors or its creation and militarization of some atolls in the Spratly Islands or its neocolonial global initiatives.

North Korea’s nuclear proliferation was mostly the work of China, not Russia. Russia worries about China and radical Islam almost as much as we do. In terms of population and economic clout, current defense investments, and bellicosity shown the U.S., China is the existential threat, not Russia.

The progressive-driven effort to re-create the Cold War is surreal, given the far greater threat of an ascendant China and leftists’ past appeasement of Putin.

All that is not to say that Putin would not act like China if he could, only that he lacks the wherewithal to do so, with an economy one-twentieth the size of ours, and with longstanding crises of demography, longevity, and social equilibrium. Without his nuclear arsenal, Putin’s would be as dangerous to the U.S. as an Iran or Venezuela.

In light of this, the progressive-driven effort to re-create the Cold War is surreal, given the far greater threat of an ascendant China and leftists’ past appeasement of Putin. Again, demonizing Russia as singularly evil is a useful tactic insofar as it delegitimizes the Trump presidency, and squares the circle of denial that front-runner Hillary Clinton blew the election. Yet Putin as Satan is also a dangerous notion — Russia has nearly 7,000 nuclear weapons in its arsenal. One of the stupidest policies in recent U.S. diplomacy was the prior lose-lose Obama program of first courting Putin as a misunderstood figure likely to reciprocate liberal empathies, then, when rebuffed, demonizing him as an ogre worthy of a new Cold War.

It is difficult now to imagine what else Trump might still do to punish Putin. He has already beefed up sanctions, expelled Russians, had Russian mercenary thugs killed in Syria, sent threats to Putin not to overreach in Syria, armed the Ukrainians, expanded U.S. oil production, increased defense spending, jawboned NATO to toughen up, and blasted German-Russian appeasement and the dangerous developing German dependency on Russian fossil fuels.

What more concrete action do Trump haters want: air strikes on Moscow? Or would they prefer that Trump drop all the above of punitive action, if Trump only would guarantee Putin that after his envisioned reelection in 2020, American policy would be “more flexible” in ending all talk of U.S. missile defense in Eastern Europe?

The Mueller/collusion façade, like the Russia-is-Satan construct, also serves progressives as a means of psychological projection. Damning Moscow 24/7 makes up for prior appeasement of Putin 24/7, the same way that the “collusion” fantasy diverts attention from the reality that Obama-administration officials sought to warp a U.S. election by abusing FISA courts, weaponizing the intelligence agencies, colluding with the Clinton campaign in peddling bought opposition research, working with unethical toady journalists, and planting informants in a presidential campaign.


And the font of this malaise? Progressives need a scapegoat to blame for their disastrous election loss in 2016 and their lack of a persuasive agenda, which, hand-in-glove, turned over the Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court to progressives’ worst nightmare.

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

THE EXODUS, JULY '47: WHEN THE BRITISH NAVY ATTACKED HOLOCAUST VICTIMS

Jeff Dunetz, 7-22-18

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/22500


The Exodus, July '47: When the British Navy attacked Holocaust victims
Forget the movie: Second Officer William (Bill) Bernstein, an American Aliyah Bet volunteer crew member was found clubbed to death, 15-year-old refugee Zvi Jakubowitz, and one other died of bullet wounds.


Forget the movie: Second Officer William (Bill) Bernstein, an American Aliyah Bet volunteer crew member was found clubbed to death, 15-year-old refugee Zvi Jakubowitz, and one other died of bullet wounds.

On 17th July 1947, a rickety old steamer named The President Warfield was renamed Exodus 1947.

In an open sea ceremony, as the steamship was being attacked by the British navy, the Zionist blue-white flag with the Star of David was hoisted and “Hatikvah, (the Hope)” which eventually became the Israeli national anthem, was sung over and over. The Exodus 1947 became Israel’s first ship of state.

Forget what you saw in the movie  “Exodus”  Paul Newman wasn’t there and the British were much more brutal than portrayed in the movie, they clubbed the Jewish refugees when trying to take them back to Germany.

With the White Paper of 1939, the British caved into Arab pressure (as they have done before and as they still do today). The Paper severely limited the number of Jews that could enter what was then called Palestine. The White Paper meant that Great Britain was sentencing thousands of Jews who could have escaped the Holocaust to death. The US refused to take them onto American soil FDR believed there werealready too many Jews in the U.S. and Churchill refused to take them on English soil or the Jews own homeland. So the Jews began to find ways to sneak Jews into the holy land. The most famous of those missions was The Exodus 1947.

Ironically The President Warfield was named after Solomon Davies Warfield president of the Baltimore Steam Packet Company a steamship line that owned the ship. Warfield was the uncle  of Wallis Warfield Simpson the woman for whom King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom,  abdicated his throne in 1937. The British would get their revenge when The President Warfield became the Exodus 1947.

Decommissioned in 1946, the ship The President Warfield was bought for $8,000 as scrap by the Western Trading Company (a front for the Haganah, which later became the Israel Defense Forces).  Jewish-American Sam (the Banana Man) Zemurray was instrumental in obtaining the ship for the Haganah, which would explain its Honduran registration. It was said that  Mr. Zemurray’s  United Fruit Company,  pretty much owned Honduras. The President Warfield was refitted in Baltimore and sailed for France on 25th February 1947 where it picked up over 4,500 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.



During the journey, the people on the Exodus 1947 prepared to be intercepted. The ship was divided into sections staffed by different groups and each went through practice resistance sessions. The training came in handy as the night after the renaming ceremony, two British destroyers rammed the “Exodus 1947″ from both sides, damaging the hull, railings, and lifeboats. It was boarded by sailors and Royal Marines and a desperate struggle developed. The Jewish refugees fought back, using tin cans, screwdrivers, potatoes, bottles, wooden boards and metal bars as weapons.

As described by a refugee Noah Klieger, “we were determined not to surrender the ship to the British without a fight. It was an unequal battle, and eventually, the Royal Navy boarding party, using truncheons and light firearms, succeeded in bringing the Exodus” under its control. The clash had lasted several hours and resulted in three deaths –- Second Officer William (Bill) Bernstein, an American Aliyah Bet volunteer crew member was found clubbed to death, a 15-year-old refugee Zvi Jakubowitz, and one other died of bullet wounds. Some 150 were injured, including other American volunteer crew members.”

After the fierce and unexpected battle, a taut voice was heard broadcasting in a fine American accent to all of Palestine on Kol Yisrael (the Voice of Israel), the Haganah secret radio:

“This is the refugee ship, Exodus 1947. Before dawn today we were attacked by five British destroyers and one cruiser at a distance of 17miles from the shores of Palestine, in international waters. The assailants immediately opened fire, threw gas bombs, and rammed our ship from three directions. On our deck there are one dead, five dying, and 120 wounded. The resistance continued for more than 3hours. Owing to the severe losses and the condition of the ship, which is in danger of sinking, we were compelled to sail in the direction of Haifa in order to save the 4500 refugees on board from drowning.”

After reaching Haifa, British soldiers transferred the Exodus 1947 passengers, exhausted from the sea journey and the battle to three freighters converted into caged prison ships. It was named “Operation Oasis.”

Exodus 1947 Arrives In Haifa

The three caged prison ships departed Haifa with the Exodus passengers. The refugees assumed that as illegal emigrants they would be interned in camps on the island of Cyprus. But the three prison ships were sailing towards the European mainland, back towards France. The conditions on board these ships were harsh. The refugees lay crammed together in the bare holds of the freighters. The British Government didn’t care that they were mistreating people who had just survived Hitler, many of whom survived concentration camps, after all, they were only Jews

The ships first landed at Toulon, France, where the passengers were ordered to disembark but they refused. When the French authorities refused to use force to remove the refugees from the ship, British authorities, fearing adverse public opinion, decided to wait until the passengers disembarked of their own accord. The British Foreign Secretary tried to scare them off the ship by threatening to send them back to Germany. But the passengers didn’t budge. They forced the issue by declaring a hunger strike, so the British sent them to Hamburg, Germany where the British authorities compelled the passengers to disembark, and some were forcibly removed from the ship by clubbing them. The British then took the 4,500+ passengers many of whom were refugees from concentration camps and transferred to displaced person camps in Germany.

Exodus 1947

Displaced persons in camps all over Europe protested vociferously and staged hunger strikes when they heard the news. Large protests erupted on both sides of the Atlantic. The ensuing public embarrassment for Britain played a significant role in the diplomatic swing of sympathy toward the Jews and the eventual recognition of a Jewish state in 1948.

The ship’s ordeals were widely covered by international media and caused the British government much public embarrassment. The former passengers were permitted to immigrate to Palestine in small groups, and most were present in Israel on May 15, 1948, when the nation their plight helped to create, declared its independence.



Sticker Printed to Protest British Mistreatment Of Exodus Passengers

A confidential report kept in the files of the child-tracking service and dated 31 October 1947 made it clear that the phenomenon of anti-Semitism also existed among the echelons of the British Mandate powers. Using sharp words, the report gives a disparaging assessment of the Jewish committee established in Pöppendorf stating that the reason for the children’s being destined for Palestine was incomprehensible considering that not even one of the children had “Palestinian” parents.

It is said that despite the fact that the Exodus 1947 didn’t deliver a single Jew to the Holy Land, the events of the Exodus voyage convinced the US government that the British mandate of Palestine was incapable of handling the Jewish refugee problem and that a United Nations-brokered solution needs to be found. The US government then intensified its pressures on the British government to return its mandate to the UN, and the British in turn were more than willing to accept this.

Seventy-one years ago, the British appeased the Arabs, denied Jews entry into the Holy Land and sent them back to the Germany from which they had just escaped to be guarded by Germans. Today Great Britain and their European allies are still appeasing radical Islamists, their terrorism, their call for the destruction of Jewish State, and the anti-Semitic hatred they teach their children. In 1947 the British physically attacked the Jews, today the attack the Jews and Jewish history because they cowardly abstain in U.N. votes.


The battle to save Israel and the Jews no longer takes place on a rickety old ship. The Jewish State now has a modern army for protection, make no mistake about it…the Jewish people are just as precarious position today as they were 1939 or in 1947, Anti-Semitism prevails in the Arab nations, Europe, and is even now back in favor in some part of America, led by the Democratic Party and former President Barack Obama.