My memory is fading. I forgot that three other dear friends joined us in Santa Fe for my birthday bash: Bob and Sandra Barker and Bill Eiland. (Bill, incidentally, is speaking in Savannah at The Adult Center at noon, this Wednesday. His topic will be our State Art Museum [GMOA]which resides on the campus of The University of Ga. in Athens.) All are welcome to attend.
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The wheels of American justice grind too slow and take too long when agencies seek to slow walk and resist, for their own nefarious purposes, in order to protect themselves. However, those wheels also, eventually, grind very fine. We are fortunate, unlike so many other nations, to have mechanisms in place that force the doors open and release the smell.
Well there it is sports fans, the "smoking gun", only it's not the one Mueller wanted, it shows that the FBI used the Steele dossier as the main tool to get the FISA warrants to spy on Carter Page.
I have two comments that I believe are appropriate in view of this 'factual' evidence.
a) New York Times investigative reporters seems to be finding information, based on facts, that prove their editorial staff are constantly editorializing based on fake and biased assumptions. The Newspaper seems to have two heads driving the animal. By now all those in the editorial department should have warts on their tongues.
b) It is also evident the FBI relied upon a false dossier in order to obtain warrants based on false information. This information, which formed the basis of the FBI's decision, was bought and paid for by The Clintons and DNC, supplied by the head of the CIA and the cover-up began.
I submit the Trump haters , most specifically led by Adam Schiff, have Russian eggs, and not the Faberge kind, all over their faces.(See 1 below.)
And:
We do it also and thus, come into court with unclean hands.. (See 1a below.)
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We do it also and thus, come into court with unclean hands.. (See 1a below.)
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Israel catches up with The Vatican. Let the hysteria begin. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
Dick
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1)
DOJ RELEASES CARTER PAGE FISA APPLICATIONS
In an unprecedented move, the Department of Justice has released 412 pages of top-secret documents related to surveillance conducted against former Trump campaign chairman Carter Page.
The documents include an October 2016 application and three renewal applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants taken out against Page.
The New York Times and other news outlets obtained the applications through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
“The FBI believes Page has been the subject of targeted recruitment by the Russian government,” reads the FISA application.
“As discussed above, the FBI believes that Page has been collaborating and conspiring with the Russian government,” reads the initial FISA application, dated Oct. 21, 2016. The Justice Department and FBI obtained three additional FISAs in January, April and June 2017.
The application also says that the FBI had probable cause to believe that Page engaged in “clandestine intelligence activities” and is an agent of a foreign power.
Republican and Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence previously released highlights from the documents. A memo released by Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has revealed that the Justice Department and FBI relied heavily on the Democrat-funded Steele dossier in the FISA applications.
The dossier is the first piece of evidence cited in the FISA application section laying out the allegations that Page coordinated with Russian government officials on election-related “influence activities.”
That section cites information from “Source #1” who alleged that during a trip to Moscow in July 2016, Page met secretly with two sanctioned Kremlin insiders, Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin, as part of a collusion scheme involving the Trump campaign.
The source appears to be Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier.
Steele also alleged in the dossier that Page worked with Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to exchange information with Russian operatives. Page has vehemently denied the dossier’s allegations, and says he has never spoken to Manafort. He also says he has never met Sechin and Diveykin while denying that he is a Russian agent.
FBI officials have told Congress that investigators had not corroborated the dossier’s allegations when it was cited in the FISA applications. But the FISA application shows that the FBI and Justice Department believed Steele to be a “reliable” source. Steele has been compensated for other work by the FBI, and his intelligence has been used in other criminal proceedings, the FISA application says.
“This is an unprecedented moment in FOIA transparency, as never before has a FISA warrant been processed for release,” Bradley Moss, a national security attorney who filed one of the numerous lawsuits for the Page documents, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Now, with the actual documents in hand, not political spin written by lawmakers with agendas, the American public can make their own decision on whether anything was inappropriate about the surveillance of Carter Page,” added Moss, who is deputy executive director for the James Madison Project, a government transparency group.
Reached for comment shortly after The Times published the FISA applications, Page told TheDCNF: “I’m having trouble finding any small bit of this document that rises above completely ignorance and/or insanity.”
1a)
FACT CHECK: HAS THE US INTERFERED IN FOREIGN ELECTIONS?
By Emily Larsen
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday that the U.S. has, like Russia, tried to influence many foreign elections.
Verdict: True
The U.S. attempted to influence over 80 foreign elections from 1946 to 2000, sometimes secretly.
Fact Check:
Paul mentioned the U.S.’s history of attempting to influence other elections in advance of President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin Monday in Helsinki, Finland. News outlets asked Trump whether he would hold Putin accountable for Russian meddling in the 2016 election by asking him to hand indicted Russians over to the U.S.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office recently obtained indictments against 12 Russians accused of stealing emails from Democrats and releasing them to the public. An additional 13 Russians suspected of posing as Americans to organize pro-Trump rallies and paying for political advertisements on social media were indicted in February. (RELATED: Bolton Says It’s ‘Pretty Silly’ To Ask Putin To Hand Russians Over To Mueller — Here’s Why)
“I think really we mistake our response if we think it’s about accountability from the Russians,” Paul said on CNN’s “State Of The Union.” “They are another country. They are going to spy on us. They do spy on us. They are going to interfere in our elections. We also do the same.”
Loch K. Johnson, a professor at the University of Georgia who began his career investigating the CIA as a Senate committee staffer in the 1970s, told The New York Times that the U.S. has certainly tried to influence foreign elections.
“We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the CIA was created in 1947,” Johnson said. “We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners — you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers. We’ve used what the British call ‘King George’s cavalry’: suitcases of cash.”
Paul cited research from Dov H. Levin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University. Levin identified 81 instances in which the U.S. interfered in foreign elections from 1946 to 2000. He could confirm that Russia interfered in 36 elections over the same period.
“One well-known example is in the case of Italy in 1948, the United States was really worried that the Italian Communist Party, the PCI, would come to power in Italy, which was seen as very likely to lead to Italy becoming a communist dictatorship and eventually becoming a Soviet ally,” Levin told The Daily Caller News Foundation. A declassified National Security Council report recommended that the U.S. end economic aid to Italy if it did not combat Communist control.
More recently, the U.S. spent millions of dollars to influence the election in Yugoslavia in 2000 and unseat its socialist leader, Slobodan Milošević.
“We gave them tens of millions of dollars in campaign funding, we sent in a campaigning adviser who basically did the polling for them,” Levin said. “We also trained thousands of campaign personnel in various campaigning methods – how to get out the vote, and so forth.”
The U.S. paid for 2.5 million stickers with the slogan “He’s Finished” and 5,000 cans of spray paint. “One of the techniques of the opposition’s election campaigns in Serbia and Yugoslavia was spraying slogans on peoples’ houses,” Levin said. “So we also gave them 5,000 spray cans to spray campaign slogans throughout Serbia.”
“Naturally, the consideration of breaking laws or not when it came to these types of interventions was not a major concern for secret or covert intervention,” Levin said. But he cautioned that instances of U.S. election interference are not directly comparable to Russia’s recent actions. “I do not see any moral equivalence between what Russia has done in 2016 and what we have done in past interventions in elections,” he said.
Steven L. Hall, the former chief of Russian operations for the CIA, told TheNYT that while U.S. actions in recent decades have not been morally equivalent to those of Russia, Russia’s actions were not far outside the norm of expected behavior. “If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,” Hall said.
Levin’s report excluded actions taken independently by private citizens or non-state actors (such as private campaign consultants), instances where the U.S. or Russia tried to delegitimize elections as a whole and policy decisions that could have unintentionally affected the election results in another country.
He does not list any U.S. cyber election intervention methods comparable to Russian cyber hacks in the 2016 election, in part because the report only examines elections before the year 2000. But he said that the U.S. did use pre-internet “analog” methods which were similar in design.
The CIA, for example, planted agents in Japanese socialist youth groups, student groups and labor groups in the 1950s and 1960s. Levin said that informants during the 1958 Japanese election gave “dirt” on people in the Socialist Party to the U.S., and then the U.S. gave that information to the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). One LDP leader told TheNYT in 1994 that he had a “deep relationship” with the CIA.
Levin categorized instances of spying on opposing campaigns, spreading damaging information and encouraging the breakup of rival political coalitions as “dirty tricks.” Russia favored influencing elections with these tactics, he said.
He expects that foreign election interference will become more common. “The use of force is becoming more and more expensive for countries while at the same time opportunities to intervene in this way are expanding,” he said.
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2)
There is Now a Jewish State. Let the Hysteria Begin.
Israel has done the unthinkable. The state of the Jews has declared itself a Jewish state. OMG.
If you see smoke rising on the horizon, it is from thousands of pages of thesauruses catching fire as a result of the febrile search for words of condemnation: “Ethnic supremacy.” “Racist policies.” “Blatant discrimination.” “2nd class citizens.” “Violation of international law.” “Immoral.” “Death of democracy.” “Segregation.”
And, of course, Israel’s Arab parliament members are calling it “apartheid.” Apartheid Israel’s Arab parliament members. (If you don’t catch the irony in that sentence, please get in touch.)
It is worth noting that if Sweden declared itself a Swedish state, or Myanmar declared itself a Myanmarish (whatever) state, the world would respond with a yawn. But Israel Jewish!? APOCALYPSE NOW!
Naturally, it’s okay for other states to have their own identity, even their own religious identity. Islamic symbols are found on the flags of 21 countries (including, among others, Turkey, one of the most vociferous critics of the Israeli legislation. Big surprise). And just for the record, there are 31 flags with Christian symbols. Even the big red dot on the Japanese flag is related to Amaterasu, the Japanese sun goddess.
But those are only symbols, right? Wrong. 25 countries declare Islam as their official religion—as does the Palestinian authority: “Islam is the official religion in Palestine. Respect and sanctity of all other heavenly religions shall be maintained. (Basic Law of the State (!) of Palestine, Article 4).
But of course, these are all autocratic states (real or wannabe). Democracies wouldn’t have an official religious identity, right? Wrong. From Costa Rica to Liechtenstein to Greenland to Tuvalu, there are dozens of democratic states with an official religion or a privileged “first among equals” religion. You’ve heard, maybe, of the Anglican Church, the established Church in England?
But in our day and age, this is just an echo of the past, with no practical consequences, right? Wrong. In Britain, the 26 most senior bishops in the Church of England have automatic seats in the House of Lords. In Sweden, the monarch must be a true member of the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Jews need not apply.
But what will happen to Israel’s Muslim and Christian minority if Israel is now officially Jewish? In a word: Nothing. The Jewish state bill enshrines the protection of their rights, and Israel has a far better track record of guarding those rights than Israel’s ethnically more homogeneous European critics, or its Arab neighbors. In Church-of-England England, for example, 68% of Pakistani and Bengali households live below the poverty line. In Christian/Muslim Lebanon, 66% of the Palestinian population lives below the poverty line. In now officially Jewish Israel, by contrast, the figure for the Arab population is 46%–obviously nothing to write home about, but not exactly your hair catching on fire, either.
So what’s the big deal? Why is the world so bent out of shape that Israel declared itself Jewish? The answer has its roots not in current geopolitics but in obscure theological history. For classic Christianity, there was almost nothing more threatening than a Jew with power. By church doctrine, Jewish degradation was proof of the truth of the Church, and Jewish dispersion from Israel was the precondition for their (our) degradation. (see: St. Augustine on Psalm 49:19 “Scatter them abroad in Your virtue: take away from them virtue, take away from them their strength. And bring them down, my protector, O Lord.)
Oops. There’s one church doctrine down the toilet.
For Muslims, the establishment of a Jewish state is religious blasphemy. As part of its imperialist past, Islam redefined Judaism as a religion, without a political/national/territorial component. This is reflected in the classic PLO Charter, Article 18: “Judaism, because it is a divine religion, is not a nationality with independent existence. Furthermore, the Jews are not one people with an independent personality…”
Oops. Sorry, guys. Am yisrael chai.
And finally, for Jews, particularly for modern, liberal, Western Jews, there is a perverse tendency to recognize the legitimacy of every political identity but our own. We applaud when Samoans are Samoan. We praise Native Americans for asserting their ancestral rights. We bemoan discrimination against Aborigines in Australia or Roma in Rome. We even take seriously the issue of Palestinian national rights, in spite of the fact that Palestinian national identity is barely a hundred years old.
But when it comes to Jews being Jews in a Jewish state with which we have been associated for nearly 4,000 years, (ever hear of Judea?) all of a sudden we’re back in the 1950’s afraid of being called “pushy.”
Oops. Grow a backbone.
Is a declaration that Israel is Jewish “provocative,” as many are claiming? No. Rockets landing on Sderot is provocative. Flammable chemicals scorching the Carmia nature preserve is provocative. The Palestinian Authority declaring that Palestinians have a right, as “freedom fighters,” to murder Israelis is provocative. Israel being declared Jewish is provocative only if you think the existence of the Jewish people is provocative.
And if that’s what you think, I couldn’t care less. Enjoy your hysteria.
About the Author
Rabbi Wolkoff serves Congregation Bnai Tikvah in North Brunswick. He has published hundred of articles and lectured internationally on Jewish topics, and has been active both in interfaith work and in the struggle against anti-Semitism, both in the United States and in Sweden, where he served for a decade. He is a JNF Rabbi for Israel.
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