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North Korea Ramped Up Cyberattacks While Talking Peace with Seoul

According to a Wall Street Journal report on Friday, North Korea significantly escalated the pace of its cyberattacks against South Korea in April, even as dictator Kim Jong-un held a historic summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and planned for a summit meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump.

The WSJ lists a broad range of targets for North Korea’s hacker onslaught:

The South Korean government is reviewing the cyberattacks, which started in the lead-up to the inter-Korean summit in April and continued through at least Wednesday, the people said. Early indications, based on the malware and targets, strongly suggest North Korea was the culprit, the people said.

The groups targeted include South Korean financial companies and organizations that focus on North Korea, the people said, with hackers seeking sensitive information. As with nearly all cyberbreaches, it is unclear how many computers were infected or what precisely was stolen.

Among the organizations affected were the Sejong Institute, an independent think tank, and the South-North Sharing Campaign, a left-leaning group that sends aid to North Korea.

The Wall Street Journal notes that North Korea has relied on its hackers to ease the pain of sanctions by raiding cryptocurrency exchanges and banks. The current wave of cyberattacks could be a last-ditch effort to exploit certain vulnerabilities in Microsoft browser software, which South Korea has been slow to correct by updating its computer systems. Another possibility is that Pyongyang’s hacker army was laying the groundwork for cyberwarfare retaliation against South Korea if negotiations collapse.

Retaliation might not be limited to South Korea. A report by Britain’s Defense Committee in April judged that the risk to the UK from “reckless cyberattacks” by North Korea is greater than the threat currently posed by North Korean missiles. The same report cited substantial evidence that China has assisted North Korea with developing its formidable cyberwarfare capabilities.

Priscilla Moriuchi, director of strategic threat development at Recorded Future, told UK Computing on Friday that the United States can expect cyberattacks from North Korea as well:

Cancellation of this summit with Kim will likely have larger implications than if President Trump never accepted the invitation in the first place. This will be viewed by North Korean leadership as a slight against the Kim family which will raise the demand for a response.

We expect that there will be some type of cyber-retaliation, most likely denial-of-service or other disruptive attacks against US government departments or military networks, defence contractors, and large American multinationals. Given the high degree of perceived offense against the Kim family, this response will likely occur in the coming weeks and months.

Lastly, the timing of the cancellation, right before the Memorial Day holiday in the United States, is consistent with the historic timing of North Korean cyber attacks in the past.

Security analysts say North Korea’s cyberwar capabilities have improved significantly over the past year, peaking with “Operation GhostSecret,” a hacking campaign directed at infrastructure, financial, and telecom systems in 17 different countries. Some analysts think Operation GhostSecret was intended to show the world what North Korea’s “Hidden Cobra” cyber-army is now capable of.

 

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China Defends University ‘Confucius Institutes’ as Suspicions Grow Deeper

China struggled to protect the reputation of its Confucius Institute as an educational and cultural “bridge” between China and the world in a column on Friday, while suspicions grow deeper the Institutes serve as instruments for spreading Chinese regime influence into other societies.

“To date, America has already built 110 Confucius Institutes and 501 Confucius Classrooms. Besides language courses, they also opened courses on traditional Chinese culture such as tea ceremony, calligraphy, painting and so on,” the Chinese People’s Daily wrote on Friday. The article also celebrated other schools in Thailand and Belgium.

Texas A&M terminated its agreement to host Confucius Institutes in April at the urging of Representatives Henry Cuellar (D-TX) and Michael McCaul (R-TX).

“These organizations are a threat to our nation’s security by serving as a platform for China’s intelligence collection and political agenda. We have a responsibility to uphold our American values of free expression, and to do whatever is necessary to counter any behavior that poses a threat to our democracy,” Cuellar and McCaul wrote in a letter to four Texas universities.

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) have also written to colleges in their states urging them to shut down the Confucius Institutes.

“There is mounting concern about the Chinese government’s increasingly aggressive attempts to use “Confucius Institutes” and other means to influence foreign academic institutions and critical analysis of China’s past history and present policies. Additionally, the PRC continues its efforts to interfere in multilateral institutions, threaten and intimidate rights defenders and their families, and impose censorship mechanisms on foreign publishers and social media companies,” Rubio wrote in his February letter.

“Confucius Institute instructors are almost always hired in China and trained by the Chinese Ministry of Education without any of the same employment and hiring protections that exist in the United States. Much more difficult to measure but no less insidious, however, is the self-censorship that often takes place in academic settings where there is a Chinese government presence in the form of a Confucius Institute,” Rubio charged, listing topics from Taiwan to Tiananmen Square that are suppressed at Confucius installations.

“The Chinese government has been clear in its goal and purpose for creating and expanding Confucius Institutes throughout the country, namely to distort academic discourse on China, threaten and silence defenders of human rights, and create a climate intolerant of dissent or open discussion,” Moulton said in his letter to Tufts University and UMass Boston. He also sent the letter to 38 colleges in the Greater Boston area that do not have Confucius Institutes yet, as a warning against opening one.

When FBI Director Christopher Wray revealed in February that Confucius Institutes are under investigation as a possible security threat, Rachelle Peterson wrote at the Hill that it was time to get the “pernicious” Chinese government-sponsored schools out of all U.S. colleges.

“I spent a year and a half studying Confucius Institutes. I found they misled students about China’s history and pressured American scholars to keep quiet about China’s unsavory policies. The Chinese director of one Institute told me that if a student asked about Tiananmen Square, she would ‘show a picture and point out the beautiful architecture.’ Another stripped faculty doors of banners referencing Taiwan,” Peterson wrote.

Her suggestions for dealing with the problem included rescinding an absurd exemption from the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) granted to the schools because they are supposedly engaged in purely academic activities, reducing federal funding to schools that accept Confucius Institute money, and strictly applying antidiscrimination laws so the Chinese government cannot control the staffing of the institutes.

“No other nation enjoys such direct access to American college classrooms,” Peterson told Deutsche Welle in April. “Confucius Institute classes are stocked with textbooks selected and paid for by the Chinese government and led by teachers vetted and hired by the Chinese government. It is inappropriate for a foreign power to have such control over a college course.”

The South China Morning Post credits Confucius Institutes with “giving China a soft power advantage” in Africa, where more than 50 such schools are teaching Mandarin Chinese to students who seek jobs with Chinese companies.

The SCMP describes one such school in Senegal that was funded with $2.5 million in Chinese government money. The costs of running the school and paying staff members are all covered by Beijing as well. Students are given Chinese names by their instructors, who also encourage them to embrace Chinese culture, history, and cuisine. A professor named Mahmoud Fall quoted in the article predicted that Chinese would soon be a more popular language in Africa than French, English, or other European languages dating back to the colonial era.

Asked if he was worried about China becoming a new colonial power, Fall replied: “This kind of cooperation is a win-win because it’s not cooperation that can be imposed by rules and regulations … you retain your freedom. It’s not based on domination. What you have with Chinese cooperation is the possibility to remain yourself, keeping your own heritage, conducting your own policies.”

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North and South Korean leaders hold surprise meeting at Panmunjon

Obviously reacting to President Trump’s cancellation of the scheduled June 12th summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, President Moon Jae-in met with the North Korean leader again on the North Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone. The UK Guardian reports:


South Korean president Moon Jae-in crossed into the north at the border village of Panmunjom, where the two met for the first time in April, according to Moon’s office. The two leaders discussed the potential US-North Korea summit, which Trump cancelled on Thursday, as well as implementing the joint statement that was released at the end of their earlier summit.



The surprise meeting highlighted Moon’s efforts to get the historic summit back on track, and showed inter-Korea relations are in a far better state than those between Washington and Pyongyang. On Friday, Trump made a partial climbdown, saying the summit could still be held in Singapore on 12 June if conditions are right.


Photos released by the South Korean presidential office showed the two leaders embracing, shaking hands amid opulent decor and holding intimate discussions, accompanied by just a single aide each.



Moon is expected to announce further details of the meeting on Sunday morning.


We don’t know who first proposed the meeting, nor do we know any detail about what was discussed. But it seems clear that both leaders want the summit to go forward, which is probably what Trump wants. They now need to please him, after all.


Obviously reacting to President Trump’s cancellation of the scheduled June 12th summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, President Moon Jae-in met with the North Korean leader again on the North Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone. The UK Guardian reports:


South Korean president Moon Jae-in crossed into the north at the border village of Panmunjom, where the two met for the first time in April, according to Moon’s office. The two leaders discussed the potential US-North Korea summit, which Trump cancelled on Thursday, as well as implementing the joint statement that was released at the end of their earlier summit.


The surprise meeting highlighted Moon’s efforts to get the historic summit back on track, and showed inter-Korea relations are in a far better state than those between Washington and Pyongyang. On Friday, Trump made a partial climbdown, saying the summit could still be held in Singapore on 12 June if conditions are right.


Photos released by the South Korean presidential office showed the two leaders embracing, shaking hands amid opulent decor and holding intimate discussions, accompanied by just a single aide each.



Moon is expected to announce further details of the meeting on Sunday morning.


We don’t know who first proposed the meeting, nor do we know any detail about what was discussed. But it seems clear that both leaders want the summit to go forward, which is probably what Trump wants. They now need to please him, after all.




via American Thinker Blog

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PRAGER: Why The Left Won’t Call Anyone ‘Animals’

If you want to understand the moral sickness at the heart of leftism, read the first paragraph of the most recent column by Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne:

“It’s never right to call other human beings ‘animals.’ It’s not something we should even have to debate. No matter how debased the behavior of a given individual or group, no matter how much legitimate anger that genuinely evil actions might inspire, dehumanizing others always leads us down a dangerous path.”

Let’s begin with the first sentence: “It’s never right to call other human beings ‘animals.'”

This is so self-evident to Dionne that he adds, “It’s not something we should even have to debate.”

Only someone who has never debated the issue could make such a claim.

So allow me to debate the assertion.

My view is the antithesis of Dionne’s. As I see it, it is not right to never call another human being an “animal.”

Calling the cruelest among us names such as “animal” or any other “dehumanizing” epithet actually protects humans. The word “beastly” exists for a reason and is frequently applied to human beings. By rhetorically reading certain despicable people out of the human race, we elevate the human race. We have declared certain behaviors out of line with being human.

Biologically, of course, we are all human. But if “human” is to mean anything moral — anything beyond the purely biological — then some people who have committed particularly heinous acts of evil against other human beings are not to be considered human. Otherwise “human” has no moral being. We should then not retain the word “inhumane.” What is the difference between “he is inhumane” and “he is an animal”? Both imply actions that render the person no longer human.

Dionne provides his answer at the end of the paragraph: “dehumanizing others always leads us down a dangerous path.”

He provides not a single argument or illustration for this truly absurd comment.

Anyone who refuses to “dehumanize” the Nazi physicians — who, with no anesthesia, froze naked people for hours and then dropped them in boiling water to rewarm them; put people in depressurized rooms where their eardrums burst, driving them out of their minds from pain; rubbed wood shavings and ground glass into infected wounds, etc. — is, to put it very gently, profoundly morally confused.

What would Dionne have us call those Nazi physicians — “not nice,” “badly flawed,” “evil”? Why is rhetorically ostracizing them from the human race “a dangerous path”? He doesn’t have an answer because he lives in the left’s world of moral-sounding platitudes. Leftism consists almost entirely of moral-sounding platitudes — statements meant to make the person making them feel morally sophisticated. But based on their relative reactions to the sadists of the MS-13 gangs, I trust Donald Trump’s moral compass more than E. J. Dionne’s.

It is ever dangerous to use dehumanizing rhetoric on people? Of course — when it is directed at people based on their race, religion, ethnicity, nationality or any other immutable physical characteristic. The Nazis did what they did to Jews and others because they dehumanized them based on their religious/ethnic/racial identity. That’s why racism is evil. But why is it dangerous to use such rhetoric on people based on their behavior? By equating labeling the cruelest among us “animals” with labeling Jews “animals,” Dionne cheapens the fight against real evil.

I once asked Rabbi Leon Radzik, a Holocaust survivor who had been in Auschwitz, what word he would use to characterize the sadistic guards in the camp. I will never forget his response: “They were monsters with a human face.”

Incredibly, Dionne would not agree with him.

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in April 2018, is “The Rational Bible,” a commentary on the book of Exodus. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

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David Hogg’s Publix stunt is an Alinsky-style shakedown

David Hogg is back at it, doing the only thing he apparently knows, which is mau-mauing business.

The youthful gun-control activist staged a ‘die-in’ at Publix in Coral Springs, Florida, to protest the grocery retailer’s donation to a pro-business Republican candidate who also supports the Second Amendment. Apparently, you can’t do that and must only work to elect anti-business leftists, or else Hogg will come protesting, bringing his media gaggle, at you.

Hogg’s do-this-or-I’ll-stage-a-dramatic-protest-and-bring-the-press is nothing but ‘a shakedown.’ It doesn’t matter that you might be supporting a Republican for business reasons to represent you, you must support leftists or else be declared a mass murderer, all in for the slaughter of high school children. What a bargain. And if you want to talk about divisiveness, and demonizing the opposition, this is how it’s done.

Sadly, Publix, wary of boycotts, has caved in, apologized for being ‘divisive,’ and declared it has halted all corporate political donations in the service of its business interests. That pretty well ends donations to any Republicans now.

Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it, as Saul Alinsky used to say in his Rules for Radicals, the textbook guide to politically motivated racketeering.

Orlando Sentinel columnist David Whitley has an excellent local perspective here.

What’s frustrating here is that Publix didn’t stand up to this little monster, whose piling-on victories have increased his power and public influence, not through the force of his ideas (which have no force and which won’t lead to any gun control) but through the force of his coercion. He’s already shown how immature he is, unable to convey his losing ideas to the public, so now he uses Chicago-style muscle as a frontman for the sleazy leftwing groups that are financing him. Because he’s not even old enough to remember the nuclear ‘die-ins’ of the Reagan era that inspired this stunt against Publix, – but the moneybags backing him are.

Now he’s got a new battery to go pull another stunt on some new hapless business as well as make other companies think twice before giving to Republicans. Would having a one-party state premised on leftist ideas help America? Would turning it into California or Venezuela be helpful. Maybe he can ask some of his Venezuelan-American classmates or his former California classmates about that one.

In the meantime, one can only pity Hogg for his ever-worsening downslide, from Parkland survivor kid, to godawful shakedown activist, and wonder if the bad course is really the result of his rage at not being able to get into the college of his choice. Eric Hoffer used to write about such disappointed fanatics and the result is never pretty.

David Hogg is back at it, doing the only thing he apparently knows, which is mau-mauing business.

The youthful gun-control activist staged a ‘die-in’ at Publix in Coral Springs, Florida, to protest the grocery retailer’s donation to a pro-business Republican candidate who also supports the Second Amendment. Apparently, you can’t do that and must only work to elect anti-business leftists, or else Hogg will come protesting, bringing his media gaggle, at you.

Hogg’s do-this-or-I’ll-stage-a-dramatic-protest-and-bring-the-press is nothing but ‘a shakedown.’ It doesn’t matter that you might be supporting a Republican for business reasons to represent you, you must support leftists or else be declared a mass murderer, all in for the slaughter of high school children. What a bargain. And if you want to talk about divisiveness, and demonizing the opposition, this is how it’s done.

Sadly, Publix, wary of boycotts, has caved in, apologized for being ‘divisive,’ and declared it has halted all corporate political donations in the service of its business interests. That pretty well ends donations to any Republicans now.

Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it, as Saul Alinsky used to say in his Rules for Radicals, the textbook guide to politically motivated racketeering.

Orlando Sentinel columnist David Whitley has an excellent local perspective here.

What’s frustrating here is that Publix didn’t stand up to this little monster, whose piling-on victories have increased his power and public influence, not through the force of his ideas (which have no force and which won’t lead to any gun control) but through the force of his coercion. He’s already shown how immature he is, unable to convey his losing ideas to the public, so now he uses Chicago-style muscle as a frontman for the sleazy leftwing groups that are financing him. Because he’s not even old enough to remember the nuclear ‘die-ins’ of the Reagan era that inspired this stunt against Publix, – but the moneybags backing him are.

Now he’s got a new battery to go pull another stunt on some new hapless business as well as make other companies think twice before giving to Republicans. Would having a one-party state premised on leftist ideas help America? Would turning it into California or Venezuela be helpful. Maybe he can ask some of his Venezuelan-American classmates or his former California classmates about that one.

In the meantime, one can only pity Hogg for his ever-worsening downslide, from Parkland survivor kid, to godawful shakedown activist, and wonder if the bad course is really the result of his rage at not being able to get into the college of his choice. Eric Hoffer used to write about such disappointed fanatics and the result is never pretty.

via American Thinker Blog

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Jarrett and Obama are Behind Spygate


Jarrett, born in Iran to American parents, has been with the Obamas since her days as deputy chief of staff in the office of Chicago mayor Richard Daley, the younger.  She hired Michelle Obama, then Michelle Robinson, to fill an opening in the mayor’s office.  As WikiLeaks describes the beginning of a long relationship (citations omitted):


In 1991, as deputy chief of staff to Mayor Richard Daley, Jarrett interviewed Michelle Robinson for an opening in the mayor’s office, after which she immediately offered Robinson the job.  Michelle Robinson asked for time to think and also asked Jarrett to meet Robinson’s fiancé, Barack Obama.  The three ended up meeting for dinner.  After the dinner, Michelle took the job with the mayor’s office, and Valerie Jarrett reportedly took the couple under her wing and “introduced them to a wealthier and better-connected Chicago than their own.”  Jarrett later took Michelle with her when Jarrett left the mayor’s office to head Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development.


The rest, as they say, is history.  Not only did Valerie Jarrett  become a mentor to the young Barack Obama, but she soon became what some have called Obama’s Rasputin, someone who had more security than our personnel did in Benghazi.


She receives more protection than our Libyan ambassador, calls the president by his first name, dines and vacations with the First Family and had the power to call off three strikes against Osama bin Laden.


Ambassador Chris Stevens did not have a Marine detail in Benghazi, Libya.  But White House senior adviser and Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett reportedly had a full Secret Service detail on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard.


“Jarrett seems to have a 24-hour, around-the-clock detail, with five or six agents full time,” Democratic pollster Pat Caddell said in an interview recently with Breitbart news.  If Stevens had a similar escort, he’d probably be alive today.  Such protection isn’t usually available to senior advisers, but Jarrett is no ordinary adviser[.]


Indeed, she is not. She arguably has had more influence over Obama than anyone with the possible exception of Michelle Obama herself:


Her influence is shown by an account in Richard Miniter’s book “Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him.”


It relates that at the urging of Jarrett, Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden on three occasions before finally approving the May 2, 2011, Navy SEAL mission.  Seems she was concerned about the possible political harm to Obama if the mission failed[.] …


Edward Klein, author of the best-selling book about Obama, “The Amateur,” once asked Obama if he ran every decision by Jarrett, and the president responded, “Absolutely.”  A former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor of the New York Times Magazine, Klein describes Jarrett as “ground zero in the Obama operation, the first couple’s friend and consigliere.”


If Obama ran every decision past Jarrett, the decision to plant spies in the Trump campaign certainly was among the most important.  Obama’s legacy was important to Jarrett, perhaps even more important than to Obama himself.  She had to preserve it and ensure that the fundamental transformation of America continued.  If Hillary could not win, Trump must be destroyed.


Former House speaker Newt Gingrich also finds it inconceivable that the spying operation was launched without Jarrett signing off on it:


In a Tuesday appearance on Fox News, Newt Gingrich said that he believed former President Barack Obama and some of his top officials – including Valerie Jarrett – were involved in spying on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign[.] …


“Presently, someone will figure out to ask what did Valerie Jarrett know and when did she know it?” Gingrich said.  “What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it?  Because what you’re seeing happen is, on every single level – and this is what happens with really big scandals – they keep on folding and they keep on folding and they keep on folding.”


Former press secretary Ari Fleischer agrees that such an operation could have been authorized only with the full knowledge of Jarrett and Obama:


Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said Thursday he believes it’s highly unlikely that President Obama did not know an FBI informant was in the Trump campaign.


“We need to know why did it begin, who authorized it and what role did Barack Obama have.  Did he know the FBI had informants there?  I’ll guarantee you the answer is yes.  No FBI would put informants in another presidential campaign without permission from the White House, including the president,” he said on “Outnumbered.”


Can it be believed that, as key players in the Obama administration like Strzok and Page, as well as FBI director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, number four at Justice Bruce Ohr, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and many others were linked in a vast criminal conspiracy to keep Hillary Clinton out of prison and Donald Trump out of the White House, Barack Obama was blissfully unaware of all this?  Rather, it can be plausibly argued that he was orchestrating it – perhaps not directly or by explicit orders, but rather by discussing the threat to his legacy Trump represented with his progressive minions and then simply saying, as crime bosses throughout history have done, “You know what needs to be done.  Do it.”


This scandal did not occur in a vacuum any more than did the weaponizing of the IRS to target the Tea Party and other conservative groups before Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign occurred in a vacuum.  The agencies under Obama’s control have been politicized before and used to intimidate and destroy his political opponents


This fish is also rotting from the head.  Back in April 2016, President Obama gave an interview in which he seemed to have foreknowledge that Hillary Clinton would be exonerated for her “carelessness” and did not “intentionally” mishandle classified emails, words that Comey would use just a few months later:


President Obama said Sunday that Hillary Clinton showed “carelessness” by using a private email server, but he also strongly defended his former secretary of state, saying she did not endanger national security, while also vowing that an ongoing FBI investigation into the matter will not be tainted by politics.


In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Obama seemed to prejudge the outcome of the ongoing inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s email scandal, and he disputed the notion that any of the emails contained classified information of true importance.


“She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy,” he said.  “What I also know is that there’s classified and then there’s classified.  There’s stuff that is really top secret top secret, and then there’s stuff that is being presented to the president, the secretary of state, you may not want going out over the wire.”


National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy has long argued that Obama was the ringleader in obstructing justice in the Hillary email investigation:


From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton-emails caper was President Barack Obama’s call – not the FBI’s, and not the Justice Department’s[.] … The decision was inevitable.  Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.


Why would Obama use a fake email account to communicate with Hillary Clinton?  Granted, classified communications between a president and a secretary of state are normal, but not via a fake email account.  Were they discussing the fix that was in during her email investigation?  McCarthy suggests just such a reason:


If Clinton had been charged, Obama’s culpable involvement would have been patent.  In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton-Obama emails would have been in the spotlight.  For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence.  More significantly, for Clinton’s defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges.


After Trump’s victory, Jarrett moved in with Obama and Michelle in their new Washington-area home with the express purpose of organizing the “resistance.”  Obama’s D.C. home was to serve as the nerve center to the resistance to the presidency of Donald Trump.  As the Daily Mail reported:


Barack Obama is turning his new home in the posh Kalorama section of the nation’s capital – just two miles away from the White House – into the nerve center of the mounting insurgency against his successor, President Donald J. Trump.


Obama’s goal, according to a close family friend, is to oust Trump from the presidency either by forcing his resignation or through his impeachment.


And Obama is being aided in his political crusade by his longtime consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, who has moved into the 8,200-square-foot, $5.3-million Kaloroma mansion with the former president and Michelle Obama, long time best friends.


Her power and influence extended from staffing the White House to virtual veto power over foreign policy decisions.  Valerie Jarrett undoubtedly had significant input into President Obama’s Munich-like deal with Iran, which kicked the nuclear can down the road to assured detonation over Israel, which Iran continues to threaten to wipe off the map when it is not wishing “death to America.”  Her influence over President Obama is legendary:


The Iranian-born Jarrett (her parents were American-born expatriates) is the only staff member who regularly follows the president home from the West Wing to the residence and one of the few people allowed to call the president by his first name.


Noam Scheiber, writing in the November 9, 2014 New Republic, called Jarrett “The Obama Whisperer,” noting her power and influence and the fear she instilled in other staffers:


Even at this late date in the Obama presidency, there is no surer way to elicit paranoid whispers or armchair psychoanalysis from Democrats than to mention the name Valerie Jarrett.  Party operatives, administration officials – they are shocked by her sheer longevity and marvel at her influence.  When I asked a longtime source who left the Obama White House years ago for his impressions of Jarrett, he confessed that he was too fearful to speak with me, even off the record.


This is not as irrational as it sounds.  Obama has said he consults Jarrett on every major decision, something current and former aides corroborate.  “Her role since she has been at the White House is one of the broadest and most expansive roles that I think has ever existed in the West Wing,” says Anita Dunn, Obama’s former communications director.  Broader, even, than the role of running the West Wing.  This summer, the call to send Attorney General Eric Holder on a risky visit to Ferguson, Missouri, was made by exactly three people: Holder himself, the president, and Jarrett, who were vacationing together on Martha’s Vineyard[.] …


Jarrett holds a key vote on Cabinet picks (she opposed Larry Summers at Treasury and was among the first Obama aides to come around on Hillary Clinton at State) and has an outsize [sic] say on ambassadorships and judgeships[.] …


And Jarrett has been known to enjoy the perks of high office herself.  When administration aides plan “bilats,” the term of art for meetings of two countries’ top officials, they realize that whatever size meeting they negotiate – nine by nine, eight by eight, etc. – our side will typically include one less foreign policy hand, because Jarrett has a standing seat at any table that includes the president.


Valerie Jarrett’s hold over President Obama is as mysterious as it has proven dangerous.  She is Obama’s Rasputin and will have great influence as the former community organizer wages guerrilla warfare from his Washington, D.C. bunker, an operation that includes Spygate.


Correction: Valerie Jarret worked for Chicago Mayor Daley the younger


Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.    










Unless we assume the FBI went completely rogue, it is inconceivable that the deployments of personnel to spy on the Trump campaign and make provocative contact with its lesser members could have occurred without the full knowledge and control of the occupants of the Oval Office.


Obama may claim a scandal-free administration, but after Fast and Furious, the targeting of the Tea Party by the IRS, the Benghazi cover-up, Hillary’s emails, to name a few, Spygate is just the latest.  I use the plural “occupants” because while Barack Hussein Obama may have been nominally the president of the United States, at the heart of every one of these scandals and virtually every administration move was Valerie Jarrett, who arguably could be considered our first female president.


Jarrett, born in Iran to American parents, has been with the Obamas since her days as deputy chief of staff in the office of Chicago mayor Richard Daley, the younger.  She hired Michelle Obama, then Michelle Robinson, to fill an opening in the mayor’s office.  As WikiLeaks describes the beginning of a long relationship (citations omitted):


In 1991, as deputy chief of staff to Mayor Richard Daley, Jarrett interviewed Michelle Robinson for an opening in the mayor’s office, after which she immediately offered Robinson the job.  Michelle Robinson asked for time to think and also asked Jarrett to meet Robinson’s fiancé, Barack Obama.  The three ended up meeting for dinner.  After the dinner, Michelle took the job with the mayor’s office, and Valerie Jarrett reportedly took the couple under her wing and “introduced them to a wealthier and better-connected Chicago than their own.”  Jarrett later took Michelle with her when Jarrett left the mayor’s office to head Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development.


The rest, as they say, is history.  Not only did Valerie Jarrett  become a mentor to the young Barack Obama, but she soon became what some have called Obama’s Rasputin, someone who had more security than our personnel did in Benghazi.


She receives more protection than our Libyan ambassador, calls the president by his first name, dines and vacations with the First Family and had the power to call off three strikes against Osama bin Laden.


Ambassador Chris Stevens did not have a Marine detail in Benghazi, Libya.  But White House senior adviser and Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett reportedly had a full Secret Service detail on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard.


“Jarrett seems to have a 24-hour, around-the-clock detail, with five or six agents full time,” Democratic pollster Pat Caddell said in an interview recently with Breitbart news.  If Stevens had a similar escort, he’d probably be alive today.  Such protection isn’t usually available to senior advisers, but Jarrett is no ordinary adviser[.]


Indeed, she is not. She arguably has had more influence over Obama than anyone with the possible exception of Michelle Obama herself:


Her influence is shown by an account in Richard Miniter’s book “Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him.”


It relates that at the urging of Jarrett, Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden on three occasions before finally approving the May 2, 2011, Navy SEAL mission.  Seems she was concerned about the possible political harm to Obama if the mission failed[.] …


Edward Klein, author of the best-selling book about Obama, “The Amateur,” once asked Obama if he ran every decision by Jarrett, and the president responded, “Absolutely.”  A former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor of the New York Times Magazine, Klein describes Jarrett as “ground zero in the Obama operation, the first couple’s friend and consigliere.”


If Obama ran every decision past Jarrett, the decision to plant spies in the Trump campaign certainly was among the most important.  Obama’s legacy was important to Jarrett, perhaps even more important than to Obama himself.  She had to preserve it and ensure that the fundamental transformation of America continued.  If Hillary could not win, Trump must be destroyed.


Former House speaker Newt Gingrich also finds it inconceivable that the spying operation was launched without Jarrett signing off on it:


In a Tuesday appearance on Fox News, Newt Gingrich said that he believed former President Barack Obama and some of his top officials – including Valerie Jarrett – were involved in spying on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign[.] …


“Presently, someone will figure out to ask what did Valerie Jarrett know and when did she know it?” Gingrich said.  “What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it?  Because what you’re seeing happen is, on every single level – and this is what happens with really big scandals – they keep on folding and they keep on folding and they keep on folding.”


Former press secretary Ari Fleischer agrees that such an operation could have been authorized only with the full knowledge of Jarrett and Obama:


Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said Thursday he believes it’s highly unlikely that President Obama did not know an FBI informant was in the Trump campaign.


“We need to know why did it begin, who authorized it and what role did Barack Obama have.  Did he know the FBI had informants there?  I’ll guarantee you the answer is yes.  No FBI would put informants in another presidential campaign without permission from the White House, including the president,” he said on “Outnumbered.”


Can it be believed that, as key players in the Obama administration like Strzok and Page, as well as FBI director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, number four at Justice Bruce Ohr, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and many others were linked in a vast criminal conspiracy to keep Hillary Clinton out of prison and Donald Trump out of the White House, Barack Obama was blissfully unaware of all this?  Rather, it can be plausibly argued that he was orchestrating it – perhaps not directly or by explicit orders, but rather by discussing the threat to his legacy Trump represented with his progressive minions and then simply saying, as crime bosses throughout history have done, “You know what needs to be done.  Do it.”


This scandal did not occur in a vacuum any more than did the weaponizing of the IRS to target the Tea Party and other conservative groups before Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign occurred in a vacuum.  The agencies under Obama’s control have been politicized before and used to intimidate and destroy his political opponents


This fish is also rotting from the head.  Back in April 2016, President Obama gave an interview in which he seemed to have foreknowledge that Hillary Clinton would be exonerated for her “carelessness” and did not “intentionally” mishandle classified emails, words that Comey would use just a few months later:


President Obama said Sunday that Hillary Clinton showed “carelessness” by using a private email server, but he also strongly defended his former secretary of state, saying she did not endanger national security, while also vowing that an ongoing FBI investigation into the matter will not be tainted by politics.


In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Obama seemed to prejudge the outcome of the ongoing inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s email scandal, and he disputed the notion that any of the emails contained classified information of true importance.


“She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy,” he said.  “What I also know is that there’s classified and then there’s classified.  There’s stuff that is really top secret top secret, and then there’s stuff that is being presented to the president, the secretary of state, you may not want going out over the wire.”


National Review contributing editor Andrew McCarthy has long argued that Obama was the ringleader in obstructing justice in the Hillary email investigation:


From the first, these columns have argued that the whitewash of the Hillary Clinton-emails caper was President Barack Obama’s call – not the FBI’s, and not the Justice Department’s[.] … The decision was inevitable.  Obama, using a pseudonymous email account, had repeatedly communicated with Secretary Clinton over her private, non-secure email account.


Why would Obama use a fake email account to communicate with Hillary Clinton?  Granted, classified communications between a president and a secretary of state are normal, but not via a fake email account.  Were they discussing the fix that was in during her email investigation?  McCarthy suggests just such a reason:


If Clinton had been charged, Obama’s culpable involvement would have been patent.  In any prosecution of Clinton, the Clinton-Obama emails would have been in the spotlight.  For the prosecution, they would be more proof of willful (or, if you prefer, grossly negligent) mishandling of intelligence.  More significantly, for Clinton’s defense, they would show that Obama was complicit in Clinton’s conduct yet faced no criminal charges.


After Trump’s victory, Jarrett moved in with Obama and Michelle in their new Washington-area home with the express purpose of organizing the “resistance.”  Obama’s D.C. home was to serve as the nerve center to the resistance to the presidency of Donald Trump.  As the Daily Mail reported:


Barack Obama is turning his new home in the posh Kalorama section of the nation’s capital – just two miles away from the White House – into the nerve center of the mounting insurgency against his successor, President Donald J. Trump.


Obama’s goal, according to a close family friend, is to oust Trump from the presidency either by forcing his resignation or through his impeachment.


And Obama is being aided in his political crusade by his longtime consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, who has moved into the 8,200-square-foot, $5.3-million Kaloroma mansion with the former president and Michelle Obama, long time best friends.


Her power and influence extended from staffing the White House to virtual veto power over foreign policy decisions.  Valerie Jarrett undoubtedly had significant input into President Obama’s Munich-like deal with Iran, which kicked the nuclear can down the road to assured detonation over Israel, which Iran continues to threaten to wipe off the map when it is not wishing “death to America.”  Her influence over President Obama is legendary:


The Iranian-born Jarrett (her parents were American-born expatriates) is the only staff member who regularly follows the president home from the West Wing to the residence and one of the few people allowed to call the president by his first name.


Noam Scheiber, writing in the November 9, 2014 New Republic, called Jarrett “The Obama Whisperer,” noting her power and influence and the fear she instilled in other staffers:


Even at this late date in the Obama presidency, there is no surer way to elicit paranoid whispers or armchair psychoanalysis from Democrats than to mention the name Valerie Jarrett.  Party operatives, administration officials – they are shocked by her sheer longevity and marvel at her influence.  When I asked a longtime source who left the Obama White House years ago for his impressions of Jarrett, he confessed that he was too fearful to speak with me, even off the record.


This is not as irrational as it sounds.  Obama has said he consults Jarrett on every major decision, something current and former aides corroborate.  “Her role since she has been at the White House is one of the broadest and most expansive roles that I think has ever existed in the West Wing,” says Anita Dunn, Obama’s former communications director.  Broader, even, than the role of running the West Wing.  This summer, the call to send Attorney General Eric Holder on a risky visit to Ferguson, Missouri, was made by exactly three people: Holder himself, the president, and Jarrett, who were vacationing together on Martha’s Vineyard[.] …


Jarrett holds a key vote on Cabinet picks (she opposed Larry Summers at Treasury and was among the first Obama aides to come around on Hillary Clinton at State) and has an outsize [sic] say on ambassadorships and judgeships[.] …


And Jarrett has been known to enjoy the perks of high office herself.  When administration aides plan “bilats,” the term of art for meetings of two countries’ top officials, they realize that whatever size meeting they negotiate – nine by nine, eight by eight, etc. – our side will typically include one less foreign policy hand, because Jarrett has a standing seat at any table that includes the president.


Valerie Jarrett’s hold over President Obama is as mysterious as it has proven dangerous.  She is Obama’s Rasputin and will have great influence as the former community organizer wages guerrilla warfare from his Washington, D.C. bunker, an operation that includes Spygate.


Correction: Valerie Jarret worked for Chicago Mayor Daley the younger


Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.    




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President Trump Stands and Shakes Over 1,000 Navy Graduates’ Hands For Over an Hour – Hillary Sits and Receives Harvard Attendance Prize

President Trump Stands and Shakes Over 1,000 Navy Graduates Hands For Over an Hour – Hillary Sits and Receives Harvard Attendance Prize

Jim Hoft
by Jim Hoft
May 26, 2018

Guest post by Joe Hoft

Yesterday we saw on video the difference between President Trump and Hillary Clinton. President Trump stood in the summer sun for over an hour and a half to shake the hand of every graduate from the Navy Academy. Hillary Clinton sat for an hour while receiving an award from Harvard for her ‘battles won and lost’.

President Trump spoke at the Navy Academy’s Graduation Ceremony for the Class of 2018. After his speech he stayed and honored the graduates by shaking the hand of each and every young graduate. This required the President to stand in the sun and shake hands for an hour and a half. (Quite an accomplishment for anyone, yet alone a man in his early 70’s.)

Here is the video of the President shaking all the graduates hands in 41 seconds –

Hillary Clinton was also in the news yesterday. She donned a winter coat while sitting and receiving an award from Harvard University.

Eighteen months after she lost the presidential election to Donald Trump, Hillary Rodham Clinton received something of a hero’s welcome Friday, as she accepted the Radcliffe Medal, an award given annually to an individual who has had a transformative effect on society.

“We honor her today for all of her battles, won and lost,” said Lizabeth Cohen, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, which presents the award.

Hillary’s outfit is thought to cover the fact that she is wearing a medical related back brace.   Although the temperatures were in the high 80’s, she wore the winter coat.

There were no pictures of Hillary being carried up stairs at this event.

The two events yesterday show the extreme differences between President Trump and Presidential candidate Clinton.  Healthy President Trump honors graduates for work well done, while sickly Hillary is given an attendance prize from far left academics at Harvard for losing an election.  And there it is!

 

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A new special counsel to investigate FBI & FISA abuses? Republicans just made a major first step

More than two dozen congressional Republicans took a major first step to initiating a second special counsel investigation in Washington on Friday, this time into potential misconduct at the highest levels of the Department of Justice and FISA abuses.

Lead by Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), 25 Republicans co-sponsored legislation on Friday demanding a second special counsel be appointed.

“Expressing the sense of Congress that the Attorney General of the United States should appoint a Special Counsel to investigate misconduct at the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation, including an investigation of abuse of the FISA warrant process, how and why the Hillary Clinton probe ended, and how and why the Donald Trump-Russia probe began,” the resolution states.

What are the details?

The legislation, just 12 pages long, lists nearly four dozen reasons why a new special counsel investigation is needed. Some of those reasons include:

  • “Misconduct” high in DOJ ranks may have led to “premature conclusion” of FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, despite clear evidence to suggest serious violations of the law occurred.
  • Former FBI Director James Comey’s seeming contradiction over when he chose to not bring charges against Clinton. He told Congress it was after investigators interviewed her. It was later revealed to have happened months earlier.
  • The DOJ’s failure to “fully investigation” Clinton for her part in the Uranium One deal and its connections to the Clinton Foundation.
  • The DOJ using “politically biased, unverified sources” to obtain secret FISA warrants on Carter Page.
  • The FBI failed to follow its own procedures, known as the “Woods Procedures,” when obtaining the warrant on Page.
  • The fact that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into President Donald Trump and Russia remains ongoing, despite uncovering hardly any evidence in two years. The legislation also alleges the investigation is “based on questionable and insufficient intelligence and biased motivations.”
  • The fact that Comey admittedly leaked information to a lawyer friend about his meetings with Trump.
  • The text messages between FBI senior agent Peter Strzok and now-former FBI lawyer Lisa Page.
  • The informant placed in the Trump campaign.
  • The DOJ’s refusal to comply with many requests made by Congress.

For all of those reasons, Zeldin wrote that “the DOJ and FBI cannot be expected to fully investigate themselves regarding this matter.”

“The concerns of the American people are serious and the issues requiring an immediate, unbiased, independent, and thorough investigation are broad,” he added. “The Attorney General of the United States should immediately appoint a special counsel to conduct a thorough and independent investigation of these grave concerns.”

Read the full legislation below:

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Tommy Robinson arrested in England while reporting on trial of Muslim grooming gang

Tommy Robinson, a well-known political activist warning of the dangers of Islamic extremism, was arrested Friday while doing a live-feed report online about the trial of Muslim gang members accused of grooming young girls for a prostitution ring.  Metro UK reports:


The co-founder of EDL[i] livestreamed ‘reports’ from outside Leeds Crown Court for an hour this morning. He showed men entering the court on Facebook until he was approached by officers telling him to stop. In a separate video, the far-right activist is filmed being led away by police, arresting him for an alleged breach of the peace and incitement. He’s heard asking one of his supporters: ‘Can you get me a solicitor?



‘This is ridiculous, I haven’t said a word. I’ve done nothing.’ He’s then filmed asking the police officers if he’s being arrested on ‘contempt of court’. Before he’s bundled into the van, he says: ‘Someone laid their hand and assaulted me outside court.


‘Other people have sworn at me and threatened me about my mother and here I am being arrested for saying nothing.’



A tweet from Nick Monroe captures a now-deleted tweet from Caolan Robertson in which he reports that Tommy Robinson was sentenced to 13 months in prison, which would imply either a ridiculously speedy trial or no trial at all. This sentence has not been confirmed in any reports that I can find, although Ezra Levant of Canada’s Rebel Media references it in a vidoe embedded at the bottom of this report.



Katie Hopkins has tweeted her fears (shared by many others) that Robinson will be murdered in custody, as he is an object of hate by many Muslims:




The Rotherham child exploitation scandal referenced in the call Hopkins takes in the video on her tweet was a horrific example of British police deliberately ignoring widespread exploitation of young girls by Muslim gangs. Wikipedia has a summary, and Google will rveal much more on this earlier example of official repression of those who would “disturb the peace” with truthful accounts of misbehavior by Muslims in Britain.


Asmost people know, there is no First Amendment in the UK. Nick Kangadis of the Media Research Center pulls no punches:


The U.K. has become an authoritarian state. While everyone ridiculously fawns over royal weddings, authorities in Britain are arresting people for shedding light on atrocities that the government doesn’t want people to know about.


Here is Ezra Levant’s commentary on the arrest:



 


Photo credit: Facebook


[i] The English Defense League. Robinson later broke with the group


Tommy Robinson, a well-known political activist warning of the dangers of Islamic extremism, was arrested Friday while doing a live-feed report online about the trial of Muslim gang members accused of grooming young girls for a prostitution ring.  Metro UK reports:


The co-founder of EDL[i] livestreamed ‘reports’ from outside Leeds Crown Court for an hour this morning. He showed men entering the court on Facebook until he was approached by officers telling him to stop. In a separate video, the far-right activist is filmed being led away by police, arresting him for an alleged breach of the peace and incitement. He’s heard asking one of his supporters: ‘Can you get me a solicitor?


‘This is ridiculous, I haven’t said a word. I’ve done nothing.’ He’s then filmed asking the police officers if he’s being arrested on ‘contempt of court’. Before he’s bundled into the van, he says: ‘Someone laid their hand and assaulted me outside court.


‘Other people have sworn at me and threatened me about my mother and here I am being arrested for saying nothing.’



A tweet from Nick Monroe captures a now-deleted tweet from Caolan Robertson in which he reports that Tommy Robinson was sentenced to 13 months in prison, which would imply either a ridiculously speedy trial or no trial at all. This sentence has not been confirmed in any reports that I can find, although Ezra Levant of Canada’s Rebel Media references it in a vidoe embedded at the bottom of this report.



Katie Hopkins has tweeted her fears (shared by many others) that Robinson will be murdered in custody, as he is an object of hate by many Muslims:




The Rotherham child exploitation scandal referenced in the call Hopkins takes in the video on her tweet was a horrific example of British police deliberately ignoring widespread exploitation of young girls by Muslim gangs. Wikipedia has a summary, and Google will rveal much more on this earlier example of official repression of those who would “disturb the peace” with truthful accounts of misbehavior by Muslims in Britain.


Asmost people know, there is no First Amendment in the UK. Nick Kangadis of the Media Research Center pulls no punches:


The U.K. has become an authoritarian state. While everyone ridiculously fawns over royal weddings, authorities in Britain are arresting people for shedding light on atrocities that the government doesn’t want people to know about.


Here is Ezra Levant’s commentary on the arrest:



 


Photo credit: Facebook


[i] The English Defense League. Robinson later broke with the group




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‘Scandal-free’ Obama is daring Trump to bust corrupt members of his administration

Mouthing an old trope dating from his time in office and ever since, former President Obama declared at a Vegas conference that he had a scandal-free administration, quite unlike President Trump. Supposedly, it was now a joke.


According to Newsweek:



“I didn’t have scandals, which seems like it shouldn’t be something you brag about,” Obama joked.


President Donald Trump’s presidency has thus far been racked with scandalous allegations, but Obama later hedged his barb. “But actually,” he said, “if you look at the history of the modern presidency, coming out of the modern presidency without anybody going to jail is really good. It’s a big deal.”


I don’t see anything to joke about with that phony claim, given that he’s mouthed it quite a few times before and not as a joke. What’s more, he made that mendacious claim just as he was being paid big dollars at the Las Vegas conference itself, which as most Americans know, is typically a disguised bribe for some favors performed earlier, and in itself a scandal. His fees are reportedly $400,000, which is nice money for a few minutes of speaking work.


Saying his administration was scandal-free is something he says every few weeks, it seems – he said it in March, here, and in February, here; in January, here, and in quite a few other instances, such as shortly after President Trump was elected, here. Even the Washington Post’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, declines to give Obama a pass on that one, citing differences in point of view.


But more to the point, his claim isn’t even true: It was rife with crony business deals, described here. There were major policy scandals, such as the subordination of embassy security abroad to the need to shill a ‘narrative’ about al-Qaida being on the run in time for elections, as happened in Benghazi. There was the monstrous Solyndra green energy scandal where business cronies left taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars and made out like bandits themselves. There was the gunrunning scandal of Fast and Furious which allowed guns to move into the hands of Mexican cartels, leading to the death of a U.S. border agent. Nobody was punished, of course. There was the scandal of the emails at the Environmental Protection Agency, where officials illegally used pseudonyms to evade Freedom of Information Act laws and got away with it. There was Hillary Clinton’s illegal private server set up to evade laws the same way and created a vast opening for foreign hackers and espionage of top secrets, with Obama willingly participating in the communications. There was the IRS targeting of political dissidents and the lies to cover it up, again, completely unpunished. There were the ‘lost’ emails – of the FBI, of the IRS, and Hillary Clinton herself while she was at the Department of State. There were the smashing of Blackberries with hammers, again, to evade transparency laws and lawmen, too. There was Clinton’s pay-to-play foundation-State Department nexus, corruption of the highest variety, and an investigation squelched due to Obama’s politicization of the FBI. There was Obama’s politicization of intelligence reports to say what he wanted on the war front, as well as his weaponization of the intelligence agencies to spy on political opponents and reporters. It turns out some of his people did go to jail, or were headed there for leaks – and he pardoned them to keep them out. Such as his “favorite” general here.


But according to Obama, the fact that no one was ever punished is the actual justification for his claim that he never had scandals. The fact that no one was ever punished is perhaps the biggest scandal of his administration.


What we are seeing here are three things:


One, Obama is not embarassed by any of his scandals, Chicago-style or otherwise. As the blogger at ThyBlackMan writes:


Obama’s claims always come with a subtle caveat. His administration didn’t have “a scandal that embarrassed us,” or they didn’t have “a majorscandal.” But, my favorite nuance from his super-secret appearance in Boston was when he said, “Generally speaking, you didn’t hear about a lot of drama inside our White House.” He’s right about that point. As I document in my forthcoming book, The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama, there were over two dozen scandals over the course of Obama’s presidency, and they were all downplayed or ignored by the mainstream media.


Two, Obama claims he had no scandals because he allowed no consequences, no matter what anyone ever did, no matter what laws they broke, which is not an argument to claim he had no scandals. In fact, as a leftist, he tended to let all kinds of miscreants and plagues on society out scot-free, starting with Bradley Manning, and moving on to all the criminals he let out via pardons, at least some of whom have resumed their lives of crime. It was quite a pattern with him, and signaled an inclination toward lawlessness, which only grew as his administration continued.


Three, Obama had a pliant press covering up for him, as the Washington Times notes in an op-ed about the latest garbage from him, headlined:


Not so fast Obama, your biggest scandal is unfolding before our eyes


Yet, to paraphrase the immortal words of Chelsea Clinton, he persists.


Why does he keep claiming he had no scandals? It’s obvious his administration had scandals. He seems to think that by repeating a lie over and over again, he can eventually make it true, in an echo of the Nazi and Stalinist wisdom. He’s all about ‘narratives’ after all.


But in laying down the marker that scandals are only scandals if someone goes to jail – and he, in his Chicago-style governance, always kept his lawbreaking friends out of jail and seems to be proud of it – he also lays a trap for himself.


How does President Trump smack this liar down and shut down his lies?


By launching prosecutions of his top miscreants, something Obama is convinced will never happen, making his claims a sort of dare.


Apparently, he doesn’t know Trump very well, because Trump is the kind of guy who might just do it.


With the stream of lies about a scandal-free administration, the path is now clear that it’s time to clean house on the continuous lawbreaking of Obama officials that hasn’t been punished a whit. It’s time to create consequences for those who thumb their nose at the law, justified only by a compliant press and their own leftwingery. Obama just gave President Trump the green light.


 


Mouthing an old trope dating from his time in office and ever since, former President Obama declared at a Vegas conference that he had a scandal-free administration, quite unlike President Trump. Supposedly, it was now a joke.


According to Newsweek:


“I didn’t have scandals, which seems like it shouldn’t be something you brag about,” Obama joked.


President Donald Trump’s presidency has thus far been racked with scandalous allegations, but Obama later hedged his barb. “But actually,” he said, “if you look at the history of the modern presidency, coming out of the modern presidency without anybody going to jail is really good. It’s a big deal.”


I don’t see anything to joke about with that phony claim, given that he’s mouthed it quite a few times before and not as a joke. What’s more, he made that mendacious claim just as he was being paid big dollars at the Las Vegas conference itself, which as most Americans know, is typically a disguised bribe for some favors performed earlier, and in itself a scandal. His fees are reportedly $400,000, which is nice money for a few minutes of speaking work.


Saying his administration was scandal-free is something he says every few weeks, it seems – he said it in March, here, and in February, here; in January, here, and in quite a few other instances, such as shortly after President Trump was elected, here. Even the Washington Post’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, declines to give Obama a pass on that one, citing differences in point of view.


But more to the point, his claim isn’t even true: It was rife with crony business deals, described here. There were major policy scandals, such as the subordination of embassy security abroad to the need to shill a ‘narrative’ about al-Qaida being on the run in time for elections, as happened in Benghazi. There was the monstrous Solyndra green energy scandal where business cronies left taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars and made out like bandits themselves. There was the gunrunning scandal of Fast and Furious which allowed guns to move into the hands of Mexican cartels, leading to the death of a U.S. border agent. Nobody was punished, of course. There was the scandal of the emails at the Environmental Protection Agency, where officials illegally used pseudonyms to evade Freedom of Information Act laws and got away with it. There was Hillary Clinton’s illegal private server set up to evade laws the same way and created a vast opening for foreign hackers and espionage of top secrets, with Obama willingly participating in the communications. There was the IRS targeting of political dissidents and the lies to cover it up, again, completely unpunished. There were the ‘lost’ emails – of the FBI, of the IRS, and Hillary Clinton herself while she was at the Department of State. There were the smashing of Blackberries with hammers, again, to evade transparency laws and lawmen, too. There was Clinton’s pay-to-play foundation-State Department nexus, corruption of the highest variety, and an investigation squelched due to Obama’s politicization of the FBI. There was Obama’s politicization of intelligence reports to say what he wanted on the war front, as well as his weaponization of the intelligence agencies to spy on political opponents and reporters. It turns out some of his people did go to jail, or were headed there for leaks – and he pardoned them to keep them out. Such as his “favorite” general here.


But according to Obama, the fact that no one was ever punished is the actual justification for his claim that he never had scandals. The fact that no one was ever punished is perhaps the biggest scandal of his administration.


What we are seeing here are three things:


One, Obama is not embarassed by any of his scandals, Chicago-style or otherwise. As the blogger at ThyBlackMan writes:


Obama’s claims always come with a subtle caveat. His administration didn’t have “a scandal that embarrassed us,” or they didn’t have “a majorscandal.” But, my favorite nuance from his super-secret appearance in Boston was when he said, “Generally speaking, you didn’t hear about a lot of drama inside our White House.” He’s right about that point. As I document in my forthcoming book, The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama, there were over two dozen scandals over the course of Obama’s presidency, and they were all downplayed or ignored by the mainstream media.


Two, Obama claims he had no scandals because he allowed no consequences, no matter what anyone ever did, no matter what laws they broke, which is not an argument to claim he had no scandals. In fact, as a leftist, he tended to let all kinds of miscreants and plagues on society out scot-free, starting with Bradley Manning, and moving on to all the criminals he let out via pardons, at least some of whom have resumed their lives of crime. It was quite a pattern with him, and signaled an inclination toward lawlessness, which only grew as his administration continued.


Three, Obama had a pliant press covering up for him, as the Washington Times notes in an op-ed about the latest garbage from him, headlined:


Not so fast Obama, your biggest scandal is unfolding before our eyes


Yet, to paraphrase the immortal words of Chelsea Clinton, he persists.


Why does he keep claiming he had no scandals? It’s obvious his administration had scandals. He seems to think that by repeating a lie over and over again, he can eventually make it true, in an echo of the Nazi and Stalinist wisdom. He’s all about ‘narratives’ after all.


But in laying down the marker that scandals are only scandals if someone goes to jail – and he, in his Chicago-style governance, always kept his lawbreaking friends out of jail and seems to be proud of it – he also lays a trap for himself.


How does President Trump smack this liar down and shut down his lies?


By launching prosecutions of his top miscreants, something Obama is convinced will never happen, making his claims a sort of dare.


Apparently, he doesn’t know Trump very well, because Trump is the kind of guy who might just do it.


With the stream of lies about a scandal-free administration, the path is now clear that it’s time to clean house on the continuous lawbreaking of Obama officials that hasn’t been punished a whit. It’s time to create consequences for those who thumb their nose at the law, justified only by a compliant press and their own leftwingery. Obama just gave President Trump the green light.


 




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