I want to run again:
I'm still trying to figure out how I lost the election.
I'm still trying to figure out how I lost the election.
I thought we had the thing bought and paid for!
Was it the Russian Uranium Deal?
Was it Wikileaks?
Was it Podesta’s Emails?
Was it Comey?
Was it having a sexual predator as a husband?
Was it Huma Abedin’s sexual predator husband Anthony Weiner?
Was it because the Clinton Foundation ripped off Haiti?
Was it subpoena violations?
Was it the congressional testimony lies?
Was it the corrupt Clinton Foundation?
Was it the Benghazi fiasco?
Was it pay for play?
Was it being recorded laughing when I got a child rapist off when I was an attorney?
Was it the Travel Gate scandal?
Was it the Whitewater scandal?
Was it the Cattle Gate scandal?
Was it the Trooper-Gate scandal?
-OR-
Was it the $15 million for Chelsea's apartment bought with Clinton Foundation money?
Or my husband's interference with Loretta Lynch & the investigation?
Or when I happily accepted the stolen debate questions given to me by CNN?
Or my own secret server in my house and my disdain for classified information?
Or deleting 30,000 emails after I was told not to?
Or having my cell phones and computers destroyed with hammers and Bleach-bit?
Was it the Seth Rich murder?
Was it the Vince Foster murder?
Was it the Gennifer Flowers assault & settlement?
Was it the $800,000 Paula Jones settlement?
Was it calling half the United States deplorable?
Was it my underhanded treatment of Bernie Sanders?
Was it Bill's impeachment?
Was it the lie I told about being under sniper fire in Bosnia?
Was it the $10 million I received for the pardon of Marc Rich?
Or the $6 BILLION lost while I was in charge of the State Dept.?
Or was it because I’m perceived as a hateful, lying, power-hungry, overly ambitious, greedy,
and nasty person?
Gee, I just can't seem to put my finger on it!
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And:
Trump vs. Hitler: Who Is Worse? | PragerU
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Salena goes to Warren, Ohio. (See 1 below.)
Actually the economy is somewhat stronger than reported:https://issuesinsights.com/
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Last night, I thought Trump's explanation of why he withdrew our few advisors and thereby, deserted the Kurds, was lame.(See 2 and 2a below.)
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Will Iran be encouraged by Trump's withdrawal from Syria to strike Israel? (See 3 below.)
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The Democrat's desire to Impeach Trump should rest on something beyond hatred and hypocrisy (See 4 and 4a below.):
https://www.nationalreview.
AND:
https://youtu.be/PCToa6JXShE
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Is Warren's goose finally cooked? https://www.theblaze.com/
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My economist friend, Peter Morici, offers some advice. (See 5 below.)
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After 5 days I am finally caught up with material for another memo.
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Dick
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1)
An old factory town isn't merely what it once was
WARREN, Ohio-From time to time, you see a story about a new industry coming to a city in desperate need of an economic jolt. Look closely, and sometimes you see that the real story is about less companies and jobs and more about the heart and soul of the city and her people.
“This city has always found a way to punch back well above its weight class, no matter what obstacles or setbacks have been thrown our way, ” Mayor Doug Franklin brags from his office located in a Victorian Italianate mansion filled with marble fireplaces, elaborate woodwork, and The tragic family history of its original owner, civic leader Henry Bishop Perkins.
Click here for the full story.
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2)
Kurdish Militia in Syria Likely to Join with Assad, Putin
By KRISTINA JOVANOVSKI/THE MEDIA LINE
Kurdish forces in Syria will likely seek an alliance with Moscow and Damascus after the United States announced a looming Turkish incursion into Syria, analysts have told The Media Line.
A statement from the White House after President Donald Trump spoke with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday night revealed that Turkey “will soon be moving forward.”
Ankara sees the Kurdish YPG militia in Syria as connected to the PKK, a Turkey-based Kurdish militia it has declared a terrorist organization. Both Washington and the European Union have also classified the PKK as a terrorist group.
Turkey has long complained about Washington’s alliance with Kurdish forces in northern Syria who have been integral in fighting against Islamic State. The Turks view them as a security threat and want them removed from the area close to the frontier. The YPG, already weakened after the US got it to remove its defensive positions along the Syrian border, will be in search of an ally to replace the US in order to support its logistical needs. There are fears that with Kurdish forces now having to face an attack by Turkey without American help, ISIS could remerge.
Brett McGurk, the former US special envoy to the global coalition to defeat ISIS, tweeted after the US announcement that Turkey cannot and does not want to deal with tens of thousands of people detained in camps in Syria, where people are at risk of radicalization, something that would lead to a resurgent ISIS.
“Believing otherwise is a reckless gamble with our national security,” McGurk wrote.
Nicholas Danforth, a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Turkey, told The Media Line that the most likely result of the announcement is that the Kurdish forces will cut a deal with Syria's Bashar al-Assad and his ally, Russia. This means, he said, that Kurdish forces will give up some autonomy to Assad, and territory to Turkey.
A statement from the White House after President Donald Trump spoke with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday night revealed that Turkey “will soon be moving forward.”
Ankara sees the Kurdish YPG militia in Syria as connected to the PKK, a Turkey-based Kurdish militia it has declared a terrorist organization. Both Washington and the European Union have also classified the PKK as a terrorist group.
Turkey has long complained about Washington’s alliance with Kurdish forces in northern Syria who have been integral in fighting against Islamic State. The Turks view them as a security threat and want them removed from the area close to the frontier. The YPG, already weakened after the US got it to remove its defensive positions along the Syrian border, will be in search of an ally to replace the US in order to support its logistical needs. There are fears that with Kurdish forces now having to face an attack by Turkey without American help, ISIS could remerge.
Brett McGurk, the former US special envoy to the global coalition to defeat ISIS, tweeted after the US announcement that Turkey cannot and does not want to deal with tens of thousands of people detained in camps in Syria, where people are at risk of radicalization, something that would lead to a resurgent ISIS.
“Believing otherwise is a reckless gamble with our national security,” McGurk wrote.
Nicholas Danforth, a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Turkey, told The Media Line that the most likely result of the announcement is that the Kurdish forces will cut a deal with Syria's Bashar al-Assad and his ally, Russia. This means, he said, that Kurdish forces will give up some autonomy to Assad, and territory to Turkey.
The White House statement added that the US would not support the Turkish operation and its forces would “no longer be in the immediate area.”
The Reuters news agency cited a US official who said the initial withdrawal would be limited to an area close to the Turkish border.
“Russia and Iran will be excited to see the United States leave. They will be less excited about seeing Turkey come in,” Danforth stated.
Muzaffer Senel, an assistant professor of political science and international relations at Istanbul’s Şehir University, agreed that Kurdish forces would try to find a new alliance by going to Moscow and Tehran following a withdrawal of the US and an incursion by Turkey.
“The policy shift of Washington will most probably be welcomed by Russia and Iran,” Senel told The Media Line. “It’s a chance for them to take all of Syria under their control.”
Analysts state that Ankara’s most pressing fear is further attempts at self-rule for Kurdish groups within Turkey if Kurdish groups are allowed to develop an independent state within Syria.
“[It’s] a historical fear of disintegration… still very much alive in the minds of Turkish policy-makers,” Senel stated.
Danforth added that Assad, keen on regaining control over all of Syria, will likely put greater pressure on Turkey if it gains ground in the country. This could mean more Russian-backed attacks on northwestern Syria, including in Idlib province, where millions of displaced Syrians live and Turkey maintains observation posts.
A Turkish report of the Trump-Erdogan phone call issued before the White House released its statement said a safe zone was needed for “neutralizing the threat stemming from PKK-YPG terrorists.”
The report also stated that Turkey “will take all necessary precautions” to fight terrorism and that Erdogan “shared with President Trump his frustration over the US military and security bureaucracy’s failure to implement the agreement between their two nations.”
In August, Ankara and Washington came to a limited agreement over the establishment of a safe zone in northeastern Syria, but Turkey began to complain that the US was stalling over its implementation and threatened to go into Syria on its own.
Erdogan’s spokesperson, Ibrahim Kalin, tweeted on Monday that the safe zone would enable Syrians to return home.
A major defeat for Erdogan’s party in a June election for mayor of Istanbul was partly blamed on residents’ resentment toward the 3.6 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey.
The report on the phone conversation also stated that Turkey would be responsible for captured ISIS fighters that Kurdish forces in Syria are currently holding. Kalin tweeted that Turkey would not allow ISIS “to return in any shape or form.”
Senel, the Şehir University assistant professor, stated that Turkey would face major obstacles in unilaterally setting up a safe zone and dealing with ISIS fighters. The obstacles would include the financial costs, as Turkey is currently mired in an economic crisis.
“It will be difficult times for Turkey,” he said.
Danforth stated that Turkey would need to take steps to deal with captured ISIS fighters, although no one knows what those would need to be.
“For the United States, ISIS was the number one priority. For Turkey, ISIS is clearly not the number one priority,” he told The Media Line. “Inevitably, that’s going to be reflected in how consciously Turkey… carries out whatever responsibilities it undertakes for dealing with ISIS fighters in the region.”
For more stories go to themedialine.org
2a) With Friends Like the U.S.
The Kurds helped to defeat ISIS. Trump leaves them to Erdogan.
That’s the risk of Mr. Trump’s abrupt decision late Sunday to abandon northern Syria to Turkey. Washington and Ankara had been negotiating to create a buffer zone to avoid a conflict there, but on Sunday the White House announced that American forces will cede the area to Turkish troops. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is now free to wage war on Syria’s Kurds, who were America’s most important allies against ISIS.
Mr. Erdogan says the U.S.-armed Kurdish fighters in Syria, known as the YPG, have ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a domestic Kurdish insurgency within Turkey. On that exaggerated claim he justifies an exercise that could amount to ethnic cleansing. Mr. Erdogan last month proposed a “safe zone” extending some 20 miles into Syria from the Turkish border, where he would resettle millions of Syrian refugees. This could require the forcible resettlement, or worse, of Kurds already living in the area.
Mr. Erdogan seems to have believed that the U.S. would help in this exercise. But after a phone call with the Turkish strongman, Mr. Trump made clear that Turkey is on its own. That also means so are the Kurds, and the U.S. withdrew its troops from two border posts. A Kurdish spokesman tweeted, “We are not expecting the US to protect NE #Syria. But people here are owed an explanation.”
This looks like a betrayal of the YPG, which lost 11,000 soldiers fighting against ISIS. America armed the Kurds in that fight, and they trusted the U.S. when they were asked to dismantle defensive positions near the Turkish border as part of the buffer-zone negotiations with Ankara. The Kurds are less likely to aid an insurgency in Turkey if they’re allowed to govern themselves in a safe area in Syria policed by the U.S. and Turkey.
Mr. Trump compounded the injury with insult when he tweeted Monday morning that the “Kurds fought with us, but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so.” For Mr. Trump, foreign policy is always a transaction, never a matter of principle.
The Kurds also have taken on the role of jailer of last resort for the thousands of captured ISIS fighters no one else wants to house. It’s not clear who, if anyone, will assume that responsibility now that the U.S. is withdrawing.
The White House says Mr. Erdogan is now responsible for all ISIS fighters in the region, but he can’t be trusted given his record of using refugees as bargaining chips with Western Europe. Released European ISIS recruits could disperse to form cells in the region or find their way back to Europe. There’s also the practical question of how to transfer control of prison camps from the Kurds to Turkish troops waging war against them.
Under heavy criticism from even friends in Congress, Mr. Trump tweeted later on Monday that he’d “totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey” if Mr. Erdogan does anything “off limits.” Administration sources say this is a warning to Mr. Erdogan not to massacre the Kurds or free ISIS prisoners, at the risk of U.S. economic sanctions.
But Mr. Erdogan also knows Mr. Trump badly wants out of the Middle East and might call the American’s bluff. “It is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars,” Mr. Trump tweeted Monday. Mr. Erdogan also could choose to slowly strangle the Kurds, figuring that won’t be enough to trigger Mr. Trump’s sanctions on a NATO ally. Washington can at least deny Turkish jet fighters airspace over Kurdish areas, which would raise the costs for Mr. Erdogan of a full-scale invasion.
Like Barack Obama, Mr. Trump thinks he can wash his hands of Syria at little cost. But the resulting vacuum allowed ISIS to grow, Russia to intervene, and now Iran to establish its proxies on Israel’s border. Within three years U.S. troops were back on the ground.
Mr. Obama left Mr. Trump with a bad Syria hand, but the President risks making the same mistake. Economic sanctions won’t deflect White House blame for a Kurdish bloodbath. And if ISIS revives, the U.S. will have to go back in—this time without Kurdish allies on the ground. Mr. Trump may want to leave the Middle East, but chaos there will follow him home.
2b) George Friedman’s Thoughts: War and a New Geopolitical Age
It is time to end this series of philosophical ruminations and turn instead to something that is at the center of geopolitics: war. The roots of my philosophical mumblings and my thoughts on war are from two of my books. The first is from my early academic work, “The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School.” The second, called “The Future of War,” came later. This is the book of which I am proudest. It is also the book that sold the fewest copies; its great moment came when the Brazilian war college adopted it as a text. I am proudest of this work because of the forecast. I wrote it in the early 1990s but envisaged a future of war that has since emerged – war waged by unmanned aircraft and hypersonic missiles and in outer space. So, I turn now to talk about the book on war in the hope that I can link the nature of enchantment to infantrymen wearing armored and powered suits.
Let me begin at the beginning. The introduction of firearms created a new culture of weapons – what I call ballistic weapons. Once fired, the round goes where the initial explosion of energy drives it, with nothing to control it but gravity and the elements, and since it is fired through hand-eye coordination, the probability of it hitting the target is low. The solution to this problem in war was to dramatically increase the number of weapons fired, compensating for inaccuracy with many rounds from many guns, thereby saturating the horizon and increasing the probability of killing the enemy. All weapons until around 1965 were ballistic; rifles, tanks, howitzers and the like grew into a vast enterprise, centered on the industrial plant that produced them.
The solution to this, in World War II, was to mass bombers, saturating a city with bombs to destroy a single factory. Bombing was so inaccurate that the probability of any bomb load hitting a factory was near zero. This kind of war required many ballistic weapons, many soldiers to use the weapons, many factories to produce them, and many bombers to destroy the factories. Nuclear weapons grew out of this logic. Massed bombers dropping ballistic weapons were inefficient. One ballistic missile with a nuclear weapon could increase the probability of destroying a factory to near certain. The inaccuracy of pre-nuclear weapons had created total war, and the intercontinental ballistic missile solved the problem of inaccuracy by increasing the size of the explosion.
Between 1967 and 1973 three minor events signaled the end of the ballistic era. In 1967, a Soviet team fired Styx missiles at the Israeli destroyer INS Eilat, sinking it. In 1972, American aircraft used laser-guided bombs to destroy the Thanh Hoa bridge in Vietnam, which had survived conventional air attacks since 1965. In 1973, a brigade of Israeli tanks driving south, parallel to the Suez Canal, was obliterated by a hail of rockets fired by Egyptian special forces.
The three events were linked. In each case, the attackers used projectiles whose trajectory could be changed after firing. The Styx missiles used in the attack on the Eilat were guided internally by a radar seeker that homed in on the ship, maneuvering as needed. The Thanh Hoa bridge was attacked by a small number of aircraft firing Bullpup missiles, which the air crew could guide to the target using a television system that fixed on the bridge. The Israeli tanks were destroyed by AT-3 Sagger missiles (note that these are NATO, not Russian, designation). The missile trailed a wire back to a control system that allowed the shooter to guide the missile to the target. In all cases the probability of any missile hitting the target was about 50 percent, vastly higher than with ballistic weapons.
This changed the mathematics of war. It’s said that in World War I it took 10,000 rounds to kill one man. I don’t know how they counted that but it was a lot. The number of projectiles that had to be fired to hit a ship, a bridge or a tank plummeted to one or two. This meant that traditional weapons – tanks, aircraft and ships – were not likely to survive on the battlefield in a war of equals, at least not without fiendishly expensive and doubtful defenses. The cost of defending yourself from a weapon soared while the cost of attacking plunged.
During Desert Storm, an American cruise missile could be fired from a ship off shore at a building on land and hit the second window in, on the third floor. This is not a theoretical example, and it exemplifies how the calculation of war had changed. Rather than firing large numbers of inaccurate weapons firing, committing massive collateral damage, combatants could fire a much smaller number of weapons to destroy a target without having to saturate the surrounding areas. These precision-guided munitions, as they were called, shifted the structure of warfare.
But precision-guided munitions have one critical requirement: intelligence. You can hit a window on a building in Baghdad if you want to, but you have to know which window you want to hit; in some cases, as with the Tomahawk, which is guided by pictures of the terrain and target, you needed to get the pictures of the target first. The challenge of firing non-ballistic weapons at a target a thousand miles away was partly a technical problem but mostly an intelligence problem
Collecting the intelligence with the requisite level of detail was not easy. Figuring out where a specific individual was in Baghdad, for example, required a combination of humans on the ground, technology to track a huge number of phone calls, and aerial surveillance, which might spook the target. Intelligence was always at the heart of war, but now it had become the enabler of tactical combat. Fighting the Iraqis in 1991 was relatively easy. But fighting a more sophisticated enemy required more sophisticated technology.
The United States had the National Security Agency for electronic intelligence, the National Reconnaissance Office for satellite imagery and the Central Intelligence Agency for human intelligence. But the evolution of warfare put a heavy burden on them. The traditional forms of intelligence did not always provide the data needed to launch a precision-guided missile. There were ships for intercepting data and submarines for tapping into underwater lines, but the speed of tactical warfare with PGMs outstripped their capabilities.
The emergence of an alternative to ballistic warfare demanded a different source of intelligence. As with Desert Storm, no one knew they were going to war until after it began. Building intelligence capabilities when war is a surprise means that you have to develop intelligence on a global scale with a high degree of geographic specificity on call. And it had to combine imagery, electronic surveillance and the ability to move data from sensor to shooter.
The microchip was invented for ICBMs and fighter planes and has become the center of new technology. Satellites that had looked for static missile launchers now need to be far more flexible and dynamic. Computers’ data flows – the internet – were essential to tell the launcher where to fire. Technologies that were emerging were force-grown by the Department of Defense, much like the microchip. Space-based sensors had to take digital photos long before Apple put that technology into the phone. And space became far more important for electronic and visual capabilities.
The emergence of precision-guided munitions drove war’s center of gravity into space. Other causes came later, but space became indispensable for managing PGMs, and any serious war has to begin there. If the U.S. and China ever go to war, the Chinese will need to fire PGMs at American ships, and therefore the Americans must blind them before they can do that by destroying China’s space-based system.
Just as the ballistic era required a vast support network to function, the PGM era needs a far smaller but much more sophisticated system to sustain it. Those systems do much more than define targets for PGM, but that is a core mission.
I can’t overemphasize the importance of the 1967-73 incidents. They opened not only a new age in war but also required a new technological platform. But the most important change was the requirement that wars begin in space, in space-based Pearl Harbors. And I suppose that is enough of a link to enchantment.
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3) Security Establishment Fears Iran
Will Directly Attack Israel Following Strike on
Saudi Arabia Oil Facilities
Will Directly Attack Israel Following Strike on
Saudi Arabia Oil Facilities
The Israeli security establishment is concerned that Iran may seek to strike the Jewish state in the same manner as it did a Saudi Arabian oil facility last month, local media reported on Sunday.
The attack on the Abqaiq facility has been blamed directly on Iran and is believed to have been carried out using cruise missiles and drones launched from Iranian territory. Iran has denied responsibility.get the best of the algemeiner straight to your inbox! sign up!
To discuss the issue, Israel’s security cabinet convened over the weekend for the first time since the September 17 elections. On the agenda was the growing threat of a direct conflict with Iran, Hebrew news website Mako reported.
Israeli officials and politicians have been more vocal in recent weeks regarding a serious and escalating security threat that has thus far gone unnamed.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the inauguration of the new Knesset last week, said, “We are facing a huge security challenge that has been growing from week to week, in the last two months and especially in recent weeks.”
“It’s not spin or a whim, anyone who knows the details knows how true they are,” Netanyahu added.
Netanyahu said Iran’s “boldness and impudence are growing” and directly referenced the attack on the Saudi oil facility.
He reminded the assembled MKs that Iran has pledged to destroy Israel and that the Jewish state must handle this threat “with the utmost seriousness.”
President Reuven Rivlin, on the same occasion, referred to a security threat “that we have not known for many years.”
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4)
Ukraine Smoke and Mirrors
There’s no substance behind the accusation Democrats claim is impeachable.
Democrats and the media for three years used a fog of facts and speculation to lull America into forgetting there was never a shred of evidence of Trump-Russia collusion. They flooded the zone with another flurry of scattershot claims in their campaign against Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Republicans might bear these tactics in mind as they confront the left’s new impeachment push.
In the two weeks since the White House released the transcript of President Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the debate has descended into the weeds of process and people. This is unsurprising given House Democrats’ decision to keep hidden the central doings of their impeachment inquiry, and the media’s need to fill a void.
The press has responded by seeking to weave dozens of obscure Ukrainian and U.S. names into a crazy quilt of corruption. Readers have no time to keep track of all the Vlads, envoys and meetings in Spain, and that’s the point. The goal is to cover the Trump administration in ugly.
Republicans for their part are miffed at the highly irregular manner in which all this is unfolding. So they’re highlighting the anonymous whistleblower, his motives and his methods. They’ve pointed out the whistleblower’s admission that his information was secondhand. They’re drilling into whether he was biased on behalf of a current Democratic presidential candidate. They are (correctly) pointing out that the whistleblower has no legal right to anonymity.
Motive matters, but what matters more is the accuracy of the complaint itself. The real news of the past few weeks has been the steady accumulation of evidence that its central claim is totally wrong.
Which shouldn’t be surprising, given how many facts the complaint mangled about the call. It alleged, for instance, that Mr. Trump asked Ukraine to “locate and turn over servers.” He didn’t. It claims Mr. Trump “praised” a prosecutor named Yuriy Lutsenko and suggested the Ukrainian president “keep him in his position.” That didn’t happen either. There’s more, and when the whistleblower can’t get the facts of the call right, it’s no surprise he got his conclusion wrong too.
There is simply no evidence of what House Democrats have made the central claim of their impeachment inquiry: that Mr. Trump engaged in a “quid pro quo” by withholding aid to Ukraine unless it “opened an investigation” into former Vice President Joe Biden.
We now have the transcript of the call, in which Mr. Trump never threatened to withhold aid as a condition of an investigation. He doesn’t even mention money. The press is trying to suggest the threat was “implicit”—which means he didn’t say it.
There’s also the belated and devastating fact that the Ukrainians say they had no knowledge the aid was being withheld until a month after the call. How can you demand a quo when the target is unaware of the quid? Further, the aid was released—despite no “investigation” or “dirt” from Ukraine. And Mr. Zelensky has twice said there was no “pressure” or “blackmail” from the U.S. with regard to an investigation.
We also now have the opening statement of Kurt Volker, the former special representative to Ukraine, from his testimony last week to the House Intelligence Committee. “As you will see from the extensive text messages I am providing,” Mr. Volker said, “Vice President Biden was never a topic of discussion” during negotiations with Kyiv. He also testified he did not discuss the withholding of aid with his Ukrainian counterparts until “late August.” This is second confirmation of the Ukrainians’ statement that they had no clue during the July phone call there was any risk to aid.
Then there are the text messages. Democrats have highlighted several in which a State Department diplomat frets that aid is being withheld for political reasons. They neglect to point out that the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, shut down that claim in his own text: “You are incorrect. . . . The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo’s of any kind.”
Republicans will be tempted to keep jumping down the rabbit holes the media and the left dig for them. They’d be better off uniformly noting that the central players in this episode, and the written record, have already refuted the complaint, and that anything further is theater, no different from the Russia-collusion hype. The left is again counting on the public getting lost in a swirl of innuendo. But facts matter, especially when it comes to impeachment.
4a) Sen. Cotton Calls Intel Community Watchdog ‘Evasive,’ ‘Insolent’ and ‘Obstructive’ in
Scathing Letter Debra Heine |
Posted By RUTHFULLY YOURS
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) fired off a scathing letter to the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) Wednesday, calling his recent testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee “insolent and obstructive.”
ICIG Michael Atkinson is under fire for secretly altering intelligence community whistleblower complaint forms in September and backdating those changes to August when the anti-Trump “whistleblower” complaint was filed.
Under the new rules, whistleblowers are no longer required to provide first-hand information to support allegations of wrongdoing.
The ICIG admitted to lawmakers that the whistleblower forms and rules were changed in September, even though the new forms and guidance state that the changes were made in August. When asked to explain why the changes were backdated to August, Atkinson reportedly had no answer.
“Your disappointing testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on September 26 was evasive to the point of being insolent and obstructive,” Cotton, a Republican member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), wrote.
Cotton added that Atkinson refused to disclose to committee members why Atkinson determined the anti-Trump complainant had a partisan political bias against Trump.
“Despite repeated questions, you refused to explain what you meant in your written report by ‘indicia of an arguable political bias on the part of a rival political candidate,’” Cotton wrote. “This information is, of course, unclassified and we were meeting in a closed setting. Yet you moralized about how you were duty bound not to share even a hint of this political bias with us.”
“But now I see media reports that you revealed to the House Intelligence Committee not only that the complainant is a registered Democrat, but also that he has a professional relationship with a Democratic presidential campaign,” Cotton continued. “I’m dissatisfied, to put it mildly, with your refusal to answer my questions, while more fully briefing the three-ring circus that the House Intelligence Committee has become.”
As American Greatness reported on Tuesday, Atkinson allegedly told the House Intelligence Committee that the anti-Trump complainant is a registered Democrat and has a significant tie to one of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.
In his letter, Cotton went to ask Atkinson to reveal the exact nature of the”whistleblower’s” political bias against the president, and whether he had coordinated messaging with CNN prior to his testimony.
Ahead of Atkinson’s testimony in the House, CNN’s Jake Tapper falsely asserted, citing a “source familiar with the investigation prompted by the whistleblower,” that the complainant’s voter registration was the sole evidence of the complainant’s political bias.
“Did you or anyone subject to your control or influence share with CNN that the ‘arguable political bias’ was merely that the complainant is a registered Democrat?” Cotton asked. He also directed Atkinson to disclose the anti-Trump Democratic presidential candidate with whom the complainant had a professional relationship.
“This information is also simple, unclassified, and personally known to you,” Cotton wrote. “Therefore please reply in writing no later than 5:00 p.m. on Friday, October 11.”
“I look forward to your answers, even two weeks late,” Cotton concluded.
In a statement on Wednesday, lawyers for the anti-Trump complainant rejected claims that their client is politically biased.
The lawyers state that their client has “never worked for or advised a political candidate, campaign or party.” But of course, conservative media reports didn’t make that claim.
According to the Washington Examiner’s Byron York, Atkinson told lawmakers last Friday that the whistleblower once had a significant tie to one of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. That’s not the same thing as working for a “candidate, campaign or party.”
The whistleblower is represented by deep state lawyers Andrew P. Bakaj, a former CIA officer, and Mark S. Zaid, a prominent national security lawyer in Washington.
Bakaj is an anti-Trump partisan who once did counseling work on Capitol Hill for Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, and Zaid is a frequent Trump critic on Twitter who has a history of sleazy deep state shenanigans.
Both anti-Trump lawyers run a group that offers financial aid to deep state officials who leak about the president, according to the Washington Examiner.
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5) MarketWatch
How to Turn a Stalemate in the U.S.-China Trade War into a Victory
U.S. Must Lead Nations that Want Free Trade or See China Rule the World
By Peter Morici
The thaw in trade tensions with China is deceptive. Recent talks mostly focus on agriculture and China is unlikely to sign any deal that does not scale back U.S. tariffs. That could take us back to square one - major U.S. complaints unresolved and China free to pursue its ambitions for wider geopolitical influence.
Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump have all long sought fundamental reforms in China's mercantilist system but Beijing has been unyielding. This includes high import barriers and subsidies to develop domestic production, forced technology transfers from foreign companies seeking access to Chinese markets, and even state-sponsored industrial espionage.
China will liberalize only at a pace that suits its purposes.
Broken promises
It may agree to purchase more U.S. farm and energy products but promises to better honor intellectual property rights, for example, have been broken in the past. Consequently, U.S. lead negotiator Ambassador Robert Lighthizer wants tariffs kept in place until he sees tangible compliance with any agreement that is signed.
All that is a recipe for stalemate or a hollow deal - more U.S. farm and perhaps energy sales in China in exchange for removing Trump's tariffs.
Armed with an undervalued currency, China could continue to amass dollars through a bilateral trade surplus and use those to aid authoritarian governments in places like the Philippines and Venezuela, enhance its influence through its Belt and Road initiative - for example, China is taking over a Cambodian naval base originally partially financed by the United States - and fracture European unity - Rome and Beijing have signed a memorandum of understanding to finance $2.8 in investment projects.
Tariffs on China won't crack all this but are first steps for encouraging, not commanding, Western multinational corporations to relocate supply chains outside of China - mostly to locations in South East Asia that potentially offer better access to U.S. and European exports.
Cooperation with European allies
Lasting success will require cooperation from our European allies who are similarly threatened by Chinese ambitions but have great allegiance to the World Trade Organization, other multilateral institutions, and established arrangements in Europe.
Bullying them with threats of tariffs, cognitive dissonance on climate change, perhaps pulling them into a war with Iran, and advocating re-engaging Russia while it continues mischief in the Ukraine and the Middle East are foolish.
Rather our message should be simple, clear and consistent.
Kick China out of WTO
Make the case that admitting China to the WTO was a mistake. The international body is a club of democratic, market economies. Beijing has no intention of becoming either, so bump it out.
By ignoring the WTO, Trump risks, as the Washington-based Peterson Institute advocates, China and the EU teaming up to reform the body. That outcome would likely favor a statist global regime rather than free markets.
To these ends, the United States should limit purchases from China to the value of our sales there by auctioning import licenses equal to the value of our exports. American businesses say some Chinese products are essential to their supply chains but most are not, and an auction system would allocate the right to import to those firms who place the highest premium on Chinese imports.
Limiting trade with China to the essentials would curtail the funds available for its Belt and Road initiative and threatening projection of military power.
Multinational efforts
As carrots to European and Asian nations, disavow new tariff threats, re-energize efforts to accomplish a free-trade agreement with the European Union, complete the recently announced trade deal with Japan, and petition to re-enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership - a free-trade club that includes our NAFTA partners, Japan. and several other major trading nations in Southeast Asia.
During the transition in 2018, the trade team persuaded President Trump that bilateral deals should take precedence over multilateral initiatives. That only works if China is isolationist, which it is not.
The EU-China bilateral investment agreement will come into force in 2020 and Beijing is negotiating a regional comprehensive economic partnership with 15 Asian and Pacific Nations. Through these and its Belt and Road initiative, China is diversifying and expanding its export markets away from the United States.
We either re-engage with nations that have an interest in open trade, or China will lead them down a different path. MAGA can't be defined in terms of America's way or the highway-the world simply is too big for even Trump to conquer.
Peter Morici is an economist and business professor at the University of Maryland, and a national columnist.
Peter Morici
Professor
Robert H. Smith School of Business
University of Maryland
New Cell: 703 350 9701
Twitter: @pmorici1
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