++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Garland apparently knows how to play the D.C dodge ball game. He defends nominee he did not really know but just met.
Garland Defends Controversial DOJ Nominees
After an exchange with Merrick Garland during his confirmation
hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT)
said he was “disappointed” the judge would not “condemn” controversial DOJ
nominees Vanita
Gupta and Kristen Clarke.
Regarding Gupta, who has been nominated to be Associate Attorney
General, Lee framed his line of questioning based on Gupta’s past comments. At
the end, all Garland could say was that he believed Gupta to be "a person
of great integrity and a person who is dedicated to the mission of the
department and particularly equal justice under law." He acknowledged,
however, that he did not know Gupta before the nomination.
Lee:
I’m going to start with some questions that can be yes or no; if they require
more than that you can say yes with this or that minor caveat but I’d prefer a
yes or no if you can provide one of these. Do you believe individuals who
advocate for the rights of unborn human beings are rendered unfit for public
office by virtue of having engaged in such advocacy?”
Garland:
No.
Lee:
Do you believe that efforts to purge voter rolls of individuals who have either
died or have left the state in question or to require voter identification are
racially discriminatory and an assault on voting rights?
Garland:
This one is one I can’t answer yes or no because you’re asking about
motivations of individuals, some of whom may have discriminatory purpose and
some of whom have no discriminatory purpose.
Lee:
Okay. Okay, I think that answers my question there because I guess what I’m
asking is does an individual without knowing more than that, is there anything
about those comments or support for those positions that in and of themselves
would make that person a racist or an assault on voting rights?
Garland:
Again, there’s nothing about the comment itself but there’s such a thing as
circumstantial evidence obviously and if there’s enormously disparate impact of
things that somebody continues to propose, it’s not unreasonable to draw
conclusions from that. The mere fact of the statement, no.
Lee:
Do you believe Republicans in the United States, and by Republicans I mean as a
whole, are determined to leave our communities to the mercy of people and
institutions driven by hate, bigotry and fear of any threat to the status quo.
Garland:
I don’t make generalizations about members of political parties; I would never
do that.
Lee:
I appreciate that and wouldn’t expect otherwise. The reason I raise these ones
is these are questions that have been drawn from comments made by Vanita Gupta,
who’s been nominated to be the associate attorney general, has advocated for
each of these positions.
Garland:
Well, Senator, I know Vanita Gupta now quite well; I didn’t know her before,
but since the nomination, I’ve gotten a chance to talk with her and speak with
her. I have to tell you, I regard her as a person of great integrity and a
person who is dedicated to the mission of the department and particularly equal
justice under law.
Lee: I’m not asking you to weigh in on her as a person; I’m just
talking about the comments.
Regarding Kristen Clarke, who's been nominated to run the DOJ's
Civil Rights Division, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson warned about her radical
views on race, which even Harvard found “deranged and dangerous.”
Garland's response to Lee was not much better, however.
Lee:
...Would an individual’s past statements, statements in the past, as an adult,
declaring that one racial group is superior to another, would statements like
that be relevant to an evaluation of whether such a person should be put in
charge of running the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division?
Garland:
Well, Senator, I read in the last few days these allegations about Kristen
Clarke, who I’ve also gotten to know, who I also trust, who I believe is a
person of integrity, whose views of the Civil Rights division I have
discussed with her, and they are in line with my own. I have every reason to
want her; she is an experienced former line prosecutor of hate crimes and we
need somebody like that to be running the —
Lee:
I’m asking about the statement; I’m not asking about her as a person; I’m
asking about the statement. In the abstract, would someone who has made that
comment, would that comment itself be relevant to the question whether that
person, having made that statement, should be put in charge of running the
Civil Rights division?
Garland:
All I can tell you is I’ve had many conversations with her about her views
about the Civil Rights division and what kind of matter she would investigate
Lee:
What about anti-Semitic comments, would those be relevant to someone wanting to
run the Civil Rights division?
Garland;
You know my views about anti-Semitism; no one needs to question those.
Lee:
I’m not questioning your—
Garland:
I know you’re not, but I want you to know I’m a pretty good judge of what an
anti-Semite is, and I do not believe that she is an anti-Semite and I do not
believe she is discriminatory in any sense.
Lee:
Tell me this: Judge, you are a man of integrity and one who honors and respects
the laws. What assurances can you give us, as one who has been nominated to
serve as the Attorney General of the United States, that you, as confirmed as
Attorney General of the United States, what assurances can you give Americans
who are Republican, who are pro-life, who are religious people who are members
of certain minority groups, in short, half, or more than half of the country,
telling them that the U.S. Department of Justice, if you’re confirmed, will
protect them if Department of Justice leaders have condoned radical positions
like those ones that I’ve described?
Garland: I’ll say it again: I don’t believe that either Vanita
or Kristen condone those positions and I have complete faith in them, but we
are a leadership team, along with Alisa Monaco that will run the Department,
and the final decision is mine. The buck stops with me, as Harry Truman said, I
will assure the people you’re talking about I am a strong believer in religious
liberty and there will not be any discrimination under my watch.
"I was disappointed that Judge Garland declined to condemn
dangerous, radical positions previously taken by fellow DOJ nominees, Vanita
Gupta and Kristen Clarke," Lee said on Twitter, sharing the
exchange.
Meanwhile:
SCOTUS dumps on Trump:
++++++++++++++++++++
Don Jr. may prove to be a more digestible version of his father and Rep. Kinzinger gets slapped down by family members:
Biden squanders leverage
Trump stockpiled on Iran in pursuit of a defective nuclear deal
The administration’s strategy for getting Iran to play ball clearly involves making upfront concessions to Tehran for nothing in return.
By Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior fellow at FDD
“We’re not going to prejudge.”
State Department spokesperson Ned Price deployed this classic Washington
euphemism last week to avoid responding to a question over how
much culpability Iran and its Shiite militias bear for recent rocket attacks against a U.S. military
base in northern Iraq. The strikes killed one contractor and wounded several
other service persons, including Americans.
Twice
since then, rockets have been fired at positions affiliated with the
U.S. presence in Iraq: a military base on Saturday and at the area around the
U.S. Embassy complex in Baghdad on Monday. These strikes are not new. Since May
2019, Iran-backed militias have been behind at least 83 such strikes on
U.S. positions, a damning pattern consistent with almost two decades of
Iran-linked attacks against the U.S. in Iraq.
The administration’s
refusal to directly call out this time-tested method of Iranian escalation also
follows its public unwillingness to blame Hezbollah — Iran’s most deadly proxy
group — when condemning the assassination of
Lokman Slim, a prominent anti-Hezbollah activist, in an attack in Lebanon this
month.
Why is the Biden
administration not connecting the dots between the Islamic Republic of Iran and
its proxies — and not doing more to publicly deter this behavior? Is it simply
that the new administration is still finding its feet after just one month in
office?
Possibly. But there is
a better explanation.
President Joe Biden is
actively signaling a change in approach
from his predecessor. He wants to
find a way back into the nuclear deal aimed at curbing Iran’s
nuclear program that his former boss, Barack Obama, concluded in
2015 only to have Donald Trump abandon in
2018.
The Biden
administration’s strategy for getting Iran to play ball clearly involves making
upfront concessions to Tehran, including de-linking the
nuclear and regional threats it poses. In contrast, Trump’s “maximum
pressure” policy was characterized by forthright condemnations
and more direct
responses to Iran-backed aggression. Team Trump also believed
that sanctions relief should occur only in exchange for a wholesale
change in behavior by the Islamic Republic that included
nullifying its regional threats.
Biden’s approach draws
directly from Obama’s playbook: turning a blind eye to regional aggression and
offering economic relief to signal support for engagement to get back to the
negotiating table. And it’s unfortunate, because the result is sure to be the
same as before as well: an overly deferential and defective deal that offers
Iran patient pathways to nuclear weapons because its
restrictions eventually sunset, while handcuffing Washington from
using its most powerful economic punishments and doing nothing to stop the
improvement of the clerical regime’s warfighting abilities or that of its
proxies.
It’s not just the
willingness to overlook Iran’s role in recent attacks in the region that makes
this clear. It’s that the Biden administration has done this while going out of
its way to tempt Tehran to talk through a policy of unilateral concessions
while continuing
to declare American interest in renewed nuclear negotiations.
Absent any
reciprocity, the Biden administration reversed the
Trump administration’s restoration of U.N. penalties on Iran’s military-related
procurement and proliferation activity. Moscow and Beijing will now be able to arm Tehran
free of international censure and the Islamic Republic’s weapons proliferation
activities will face
fewer impediments. Also at the U.N., the State Department is easing travel
restrictions on Iranian diplomats in New York. The regime in Iran has used its
diplomatic personnel and facilities in the past to support terrorism.
Furthermore, the
administration signaled that it doesn’t oppose a
$5 billion International
Monetary Fund loan to Iran. While ostensibly for Covid-19
relief, this windfall will fill the regime’s coffers with little accountability
at a time when it’s down
to less than $10 billion in foreign exchange reserves. The more
cash Iran has on hand means the more it can fund its regional proxies and
bolster its missile, military and nuclear programs, regardless of what the IMF
money is designated for.
Price
did speak
of “consequences”
for the recent rocket attack, and to be fair, Washington so far has maintained
the bulk of the penalties Trump imposed on Iran. But Secretary of State Antony
Blinken’s press release on the
attack contained zero mentions of Iran, or any other indication of what
type of concrete action would be taken.
Similarly, in Yemen,
where Houthi
rebels continue to fire drones and
missiles at Saudi civilian targets,
a recent State Department press release urging the
rebels to end their assaults failed to mention Iran despite it providing the
rebels with weapons and
training. The Biden team even decided to remove the
group from the State Department’s list of
foreign terrorist organizations — another missed opportunity for demanding
reciprocity.
Unfortunately, we’ve
seen this movie before. As the Obama administration courted Tehran for nuclear
talks from 2012 to 2015, it restricted its counterterrorism and
counternarcotics policies toward the regime’s proxies like Hezbollah. As
Politico exposed in
2017, U.S. efforts against Hezbollah lessened as the importance of getting a
nuclear deal with Iran grew.
The desire to
achieve and maintain the Iran nuclear deal also had other negative regional
effects. Some of those in the Obama administration arguing for a more robust Syria
policy in support of protestors and against the atrocities of
President Bashar al-Assad — Tehran’s man in Damascus — were overridden since
targeting his regime would have necessarily aggravated the Islamic Republic.
The Biden
administration’s eagerness for diplomacy will likely be read by Iran’s supreme
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as a vulnerability to exploit. And in response,
Tehran will do what it has done for decades: intensify its aggression and only
back down if presented with
no other alternative.
Iran is watching
Washington begin to dismantle maximum pressure in favor of “maximum
diplomacy.” Absent a willingness to add to or even maintain existing
sanctions, as well lacking broader efforts to tackle the clerical regime’s
regional threat network, such an approach is indeed possible to prejudge: It
will end in failure.
Mark
Dubowitz is the chief executive of the Washington, D.C.-based Foundation for
Defense of Democracies. He was sanctioned by Iran in 2019.
Behnam
Ben Taleblu is a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Foundation for
Defense of Democracies, where he focuses on Iranian political and security
issues.
And:
Biden is set to repeat Obama’s Mideast failures
Every now and then, America mislays one of its Mideast allies.
“Who lost Iran?” they asked in 1979, as the shah’s regime went sideways, the
answer being Jimmy Carter and the State Department. “Who lost Egypt?” they
asked in 2012, as the Muslim Brotherhood took power, the answer being Barack
Obama and the State Department.
“Who lost Israel?” will soon be added to this perplexed refrain.
The answer will be President Biden and the State Department.
But this time, America will be losing the region as a whole — to
its historic rival, Russia. Iranian mischief will wax again, and Washington’s
Arab and Israeli allies will move on without anyone losing much sleep over
what the White House thinks about anything. This is a deliberate strategic
choice, and it will lead to the collapse of American influence in western
Asia.
Team Biden appears bent on reviving the Iran deal at all costs.
The costs include completing the Democrats’ turn away from the Jewish
state and thoroughly alienating America’s Sunni-Arab clients. In reviving
the nuclear deal, moreover, Washington will repeat a failed experiment in the
hope of different results.
The Iranian regime won’t accept a tougher deal than the 2015
accord, and the Biden administration is Obama 3.0: The same team looks to
rehabilitate its reputation, not to secure the national interest. The
Obama-Bidenites will accept any humiliation from Tehran and call it a
diplomatic breakthrough.
The Obama-Biden Mideast template, the one favored by much of
Washington’s foreign-policy cognoscenti, involves abandoning America’s allies
and perversely empowering the Tehran regime,
by putting it on what Henry Kissinger called “a glide path to a nuclear
weapon.”
Former President Donald Trump rejected that template. He knew
bankruptcy when he saw it, and he told Americans what the rest of the world already
knows: Their experts are fools, their Mideast policies a catalogue of failure.
Trump dropped the Iran deal and chose containment. And he trashed
the “land for peace” paradigm between Israel and the Palestinians — and forged peace deals between
the Jewish state and four Arab states.
Blessedly, much of Trump’s legacy is locked in. Team Biden can’t
roll back the Abraham Accords or return the US Embassy to Tel Aviv. No one in
the region now imagines total Israeli withdrawal from the disputed territories
known as the West Bank.
The one area where Trump’s legacy isn’t locked in is the Iran
deal. Don’t believe new Secretary of State Antony Blinken when he says the
administration wants an expanded deal, or that the administration will consult
with America’s allies. Team Biden is a revival of the Obama administration, and
it inherits the ignorance and arrogance that led to Obama’s having his nose
rubbed in the desert sand by Ayatollah Khamenei.
The Biden team has already signaled it wants to reassess relations
with Saudi Arabia and taken Yemen’s Houthis off the terrorist list as a sop to
Iran. The prime minister of Israel has had to wait for his call from Biden.
The Bidenites might imagine they’re putting America’s needy,
gross allies in their place. But in reality, Team Biden is merely speeding up
the arrival of a post-American Middle East.
The Israelis have let it be known that they assassinated Iran’s nuclear planner
Mohsen Fakhrizadeh with no US involvement and
minimal notice to Washington. The Saudis are edging toward open relations
with Israel, as the anti-Tehran front hardens.
Russia has already replaced America as the principal outside power
in the region, and Netanyahu would probably prefer to deal with Vladimir Putin
that with Biden. Turkey is pushing into Syria and Iraq.
Meanwhile, Chinese investment pours in. If the United States loses
control of the Mideast, and the Persian Gulf in particular, it loses control
of the world’s most valuable waterway.
So the question isn’t so much “Who lost Israel?” as “Is the US
losing the entire Middle East?” And the answer has to be yes.
That prospect alarms American Jews and evangelical Christians, but
Israel will be fine without Washington. Its new friends need its tech and
military power, and its new patrons don’t share the left’s boutique fetish for
the Palestinians.
The United States, though, won’t be fine: It will be reduced to a
decaying, irrelevant power, capable only of pique and petty blocking moves —
and shut out of the 21st-century world.
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