A coherent, must read assessment, by a brilliant mind, of our current political approach toward presidential governance. (See 1 below.)
More food for thought. (See 1a below.)
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Now it is again our turn. (See 2 below.)
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Iranian spies caught.
Is the new game in town, and a much cheaper one to conduct, a new type of spying and espionage? Are open democratic societies more vulnerable than totolaterian ones? Will this result in restrictions of freedoms and thus, a partial victory?
Will artificial intelligence smart weapons and robots basically change the face of war and conflict?
You decide. (See 3 below.)
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Is this censorship of what I have written and posted?
What I have posted is already in the public arena but because I cull items pertaining to Trump and/or conservative viewpoints, social media organs place a warning on my blogs.
Should they have this right? Is this discrimination?
What I find even more interesting is the availability of a variety of viewpoints now available making newspapers and other news (entertainment as I like to call them) media sources even less relevant.
Is what I do important? Some readers say yes, others have either requested I no longer send them my memos or seldom read them. That is their right as it is my ability to post.
Is this right being monitored and selectively watched by enormous and powerful non-regulated corporations outside of government? I understand the Orwellian threat of "big brother" government but now we even have some "cousins" watching you.
You decide. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)
A Post-Trump World?
Removing him would only make things worse — for his opponents & the nation.
It has been quite a ride since Inauguration Day — or, rather, from Michael Wolff to Omarosa and Michael Cohen, or from the Emoluments Clause to the 25th Amendment, or from talk of decapitating Trump to talk of blowing up the White House.
Yet, what might happen should Trump be removed from office, either by impeachment leading to conviction or resignation or by federal indictment from Robert Mueller?
Given the evidence so far, the results could be civil chaos, and for a variety of reasons:
The Trump Record
Had Trump misled his base and not fulfilled his campaign promises, he would have little popular support. Had he tanked the economy and started a war, he would be polling in the 20s rather than the mid to lower 40s.
Trump also polls about 85 percent among Republicans. He is even more popular among blue-collar “Trump voters,” largely because of efforts to equalize trade, restore U.S. deterrence, end illegal immigration, and jump-start the economy, as evidenced by a record-high stock market, near-record peacetime unemployment, and likely annualized GDP growth of 3 percent or more. Minority joblessness is also at a near-record low. The startling fact is that a so-called buffoonish real-estate developer hit upon a calculus to restore robust economic growth in a way that all the degreed experts of the prior administration had not.
His judicial picks belie predictions that Trump would not keep his vows to appoint strict constructionists. There have been no David Souter–like or Harriet Miers–like nominations to the Supreme Court.
His national-security team at Defense, State, the National Security Council, the CIA, and the UN is better than any seen in prior postwar administrations. Mike Pompeo is not Hillary Clinton, H. R. McMaster and John Bolton have not been Susan Rice, and Jim Mattis is not Chuck Hagel. Nor is Nikki Haley playing the role of Samantha Power at the U.N., or sending in countless requests to unmask the names of those swept in FISA warrants.
In other words, Trump did what he said he would, despite widespread skepticism. Even his critics concede that the economy is booming. In retrospect, smug prognostications of disaster should the U.S. leave the Iran deal or the Paris Climate Accord or move the embassy to Jerusalem or get tough with the North Koreans or prod NATO members into meeting their prior promises were flat-out wrong.
The plaint against Trump is not that he ruined the economy, but that the ghost of Obama is responsible for Trump’s present economic renaissance, and not that his foreign policy has failed, but that allies, neutrals, and enemies do not appreciate American recalibrations or like us much for being suddenly noncompliant.
In sum, impeaching or removing a successful president is not a winning proposition. More important, we have never threatened any president with impeachment primarily for purported wrongdoing before he took office.
Had we done so, every president from Dwight Eisenhower (who avoided $400,000 in taxes by finagling a one-time government ruling to declare the huge royalties on his memoir as “capital gains” rather than income) to Barack Obama (who, well aside from Tony Rezko’s “gift,” faced campaign violations involving nearly $1.8 million in improper 2008 contributions that earned a $375,000 fine) would have faced non-stop legal hounding while in office. Harry Truman would have been impeached his first year, had a special prosecutor reviewed his long relationships of years past with the criminal syndicate run by Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast. In 1963, a Mueller-like special counsel would still have been ferreting out all the election tampering during the 1960 election and its relationship to JFK.
Donald Trump has been subjected to nearly 20 months of unprecedented venom and fury. We know that some of his past associates are uncouth and criminally minded, and that he is crude in retorts and undisciplined in his private life — none of which justifies the allegations that he has committed high crimes and misdemeanors while in office. That fact is another reason why Trump’s polls have not yet tanked, as Richard Nixon’s did in mid-1974.
Watergate is not the proper moral or political referent. The impeachment of Bill Clinton, mostly for lying about cavorting with a young White House intern, is — because the act occurred during his presidential tenure. Yet Clinton’s strong economic record ensured an eventual boomerang on his accusers. There is a good chance that third-quarter economic news will be even better for Republican House candidates, and they might yet offer a collective October questioning of their respective opponents, “Will you or will you not vote to impeach the president if you are in the majority?” For all the current braggadocio, most Democrat candidates will evade an answer.
Unequal Application of the Law
For every crime — collusion, perjury, obstruction, fraud — that Mueller seeks to use to delegitimize Trump, there is a comparable or greater crime in plain sight that he ignores. The asymmetry is not insignificant and involves not the often-disreputable political class as much as the supposedly professional bureaucratic hierarchy.
Deluding the FISA court, implanting spies in a political campaign, unmasking and leaking the names of surveilled citizens, not reporting campaign expenditures funneled through fronts such as Perkins Coie and Fusion/GPS to employ a foreign national to smear a political opponent, destroying subpoenaed documents, lying to Congress, lying to federal investigators, and far more all go unnoticed. The onus is on Mueller’s team to explain by what criterion a losing presidential candidate gains immunity from legal exposure while the winning one earns legal scrutiny.
In lieu of an explanation, we are to assume that high government officials repeatedly broke the law and covered up their illegality. They calculated that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in and would ignore or reward their often-illegal zeal.
Again, it is hard to impeach a president for alleged crimes that were committed before he took office and were as likely committed by his opponent.
Vice President Pence
Should Trump somehow leave office, Vice President Mike Pence would likely seek to carry out his populist agenda geared to maintaining Trump’s Electoral College winning formula. No one could calibrate whether his more discreet manner and sterling character and personal ethos would gain independents to his agenda or lose some of the base that preferred Trump’s greater combativeness and cunning.
Either way, it is unlikely that either the Left or the Never Trump Right would be happy with a Pence presidency. Indeed, on social issues or religious agendas, they might find Pence more unpalatable — and yet far harder to defame.
Nonetheless, do not expect the Left to cease its hysteria should Trump disappear; it would simply recalibrate and refocus on Pence. The effort would be to repeat the Trump-demonization formula of trying to leverage some sort of legal infraction into a melodramatic felony to discredit an opposition president — perhaps in the manner the Left is now seeking to turn the upright Brett Kavanaugh into a veritable monster. Getting Trump would likely only whet the appetite to go after his successor.
The Trump Base
Conventional wisdom voiced by the Never Trump movement and dissident political voices is that Trump “hijacked” the Republican party. Accordingly, in the post-Trump era, it must then return to its sober and judicious, but otherwise mostly losing, presidential record embodied by recent unsuccessful mastheads.
But there are problems here as well.
The base not only has little allegiance to the Wall Street/Chamber of Commerce view of the world on trade, immigration, and manufacturing, but could either sit out or oppose any election that returns the party to the orthodox ideology of the recent past.
The Trump base will see a Trump removal as a Deep State/elite-bluestocking effort to nullify an election. With long memories, they will be far less likely to vote Republican at the national level. We should remember that conservatives have maligned Trump voters as much as has the Left, from “crazies” to what Eliot Cohen recently referred to as a “peasant revolt.”
What got Trump elected was not just his populist/nationalist agenda but a canny appraisal of the Electoral College. So far in the two years of Republican-party civil war, few Never Trumpers have offered anything like the following: “We do not need the crude Trump and his crackpot heresies, or his pathetic peasant rallies, but instead can return to Republican orthodoxy and thereby win the states of Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.”
Few seem to ponder that the Trump election was not so much a vote for a raconteur who frequented with the likes of Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels, but rather for someone who was not the Republican party, at least as embodied in the last few years in the national elections. Few have argued that had Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or John Kasich won the Republican nomination, his agenda and Marquess of Queensbury rules of decorum would have won over the swing voters in the above key states. That is not an endorsement of either Trump’s heterodox views or his personal comportment; it is just a statement of fact.
A Trump abdication of some sort would alienate current Trump voters from the Republican party for a generation.
The Never Trumpers
Republicans who for two years have made the argument that Trump’s personal downsides have outweighed his otherwise conservative agenda, or that his unorthodox ideas on trade and immigration nullify his judicial appointments and tax and deregulation record, will not suddenly be called in to nurse a Republican Phoenix to arise out of the Trump ashes.
At least 85 to 90 percent of the Republican party disagrees with Never Trump absolutism. Fair or not, the so-called Never Trumpers would be as likely to be blamed for their nonstop ankle-biting of a deposed Trump as they are to be cited as prescient in warning of the ultimate wages of his sins.
It is also likely that MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times would view Never Trumpers in the fashion that MSNBC once saw Pat Buchanan after the end of the Bush presidency, the successful Iraq surge, and the ascendency of Barack Obama: a once-expedient conservative resource to fuel Bush opposition, but no longer needed or wanted after his utility was over, and so to be gradually eased out once a suitable illiberal pretext could be found.
While it is desirable for liberal organs to have a “conservative” writing 24/7 about the evils of Trump, it is not of much value, once the evils of Trump are ostensibly gone. In other words, in a post-Trump world, many of the Never Trump Republicans would likely be faced with either becoming permanent converts to the liberal cause or being orphaned from their once-welcoming liberal friends and current coveted progressive billets.
Elections Have No Consequences?
If Democrats regain the presidency, they should fear the precedent that they have set. To thwart a progressive agenda, some zealous conservatives might in the future adopt the successful 2017–19 Democratic playbook on the principle simply that it worked.
We are in danger of establishing a precedent that in the new American politics, the way to defeat an oppositional leader is not to wait for the next election but to warp the criminal-justice system, normalize violent rhetoric against the person of the president, and consider the president guilty of whatever crime from his past is most convenient.
Crudity will become tantamount to high crimes and misdemeanors. And the new rules will demand that when a president-elect enters office, he does not begin a new political life, but rather is subject to new legal inquiries about everything that he has done previously.
As cynics, we have grown accustomed to personal shenanigans from politicians — a JFK, LBJ, Clinton, or Trump; we do not expect flagrant lying, obstruction of justice, conflicts of interest, and violations of the law from our “professional” overseers at the CIA, FBI, DOJ, and NSC.
And yet in the last year of the Obama presidency, they were unleashed to use likely illegal means to destroy a perceived threat, assured that a Clinton presidency would provide de facto amnesty.
The elite media, the Democratic party hierarchy, the intellectual establishment, the entertainment industry, the Never Trump punditry, and the identity-politics industry have all created a vast echo chamber. Inside it, each seems to vie with the other to adduce the most creative end-game scenarios surrounding the hated Trump. This week we are told that providing money to your own campaign to purchase, via a non-disclosure agreement, the silence of an alleged past paramour is an impeachable offense, while assuming that hiding campaign money sent through firewall intermediaries to hire a foreign spook to disrupt a presidential campaign and to seed an unverified dossier among government grandees leads to nothing.
Outside of their bubble, our elites have no idea of what half the “peasant” class thinks of them, or what it will do if they succeed, or the untold paradoxes and ironies that they will bring upon themselves.
1a)
SOURCES: CHINA HACKED HILLARY CLINTON’S PRIVATE EMAIL SERVER
By Richard Pollock | Reporter
A Chinese-owned company penetrated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server, according to sources briefed on the matter.
The company inserted code that forwarded copies of Clinton’s emails to the Chinese company in real time.
The Intelligence Community Inspector General warned of the problem, but the FBI subsequently failed to act, Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert said during a July hearing.
A Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton’s private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails, two sources briefed on the matter told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Chinese firm obtained Clinton’s emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server, according to the sources, who said the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation.
The Chinese wrote code that was embedded in the server, which was kept in Clinton’s residence in upstate New York. The code generated an instant “courtesy copy” for nearly all of her emails and forwarded them to the Chinese company, according to the sources.
The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) found that virtually all of Clinton’s emails were sent to a “foreign entity,” Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, said at a July 12 House Committee on the Judiciary hearing. He did not reveal the entity’s identity, but said it was unrelated to Russia. (RELATED: Gohmert: Watchdog Found Clinton Emails Were Sent To ‘Foreign Entity’)
Two officials with the ICIG, investigator Frank Rucker and attorney Janette McMillan, met repeatedly with FBI officials to warn them of the Chinese intrusion, according to a former intelligence officer with expertise in cybersecurity issues, who was briefed on the matter. He spoke anonymously, as he was not authorized to publicly address the Chinese’s role with Clinton’s server.
Among those FBI officials was Peter Strzok, who was then the bureau’s top counterintelligence official. Strzok was fired this month following the discovery he sent anti-Trump texts to his mistress and co-worker, Lisa Page. Strzok didn’t act on the information the ICIG provided him, according to Gohmert.
Gohmert mentioned in the Judiciary Committee hearing that ICIG officials told Strzok and three other top FBI officials that they found an “anomaly” on Clinton’s server.
The former intelligence officer TheDCNF spoke with said the ICIG “discovered the anomaly pretty early in 2015.”
“When [the ICIG] did a very deep dive, they found in the actual metadata — the data which is at the header and footer of all the emails — that a copy, a ‘courtesy copy,’ was being sent to a third party and that third party was a known Chinese public company that was involved in collecting intelligence for China,” the former intelligence officer told The DCNF.
“The [the ICIG] believe that there was some level of phishing.But once they got into the server something was embedded,” he said. “The Chinese are notorious for embedding little surprises like this.”
The intelligence officer declined to name the Chinese company.
“We do know the name of the company.There are indications there are other ‘cutouts’ that were involved.I would be in a lot of trouble if I gave you the name,” he told The DCNF.
A government staff official who’s been briefed on the ICIG’s findings told The DCNF that the Chinese state-owned firm linked to the hacking operates in Washington’s northern Virginia suburbs. The source was not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.
The company that penetrated Clinton’s server was not a technology firm and it served as a “front group” for the Chinese government, the source told The DCNF.
The Fairfax and Loudoun county governments told The
DCNF that 13 state-owned Chinese companies operate in the area. Of those, three were not technologically oriented.
Fairfax County Economic Development Authority communications manager Seth Livingston told The DCNF that all of the nine firms operating in his county were there in 2009 when Clinton began as secretary of state.
“Our Asian folks believe that all of the companies have been around and known to us since that time period,” he said in an email.
“This is the most combed over subject in modern American political history,” Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told The DCNF. “The FBI spent thousands of hours investigating, and found no evidence of intrusion. That’s a fact.”
“But in an age where facts are alternative and truth isn’t truth, it’s no surprise that an outlet like the Daily Caller would try to distract us from very real and very immediate threats to our democracy brought by the man occupying the White House,” he continued.
Department of State Inspector General Steven A. Linick and then-ICIG I. Charles McCullough III scrutinized Clinton’s server in 2015. McCullough told Congress in July 2015 that her emails contained classified material.
“IC IG was involved in the classification review of certain information drawn from the private email server,” an agency spokeswoman told The DCNF. She declined to comment further.
The two IGs asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether the classified information was compromised, according to a July 23, 2015, New York Times report based on unnamed senior government officials.
The FBI issued a referral to the Justice Department in July 2015. The bureau warned that classified information may have been disclosed to a foreign power or to one of its agents.
“FBIHQ, Counterespionage Section, is opening a full investigation based on specific articulated facts provided by an 811 referral from the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, dated July 6, 2015 regarding the potential compromise of classified information,” a July 10, 2015, FBI memo stated.
An 811 referral informs the FBI of classified information that was potentially released to a foreign power or agent of a foreign power.
“This investigation is also designated a Sensitive Investigative Matter (SIM) due to a connection to a current public official, political appointee or candidate,” the memo stated.
Then-FBI Deputy Director Mark F. Giuliano sent a follow-up memo on July 21, 2015, to President Barack Obama’s deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, about two conversations he had with her about the criminal referral.
“On 13 July 2015 and 20 July 2015, I verbally advised you of a Section 811(c) referral from the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community received by the FBI on 06 July 2015. The referral addressed the mishandling of classified information on the personal e-mail account and electronic media of a former high-level us Government official,” according to the FBI memo, which was hand delivered to Yates.
Justice Department spokesman Devin M. O’Malley declined to comment on this story.
Former FBI Director James Comey acknowledged in his recent book, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” that the FBI was conducting a criminal investigation into Clinton’s conduct.
London Center for Policy Research’s vice president of operations, retired Col. Anthony Shaffer, told The DCNF that Clinton’s server was vulnerable to hacking.
“Look, there’s evidence based on the complete lack of security hygiene on the server.Fourteen-year-old hackers from Canada could have probably hacked into her server and left very little trace,” Shaffer said. “Any sophisticated organization is going to be able to essentially get in and then clean up their presence.”
And a former consultant to the U.S. trade representative, Claude Barfield, told The DCNF: “The Chinese were in the process of really gaining technological competence in 2009 to 2010. This begins to really take off in the early years of the Obama administration. The Obama administration was kind of late and there was this slow reaction about how sophisticated the Chinese were.”
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2)Open Letter To The NFL PLAYERS. The Boycott is coming.
You graduated high school in 2011. Your teenage years were a struggle. You grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. Your mother was the leader of the family and worked tirelessly to keep a roof over your head and food on your plate.
Academics were a struggle for you and your grades were mediocre at best. The only thing that made you stand out is you weighed 225 lbs and could run 40 yards in 4.2 seconds while carrying a football.
Your best friend was just like you, except he didn’t play football. Instead of going to football practice after school, he went to work at McDonalds for minimum wage.
You were recruited by all the big colleges and spent every weekend of your senior year making visits to universities where coaches and boosters tried to convince you their school was best. They laid out the red carpet for you.
Your best friend worked double shifts at Mickey D’s. College was not an option for him. On the day you signed with Big State University, your best friend signed paperwork with his Army recruiter. You went to summer workouts. He went to basic training.
You spent the next four years living in the athletic dorm, eating at the training table. You spent your Saturdays on the football field, cheered on by adoring fans. Tutors attended to your every academic need. You attended class when you felt like it. Sure, you worked hard. You lifted weights, ran sprints, studied plays, and soon became one of the top football players in the country.
Your best friend was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division. While you were in college, he deployed to Iraq once and Afghanistan twice. He became a Sergeant and led a squad of 19 year old soldiers who grew up just like he did. He shed his blood in Afghanistan and watched young American's give their lives, limbs, and innocence for the USA.
You went to the NFL combine and scored off the charts. You hired an agent and waited for draft day. You were drafted in the first round and your agent immediately went to work, ensuring that you received the most money possible. You signed for $16 million although you had never played a single down of professional football.
Your best friend re-enlisted in the Army for four more years. As a combat tested sergeant, he will be paid $32,000 per year.
You will drive a Ferrari on the streets of South Beach. He will ride in the back of a Blackhawk helicopter with 10 other combat loaded soldiers.
You will sleep at the Ritz. He will dig a hole in the ground and try to sleep.
You will “make it rain” in the club. He will pray for rain as the temperature reaches 120 degrees.
On Sunday, you will run into a stadium as tens of thousands of fans cheer and yell your name. For your best friend, there is little difference between Sunday and any other day of the week. There are no adoring fans. There are only people trying to kill him and his soldiers. Every now and then, he and his soldiers leave the front lines and “go to the rear” to rest. He might be lucky enough to catch an NFL game on TV.
When the National Anthem plays and you take a knee, he will jump to his feet and salute the television. While you protest the unfairness of life in the United States, he will give thanks to God that he has the honor of defending his great country.
To the players of the NFL: We are the people who buy your tickets, watch you on TV, and wear your jerseys. We anxiously wait for Sundays so we can cheer for you and marvel at your athleticism. Although we love to watch you play, we care little about your opinions until you offend us.
You have the absolute right to express yourselves, but we have the absolute right to boycott you. We have tolerated your drug use and DUIs, your domestic violence, and your vulgar displays of wealth. We should be ashamed for putting our admiration of your physical skills before what is morally right.
But now you have gone too far. You have insulted our flag, our country, our soldiers, our police officers, and our veterans. You are living the American dream, yet you disparage our great country.
I encourage all like minded Americans to boycott the NFL.
National boycott of the NFL for Sunday November 12th, Veterans Day Weekend. Boycott all football telecast, all fans, all ticket holders, stay away from attending any games, let them play to empty stadiums.
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3) Arrest of Iranian Spies in U.S. Just ‘Tip of the Iceberg,’ Lawmaker Warns
Iran spies stationed across U.S. a result of Obama-era cash payouts
The recent arrest of two Iranian agents alleged to have been running spy operations on U.S. soil is just "the tip of the iceberg" in terms of the Islamic Republic's efforts to conduct intelligence operations in America that could result in a terrorist attack, according to a leading lawmaker and U.S. officials who spoke to theWashington Free Beaconabout the matter.
Following the arrest of two Iranian individuals charged with spying on Jewish and Israeli facilities in the California area, Rep. Peter Roskam (R., Ill.) told the Free Beacon it is likely Iran has stationed multiple regime-tied agents in the United States to conduct intelligence operations.
While the arrest of the two Iranians was met with shock in the press, Roskam said he was not surprised by the arrests, which have unearthed concrete evidence of the Islamic Republic's efforts to foment discord across the globe, including on American soil.
"This is the tip of the iceberg," Roskam said in an interview. "This is not a surprise and this is a result of the Iran regime getting financial support from the Obama administration in the Iran deal."
Iran has been emboldened by the lack of international repercussions on its malevolent behavior and may have increased its intelligence operations in America in the years since the landmark nuclear deal, he said.
Iran is "acting with impunity, that deal emboldened them," Roskam said. "This is an unmasking of that. Unfortunately it's all too predictable. Give a malevolent regime huge amounts of cash with no restraining influence and this is what happens."
The Trump Justice Department announced last week it had arrested two Iranians and charged them with spying on behalf of the hardline regime, a discovery that has refocused attention on the Islamic Republic's global spy operations.
Lawmakers and experts have been warning for some time that Iran has stationed what some described as "sleeper cell" agents across the United States. These agents are believed to operate with impunity and could lay the groundwork for a large-scale terror attack on American soil.
The two Iranian individuals—identified as Ahmadreza Mohammadi-Doostdar, a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen, and Majid Ghorbani, an Iranian citizen and resident of California—were formally charged by the Trump administration "with allegedly acting on behalf of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran by conducting covert surveillance of Israeli and Jewish facilities in the United States, and collecting identifying information about American citizens and U.S. nationals who are members of the group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK)," an Iranian opposition group that promotes regime change in the Islamic Republic, the DOJ announced.
One U.S. official, agreeing with Roskam's assessment, told the Free Beacon Iran has been running "vast espionage and information operations in the United States" with virtual impunity. The arrest of the two recently charged Iranians denotes a significant shift in policy that could result in the capture of more agents.
"If there's anything that's become obvious in the last few months, it's that the Iranians are running vast espionage and information operations in the United States," said the source, who could only discuss the situation on background. "The Trump administration has been warning since day one that some of the windfall Iran got from the nuclear deal has been going into malign cyber operations."
"The propaganda network that Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube uncovered was doubling as a hacking network that had been ramping up in the last couple of years," the source said, referring the recent uncovering of a massive social media influence campaign believed to be organized by Iran.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), also a vocal critic of the Iranian regime, told the Free Beacon the recent arrest of the two Iranians is cause for major concern.
"I am deeply alarmed by the Justice Department's new indictment against alleged Iranian agents," Rubio said. "Iran's regime has sponsored terrorist attacks against Americans abroad and our allies, and may now be seeking to target American citizens, as well as Jewish or Israeli facilities, on U.S. soil."
Roskam, in his comment to the Free Beacon, noted that "Iran's malevolence" toward Israel and other countries it considers an enemy is well documented.
"What's new here is a level of aggression against the United States and an impunity with which they're operating," the lawmaker said, referring to the spy operations on Jewish targets—a cornerstone of Iran's global terror operations, particularly its 1994 bombing of a Jewish facility in Argentina that sent shockwaves through the global Jewish community.
The operations on U.S. soil are "incredibly provocative and an indication where the Iranian regime is," Roskam said.
Iran has publicly stated multiple times over the past years that it has a vast espionage network that includes the United States. While many have dismissed these claims as posturing, Roskam said Iran should be taken at its word.
"The takeaway is we can take the Iranians at face value," he said. "They were declarative during the Iran negotiations: They were not willing to make any commitments as it relates to their state sponsorship of terror. It's clear they haven't. This can't be a surprise to anyone. It is entirely consistent with what they've been communicating. The surprise is the idea anyone thought they were slowing down or giving up their aggressive disposition."
Congress will play a prominent role in investigating the matter in the months to come. This will include working with federal law enforcement to ensure Iranian agents are not able to coordinate terror attacks on Jewish or Israeli facilities.
Earlier this year, Congress heard testimony from a panel of experts of former U.S. officials about Iran's "sleeper cell" networks in America.
Iran, through terrorists affiliated with Hezbollah, could easily launch strikes in America.
"They are as good or better at explosive devices than ISIS, they are better at assassinations and developing assassination cells," Michael Pregent, a former intelligence officer who worked to counter Iranian influence in the region, said during the April hearing. "They're better at targeting, better at looking at things," and they can outsource attacks to Hezbollah.
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4)
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