++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Hamas continues to believe goading Israel into defending itself is a worthy endeavor and transcends any responsibility it has to those under its charge because of the cynical negative re-action it will invoke among world opinion.. (See 1 below.)
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Slowly but surely the links exposing the Russian Collusion illusion are beginning to unfold. It is now evident Russia/Putin was, as anyone in their right mind would assume, involved in manipulating our election. The problem with it all apparently is that so was CIA Director Brennan who was running cover for Hillary in order to defeat Trump and insure his own re-appointment. In conjunction with these shenanigans the Steele Dossier was also connected because of Putin's desire to have Trump curb the effect of the Magnitsky Act.
It becomes evident Brennan and former Sen. Reid were up to their arm pits in stirring the "connection" pot, the FBI and other intelligent agencies were initially reluctant to buy what they were being told, members of Trump's team were being manipulated by Putin and this sordid story is now unfolding as a result of excellent investigative reporting by Kim Strassel and the untiring efforts of Representatives Nunes, Jordan and Gowdy, among others, and ., Representatives Schiff and their like might have a lot of Russian eggs smeared on their faces when all the dots are connected and finally revealed.
I am posting several op eds that , when read together, make the connections I have averred. (See 2, 2a and 2b below.)
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An article connected to and supporting my own previous comments. (See 3 below.)
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About time. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Liberman: Hamas is forcing Israel into a larger Gaza war than 2014
Hamas is pushing Israel into a wide scale war that will be larger in scope than Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said as he visited the southern city of Sderot on Friday morning.“Hamas leaders are forcibly leading us into a situation where we will have no choice, a situation in which we will have to embark on a painful, wide-scale military operation,” Liberman said.
“Hamas is responsible for this crisis, but unfortunately it’s the Gaza residents that may have to pay the price,” he noted.
Liberman added that such a military operation “will be larger and more painful than Operation Protective Edge,” in reference to the 2014 summer war with Hamas in Gaza.
He called on Gaza residents to pressure Hamas to change direction and halt its attacks on Israel, which in the last weeks have included flaming kites, rockets and mortars.
It’s possible to restore a state of reason in which “economic relief can be exchanged for a complete cessation of terror and incitement,” Liberman noted.
He also argued that while there are those in the media who said that one shouldn’t go to war because of the flaming kites, anyone who has seen the burnt forests and the thousand of agricultural fields that were destroyed, “understands that the situation is intolerable.”
“We have acted responsibly and with restraint, even though the real problem is that our deterrence capacity is eroding,” the Defense Minister pointed out.
“The change to this equation and of course the sense of security, is not less important than security itself.”
One should not accept the situation, just as the one that occurs last weekend, in which residents of the southern periphery ran some 20 times into shelters or made preparations to make their security rooms usable, part of their sabbath preparations Liberman concluded.
“We have acted responsibly and with discretion.”
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2) Donald Trump, Meet Bill Browder
2) Donald Trump, Meet Bill Browder
Putin wants Trump to help him silence the man who was also targeted by Fusion GPS.
By The Editorial Board
Vladimir Putin knows what he wants from Donald Trump, and one priority is help in silencing businessman and human-rights advocate Bill Browder. Someone should tell Mr. Trump that he and Mr. Browder were both targeted by Fusion GPS, the political gun-for-hire that midwifed the Steele dossier in 2016.
Mr. Browder has been on Moscow’s enemies list since he lobbied Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act in 2012. The law is named for Mr. Browder’s late lawyer and auditor Sergei Magnitsky, who exposed a $230 million fraud embarrassing to the Kremlin, was arrested on trumped-up charges, and died from torture and neglect in a Moscow detention center at age 37.
The Magnitsky Act, versions of which have also passed in Britain, Canada and the Baltic states, allows for sanctions and travel restrictions on human-rights violators. The U.S. has sanctioned 51 Russians under the law. The Kremlin has been hounding Mr. Browder for years, lodging “red notice” requests with Interpol for his arrest and filing frivolous lawsuits in U.S. and British courts.
The news this week is that Mr. Putin complained about Mr. Browder in Helsinki at his news conference with Mr. Trump. The Russian accused Mr. Browder of tax fraud and “a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton, ” the latter of which looks like an unsubtle attempt to seduce Mr. Trump to help him.
The next day Russia’s prosecutor general said Moscow wants to question several U.S. officials allegedly involved with Mr. Browder, including former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. Asked about that Wednesday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said “the President’s going to meet with his team and we’ll let you know when we have an announcement on that.” What?
It seems Mr. Putin also sought Mr. Trump’s intervention against Mr. Browder during their private meeting in Helsinki. The State Department rightly rejected Mr. Putin’s interrogation request as “absurd” on Wednesday, but allow us to connect some dots for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Putin wants relief from Magnitsky Act sanctions and tried to lure Donald Trump Jr. to support relief in the 2016 campaign. Recall that Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya met Don Jr. and son-in-law Jared Kushner in June 2016 at Trump Tower on the pretext of having dirt on Hillary Clinton. It turned out she had nothing on Mrs. Clinton but wanted to lobby the two to support repeal of the Magnitsky Act.
Mrs. Veselnitskaya also worked alongside Fusion GPS to undermine the Magnitsky Act, which means Fusion was working both for the Russians to smear Mr. Browder and the Clinton campaign to smear Mr. Trump via the Steele dossier.
Mr. Browder has told Congress that Fusion spread false information to news outlets that Magnitsky wasn’t murdered. And Fusion co-founder Glenn Simpson told Congress that he had planted information with U.S. media about Mr. Browder’s “activities in Russia” and his supposed “history of tax avoidance.” We doubt Mr. Putin told Mr. Trump about the Kremlin link to Fusion in their private conversation about Mr. Browder.
All of this is another way of saying to Mr. Trump that Vladimir Putin is trying to con you, sir. And on that point, the U.S. Senate did Mr. Trump a favor Thursday by voting 98-0 for a resolution warning the President not to let the Russian government question diplomats or other officials.
On Thursday afternoon the White House seemed to see where the politics of this was going when it released a statement saying that the request to interview U.S. officials “was made in sincerity by President Putin, but President Trump disagrees with it.” The White House then announced that Mr. Trump will invite Mr. Putin to meet in Washington.
Mr. Trump should know that critics of the Kremlin often end up dead, and Mr. Browder is undoubtedly a target. Before he cuddles with the bear again, Mr. Trump ought to say publicly that Mr. Putin will get no help from the U.S. against Mr. Browder. And that if anything happens to Mr. Browder—if he should fall from a bridge, or be shot as he gets out of a car—the world is going to blame Vladimir Putin.
2a) Brennan and the 2016 Spy Scandal
Obama’s CIA director acknowledges egging on the FBI’s probe of Trump and Russia.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
But the man who deserves a belated bit of scrutiny is former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan. He’s accused President Trump of “venality, moral turpitude and political corruption,” and berated GOP investigations of the FBI. This week he claimed on Twitter that Mr. Trump’s press conference in Helsinki was “nothing short of treasonous.” This is rough stuff, even for an Obama partisan.
That’s what Mr. Brennan is—a partisan—and it is why his role in the 2016 scandal is in some ways more concerning than the FBI’s. Mr. Comey stands accused of flouting the rules, breaking the chain of command, abusing investigatory powers. Yet it seems far likelier that the FBI’s Trump investigation was a function of arrogance and overconfidence than some partisan plot. No such case can be made for Mr. Brennan. Before his nomination as CIA director, he served as a close Obama adviser. And the record shows he went on to use his position—as head of the most powerful spy agency in the world—to assist Hillary Clinton’s campaign (and keep his job).
Mr. Brennan has taken credit for launching the Trump investigation. At a House Intelligence Committee hearing in May 2017, he explained that he became “aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons.” The CIA can’t investigate U.S. citizens, but he made sure that “every information and bit of intelligence” was “shared with the bureau,” meaning the FBI. This information, he said, “served as the basis for the FBI investigation.” My sources suggest Mr. Brennan was overstating his initial role, but either way, by his own testimony, he as an Obama-Clinton partisan was pushing information to the FBI and pressuring it to act.
More notable, Mr. Brennan then took the lead on shaping the narrative that Russia was interfering in the election specifically to help Mr. Trump—which quickly evolved into the Trump-collusion narrative. Team Clinton was eager to make the claim, especially in light of the Democratic National Committee server hack. Numerous reports show Mr. Brennan aggressively pushing the same line internally. Their problem was that as of July 2016 even then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper didn’t buy it. He publicly refused to say who was responsible for the hack, or ascribe motivation. Mr. Brennan also couldn’t get the FBI to sign on to the view; the bureau continued to believe Russian cyberattacks were aimed at disrupting the U.S. political system generally, not aiding Mr. Trump.
The CIA director couldn’t himself go public with his Clinton spin—he lacked the support of the intelligence community and had to be careful not to be seen interfering in U.S. politics. So what to do? He called Harry Reid. In a late August briefing, he told the Senate minority leader that Russia was trying to help Mr. Trump win the election, and that Trump advisers might be colluding with Russia. (Two years later, no public evidence has emerged to support such a claim.)
But the truth was irrelevant. On cue, within a few days of the briefing, Mr. Reid wrote a letter to Mr. Comey, which of course immediately became public. “The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount,” wrote Mr. Reid, going on to float Team Clinton’s Russians-are-helping-Trump theory. Mr. Reid publicly divulged at least one of the allegations contained in the infamous Steele dossier, insisting that the FBI use “every resource available to investigate this matter.”
The Reid letter marked the first official blast of the Brennan-Clinton collusion narrative into the open. Clinton opposition-research firm Fusion GPS followed up by briefing its media allies about the dossier it had dropped off at the FBI. On Sept. 23, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff ran the headline: “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” Voilà. Not only was the collusion narrative out there, but so was evidence that the FBI was investigating.
In their recent book “Russian Roulette,” Mr. Isikoff and David Corn say even Mr. Reid believed Mr. Brennan had an “ulterior motive” with the briefing, and “concluded the CIA chief believed the public needed to know about the Russia operation, including the information about the possible links to the Trump campaign.” (Brennan allies have denied his aim was to leak damaging information.)
Clinton supporters have a plausible case that Mr. Comey’s late-October announcement that the FBI had reopened its investigation into the candidate affected the election. But Trump supporters have a claim that the public outing of the collusion narrative and FBI investigation took a toll on their candidate. Politics was at the center of that outing, and Mr. Brennan was a ringmaster. Remember that when reading his next “treason” tweet.
2b) Why Trump’s Detractors Cry ‘Treason’
He won’t go along with their efforts to deny the legitimacy of his election. Can you blame him?
By Michael Anton
President Trump is, as ever, fortunate in his enemies. Whatever one thinks of what he said in Helsinki, the overreaction is helping him plow through yet another media meltdown. Cries of “treason,” charges that the president is a Russian “asset,” and insistence that remarks at a press conference constitute impeachable offenses fire up the Democratic base. To everyone else, they seem unhinged.
What’s the fuss about, anyway? Before Helsinki, Mr. Trump had said three times—on camera—that he believed Russia meddled in the 2016 election. Yet a reporter asked him again. Why?
Mr. Trump intuits, correctly, that the media push the issue in order to undermine his legitimacy. He obviously has no interest in helping them do that, hence he challenges the question’s premise. His opponents won’t take yes for an answer because asking him over and over fuels the falsehood that he “sides with Russia over his own intelligence agencies.”
He doesn’t. But doesn’t he have good reason to be cautious about the intelligence community? There’s plenty of evidence of illicit American interference in the 2016 election, all of it to defeat Mr. Trump and elect Hillary Clinton. Yet when Mr. Trump points that out, he’s literally called a traitor—by the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency. John Brennan and James Clapper attack the president in vitriolic terms almost daily. James Comey occasionally chimes in with a Bible quote. They have a First Amendment right to do so. But constantly bashing the president casts doubt on their impartiality and professionalism while in office.
Despite all this, Mr. Trump says he believes their case that Russia meddled in 2016. So do I. But I stress the word “believe.” I don’t know and neither does anyone outside the highest levels of government. Those in the media who hyperventilate every time Mr. Trump is insufficiently emphatic in acknowledging Russian meddling don’t seem to realize he is one of the very few people in the country who’ve actually seen the underlying evidence.
Before last week’s indictments, all the intelligence community had made public was a 14-page unclassified summary that states conclusions but reveals nothing about how they were reached. That’s typical for an unclassified product, but it means the rest of us—including the media—have to take the case on faith. Yet, bizarrely, the media insist they know better than Mr. Trump.
There is more public evidence of American meddling—politicized leaks, gaming a criminal investigation, surveillance of campaign associates, and strings of biased messages by officials—than of Russian. There may be piles of secret evidence of the latter. If so, why not make more of it public? Especially since, as we have been told, acknowledging Russian interference is the patriotic imperative of our time.
From what has been made public, Russian meddling consisted of trolling social media and allegedly hacking Democratic National Committee emails. Information operations are also as old as statecraft. There’s not a lot the target country can do to stop them, beyond pointing out and ridiculing ham-fisted propaganda. Throughout the Cold War, most Americans not on the left were unaffected by far more aggressive and better-financed Soviet disinformation. But we’re supposed to believe that $10 million spent on Facebook ads and troll farms overcame Mrs. Clinton’s $768 million war chest?
Every effort should be made to protect all of America’s cybernetworks, including the privacy of campaign operatives. But it’s absurd to assume that a single vote in Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin was turned by reading John Podesta’s embarrassing emails.
Few of the president’s opponents actually say that Russia swung him the election. But that’s clearly what they insinuate and want people to believe. Mr. Trump understands this and is frustrated by it. Can you blame him?
Mr. Anton, a lecturer at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center, served as deputy assistant to the president for strategic communications, 2017-18.
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3) When District Judges Try to Run the Country
By Jason L. Riley
By Jason L. Riley
In recent years national injunctions have somehow become all the rage, even though it’s not clear they are constitutional. Traditionally, an injunction requires the parties in a case—and only those individuals—to continue or cease particular actions. What makes national injunctions distinct and controversial is that they apply to people who are not parties in the case. And state attorneys general now regularly use them as political cudgels to thwart the implementation of federal policy not just in their respective states, but everywhere.
The Trump administration, for example, has tried to withhold funding from “sanctuary” cities that refuse to assist the federal government with immigration enforcement. After Chicago sued, a federal judge in the Northern District of Illinois not only issued an injunction but said it applied to other cities all over the country, which are not parties in the case.
The issue here is not the wisdom or silliness of a given federal policy. The bigger concerns are the scope of lower-court judges’ authority and the integrity of the judicial process. Under the Constitution, lower courts are empowered to decide cases for particular parties, not for the whole nation. In his concurrence last month in Trump v. Hawaii, the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the administration’s travel ban, Justice Clarence Thomas expresses skepticism that district courts have the authority to issue national injunctions and urges his colleagues to address this judicial adventurism sooner rather than later.
“These injunctions are beginning to take a toll on the federal court system—preventing legal questions from percolating through the federal courts, encouraging forum shopping and making every case a national emergency for the courts and for the Executive Branch,” Justice Thomas writes. “If their popularity continues, this Court must address their legality.” The same concern is echoed by a growing number of legal scholars, who worry that the national-injunction trend will result in the Supreme Court reviewing hastily considered lower court rulings that never had the chance to work their way up the system.
In testimony last year before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Samuel Bray, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, explained that the Supreme Court justices typically wait until there’s a split at the circuit-court level before they decide to hear a case. National injunctions, he said, force the high court “to decide cases faster, with less evidence, with fewer contrary opinions—a recipe for bad judicial decisionmaking.”
As usual, both political parties helped pave the way in getting to this point. Republican state attorneys general obtained nationwide injunctions to stop various Obama administration initiatives. Under President Trump, Democratic attorneys general are using the same playbook. If you’re looking for someone to blame, says Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston, try Congress. “Nationwide injunctions didn’t start with Obama and they didn’t start with Trump. They’ve been around for a while,” Mr. Blackman told me in an interview. “I think they’ve accelerated a lot in recent years because they’re so effective in stopping executive actions.” As Congress has become more fractious, recent presidents have responded by finding ways to bypass legislative gridlock.
Federal judges aren’t inclined to limit their power, and state attorneys general are unlikely to change their behavior on their own, so the situation may worsen before it improves. During the Obama administration, Texas and a coalition of more than 20 other states would find a friendly jurisdiction, file a single case, and take their chances with the judge. Democrats in the Trump era aren’t putting all of their eggs in one basket. Blue state attorneys general are suing in friendly jurisdictions far and wide—Hawaii, California, New York, the District of Columbia—and doing so simultaneously.
What this means in practice is that the Trump administration has no room for error in court. Losing one case could mean the end of the policy, at least until the Supreme Court resolves the matter. The left’s goal is to keep U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his staff busy complying with national injunctions instead of advancing the president’s agenda. And you can count on the GOP to return the favor the next time a Democrat occupies the White House.
If lawmakers have the will, there is a way to address the abuse of national injunctions via the Federal Rules for Civil Procedure, which are approved by Congress. Barring that, the Supreme Court may have to settle the matter, and we know that at least one justice would welcome the opportunity.
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