US EMBASSY [OBAMA ADMINISTRATION ] PRESSED UKRAINE TO DROP PROBE OF GEORGE SOROS GROUP DURING 2016 ELECTION

JOHN SOLOMON  The Hill  3-26-19

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/435906-us-embassy-pressed-ukraine-to-drop-probe-of-george-soros-group-during-2016

While the 2016 presidential race was raging in America, Ukrainian prosecutors ran into some unexpectedly strong headwinds as they pursued an investigation into the activities of a nonprofit in their homeland known as the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC).

The focus on AntAC — whose youthful street activists famously wore “Ukraine F*&k Corruption” T-shirts — was part of a larger probe by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office into whether $4.4 million in U.S. funds to fight corruption inside the former Soviet republic had been improperly diverted.

The prosecutors soon would learn the resistance they faced was blowing directly from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, where the Obama administration took the rare step of trying to press the Ukrainian government to back off its investigation of both the U.S. aid and the group.

“The investigation into the Anti-Corruption Action Center (sic), based on the assistance they have received from us, is similarly misplaced,” then-embassy Charge d’ Affaires George Kent wrote the prosecutor’s office in April 2016 in a letter that also argued U.S. officials had no concerns about how the U.S. aid had been spent.

At the time, the nation’s prosecutor general had just been fired, under pressure from the United States, and a permanent replacement had not been named.

A few months later, Yuri Lutsenko, widely regarded as a hero in the West for spending two years in prison after fighting Russian aggression in his country, was named prosecutor general and invited to meet new U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.

Lutsenko told me he was stunned when the ambassador “gave me a list of people whom we should not prosecute.” The list included a founder of the AntAC group and two members of Parliament who vocally supported the group’s anti-corruption reform agenda, according to a source directly familiar with the meeting.

It turns out the group that Ukrainian law enforcement was probing was co-funded by the Obama administration and liberal mega-donor George Soros. And it was collaborating with the FBI agents investigating then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s business activities with pro-Russian figures in Ukraine.

The implied message to Ukraine’s prosecutors was clear: Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an America presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama, Ukrainian officials said.

“We ran right into a buzzsaw and we got bloodied,” a senior Ukrainian official told me.

Lutsenko suggested the embassy applied pressure because it did not want Americans to see who was being funded with its tax dollars. “At the time, Ms. Ambassador thought our interviews of the Ukrainian citizens, of the Ukrainian civil servants who were frequent visitors in the U.S. Embassy, could cast a shadow on that anti-corruption policy,” he said.

State officials told me privately they wanted Ukraine prosecutors to back off AntAC because they feared the investigation was simply retribution for the group’s high-profile efforts to force anti-corruption reforms inside Ukraine, some of which took authorities and prestige from the Prosecutor General’s Office.

But it was an unusual intervention, the officials acknowledged. “We’re not normally in the business of telling a country’s police force who they can and can’t pursue, unless it involves an American citizen we think is wrongly accused,” one official said.

In the end, no action was taken against AntAC and it remains thriving today. Nonetheless, the anecdote is taking on new significance.

First, it conflicts with the State Department’s official statement last week after Lutsenko first mentioned the do-not-prosecute list. The embassy responded that the claim was a fabrication and a sign that corruption is alive and well inside Ukraine.

But Kent’s letter unequivocally shows the embassy did press Ukrainian prosecutors to back off what normally would be considered an internal law enforcement matter inside a sovereign country. And more than a half-dozen U.S. and Ukrainian sources confirmed to me the AntAC case wasn’t the only one in which American officials exerted pressure on Ukrainian investigators in 2016.

When I asked State to explain the letter and inclusion of the Soros-connected names during the meeting, it demurred. “As a general rule, we don’t read out private diplomatic meetings,” it responded. “Ambassador Yovanovitch represents the President of the United States in Ukraine, and America stands behind her and her statements.”

Second, the AntAC anecdote highlights a little-known fact that the pursuit of foreign corruption has resulted in an unusual alliance between the U.S. government and a political mega-donor.

After the Obama Justice Department launched its Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative a decade ago to prosecute corruption in other countries, the State Department, Justice Department and FBI outsourced some of its work in Ukraine to groups funded by Soros.

The Hungarian-American businessman is one of the largest donors to American liberal causes, a champion of the U.S. kleptocracy crackdown and a man with extensive business interests in Ukraine.

One key U.S. partner was AntAC, which received 59 percent (or $1 million) of its nearly $1.7 million budget since 2012 from U.S. budgets tied to State and Justice, and nearly $290,000 from Soros’s International Renaissance Foundation, according to the group’s donor disclosure records.  

The U.S.-Soros collaboration was visible in Kiev. Several senior Department of Justice (DOJ) officials and FBI agents appeared in pictures as participants or attendees at Soros-sponsored events and conferences.

One attendee was Karen Greenaway, then the FBI supervisor in charge of international fraud cases and one of the lead agents in the Manafort investigation in Ukraine. She attended multiple such events and won glowing praise in a social media post from AntAC’s executive director.

In one event during 2016, Greenaway and Ambassador Yovanovitch participated alongside AntAC’s executive director, Daria Kaleniuk, and Lutsenko was present. The message was clear: The embassy supported AntAC.

The FBI confirmed Greenaway’s contacts with the Soros group, saying they were part of her investigative work: “In furtherance of the FBI’s mission and in the course of their duties, FBI employees routinely travel and participated in public forums in an official capacity. At a minimum, all such travel and speaking engagements are authorized by the employee’s direct supervisor and can receive further authorization all the way up to the relevant division head, along with an ethics official determination.”   

Greenaway recently retired, and Soros’s AntAC soon after announced she was joining its supervisory board.

Internal memos from Soros’s umbrella charity organization, Open Society Foundations, describe a concerted strategy of creating friendships inside key government agencies such as State, DOJ and the FBI that can be leveraged inside the countries Soros was targeting for anti-corruption activism.

“We have broadly recognized the importance of developing supportive constituencies in order to make headway in tightening the global web of anti-corruption accountability,” a Feb. 21, 2014, memo states. “We first conceived of this in terms of fostering and helping to build a political environment favorable to high-level anti-corruption cases.”

That same memo shows Soros’s organization wanted to make Ukraine a top priority, starting in 2014, and planned to use the Anti-Corruption Action Centre as its lead.

“Ukraine: Behind the scenes advice and support to Ukrainian partner Anti-Corruption Action Centre’s efforts to generate corruption litigation in Europe and the U.S. respecting state assets stolen by senior Ukrainian leaders,” the memo states.

The memo included a chart of Ukrainians the Soros team wanted to have pursued, including some with ties to Manafort.

Senior U.S. law enforcement officials confirmed to me that the early kleptocracy collaborations inside Ukraine led to highly visible U.S. actions against the oligarch Dmitri Firtash, a major target of the Soros group, and Manafort. Firtash is now represented by former Hillary Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis and former U.S. Attorney Dan Webb.

Documents posted online by Open Society Foundations show that after U.S. officials scored some early successes in corruption cases in Ukraine, such as asset forfeitures, AntAC requested to receive some of the seized money.

“Ukrainian NGO Anticorruption Action Centre (AntAC) petitioned the United States Justice Department on behalf of Ukrainian civil society to dedicate the nearly $3 million in forfeited and seized assets allegedly laundered by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, to creating an anti-corruption training facility,” a 2015 foundation document stated.

Spokespersons for AntAC and Open Society Foundations did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Soros, deferred any comment about AntAC to the group. But he did he confirm his boss supported the continued investigation of Russia collusion allegations against Trump well past 2016.

Vachon said Soros wrote a sizable check from his personal funds in fall 2017 to a new group, Democracy Integrity Project, started by a former FBI agent and Senate staffer Daniel Jones to continue “investigation and research into foreign interference in American elections and European elections.”  

Vachon said the group asked Soros not to divulge the size of his contribution, and Soros later learned the group hired Fusion GPS, the same firm that was paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic Party to create the infamous “Steele dossier” alleging Trump-Russia collusion.

The he said-she said battle playing out between Ukraine’s chief prosecutor and the American ambassador doesn’t benefit either side, but an honest, complete and transparent account of what the embassy communicated to Ukraine’s law enforcement does.

And the tale of AntAC raises some cogent questions:

Why would the U.S. Embassy intervene on a Ukrainian internal investigation and later deny it exerted such pressure?

Did Soros’s role as a major political funder have any impact?

Do Americans want U.S. tax dollars commingled with activists’ private funds when it comes to anti-corruption probes?

Someone in State and Congress should try to get the answers.

John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill

THE FOREIGN POLICY FIASCO THAT WASN’T

  Bret Stephens NY Times March 29, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/opinion/iran-us-foreign-policy.html

Withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal has paid dividends.

It’s been nearly a year since Donald Trump made the decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, to loud cries that it would bring nothing but woe to the United States and our interests in the Middle East.

So far, the result has been closer to the opposite.

That much was further made clear thanks to excellent reporting this week by The Times’s Ben Hubbard. “Iran’s financial crisis, exacerbated by American sanctions,” he writes from Lebanon, “appears to be undermining its support for militant groups and political allies who bolster Iranian influence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere.”

Well, heavens to Betsy. When the Obama administration negotiated the nuclear deal, the president acknowledged that sanctions relief for Tehran would inevitably mean more money for groups like Hezbollah. But he also insisted it wouldn’t make much of a difference in terms of Iran’s capacity to make mischief in the Middle East.

Hubbard’s reporting suggests otherwise. Iran can no longer finance civilian projects or credit lines in Syria. Hezbollah fighters and Palestinian militants aren’t being paid, and their families are losing subsidized housing. Even Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has complained publicly about the effects of U.S. sanctions.

Nor are those the only benefits of withdrawal. The U.S. is no longer looking the other way at Hezbollah’s criminal enterprises, including drug smuggling and money laundering, the way it did during the Obama administration in order to engage Iran diplomatically. Iran’s protest movement, quashed in 2009, has shown signs of renewed life, not least because of public fury that the regime spends money on foreign adventures while economic conditions worsen at home.

Most importantly, Iran has not used the U.S. withdrawal from the deal to restart its nuclear programs, despite its threats to do so. Part of this has to do with Tehran’s belief that it can wait Trump out, especially since Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris have promised to re-enter the deal if elected.

But it also suggests an edge of fear in Tehran’s calculations. The U.S. can still impose a great deal more pain on the Islamic Republic if it chooses to do so.

How so? Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told me earlier this week that the sanctions needle now stands at around a 6. With a nod to Spin̈al Tap’s Nigel Tufnel, he says, “We need to get to 11.”

Iran still exports about a million barrels of oil a day; the administration could bring it to zero by refusing to hand out sanctions waivers. The State Department could also designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, on a par with Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. Such a designation, Dubowitz says, would “make the entire Iranian economy radioactive” to foreign investment, since the I.R.G.C. is heavily involved in scores of Iranian businesses.

Even here Dubowitz is merely warming to his theme. Freeze Iran’s foreign exchange reserves? Doable. Expose the immense wealth of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and sanction the companies he and other leading regime figures control? Ditto. Unleash lawsuits against companies still doing business with Iran to recover billions of dollars in outstanding terrorism judgments against the country? That, too.

The point isn’t to punish Iran for punishment’s sake. It’s to create leverage for a better nuclear deal. Last May, Mike Pompeo set a dozen parameters for an agreement, including “unqualified access” to U.N. nuclear inspectors, permanent cessation of uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing, the end of Iran’s ballistic-missile program, withdrawal of its forces from Syria, and the release of U.S. nationals held in its prisons.

Pompeo’s demands have been alternatively dismissed as silly or reckless by most of Washington’s foreign policy establishment. But it says something about the debasement of diplomatic expectations — both of what we have a right to demand and what we think we can achieve — that any of it should be controversial.

Non-nuclear states that sponsor terrorism and subscribe to millenarian ideologies should never have access to any part of the nuclear fuel cycle, ever. Any U.S. administration that abdicates the responsibility to do everything it can to prevent such access effectively renounces America’s status as a superpower as well.

Iran’s G.D.P. is roughly equivalent to that of the greater Boston area, with 17 times the population. The regime may be a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East. But it is hardly a giant on the world stage, immune to any form of economic pressure.

The Trump administration has succeeded in dramatically raising the costs to Iran for its sinister behavior, at no cost to the United States or our allies. That’s the definition of a foreign-policy achievement. It’s time to move the needle up again. The longer Hezbollah fighters go unpaid, or the Assad regime unaided, the better off the people of the Middle East will be.

.

Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. 

‘SHAME’: VICTOR DAVIS HANSON DELIVERS SCATHING INDICTMENT OF FAILED ‘COUP

by WorldTribune Staff, February 20, 2019

https://www.worldtribune.com/shame-victor-davis-hanson-delivers-scathing-indictment-of-failed-coup/

The first “coup” in U.S. history in which government bureaucrats sought to overturn an election and to remove a sitting U.S. president has failed, a columnist noted.

“Not thugs in sunglasses and epaulettes, not oligarchs in private jets, not shaggy would-be Marxists, but sanctimonious arrogant bureaucrats in suits and ties used their government agencies to seek to overturn the 2016 election, abort a presidency, and subvert the U.S. Constitution,” Victor Davis Hanson wrote on Feb. 17 in an op-ed titled ‘Autopsy of a Dead Coup’ for the Center for American Greatness.

‘A host of the Washington hierarchy lied under oath, obstructed justice, illegally leaked to the press, unmasked and leaked names of surveilled Americans, and misled federal courts under the guise of a ‘higher loyalty’ to the cause of destroying Donald J. Trump.’ / Getty Images

“And they did all that and more on the premise that they were our moral superiors and had uniquely divine rights to destroy a presidency that they loathed,” Hanson wrote.

The effort by the Hillary Clinton campaign “to create, disseminate among court media, and then salt among high Obama administration officials, a fabricated, opposition smear dossier failed,” Hanson noted.

“So has the second special prosecutor phase of the coup to abort the Trump presidency failed. There are many elements to what in time likely will become recognized as the greatest scandal in American political history.”

Hanson continued: “The deep state is by nature cowardly. It does not move unless it feels it can disguise its subterranean efforts or that, if revealed, those efforts will be seen as popular and necessary – as expressed in tell-all book titles such as fired FBI Directors James Comey’s Higher Loyalty or in disgraced Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s psychodramatic The Threat.

“In candidate and President Trump’s case that prepping of the battlefield translated into a coordinated effort among the media, political progressives and celebrities to so demonize Trump that his imminent removal likely would appear a relief to the people. Anything was justified that led to that end.”

Hanson noted that “Journalists themselves consulted with the Clinton campaign to coordinate attacks. From the WikiLeaks trove, journalistic grandees such as John Harwood, Mark Leibovich, Dana Milbank, and Glenn Thrush often communicated (and even post factum were unapologetic about doing so) with John Podesta’s staff to construct various anti-Trump themes and have the Clinton campaign review or even audit them in advance.

“Some contract ‘journalists’ apparently were paid directly by Fusion GPS – created by former reporters Glen Simpson of the Wall Street Journal and Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post – to spread lurid stories from the dossier. Others more refined like Christiane Amanpour and James Rutenberg had argued for a new journalistic ethos that partisan coverage was certainly justified in the age of Trump, given his assumed existential threat to The Truth.”

Or as Rutenberg put it in 2016: “If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, non-opinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable. But the question that everyone is grappling with is: Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?”

Hanson wrote: “I suppose Rutenberg never considered that half the country might have considered the Hillary Clinton presidency ‘potentially dangerous,’ and yet did not expect the evening news, in 90 percent of its coverage, to reflect such suspicions.”

CNN “soon proved that it is no longer a news organization at all – as reporters like Gloria Borger, Chris Cuomo, Eric Lichtblau, Manu Raju, Brian Rokus, Jake Tapper, Jeff Zeleny, and teams such as Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen as well as Thomas Frank, and Lex Harris all trafficked in false rumors and unproven gossip detrimental to Trump, while hosts and guest hosts such as Reza Aslan, the late Anthony Bourdain, and Anderson Cooper stooped to obscenity and grossness to attack Trump,” Hanson wrote.

“Both politicos and celebrities tried to drive Trump’s numbers down to facilitate some sort of popular ratification for his removal. Hollywood and the coastal corridor punditry exhausted public expressions of assassinating or injuring the president, as the likes of Jim Carrey, Johnny Depp, Robert de Niro, Peter Fonda, Kathy Griffin, Madonna, Snoop Dogg, and a host of others vied rhetorically to slice apart, shoot, beat up, cage, behead, and blow up the president.

“Left wing social media and mainstream journalism spread sensational lies about supposed maniacal Trump supporters in MAGA hats. They constructed fantasies that veritable white racists were now liberated to run amuck insulting and beating up people of color as they taunted the poor and victimized minorities with vicious Trump sloganeering – even as the Covington farce and now the even more embarrassing Jussie Smollett charade evaporated without apologies from the media and progressive merchants of such hate.”

During the 2016 election, “the Obama Department of Justice warped the Clinton email scandal investigation, from Bill Clinton’s secret meeting on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, to unethical immunity given to the unveracious Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, to James Comey’s convoluted predetermined treatment of “likely winner” Clinton, and to DOJ’s Bruce Ohr’s flagrant conflict of interests in relation to Fusion GPS,” Hanson wrote.

“About a dozen FBI and DOJ grandees have now resigned, retired, been fired, or reassigned for unethical and likely illegal behavior – and yet have not faced criminal indictments. The reputation of the FBI as venerable agency is all but wrecked. Its administrators variously have libeled the Trump voters, expressed hatred for Trump, talked of “insurance policies” in ending the Trump candidacy, and inserted informants into the Trump campaign.

“The former Obama directors of the CIA and National Intelligence, with security clearances intact, hit the television airways as paid ‘consultants’ and almost daily accused the sitting president of Russian collusion and treason – without cross-examination or notice that both previously had lied under oath to Congress (and did so without subsequent legal exposure), and both were likely knee-deep in the dissemination of the Steele dossier among Obama administration officials.”

Hanson continued: “John Brennan’s CIA likely helped to spread the Fusion GPS dossier among elected and administrative state officials. Some in the NSC in massive and unprecedented fashion requested the unmasking of surveilled names of Trump subordinates, and then illegally leaked them to the press.

“The FISA courts, fairly or not, are now mostly discredited, given they either were willingly or naively hoodwinked by FBI and DOJ officials who submitted as chief evidence for surveillance on American citizens, an unverified dossier – without disclosure that the bought campaign hit-piece was paid for by Hillary Clinton, authored by a discredited has-been British agent, relied on murky purchased Russian sources, and used in circular fashion to seed news accounts of supposed Trump misbehavior.”

The “Crown Jewel” of the coup, Hanson noted, “was the appointment of special counsel Robert Muller to discover supposed 2016 Trump-Russian election collusion. Never has any special investigation been so ill-starred from its conception.”

Mueller’s team “soon discovered there was no Trump-Russian 2016 election collusion – and yet went ahead to leverage Trump campaign subordinates on process crimes in hopes of finding some culpability in Trump’s past 50-year business, legal, and tax records.”

While it has failed to prove “collusion,” the Mueller probe “succeeded brilliantly in two ways,” Hanson wrote.

“The ‘counterintelligence’ investigation subverted two years of the Trump presidency by constant leaks that Trump soon would be indicted, jailed, disgraced, or impeached. As a result, Trump’s stellar economic and foreign policy record would never earn fifty percent of public support.

“Second, Mueller’s pre-emptive attacks offered an effective offensive defense for the likely felonious behavior of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Peter Strzok, and a host of others. While the Mueller lawyers threatened to destroy the lives of bit players like Jerome Corsi, George Papadopoulos, and Roger Stone, they de facto provided exemption to a host of the Washington hierarchy who had lied under oath, obstructed justice, illegally leaked to the press, unmasked and leaked names of surveilled Americans, and misled federal courts under the guise of a ‘higher loyalty’ to the cause of destroying Donald J. Trump.”

Hanson concluded: “Shame on all these failed conspirators and their abettors, and may these immoral people finally earn a long deserved legal and moral reckoning.”

LIMBAUGH: FBI TRIED TO PLANT RUSSIA-LINKED INFORMANTS IN TRUMP CAMPAIGN TO PROVE COLLUSION

Randy DeSoto  The Western Journal     March 30, 2019

https://www.westernjournal.com/limbaugh-fbi-tried-plant-russia-linked-informants-trump-campaign-prove-collusion/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=conservative-brief-WJ&utm_campaign=dailypm&utm_content=western-journal

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Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh alleged the FBI actively tried to place informants with Russian ties in the Trump campaign, so the plants could then be used to prove collusion with Moscow.

“This was not an investigation, this was a coup,” Limbaugh asserted on Fox News’ “Hannity” on Thursday night.

The conservative icon pointed to a passage in Attorney General Williams Barr’s summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report released earlier this week, which noted the Trump campaign turned down entreaties from those with Russia contacts.

Barr’s summary specifically stated, “The special counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

Limbaugh argued the offers were actually being generated by the FBI itself for the purpose of ensnaring the campaign in a collusion trap.

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“What happened is the FBI attempted to plant their own informants on the Trump campaign,” he told host Sean Hannity. “One of them named Stefan Halper, a Cambridge professor, MI-6 UK, they tried to get him hired in a foreign policy advisory role during the campaign and, fortunately after interviewing him, didn’t hire him.”

“If he had been hired, and they tried to get two more people, if they had been hired, here’s is what they would have done: They would have started communicating with Russia agents they know, and then there would have been the collusion that the FBI was trying to create,” said Limbaugh.

“This is worse than anybody was led to believe it is,” the commentator concluded.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board found Halper’s involvement as an informant in the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation troubling in an Op-Ed published last May.

“Multiple media sources have now confirmed that American academic Stefan Halper is the ‘top secret’ informant the FBI asked to sidle up to Trump campaign officials in 2016. Some questions follow: Who asked Mr. Halper to keep tabs on the Trump officials, and when and why?”

The piece noted that Halper reached out to Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.

Organizers of the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar in Great Britain, in which Halper participated, paid for Page’s round-trip airfare from the U.S. to attend the mid-July 2016 event.

Another noteworthy participant was former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, whose time at the intelligence agency overlapped with Trump dossier author Christopher Steele. Steele served as head of the Russia desk for MI6.

Dearlove told The Washington Post that Steele’s reputation was “superb,” according to The Journal.

RELATED: Limbaugh: Mueller Investigation a ‘Cover-Up,’ Meant To ‘Distract Everybody’s Attention’

“Perhaps all of this is a crazy coincidence, but House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes is right to investigate,” the editorial board wrote at the time.

The Daily Caller investigative correspondent Chuck Ross reported that Halper contacted Papadopoulos in September 2016, inviting him to fly to London and offering him $3,000 to write a foreign policy paper.

When they met, sources familiar with Papadopoulos’s version of their meetings “said Halper randomly asked Papadopoulos whether he knew about Democratic National Committee emails that had been hacked and leaked by Russians,” Ross wrote.

Halper then “grew agitated and pressed Papadopoulos on the topic,” when the campaign adviser said he had no knowledge of it.

Do you agree with Rush Limbaugh’s assertions about the FBI?

The FBI informant’s assistant, Azra Turk, also brought up Russians and emails over drinks as she “flirted heavily” with the then-28-year-old Papadopoulos, a source told Ross.

Additionally, Halper reached out to Trump campaign consultant Sam Clovis during this timeframe, offering his own foreign policy expertise to the campaign.

“Halper and Dearlove were in the news in December 2016 when they threatened to resign from the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar over what they said w       ere pervasive Russian ties,” Ross reported.

Trump tweeted in May 2018, “Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president.”

He added, “It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a ‘hot’ Fake News story. If true — all time biggest political scandal!”

TRUMP’S LAW OF DIMINISHING RETURNS

 DAVID M. WEINBERG  Jerusalem Post   March 29, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Trumps-law-of-diminishing-returns-585100

The usual gang of American Mideast experts have been quick to criticize Trump.

US President Donald Trump’s recognition this week of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights has mega-important implications for Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy of the future.

The landmark decision asserts the law of diminishing returns: Arabs who refuse to make peace with Israel lose rights and assets as time goes forward. Mahmoud Abbas: Take notice.

Papa Hafez Assad and Baby Bashar Assad had opportunity after opportunity over 50 years to cut a peace deal with Israel that would have secured Syrian sovereignty over the Golan. Even after Israel formally annexed the territory in 1981, and even after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took office in 1996, the Assads could have struck a deal. But they backed away each time. Then the Alawite regime crumbled in bloody civil war and the Iranians moved in. And now, relinquishing the Golan would be an insane Israeli move.

All along, it was doubtful that the French-colonialist construct called Syria had any greater claim to the Golan Heights than Israel did – historically, culturally or in geopolitical terms. But there was a formula called “land for peace” which gained international currency, and which might have worked in favor of the Assad regime – had it been willing to make peace. But the Assads preferred cold war; the “land for peace” construct grew moldy, and it eventually became irrelevant.

To Trump’s everlasting credit, he has now effectively jettisoned the “land for peace” construct, and instead applied raw political logic: Having forfeited many opportunities for peace and having lost any moral legitimacy as a state actor, Syria deserves nothing. Conversely, Israel deserves security and diplomatic justice. Israel deserves the Golan.

The usual gang of American Mideast experts have been quick to criticize Trump. The Golan move “signs the death warrant for Jared Kushner’s long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian peace plan,” barked Tamara Cofman Wittes of the Brookings Institution. “This jeopardizes the administration’s own peace plan,” warned Richard Haas of the Council of Foreign Relations, and Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute.  

These experts have it exactly backwards! Trump’s bold Golan declaration enormously improves the chances for eventual Palestinian-Israeli peace because it puts Abbas on notice: Deal or lose.

You see, for more than two decades since the advent of the Oslo process, a dangerous dynamic has been in place. The Palestinians walked away from the negotiating table again and again, and somehow the cost to Israel of a deal went up and up. The Palestinian Authority paid no price for its rejectionism, while Israel was expected to pay an ever-steeper price for engaging and satisfying the Palestinians. 

This was the case in every round of negotiation: Oslo I, Oslo II, Wye, Camp David, Taba, Annapolis and the Kerry rounds. Each time, Israel was expected to concede more and more. Washington pressured Israel to constantly reward Abbas for coming to, and staying at, the negotiating table. This fed Palestinian appetites, and allowed Abbas to continually blackmail the US and Israel for “sweeteners” (like the release of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli jails) and concessions (40%, then 80%, then 92%, then 95%, then 97% of the West Bank land mass, etc.).

Each time, the Palestinians pocketed Israeli concessions without willingness on their part to compromise on concrete issues, then crashed the talks or used Hamas to doom the talks while running to international institutions to blame Israel, and then broke almost every previous commitment of their own.

As such, Palestinian demands haven’t moderated over the years; they have hardened and radicalized, fed by a steady diet of expectations inflated by the Clinton and Obama administrations and the European Union. Backed by the sacred “land for peace” principle, the diplomatic dynamic always worked against Israel. 

Until now.

NOW, SAYS the Trump administration, we’re going to approach Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy differently, applying new rules and a healthier dynamic.

First, America no longer worships at the altar of the 50-year-old “land for peace” recipe. Peace and prosperity are their own rewards. As for land, well, let’s look at what arrangements are fair, realistic and sustainable in the current situation. There is nothing holy about the 1949 armistice line (the “Green Line”).

Second, America will reasonably apply the law of diminishing returns, meaning that those who aren’t willing to compromise will lose. If Abbas doesn’t engage on Trump’s so-called “deal of the century” and thinks that he can hold out for a better deal imposed on Israel by a more pro-Palestinian American administration in the future... think again!

Time won’t stand still. Like Assad’s regime, Abbas’s “Authority” risks losing all moral and political legitimacy as a semi-state actor if it persists with horrible policies like “pay-for-slay” (incentivizing terrorism against Israel), attempts to criminalize Israel in international institutions, or refusing to engage in negotiations toward a levelheaded compromise with Israel.

As a result, the Trump administration is liable to apply the Golan precedent to the West Bank. It could recognize Israeli sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria (say, the broad Jerusalem to Jericho envelope and the Jordan Valley, or most of Area C) – or it may dial-back from support for Palestinian independence altogether and instead re-invest Jordan with tutelage over parts of the West Bank.

In short, the aspects of Palestinian sovereignty in some parts of Judea and Samaria that might be available now to the Palestinian Authority in a deal with Israel won’t necessarily be obtainable in several years’ time. Abbas better hurry up and pony up, or he will encounter the very painful cost of missed opportunity.

The Trump administration’s reversing of the long-deleterious global political dynamic regarding Israel and the Palestinians is supremely valuable. It transforms the Mideast diplomatic playing field. It creates pressure for forward momentum and real progress by intimating that time works against Palestinian interests.

I am hoping that Trump’s peace plan goes one step further. Whatever ideas are presented in the plan regarding borders, I think it is imperative that America push back against Palestinian denial of Jewish history in Jerusalem, as well as the Wakf Islamic religious trust’s violent and outrageous shenanigans on the Temple Mount. 

The plan should insist on Jewish prayer rights on Har Habayit, (the Temple Mount). This will do justice to the Jewish people, and willy-nilly force Palestinian recognition of the Jewish people’s ancient ties to the holy site and to the Holy Land.

Jewish prayer on the site of the First and Second Temples (and not just beneath the ruins of those temples, outside the Mount’s external retaining barrier known as the Western Wall) can be facilitated without disrespecting Islam.

One possibility is a time-sharing agreement at the site, like the prayer arrangements that apply in Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs. Alternatively, a modest synagogue could be established on the fringes of the vast and mostly unused Temple Mount plaza in a way that doesn’t overshadow the two large Islamic structures on the Mount or undermine the several gargantuan Muslim prayer vaults underground.   

Call this a law of increasing returns: Fueling reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians by tackling unalterable truths and facing the inevitable.

The writer is vice president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, jiss.org.il. His personal site is davidmweinberg.com.

MUELLER’S PROBE COMES AT A COST:

LOST FAITH IN THE JUSTICE SYSTEM

Brett Velicovich  Town Hall   Mar 29, 2019 

https://townhall.com/columnists/brettvelicovich/2019/03/29/muellers-probe-comes-at-a-cost-lost-faith-in-the-justice-system-n2543967?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=03/30/2019&bcid=9930c656b2212929c884960baf64bc5a&recip=26163198

Robert Mueller’s investigation lasted nearly two years, but it will take far longer than that to restore faith in America’s justice system after this blatant attempt to turn the FBI and Department of Justice into political weapons.

Attorney General William Barr summarized the core findings of the Mueller probe in a letter to Congress on Sunday, revealing that the FBI found no collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government.

"[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities," the Special Counsel concluded, as quoted by Barr.  

Notably, the Attorney General also revealed the jaw-dropping scale of the investigation, explaining that Mueller “employed 19 lawyers who were assisted by a team of approximately 40 FBI agents, intelligence forensic accountants, and other professional staff.” 

“The Special Counsel issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants, obtained more than 230 orders for communication records, issued almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers, made 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses,” Barr revealed.

This mind-blowing effort didn’t come cheap. According to numerous estimates, the entire probe cost taxpayers around $30 million — a stunning price tag for a baseless witch hunt that was never going to reveal evidence of collusion because it didn’t actually take place.

For that reason alone, even though the Mueller probe ultimately vindicated President Trump and his campaign, it was an unacceptable assault on our criminal justice system that has completely eviscerated the American people’s faith in both our judicial institutions and the FBI. 

In other words, the cloud of suspicion that was hovering over the President’s head is now circling over the FBI headquarters. Mueller’s investigation may have vindicated Donald Trump, but nothing can rectify the gross injustices perpetrated against him, his associates, and the American people from the very earliest days of this presidency.

By perpetuating an unsubstantiated myth about President Trump and calling for a formal investigation, the Democrats sought to undermine the results of the 2016 election in close coordination with partisan actors in the FBI. The bureau's leadership should have objected vociferously to this injustice, but it did nothing.

The Democratic Party, for its part, shouldn’t have been allowed to use the FBI as its puppet, and the FBI should have resisted calls to launch an investigation based on a partisan myth. The fact that both were allowed to happen is a dark stain on the FBI’s reputation, one that can only be washed out after the bureau spends years compiling a new record of scrupulous honesty and political neutrality.

Notably, the bureau already had a credibility problem in its senior ranks even before Mueller’s findings were revealed — according to a poll published earlier in the month, 50 percent of Americans believed that Mueller’s probe was a “witch-hunt” intended to attack the President. Only 47 percent of respondents disagreed.

And where was the FBI investigation into the blatant sabotage of the President, not only during these years of proceedings but also during the recent North Korea talks? Sabotage is defined as the deliberate effort to obstruct (something), especially for political advantage. It’s a major offense, especially within intelligence circles, and those at the upper echelons of Congress who hold security clearances should know better. The FBI ran a counter-intelligence investigation into the President’s actions but has neglected to look into the potential sabotage of the North Korea summit meeting by congressional Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee who appeared to coordinate the Cohen hearings specifically to distract attention from the President’s efforts to avert nuclear war.

Sadly, and to the detriment of the many great FBI agents I’ve worked with over the years, the senior leaders involved in Trump’s investigation have done tremendous damage to the FBI’s reputation for many years to come.

Don’t be surprised if that’s the high point for the FBI’s reputation for many years to come.

Mueller’s investigation cost far more than just $30 million and nearly two years of partisan attacks — it also cost us our faith in the justice system.

Brett Velicovich is a U.S. Army veteran and author of “Drone Warrior: An Elite Soldier's Inside Account of the Hunt for America's Most Dangerous Enemies”

IN SUBPOENA FIGHT, TRUMP LAWYER TOLD MUELLER: 'YOU WANT TO DO IT, YOU'VE GOT YOURSELF A WAR 

The evidence showed there was simply nothing to the theory of Trump-Russia collusion.

by Byron York  | March 28, 2019 

Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller completed his investigation without ever interviewing President Trump. The two sides wrangled over the issue for much of the Mueller investigation before Trump finally agreed to answer questions in writing. Now, in a new podcast interview, a former lawyer for the president, John Dowd, said the wrangling became so contentious that he threatened Mueller with "war" if the special counsel subpoenaed the president.

Dowd, who was Trump's lawyer from June 2017 to March 2018, said Mueller was hampered by two daunting problems. The first was that Mueller could not establish that a crime had occurred — that there had been conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia to fix the 2016 election. Indeed, the Mueller report, as quoted in Attorney General William Barr's summary of its findings, said "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities" and "the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference."

Mueller's second problem, as Dowd and the Trump team saw it, was that precedent from a Clinton-era independent counsel investigation, the Mike Espy case, held that to overcome a presidential claim of privilege, a prosecutor had to show that the president's testimony would provide evidence that was directly relevant to a criminal matter, and that that evidence was not available from any other source. Dowd argued that the White House had cooperated so extensively with Mueller, had provided him so much material that helped explain the president's actions, including contemporaneous accounts of what Trump said in private conversations, that Mueller could not effectively claim that he had no other source of information.

Mueller and the president's team went back and forth on the question of a presidential interview for quite a while. "[Mueller] said, 'Well, John, I need to know what was in the president's head,'" Dowd recalled. "I said you already do, you know in real time."

The conflict dominated a difficult March 5, 2018, meeting. "I asked, what's the president's status?" Dowd said. "[Mueller said] he's a witness-slash-subject. And I said, you mean he has no exposure? He said that's right. So I knew then for sure, by inference, that [Mueller] had nothing to proceed on in the collusion and conspiracy area."

Still, Mueller said he needed to interview Trump, and that he might subpoena the president.

"He dropped that on the table, and I reacted very strongly," Dowd recalled. "I said go ahead, you're threatening this president with a subpoena. It's doubtful whether the [Justice Department] Office of Legal Counsel would have approved such a thing. ... But beside that, I said, well go ahead. I want to hear what you tell the court is your basis to do it when you don't have a crime, you've just told me [Trump] doesn't have any exposure, so what are you going to tell a U.S. district judge? Because we're going to move to quash this thing. And Jay Sekulow and his team were ready to do it ... We're ready to do it if you want to do it."

"Then he backed off, he said don't get upset," Dowd continued.

"I said, look, what basis do you have to do it? We're not afraid of a grand jury subpoena. You want to do it, you've got yourself a war and you're going to lose it. There's no way [Mueller] could win that. I think he concluded that, even with all the firepower he had on his side, I think they knew they couldn't do it. I think they thought they might scare us into it, but we were not going to go there."

The subpoena never came.

Turning to today's situation, Dowd said he was favorably impressed with Barr's summary of Mueller's key findings. But he felt Barr should have included a description of the Trump White House's cooperation with Mueller. As an example, Dowd pointed to notes taken by Annie Donaldson, a top aide to Don McGahn, then the White House counsel. Donaldson was present at critical meetings with the president and McGahn, and also Reince Priebus, then the White House chief of staff. She took detailed notes of the meetings, including what the president said. If she was not in the meeting, McGahn would go back to his office and dictate to Donaldson what had taken place.

All those notes were turned over to Mueller. "I challenge anyone to find a president that was so fully cooperative or transparent, and I must say particularly the intimate notes of his counsel and other senior staff that we produced," Dowd said. "Annie Donaldson's notes will take you 15 hours to read through them. They are the real-time comments and thoughts of the president in conference with Don McGahn and other lawyers at various times, and chief of staff Priebus, and other people. It was remarkable that that material was produced."

Dowd was well-known as an advocate of cooperation with the Mueller probe, believing it would help Mueller finish his job quickly. In that, he was disappointed. Dowd hoped Mueller would be done by the end of 2017 — "By early December, he had exhausted all of the evidence and the witnesses" — but the investigation dragged on until March 2019. Still, Dowd's cooperation policy yielded other benefits. Most significantly, it was a powerful argument against the accusation that Trump obstructed justice. "How could you possibly think this guy obstructed when he was so cooperative?" Dowd asked.

Yet Mueller appears to have left the obstruction question open. The Mueller report, as quoted by Barr, said the obstruction investigation raised "difficult issues," adding, "While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him." Dowd said he was perplexed by Mueller's decision not to make a decision.

The bottom line is that Dowd is happy the investigation is over but unhappy it ever started. Despite the media frenzy, he said, the evidence showed there was simply nothing to the theory of Trump-Russia collusion. And yet the special counsel investigation went on for 674 days. Even now, the accusations of collusion and obstruction are still flying. "It's probably the biggest fraud ever committed against the people of the United States," said Dowd.

The Trump-Russia collusion hall of shame

By Marc A. Thiessen The Washington Post

 The Trump-Russia collusion hall of shame
 
The news that special counsel Robert Mueller "did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government" has left a lot of people in Washington with a lot of explaining to do.
Put aside the rogues' gallery of reporters and pundits who assured us that Donald Trump had conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the presidency. What is most insidious are those who did have access to classified intelligence and led Americans to believe that they had seen what we could not: actual evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.

Recall that in 2016, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., released a letter to FBI Director James Comey claiming the FBI had proof of Trump-Russia collusion. "In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government," Reid declared. When asked what information Reid was referring to, a spokesman said, "There have been classified briefings on this topic. That is all I can say."

Trump has called for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., to resign. He is absolutely correct. Schiff repeatedly said that his committee had dug up "plenty of evidence of collusion or conspiracy." In March 2017, he said on "Meet the Press," "I can't go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now" and last May he told ABC that Trump's Russia conspiracy is of "a size and scope probably beyond Watergate."

Schiff is a disgrace. But he is not alone.
Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., a member of the Intelligence Committee, said, "In our investigation, we saw strong evidence of collusion" and declared Trump an agent "working on behalf of the Russians." House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., claimed, "It's clear that the campaign colluded, and there's a lot of evidence of that."

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a member of the Judiciary Committee, assured us last year that "the evidence is pretty clear that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians."

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Intelligence Committee, said, "There is no longer a question of whether this campaign sought to collude with a hostile foreign power to subvert America's democracy."

And recently, the committee's vice chairman, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., declared that "enormous amounts of evidence" exist of collusion between Trump and Russia and that "there's no one that could factually say there's not plenty of evidence of collaboration or communications between Trump Organization and Russians." Except for Mueller, of course.

These comments by people with access to intelligence were shameful. But the most sinister of all is John Brennan, who used his authority as former CIA director to suggest that Trump was a traitor and a compromised Russian asset. After Trump's Helsinki summit, Brennan declared "he is wholly in the pocket of Putin." When challenged by Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press," Brennan stood by his assessment. "I called [Trump's] behavior treasonous, which is to betray one's trust and aid and abet the enemy, and I stand very much by that claim."

This month, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell told Brennan this investigation was "developing while you were still on the job" and asked, "Did you see enough at that stage to believe ... that that would result in indictments?" Brennan replied, "I thought at the time there was going to be individuals who were going to have issues with the Department of Justice. Yes."

In a New York Times op-ed, he wrote that "Trump's claims of no collusion are, in a word, hogwash." Now, Brennan feigns contrition. "I don't know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was," he said, adding, "I am relieved that it's been determined there was not a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government over our election."

Hogwash. He wanted it to be true, and he relied on his CIA credentials to convince Americans that it was. That is a violation of the public trust. Trump was right to revoke Brennan's security clearance. He is among the worst of the worst, the Trump-Russia collusion hall of shame. We have long since passed the point where Americans expect objectivity from the press. But we should hold our elected and appointed officials handling sensitive national security issues to a higher standard.