The Ben Rhodes Ally and Muslim Brotherhood Promoter defending McMaster

By Daniel Greenfield, FPM

POSTING NOTE:As every detail comes into play it appears more likely that the "Russian collusion" allegations are another Ben Rhodes manufactured scenario.

One of the central criticisms of McMaster is that his coup is purging Trump allies while keeping Obama holdovers. The man at the center of the holdover controversy is Ben Rhodes.

Rhodes has been compared to Obama’s Goebbels. A malicious smear artist with a talent for gaming the media. And backing Iran’s genocidal push for nuclear capabilities.

There have been multiple accusations made that under McMaster, Ben Rhodes has NSC access, and that those holdovers who report to him, have been protected by McMaster.

From Caroline Glick

He allows anti-Israel, pro-Muslim Brotherhood, pro-Iran Obama people like Robert Malley to walk around the NSC and tell people what to do and think. He has left Ben (reporters know nothing about foreign policy and I lied to sell them the Iran deal) Rhodes’ and Valerie Jarrett’s people in place.

From Babbin at the Spectator…

There are four people in positions of responsibility in the NSC who have been identified by a source as people who had been “direct reports” to Rhodes — i.e., who worked under his direct supervision — who McMaster has protected and retained. They are: Abigail Grace (Special Assistant), Fernando Cutz (NSC Director for South America), Andrea Hall (NSC Senior Director for WMD, Terrorism & Threat Reduction), and Merry Lin (?Director for Global and Asia Economics).

Ben Rhodes has claimed that the attacks on McMaster are Russian propaganda. But the truly furious effort has come from one of his former allies, Michael McFaul.

McFaul worked with Rhodes at the NSC. He was the author of Advancing Democracy Abroad, a book which, among other things, proposed the inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood in “democracy” and argued that their organizations were quite different than Islamic terrorist groups. This was one of the great obsessions of Obama Inc. And PSD-11, the Obama directive which remains secret and whose investigation was supposedly one of the factors that led to the purge of Higgins at the NSC, is closely linked to it.

According to Michael McFaul, who worked with Rhodes in the National Security Council and was later named the American ambassador to Russia, Rhodes “became, first in the speechwriting process, and later, in the heat of the Arab Spring, a central figure” in the Obama administration. “Because of his close personal relationship with the president,” added McFaul, “Ben can always make policy through the speeches and statements made by President Obama.”

He was also involved in planning out the post-Gaddafi Libya after Obama’s illegal invasion in support of Islamist terrorists. A plot that led directly to the Benghazi massacre.

Here was the scene after Egypt fell.

But Rhodes’ camp carried the day. Obama told Mubarak he had to go, and on February 11 the Egyptian stepped down. Afterward, a group of White House aides—including Rhodes and Denis McDonough, then deputy national security adviser and now Obama’s chief of staff—gathered for an impromptu party in the office of Michael McFaul, Obama’s top Russia aide. They celebrated the historic moment with beer and vodka. “It was a euphoric night for us, no doubt,” says McFaul. But his academic background in democracy issues gave him an understanding of the many ways things might go wrong. Amid the celebration, he recalls, “I was nervous as hell.”

Now here’s McFaul furiously defending McMaster on Twitter. Because of his background, McFaul had been enlisted to push the Obama coup’s Russia conspiracy meme.

And then the McMaster stuff began popping up.

It certainly is interesting that a Ben Rhodes ally would invest this much effort in protecting the man who is protecting Ben Rhodes’ allies at the NSC. While purging anyone who would threaten them.

Seymour Hersh: Spy chiefs invented Russia-collusion story

Garth Kant 

MIL-ED Publication notes:

1.     We have not determined whether any of the  remarks attributed to Seymour Hersh were actually voiced by Seymour Hersh.

2.      However, the points raised  in this article are valid. The questions raised in this article are of extreme national importance:. Close public/intelligence scrutiny should be given to exactly who served on the team. Who selected them and how were they selected. How were their conclusions vetted and tested. And by whom. Etc. etc. 

3.    Other related articles previously published by MIL-ED included:

 a.Creators of the “Trump Dossier” were Paid Russian Agent

[Original article by  By Onan Coca  July 28, 2017 …http://constitution.com/democrat-backed-creators-trump-dossier-paid-russian-agents/] 

b.With Robert Mueller, FBI gets second chance to inspect 'hacked' DNC computers - Washington Times by Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Thursday, July 27, 2017 

c.The Untouchable John Brennan Gregory D. Johnsen  BuzzFeed News World Correspondent  4-23-2015 https://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/how-cia-director-john-brennan-became-americas-spy-and-obamas?utm_term=.hcMR4dbo3#.ciWMk3zdb 

d. Russia Didn't Interfere In U.S. Election To Help Trump, But To Destabilize America  by Paul Roderick Gregory Published Jewish World Review July 18, 2017  Read more at http://jewishworldreview.com/0717/gregory071817.php3#8eDJ1rSAbOls7ujy.99

Famous journalist claims they lied to Obama and lied about Trump

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh tells all about intel, fake news

CAUTION: This interview contains obscenities and foul language. Listener discretion is advised.

(Listen to the audio of investigative reporter Seymour Hersh blasting intelligence officials for fabricating the story that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. WARNING: The interview contains obscenities and foul language. Listener discretion is advised.)

WASHINGTON – The entire Russia collusion story was a fiction made up by intelligence chiefs who lied about President Trump, and lied to President Obama and the media, according to a person on a just-released audio recording who is almost certainly legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

Further, the person who recorded the audio is almost certainly financier Ed Butowsky, who hired private investigator Rod Wheeler to investigate the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich last July.

Wheeler filed a defamation lawsuit against Butowsky and Fox News on Tuesday over a story the network retracted about the investigation.

The text of Wheeler’s lawsuit described a conversation between Hersh and Butowsky in which the reporter said: “I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. And I know this person is unbelievably accurate and careful. He’s a very high level guy.”

 Judging by a report in the Washington Post, the conversation happened during, or before, February.

The audio was first posted late Tuesday afternoon on a site called Big League Politics then went viral after it was linked on Twitter by WikiLeaks.

Hersh, himself, acknowledged speaking with Butkowsy, during an NPR interview Monday in which he referred to the Seth Rich angle as gossip and said Butowsky “took two and two and made 45 out of it.”

But Hersh did not disavow what he said about the Russia collusion narrative.

On the recording, the reporter called the entire story that the Trump presidential campaign and transition team colluded with Russia “a Brennan operation.”

Hersh accused former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and current NSA Director Michael Rogers of peddling “disinformation” and misleading Obama and the press.

And he added, “Trump’s not wrong to think they all f—ing lied about him.”

Hersh suggested Rogers falsely told the press that American intelligence agencies even knew who in the Russian military intelligence service “leaked it,” in apparent reference to the hacked Democratic emails that embarrassed the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign.

He also dismissively called Brennan an “a—hole,” Rogers a “f—ing moron” and Clapper “sort of a better guy but not a rocket scientist.”

Hersh ascribed a simple motive to the subterfuge by the top spies: They wanted to keep their jobs by assuring Clinton won the presidential election.

“With Trump they’re gone. You know, they’re done – they’re going to live on their pensions, they’re not going to make it.”

Hersh also explained why the story came to dominate the news cycle, portraying his colleagues in the establishment media as, essentially, too gullible.

“I worked at the New York Times for years and they have smart guys but they are totally beholden on sources. If the president or the head of the (unintelligible) tells them something they actually believe it,” he said.

And, speaking of those highly placed sources, he said, “These guys run the f—ing Times.”

Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for exposing the My Lai massacre and has become one of the nation’s best-known and most-accomplished investigative reporters.

According to his biography in the New Yorker, in addition to Hersh’s Pulitzer, his journalism and publishing awards include five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes for investigative reporting.

Hersh made on-the-record comments critical of the Russia collusion story to The Intercept on Jan. 25, flatly saying he did not believe the assessment by the intelligence community that Russian President Vladimir Putin orchestrated a hacking campaign designed to elect Trump.

He also blasted the major media for uncritically accepting the claims by Obama’s intelligence officials as facts.

“The way they (the media) behaved on the Russia stuff was outrageous,” Hersh said two days after Trump was inaugurated. “They were just so willing to believe stuff.”

Hersh told the Intercept that if he had been covering the story, “I would have made Brennan into a buffoon. A yapping buffoon in the last few days. Instead, everything is reported seriously.”

The reporter zeroed in on questionable aspects of the intelligence assessment that would become highly relevant when Brennan and Clapper finally testified before congressional committees months after the inauguration of Trump.

“What does an assessment mean?,” asked Hersh. “It’s not a national intelligence estimate. If you had a real estimate, you would have five or six dissents. One time they said 17 agencies all agreed. Oh really? The Coast Guard and the Air Force — they all agreed on it?”

He continued, “And it was outrageous and nobody did that story. An assessment is simply an opinion. If they had a fact, they’d give it to you. An assessment is just that. It’s a belief.”

Hersh’s critique of the flimsiness of the intelligent assessment parallels the analysis made by a prominent former CIA analyst after Clapper revealed during a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on May 8, that it was not true that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies had compiled, and agreed with, the findings.

 Clapper not only revealed that just three agencies, the NSA, FBI and CIA, were involved in the assessment.

He also revealed that those agencies did not do the assessment themselves.

The analysis and conclusion were made by an irregular and hand-picked panel of what were called experts, who actually may have been, according to former CIA officer Fred Fleitz, highly politicized.

Fleitz served in U.S. national security positions for 25 years at the CIA, DIA, Department of State and the House Intelligence Committee staff.

As someone intimately familiar with the inner workings of the intelligence community, Fleitz penned an article for Fox News on May 12, that spelled out what really happened.

He had written previously that when the U.S. Intelligence Community issued an ‘Intelligence Community Assessment’ (ICA) on January 6, 2017, that found Russia deliberately interfered in the 2016 presidential election to benefit Trump’s candidacy, he “was suspicious because it reached unusually clear judgments on a politically explosive issue with no dissenting views.”

Fleitz was then surprised to hear Clapper explain in his May testimony that two dozen or so “seasoned experts” were “handpicked” from the contributing agencies and drafted the ICA “under the aegis of his former office” (the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.)

Wrote Fleitz, “This process drastically differed from the Intelligence Community’s normal procedures.”

Describing just how unusual that was, he said, “Hand-picking a handful of analysts from just three intelligence agencies to write such a controversial assessment went against standing rules to vet such analyses throughout the Intelligence Community within its existing structure.”

Furthermore, “The idea of using hand-picked intelligence analysts selected through some unknown process to write an assessment on such a politically sensitive topic carries a strong stench of politicization.”

Fleitz also noted that former FBI Director James Comey had testified that the report’s conclusion of Russian interference was based on logic, not evidence.

“So we now know,” surmised the former CIA officer, “this was a subjective judgment made by a hand-picked group of intelligence analysts.”

“One has to ask how these hand-picked analysts were picked. Who picked them? Who was excluded?”

Fleitz called it a major problem that “the process gave John Brennan, CIA’s hyper-partisan former director, enormous influence over the drafting of the ICA.”

“Given Brennan’s scathing criticism of Mr. Trump before and after the election, he should have had no role whatsoever in the drafting of this assessment. Instead, Brennan probably selected the CIA analysts who worked on the ICA and reviewed and approved their conclusions.”

In other words, it seems Fleitz thought it not impossible that Brennan rigged the report to arrive at the conclusion he wanted.

Which makes Brennan’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on May 24, all the more relevant, because even though he testified he saw no evidence of collusion, the former CIA director admitted it was he who set in motion the FBI’s investigation into whether the Trump team colluded with the Russians.

Fleitz wants Congress to investigate the spies. He wrote:

“The unusual way that the January 6, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment was drafted raises major questions as to whether it was rigged by the Obama administration to produce conclusions that would discredit the election outcome and Mr. Trump’s presidency. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees therefore should add investigations of whether this ICA was politicized to their investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.”

McMaster Worked at Think Tank Backed by Soros-Funded Group that Helped Obama Sell Iran Nuclear Deal

Aaron Klein  Aug 6, 2017

From September 2006 to February 2017, McMaster is listed as a member of International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), where he served as consulting senior fellow.  The IISS describes itself as a “world-leading authority on global security, political risk and military conflict.”

The IISS has been supportive of the Obama administration-brokered 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, and the group has repeatedly hit back against charges that Tehran has violated the agreement.

McMaster himself has been accused of purging the National Security Council of hardliners on Iran, and he is seen as a leading proponent of the Iran nuclear accord within the Trump administration. He has reportedly urged the White House to recertify Iran’s compliance with the Iran nuclear deal.

IISS’s website contains a list of groups, corporations and government entities that provide funding to the think tank, including during the period of McMaster’s work there. Curiously missing from the page of donors, however, is the controversial Ploughshares Fund, a grantmaking group identified last year by the Obama White House as central in helping to market the Iran nuclear deal to the news media.

An archived version of IISS’s donors page lists Ploughshares as a donor.

 IISS is listed as a grantee for Iran issues in Ploughshares Fund’s budget report for 2016.

That report spotlights IISS as a grantee for Iran work done by Michael Elleman, IISS senior fellow for missile defense.

In a recent IISS analysis, Elleman cast doubt on charges that Iran and North Korea are working together on ballistic-missile development, claiming “there is little evidence to indicate the two regimes are engaged in deep missile-related collaboration, or pursuing joint-development programs.”

Joseph Cirincione, president of Ploughshares Fund, is listed as a member of IISS in his Georgetown University bio.

Soros-Funded Ploughshares Part of ‘Echo Chamber’ to Sell Obama’s Iran Deal

Ploughshares Fund is financed by Soros’ Open Society Institute.

The involvement of Ploughshares in selling the Iran agreement to the public was revealed in an extensive New York Times Magazine profile of Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, titled, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.” The article contains interviews with Rhodes and scores of top Obama administration officials.

Robert Malley, then a senior director at the National Security Council, expounded on the genesis and execution of the marketing plan to sell the Iran deal.

Malley explained to the Times that “experts” were utilized to create an “echo chamber” that disseminated administration claims about Iran to “hundreds of often-clueless reporters” in the news media.

Times author David Samuels wrote:

In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

Rhodes told Samuels that the marketing strategy took advantage of the “absence of rational discourse” and utilized outside groups, including Ploughshares.

When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he said. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.

Ploughshares says it has awarded hundreds of grants “whose aggregate value exceeded $60 million.”

A previous investigation by this reporter showed Ploughshares has partnered with a who’s-who of the radical left, including Code Pink, the pro-Palestinian J Street, United for Peace & Justice, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and Demos, a progressive economic advisory group where Obama’s controversial former green jobs czar, Van Jones, has served on the board.

The group says its mission is to support the “smartest minds and most effective organizations to reduce nuclear stockpiles, prevent new nuclear states, and increase global security.”

Ploughshares is in turn financed by Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Buffett Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Another Ploughshares donor is the Tides Foundation, which is one of the largest funders of the radical left. Tides is funded by Soros.

Ploughshares has donated to the Institute for Policy Studies, which calls for massive slashes in the U.S. defense budget.

It has also financed the International Crisis Group, a small organization that boasts George Soros and his son, Alexander, on its board and where Malley now works as vice president for public policy.

Ploughshares, McMaster and John Kerry

Last week, McMaster removed Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a Trump aide and Iran deal opponent, from the National Security Council in what the Jerusalem Post reported was a possible “sweep of Iran hard-liners.”

The Post reported on two other McMaster purges of Iran hardliners:

Cohen-Watnick’s removal comes after the revelation by The Atlantic on Wednesday of the dismissal of Rich Higgins, another Iran hawk who was the NSC’s director of strategic planning. Higgins was sacked for circulating a memo in which he alleged that there was a “Maoist” insurgency within and without the government of “globalists and Islamists.”

Also gone is Derek Harvey, who held the Middle East portfolio at the NSC, and who also was an Iran hawk, and who may assume another role in the administration. McMaster tapped Michael Bell, a retired army colonel who has a conventional career portfolio, to replace Harvey.

Speaking at a recent event held by Ploughshares Fund, former Secretary of State John Kerry implied that McMaster is the best bet at keeping the nuclear agreement alive, according to a Ploughshares Fund description of the June 5, 2017 event.

IISS, meanwhile, has supported the Iran nuclear agreement and has defended Tehran against reports it has violated tenets of the deal.

Last month, IISS featured a piece by Mark Fitzpatrick, chief of the think tank’s non-proliferation and nuclear policy program, titled, “Three strikes against claims that Iran is violating the nuclear accord.”

The IISS piece argued that “criticism of Iran’s conduct in relation to the 2015 nuclear deal does not withstand scrutiny,” and that the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the agreement “would not convince other parties to re-impose sanctions, but could trigger a global crisis.”

In June, the IISS’s Fitzpatrick opined that “Critics are wrong: Iran remains in compliance with nuclear accord.”

An IISS strategic comment paper, titled, “Trump’s erratic Middle East policy,” argued that Trump’s confrontational approach toward Iran is “unlikely to lend needed stability to the region.”

McMaster’s NSC coup against Trump purges critics of Islam and Obama…The National Security Council is becoming a national security threat.

By Daniel Greenfield, FPM

NOTE 1.     It is with very mixed feelings that we republish this article [McMaster’s NSC coup against Trump purges critics of Islam and Obama…The National Security Council is becoming a national security threat] by  Daniel Greenfield.

 Personally, we hold Gen. McMaster in the highest regard as a  distinguished soldier and as a patriot.We regard his actions as being dangerously flawed but we do not believe  that his intentions are anything but the best.

 However, the facts stated are correct and are alarming.

 So please read this article and mentally edit out those words  that attribute unpatriotic motivations to General McMaster. 

NOTE 2.    The intelligence claim  that Putin directly ordered the Russians to interfere in the US 2016 election [in favor of Donald Trump] is the "output" of a small joint FBI/CIA committee  consisting of members solely selected by James Comey and John Brennan working with Ben Rhodes,Jr. and Susan Rice,

 Only two agencies  that  accepted  this report with a "high degree of confidence" were the FBI and the CIA. The NSA reported a "moderate degree of confidence". The statement that this conclusion was  the unanimous conclusion of the entire intelligence community [all the US intelligence agencies] has since been withdrawn as being an inaccurate description…..

Read The Untouchable John Brennan byGregory D. Johnsen  BuzzFeed News World Correspondent  4-23-2015
https://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/how-cia-director-john-brennan-became-americas-spy-and-obamas?utm_term=.hcMR4dbo3#.ciWMk3zdb


Derek Harvey was a man who saw things coming. He had warned of Al Qaeda when most chose to ignore it. He had seen the Sunni insurgency rising when most chose to deny it.

The former Army colonel had made his reputation by learning the lay of the land. In Iraq that meant sleeping on mud floors and digging into documents to figure out where the threat was coming from.

It was hard to imagine anyone better qualified to serve as President Trump’s top Middle East adviser at the National Security Council than a man who had been on the ground in Iraq and who had seen it all.


Just like in Iraq, Harvey began digging at the NSC. He came up with a list of Obama holdovers who were leaking to the press. McMaster, the new head of the NSC, refused to fire any of them.

McMaster had a different list of people he wanted to fire. It was easy to make the list. Harvey was on it.

All you had to do was name Islamic terrorism as the problem and oppose the Iran Deal. If you came in with Flynn, you would be out. If you were loyal to Trump, your days were numbered.

And if you warned about Obama holdovers undermining the new administration, you were a target.

One of McMaster’s first acts at the NSC was to ban any mention of “Obama holdovers.” Not only did the McMaster coup purge Harvey, who had assembled the holdover list, but his biggest target was Ezra Watnick-Cohen, who had exposed the eavesdropping on Trump officials by Obama personnel.

Ezra Watnick-Cohen had provided proof of the Obama surveillance to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes. McMaster, however, was desperately working to fire him and replace him with Linda Weissgold. McMaster’s choice to replace Watnick-Cohen was the woman who helped draft the Benghazi talking points which blamed the Islamic terrorist attack on a video protest.

After protests by Bannon and Kushner, President Trump overruled McMaster. Watnick-Cohen stayed. For a while. Now Ezra Watnick-Cohen has been fired anyway.

According to the media, Watnick-Cohen was guilty of “anti-Muslim fervor” and “hardline views.” And there’s no room for anyone telling the truth about Islamic terrorism at McMaster’s NSC.

McMaster had even demanded that President Trump refrain from telling the truth about Islamic terrorism.

Another of his targets was Rich Higgins, who had written a memo warning of the role of the left in undermining counterterrorism. Higgins had served as a director for strategic planning at the NSC. He had warned in plain language about the threat of Islamic terrorism, of Sharia law, of the Hijrah colonization by Islamic migrants, of the Muslim Brotherhood, and of its alliance with the left as strategic threats.

Higgins had stood by Trump during the Khizr Khan attacks. And he had written a memo warning that “the left is aligned with Islamist organizations at local, national, and international levels” and that “they operate in social media, television, the 24-hour news cycle in all media and are entrenched at the upper levels of the bureaucracies.”

Like Harvey and Ezra Watnick-Cohen, Higgins had warned of an enemy within. And paid the price.

McMaster’s cronies had allegedly used the NSC’s email system to track down the source of the memo. The left and its useful idiots were indeed entrenched at the upper level of the bureaucracy.

Higgins was fired.

Like Harvey and Watnick-Cohen, Higgins had also become too dangerous to the Obama holdovers. Harvey had assembled a list of names and a plan to dismantle the Iranian nuclear deal. Watnick-Cohen had dug into the Obama surveillance of Trump officials. And Higgins had sought to declassify Presidential Study Directive 11. PSD-11 was the secret blueprint of Obama’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Pete Hoekstra, the former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, linked PSD-11 to the rise of ISIS and called for its declassification.

Replacing Harvey is Michael Bell. When the Washington Post needed someone to badmouth Dr. Gorka, they turned to Bell: the former chancellor of the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University.  Bell suggested that Dr. Gorka was an uneven scholar. And Dr. Gorka was accused of failing to incorporate other perspectives on Islam.

The pattern has never been hard to spot.

McMaster forced out K.T. McFarland from her role as Deputy National Security Advisor. Slotted in was Dina Habib-Powell.

McFarland was an Oxford and Cambridge grad who had worked at the Pentagon for the Reagan administration. Dina Habib-Powell had no national security background. She was an Egyptian-American immigrant and former Bush gatekeeper whose pals included Huma Abedin and Valerie Jarrett.

Powell, who has been described as the Republican Huma, said that Abedin “feels a deep responsibility to encourage more mutual understanding between her beliefs and culture and American culture.”

When visiting Egypt, Habib-Powell had assured the locals of how Bush, after September 11, “visited a mosque, took off his shoes and paid his respects.” “I see the president talk of Islam as a religion of peace, I see him host an iftar every year,” she gushed.

K.T. McFarland had written that “Global Islamist jihad is at war with all of Western civilization.”

It’s not hard to see why McMaster pushed out McFarland and elevated Habib-Powell.

Habib-Powell had attended the Iftar dinner with members of Muslim Brotherhood front groups. You can see her photographed at the American Task Force of Palestine gala. The ATFP was originally Rashid Khalidi’s American Committee on Jerusalem. She was there as a presenter at the Middle East Institute after a speech by Hanan Ashrawi. Her achievements under Bush included cultural exchanges with Iran, as well as cash for the Palestinian Authority and for Lebanon after the Hezbollah war with Israel.

While President Trump fights to restrict Muslim immigration, at his side is the woman who had once bragged on CNN, “Over 90% of student visas are now issued in under a week, and that is in the Middle East.”

But that is typical of the McMaster revamp of the NSC. It’s populated by swamp creatures who oppose the positions that President Trump ran on. And who are doing everything possible to undermine them.

President Trump promised a reset from Obama’s anti-Israel policies. McMaster picked Kris Bauman as the NSC’s point man on Israel. Bauman had defended Islamic terrorists and blamed Israel for the violence. He had urged pressure on Israel as the solution. Ideas like that fit in at McMaster’s NSC.

Meanwhile Derek Harvey, who had tried to halt Obama’s $221 million terror funding prize to the Palestinian Authority, was forced out.

This too is part of the pattern. As Caroline Glick has pointed out, the personnel being purged in the McMaster coup “are pro-Israel and oppose the Iran nuclear deal.”

When Adam Lovinger urged that “more attention be given to the threat of Iran and Islamic extremism,” his security clearance was revoked.  Robin Townley was forced out in the same way.

Meanwhile, McMaster sent a letter to Susan Rice, Obama’s former National Security Adviser, assuring her that the NSC would work with her to “allow you access to classified information.” He claimed that Rice’s continued access to classified information is “consistent with the national security interests of the United States.”

Why does Susan Rice, who is alleged to have participated in the Obama eavesdropping on Trump people, need access to classified information? What national security purpose is served by it?

The same national security purpose that is served by McMaster’s purge of anyone at the NSC who dares to name Islamic terrorism, who wants a tougher stance on Iran, and who asks tough questions.

And the purge of reformers and original thinkers is only beginning.

The latest reports say that McMaster has a list of enemies who will be ousted from the NSC. And when that is done, the NSC will be a purely Obama-Bush operation. The consensus will be that the Iran Deal must stay, that Islam has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, that we need to find ways to work with the aspirations of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that Israel must make concessions to terrorists.

If you loved the foreign policy that brought us 9/11, ISIS, and billions in funding to terrorists from Syria to Libya to the West Bank, you won’t be able to get enough of McMaster’s brand new NSC.

And neither will America’s enemies.

The swamp is overflowing. The National Security Council is becoming a national security threat.

President Bush was a good man. And he meant well. But he was surrounded by officials who lied to him. They filled his administration with appeasers and paraded Islamists through the Oval Office. And by the time they were done, thousands more Americans had died and Islamists had developed an even bigger foothold on American soil than they had before September 11. This cannot be allowed to happen again.

If you love America, if you believe that Islamic terrorism needs to be fought, not appeased, then it’s time to take a stand against the McMaster coup and his Obama holdover allies, for our security and future.

It’s not just about a bunch of names. It’s about the survival of America.

H.R. McMaster Is Proof The Deep State Exists

George Rasley, CHQ Editor | 8/4/17

http://www.conservativehq.com/article/26187-hr-mcmaster-proof-deep-state-exists

It gives us much anguish to publish this article since we carry great personal affection for General McMaster... however the facts stated are correct and deserve very close scrutiny.

What would you say if Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council, who discovered the Obama-era unmasking of the names of Donald Trump associates whose communications were perhaps illegally intercepted and leaked by the Obama intelligence apparatus, was fired, and that Susan Rice, the person at the heart of the Benghazi cover-up and the unmasking and leaking of the unmasked names, was granted a renewal of her Top Secret security clearance?

If you said that could never happen in a Donald Trump administration you’d be wrong, because H.R. McMaster, H.R. McMasterPresident Trump’s National Security Advisor just did it.

And what would you say if the same person who fired Ezra Cohen-Watnick also fired other Trump loyalists with stellar records, such as Col. Derek Harvey, the NSC’s Middle East director and Rich Higgins (an early Trump supporter and advisor) who was in the NSC’s strategic-planning office?

If you said that could never happen in a Donald Trump administration you’d be wrong about that too, because H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s National Security Advisor just did it.

And what would you say if the same person who fired all of these brilliant national security staffers and who also granted disgraced Obama National Security Susan Rice a renewal of her Top Secret security clearance also stated that “Susan Rice did nothing wrong,” even though her actions are the subject of a congressional inquiry and call for a Special Counsel?

If you said that could never happen in a Donald Trump administration you’d be wrong about that too, because H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s National Security Advisor just did it.

And what would you say if a National Security Advisor was told to stop the illegal press leaks from his staff and he did nothing, allowing the leaks to proceed at an unprecedented rate?

If you said that could never happen in a Donald Trump administration you’d be wrong about that too, because under H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s National Security Advisor, that’s what’s been happening.

And what would you say if a National Security Council staffer was directed to compile a list of Obama holdovers and took that list directly to the president, who requested that his National Security Advisor follow through with the recommendations, and National Security Advisor outright refused.

If you said that could never happen in a Donald Trump administration you’d be wrong about that too, because H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s National Security Advisor, did exactly that.

And what would you say if, after the American electorate rejected the failed policies of Obama and his erstwhile successor Hillary Clinton top Obama officials continue to come and go in and out of the White House compound as they please. And that one prominent official, Robert Malley (Obama’s “ISIS czar"), has continued to brief National Security Council staff, who have continued to advise the President to certify Iran is complying with Obama’s nuclear weapons deal in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is not?*

If you said that could never happen in a Donald Trump administration you’d be wrong about that too, because under H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s National Security Advisor, that’s what’s been happening.

And what would you say if the same disgraced Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who was at the center of the Benghazi cover-up and the unmasking and leaking scandal, advised President Trump’s National Security Advisor to get rid of all of the Trump loyalists on his staff?

If you said that could never happen in a Donald Trump administration you’d be wrong about that too, because H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s National Security Advisor, did exactly that.

Why would President Trump want to keep Obama policy staff on at the White House where they could leak and undermine his goals?

The answer is of course he wouldn’t, but President Trump’s goals are not the goals and policies of the establishment intelligence and military Deep State to whom H.R. McMaster owes his military career and loyalty.

Their goal is to maintain the Obama and Bush fiction that the war Islam has declared on the West is merely a regional war that can be won by the kinetic approach that has failed for the past sixteen years and that defeating Islamism and jihad have nothing to do with winning this war abroad and at home.

If there was ever proof that the Deep State exists and protects its own it is the record and actions of H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s ill-conceived National Security Advisor.

In our view, the goal of McMaster’s purges is isolate President Trump and place “his people” on the NSC staff, thus returning the NSC and the intelligence community to the Obama model where, as Mike Flynn put it, reporting on the terrorism threat that came up the intelligence community's chain of command was very different from what was being presented at the top levels of government.

McMaster’s power play to isolate the President is a clear and present danger to the success of President Trump’s administration and to the fulfillment of his campaign promises. It is past time for McMaster to be fired.

George Rasley is editor of Richard Viguerie's ConservativeHQ.com. A veteran of over 300 political campaigns, he served on the staff of Vice President Dan Quayle, as Director of Policy and Communication for Congressman Adam Putnam (FL-12) then Vice Chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee's Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, and as spokesman for Rep. Mac Thornberry now-Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

*Hat tip to Conservative Review’s Jordan Schachtel for this item.

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On the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict”  and  on Iran, the State Department, under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, is reported to be in “open war” with the White House.

 Key high level positions remain vacant as Obama holdovers “continue running the show and formulating policy, where they have increasingly clashed with the White House’s own agenda.” Tillerson has reportedly run interference to protect the Obama holdovers from being removed, allowing resistance to President Trump’s foreign policy agenda to flourish within the State Department.

The first casualty of this internal coup by the State Department is Israel. The shadow of the Obama administration’s anti-Israel bias was reflected in a report the State Department released on July 17, 2017 entitled Country Reports on Terrorism 2016. It praised Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for reiterating “his commitment to nonviolence, recognition of the State of Israel, and pursuit of an independent Palestinian state through peaceful means.” The report referred to what it called “significant steps during President Abbas’ tenure (2005 to date) to ensure that official institutions in the West Bank under its control do not create or disseminate content that incites violence." 

The State Department report brushed aside clear evidence of a continuing barrage of incendiary rhetoric appearing on official Palestinian Authority and Fatah social media outlets and of inflammatory statements by Palestinian officials, including Abbas himself. Instead, it claimed that the Palestinian Authority “has made progress in reducing official rhetoric that could be considered incitement to violence.” 

The State Department report conveniently skipped over the fact that Abbas remains committed to paying regular salaries to Palestinian terrorists imprisoned for killing Jews and to terrorists’ families. Their perfidiously named "Martyrs Fund" has a treasure chest of about $300 million dollars. That blood money comes in part from foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority, some of which is contributed by American taxpayers. President Trump has spoken out against the 'pay to slay Jews' terrorist payments, but the State Department has turned a blind eye. Obama holdover Stuart Jones, the Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, is reported to have steered Secretary Tillerson into making the erroneous claim that the Palestinian Authority had ceased spending U.S. taxpayer funds to pay terrorists. 

After reciting the litany of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis, the State Department report held Israel largely responsible:

“Continued drivers of violence included a lack of hope in achieving Palestinian statehood, Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the perception that the Israeli government was changing the status quo on the Haram Al Sharif/Temple Mount, and IDF tactics that the Palestinians considered overly aggressive.”

Just a few hours after three members of an Israeli family were massacred by a Palestinian terrorist, a State Department official tried to defend the report’s conclusions on the drivers of Palestinian violence. The official sounded like a clinical psychologist or a social worker, declaring that there is “no one single pathway to violence—each individual's path to terrorism is personalized, with certain commonalities.” This is the same type of irresponsible rhetoric used by the Obama administration in discussing the supposed root causes of what it called “violent extremism.”

The State Department has also carried over the Obama administration’s soft pedaling on Iran. Instead of presenting options to President Trump supporting a refusal to re-certify that Iran has complied with all of its obligations under the disastrous Obama nuclear deal with Iran, the State Department took Iran’s side. It recommended twice that President Trump sign certifications of Iran’s compliance. Deprived by the State Department of any analysis to the contrary, as he had requested, the president reluctantly signed the certifications in April and July. However, he has reportedly decided to sidestep the State Department going forward and rely instead on a White House team to prepare the way for refusing to sign the certification the next time it is presented to him. CIA Director Mike Pompeo, senior strategist Steve Bannon, and deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka opposed the State Department’s recommendation.

Foreign Policy quoted one senior State Department, speaking on condition of anonymity, as saying, “The White House, they see the State Department as ‘the swamp.’”

The State Department is a swamp infested with Obama holdovers such as Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, the former Iran director for Obama’s National Security Council, who helped push through the Iran deal. When she moved over to the State Department during the waning months of the Obama administration, she was assigned to oversee the Persian Gulf region policy planning portfolio, which included issues related to Iran. She continued in that high-level advisory position until April of this year, when she was re-assigned to the Office of Iranian Affairs. In other words, a strong supporter of the Iranian nuclear deal with a vested interest in its continuation was on Secretary of State Tillerson’s policy planning team. Secretary Tillerson no doubt relied on this tainted team for input into his decision to recommend the first certification signing last April. Ms. Nowrouzzadeh is still working on Iranian-related issues for the State Department where she can do some damage. However, at least she is no longer part of the Secretary of State’s brain trust. 

President Trump, not State Department bureaucrats, was elected by the American people. 

Saboteurs within the State Department and other government agencies should be rooted out immediately and removed from their  positions of influence since  they appear to be very aggressively undercutting Israel and   the president’s ability to respond  to  Iran’s increasing support  for international terror operations.