FBI Never Saw CrowdStrike Unredacted or Final Report on Alleged Russian Hacking Because None was Produced By Ray McGovern

FBI Never Saw CrowdStrike Unredacted or Final Report on Alleged Russian Hacking Because None was Produced

 By Ray McGovern

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The FBI relied on CrowdStrike’s “conclusion” to blame Russia for hacking DNC servers, though the private firm never produced a final report and the FBI never asked them to, as Ray McGovern explains.

CrowdStrike, the controversial cybersecurity firm that the Democratic National Committee chose over the FBI in 2016 to examine its compromised computer servers, never produced an un-redacted or final forensic report for the government because the FBI never required it to, the Justice Department has admitted.

The revelation came in a court filing by the government in the pre-trial phase of Roger Stone, a long-time Republican operative who had an unofficial role in the campaign of candidate Donald Trump. Stone has been charged with misleading Congress, obstructing justice and intimidating a witness.

The filing was in response to a motion by Stone’s lawyers asking for “unredacted reports” from CrowdStrike in an effort to get the government to prove that Russia hacked the DNC server. “The government … does not possess the information the defandant seeks,” the filing says.

In his motion, Stone’s lawyers said he had only been given three redacted drafts. In a startling footnote in the government’s response, the DOJ admits the drafts are all that exist. “Although the reports produced to the defendant are marked ‘draft,’ counsel for the DNC and DCCC informed the government that they are the last version of the report produced,” the footnote says.

In other words CrowdStrike, upon which the FBI relied to conclude that Russia hacked the DNC, never completed a final report and only turned over three redacted drafts to the government.

Stone on his way to court in February. (Victoria Pickering/Flickr)

These drafts were “voluntarily” given to the FBI by DNC lawyers, the filing says. “No redacted information concerned the attribution of the attack to Russian actors,” the filing quotes DNC lawyers as saying.

In Stone’s motion his lawyers argued: “If the Russian state did not hack the DNC, DCCC, or [Clinton campaign chairman John] Podesta’s servers, then Roger Stone was prosecuted for obstructing a congressional investigation into an unproven Russian state hacking conspiracy … The issue of whether or not the DNC was hacked is central to the Defendant’s defense.”

The DOJ responded: “The government does not need to prove at the defendant’s trial that the Russians hacked the DNC in order to prove the defendant made false statements, tampered with a witness, and obstructed justice into a congressional investigation regarding election interference.”

Thousands of emails from the DNC server were published by WikiLeaks in July 2016 revealing that the DNC interfered in the Democratic primary process to favor former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders for the party’s presidential nomination. The U.S. indicted 12 Russian military intelligence agents in 2018 for allegedly hacking the DNC server and giving the emails to WikiLeaks.

Comey Can’t Say Why

At a time of high tension in the 2016 presidential campaign, when the late Sen. John McCain and others were calling Russian “hacking” an “act of war,” the FBI settled for three redacted “draft reports” from CrowdStrike rather than investigate the alleged hacking itself, the court document shows.

Then FBI Director James Comey admitted in congressional testimony that he chose not to take control of the DNC’s “hacked” computers, and did not dispatch FBI computer experts to inspect them, but has had trouble explaining why.

In his testimony, he conceded that “best practices” would have dictated that forensic experts gain physical access to the computers. Nevertheless, the FBI decided to rely on forensics performed by a firm being paid for by the DNC.

Suspicions grew as Comey started referring to CrowdStrike as the “pros that they hired.” Doubts became more intense when he referred to CrowdStrike as “a high-class entity.” In fact the company had a tarnished reputation for reliability and objectivity well before it was hired by the DNC.

Comey in 2013 with Robert Mueller and Barack Obama. (Wikimedia Commons)

Dimitri Alperovitch, a CrowdStrike co-founder, is an opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a senior fellow at the anti-Russian Atlantic Council think tank in Washington. CrowdStrike said it determined that Russia had hacked the DNC server because it found Cyrillic letters in the metadata, as well as the name of the first Soviet intelligence chief—clues an amateur might leave.

CrowdStrike was forced to “revise(d) and retract(ed) statements it used to buttress claims of Russian hacking during last year’s American presidential election campaign,” Voice of America reported in March 2017. 

CrowdStrike’s Early Role

In a Memorandum for the President on July 24, 2017, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity referred prominently to this instructive time sequence:

June 12, 2016: Julian Assange announces WikiLeaks is about to publish ‘emails related to Hillary Clinton.’

June 14, 2016: DNC contractor CrowdStrike, (with a dubious professional record and multiple conflicts of interest) announces that malware has been found on the DNC server and claims there is evidence it was injected by Russians.

June 15, 2016: ‘Guccifer 2.0’ affirms the DNC statement; claims responsibility for the ‘hack;’ claims to be a WikiLeaks source; and posts a document that the forensics show was synthetically tainted with ‘Russian fingerprints.’

VIPS does not believe the June 12, 14, & 15 timing was pure coincidence. Rather, it suggests the start of a pre-emptive move to associate Russia with anything WikiLeaks might have been about to publish and to “show” that it came from a Russian hack.  

Bill Binney, a former NSA technical director and a VIPS member, filed an affidavit in Stone’s case. Binney said: “WikiLeaks did not receive stolen data from the Russian government. Intrinsic metadata in the publicly available files on WikiLeaks demonstrates that the files acquired by WikiLeaks were delivered in a medium such as a thumb drive.”

Preferring CrowdStrike; ’Splaining to Congress

Why did FBI Director James Comey not simply insist on access to the DNC computers? Surely he could have gotten the appropriate authorization. In early January 2017, reacting to media reports that the FBI never asked for access, Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee there were “multiple requests at different levels” for access to the DNC servers.“Ultimately what was agreed to is the private company would share with us what they saw,” he said. Comey described CrowdStrike as a “highly respected” cybersecurity company.

Asked by committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) whether direct access to the servers and devices would have helped the FBI in their investigation, Comey said it would have. “Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that’s involved, so it’s the best evidence,” he said.

Five months later, after Comey had been fired, Burr gave him a Mulligan in the form of a few kid-gloves, clearly well-rehearsed, questions:

BURR:And the FBI, in this case, unlike other cases that you might investigate — did you ever have access to the actual hardware that was hacked? Or did you have to rely on a third party to provide you the data that they had collected?

COMEY:In the case of the DNC, … we did not have access to the devices themselves. We got relevant forensic information from a private party, a high-class entity, that had done the work. But we didn’t get direct access.

BURR:But no content?

COMEY:Correct.

BURR:Isn’t content an important part of the forensics from a counterintelligence standpoint?

COMEY:It is, although what was briefed to me by my folks — the people who were my folks at the time is that they had gotten the information from the private party that they needed to understand the intrusion by the spring of 2016.

More telling was earlier questioning by House Intelligence Committee member, Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX), who had been a CIA officer for a decade.On March 20, 2017 while he was still FBI director, Comey evidenced some considerable discomfort as he tried to explain to the committee why the FBI did not insist on getting physical access to the DNC computers and do its own forensics:

HURD:So there was about a year between the FBI’s first notification of some potential problems with the DNC network and then that information getting on — getting on Wikileaks.

COMEY:Yes, sir.

HURD:… when did the DNC provide access for — to the FBI for your technical folks to review what happened?

COMEY:Well we never got direct access to the machines themselves. The DNC in the spring of 2016 hired a firm that ultimately shared with us their forensics from their review of the system. …

HURD:… So, Director FBI notified the DNC early, before any information was put on Wikileaksand when — youhave still been — never been given access to any of the technical or the physical machines that were — that were hacked by the Russians.

COMEY: That’s correct although we got the forensics from the pros that they hired which — again, best practice is always to get access to the machines themselves, but this — my folks tell me was an appropriate substitute.

Comey Spikes Deal With Assange

Assange: Comey killed deal. (YouTube)

Director Comey’s March 20, 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee came at the same time he was scuttling months-long negotiations between Assange and lawyers representing the DOJ and CIA to grant some limited immunity for the WikiLeaks founder. In return, Assange offered to: (1) redact “some classified CIA information he might release in the future,” and (2) “provide technical evidence and discussion regarding who did not engage in the DNC releases.”

Investigative journalist John Solomon, quoting WikiLeaks’ intermediary with the government, broke this story, based on “interviews and a trove of internal DOJ documents turned over to Senate investigators.” It would be a safe assumption that Assange was offering to prove that Russia was not WikiLeaks’ source of the DNC emails, something Assange has repeatedly said.

That, of course, would have been the last thing Comey would have wanted.

On March 31, 2017 WikiLeaks released the most damaging disclosure up to that point from what it called “Vault 7” — a treasure trove of CIA cybertools leaked from CIA files. This disclosure featured the tool “Marble Framework,” which enabled the CIA to hack into computers, disguise who hacked in, and falsely attribute the hack to someone else by leaving so-called tell-tale signs — like Cyrillic, for example.

The CIA documents also showed that the “Marble” tool had been employed in 2016.

Two weeks later, then CIA Director Mike Pompeo branded WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” and the U.S. put pressure on Ecuador, which had given Assange asylum, to expel him from its London embassy. He was on April 11 when British police arrested him. On the same day he was convicted of skipping bail on a Swedish investigation that had since been dropped. Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in London’s max-security Belmarsh prison.

Comey, it seems a safe bet, still worries that Assange or one of his associates, will provide “technical evidence” enough to prove “who did not engage in the DNC releases.”

What Were They Thinking?

At the March 20, 2017 House Intelligence Committee hearing, Congressman Trey Gowdy heaped effusive praise on then-FBI Director Comey, calling him “incredibly respected.” At that early stage, no doubt Gowdy meant no double entendre. He might now.

As Russia-gate transmogrifies into Deep State-gate, the DOJ is launching a probe into the origins of Russia-gate and the intelligence agencies alleged role in it. It remains to be seen whether U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut John Durham, who is leading the probe, will interview Assange, unlike Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who did not. 

It is proving very difficult for some of my old FBI friends and others to believe that Comey and other justice, intelligence, and security officials at the very top could have played fast and loose with the Constitution and the law and lived a lie over the past few years.

“How did they ever think they could get away with it?” they ask. The answer is deceivingly simple. Comey himself has explained it in a moment of seemingly unintentional candor in his pretentious book, “A Higher Loyalty.” He wrote, “I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president.”

There would be no problem, of course, if Mrs. Clinton had won the election. That’s what they all thought; and that probably explains their lack of care in keeping their activities off the written record and out of computers. Elementary tradecraft goes out the window with these upper-echelon, “high-class-entity” officials, when they are sure that she, and they, are going to be the inevitable winners — with promotions, not indictments in store for them.

Additional reporting by Joe Lauria

Background Reading on Deep State-Gate

https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/doj-admits-fbi-never-saw-crowdstrike-report-on-dnc-russian-hacking-claim/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/06/figures-fbi-doj-never-obtained-the-unredacted-crowdstrike-reports-on-russian-hack-of-dnc-server/

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/03/13/vips-muellers-forensics-free-findings/

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/04/16/vips-fault-mueller-probe-criticize-refusal-to-interview-assange/

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/05/03/orwellian-cloud-hovers-over-russia-gate/

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/

http://raymcgovern.com/2017/05/17/beneath-the-corporate-mediadeep-state-campaign-to-remove-trump-and-thwart-detente-with-russia/

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/06/13/ray-mcgovern-doj-bloodhounds-on-the-scent-of-john-brennan/

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/11/14/clappers-credibility-collapses/

https://raymcgovern.com/2019/01/06/transcript-when-clapper-was-asked-real-questions/

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-hacking-intelligence-20170105-story.html

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-trump-russia-phony-20170517-story.html

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-year career as a CIA analyst, he led the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and prepared the President’s Daily Brief for three presidents. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

AMERICA CAN FACE DOWN A FRAGILE IRAN Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh Wall Street Journal 6-16-19

 AMERICA CAN FACE DOWN A FRAGILE IRAN

Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh  Wall Street Journal  6-16-19

https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-can-face-down-a-fragile-iran-11560714158?mod=itp_wsj&mod=&mod=djemITP_h

In the U.S. and Europe, much of the mainstream media has swallowed a narrative about Donald Trump and Iran. While Iran is an aggressive authoritarian state, the story goes, it is nonetheless a victim of American belligerence. Tehran was adhering to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, negotiated by the Obama administration, when the truculent Mr. Trump abruptly abandoned the accord. For more than a year, according to the narrative, the mullahs have shown patience by continuing to abide by the agreement, even with the resurrection of punishing American sanctions.

Iranian patience has run out, critics complain, because of the Trump administration’s recent announcement that it will try to drive the Islamic Republic’s oil exports to zero. Tehran’s “hard-liners” now have the upper hand. Washington’s economic warfare, the narrative goes, may provoke the clerical regime into a military conflict. And if war comes, the mullahs are ready to trap America in another Middle Eastern quagmire.

The narrative misses a key point. Iran is in no shape for a prolonged confrontation with the U.S. The regime is in a politically precarious position. The sullen Iranian middle class has given up on the possibility of reform or prosperity. The lower classes, once tethered to the regime by the expansive welfare state, have also grown disloyal. The intelligentsia no longer believes that faith and freedom can be harmonized. And the youth have become the regime’s most unrelenting critics.

Iran’s fragile theocracy can’t absorb a massive external shock. That’s why Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has, for the most part, adhered to the JCPOA, and why he is likely angling for negotiation over confrontation with the Great Satan.

The ruling clerics, Mr. Khamenei in particular, are competent strategists. They appreciate the need to enhance their leverage before any talks. Terrorism has always been the regime’s preferred method of inflicting pain on adversaries. Assassination attempts orchestrated by Iranian “diplomats” in Europe are on the rise. These thwarted operations, which could have killed many people, appear to have inclined the Europeans toward more dialogue with Tehran, not less.

The regime also has at its disposal foreign militias such as Hezbollah, which it uses to target regional foes without admitting direct responsibility. And there are more-direct means to increase negotiating leverage. The attacks in recent weeks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman are probably the handiwork of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s naval units, which train regularly in the use of mines. The most recent shipping attacks have had their intended effect. European officials, Democratic politicians and much of the American press are pleading for dialogue.

The key to dealing with the Islamic Republic is to appreciate that it is an exhausted regime, perhaps well on its way to extinction. A vulnerable, resentful enemy is a dangerous one. The U.S. should shore up its military might in the region and harden defenses around bases and diplomatic compounds. But the regime’s essential weakness means it can’t muster sufficient strength for a prolonged conflict with a determined superpower. The mullahs’ clenched fists, slogans of martyrdom, and staged demonstrations shouldn’t be confused with real power. The Trump administration’s strategy of maximum pressure shouldn’t be diluted as the two sides edge closer to the negotiating table.

Despite the criticisms from Democrats and Europeans, Mr. Trump’s Iran policy has had considerable success. He abrogated a deficient agreement that was smoothing Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon. He restored sanctions, which many Iran-deal partisans insisted couldn’t be done effectively. The economic pain Tehran feels today is as great as when the Europeans implemented their oil embargo in 2012. Iran’s oil exports have contracted rapidly, denying the regime billions of dollars in hard currency. The key challenge for the Trump administration now is to sustain its strategy as the Iranians start dangling the possibility of a diplomatic opening.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s most important contribution has been to dispense with the once-popular notion that the nuclear issue can be separated from the clerical regime’s regional ambitions. His May 2018 “12 points” speech sensibly posited that the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism shouldn’t possess a nuclear arsenal. The administration has developed a containment strategy that is unconventional and restrained—Iran’s expeditionary forces and allied militias in the northern Middle East haven’t been targeted—but still punishing. As long as Mr. Trump is willing to respond to a direct challenge, conventional or nuclear, and Tehran is convinced of the president’s mettle, time is on Washington’s side.

America’s Iran problem will remain until the theocracy cracks. Given the regime’s inability to escape the contradictions of its own making, that day is drawing closer. The U.S. needs stamina—and a clear understanding of how the enemy sees itself.

Mr. Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

AL-HABBASH,TOP ABBAS ADVISER PUBLICLY DECLARES THAT THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY IS THE SWORN ENEMY OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL.“

AL-HABBASH,TOP ABBAS ADVISER PUBLICLY DECLARES THAT THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY IS THE SWORN ENEMY OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL.“

In 2018, Al-Habbash explained to viewers on official PA TV that Islam’s religious war to destroy Israel had started,” His exhortations include: “The “Battle with Israel is between good and evil”; Israel is Satan’s project”; and Israel is the Culture of Satan.”

Mahmoud Al-Habbash , a top aide to Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas declares that the essential conflict with Israel is a battle “between good and evil.”

Mahmoud Al-Habbash is Abbas’ adviser on religious and Islamic affairs and a PA supreme judge on Shari’ah Islamic law.,

Mahmoud Al-Habbash  declares [ Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), an Israeli research institute that studies Palestinian society ]  there is an “Israeli plot” regarding Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, where Islam’s third holiest shrine is located but which is also the location of the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest shrine.

When Israel captured the Temple Mount in the 1967 war, it nevertheless allowed for an Islamic body to maintain religious control of the site. To this day, the entry of Jews is severely restricted and Jewish prayer is forbidden.

However, as far as Al-Habbash is concerned, Jewish history is a myth.

He says that Muslims are waging “a battle between facts and myth, between truth and falsehood, between justice and injustice, between integrity and distortion, between tolerance and fanaticism,” 

Adds PMW: His comments might be considered perplexing considering that Israel has shown tolerance toward other religions to practice their faith as opposed to Islamic officials who refuse to acknowledge the right of Jews to ascend the Temple Mount.

Other quotes by Al-Habbash as cited by PMW include calling Israel “Satan’s project” and a “Culture of Satan.”

“In 2018, Al-Habbash explained to viewers on official PA TV that Islam’s religious war to destroy Israel had started.”

U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth New York Times 6-15-19

U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid

David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth New York Times  6-15-19

WASHINGTON — The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said.

In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously unreported deployment of American computer code inside Russia’s grid and other targets as a classified companion to more publicly discussed action directed at Moscow’s disinformation and hacking units around the 2018 midterm elections.

Advocates of the more aggressive strategy said it was long overdue, after years of public warnings from the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. that Russia has inserted malware that could sabotage American power plants, oil and gas pipelines, or water supplies in any future conflict with the United States.

But it also carries significant risk of escalating the daily digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.

The administration declined to describe specific actions it was taking under the new authorities, which were granted separately by the White House and Congress last year to United States Cyber Command, the arm of the Pentagon that runs the military’s offensive and defensive operations in the online world.

Gen. Paul Nakasone, the commander of United States Cyber Command, was given more leeway to conduct offensive online operations without obtaining presidential approval.

But in a public appearance on Tuesday, President Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, said the United States was now taking a broader view of potential digital targets as part of an effort “to say to Russia, or anybody else that’s engaged in cyberoperations against us, ‘You will pay a price.’”

Power grids have been a low-intensity battleground for years.

Since at least 2012, current and former officials say, the United States has put reconnaissance probes into the control systems of the Russian electric grid.

But now the American strategy has shifted more toward offense, officials say, with the placement of potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never been tried before. It is intended partly as a warning, and partly to be poised to conduct cyberstrikes if a major conflict broke out between Washington and Moscow.

 How President Vladimir V. Putin’s government would react to the more aggressive American posture is unclear.

The commander of United States Cyber Command, Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, has been outspoken about the need to “defend forward” deep in an adversary’s networks to demonstrate that the United States will respond to the barrage of online attacks aimed at it.

“They don’t fear us,” he told the Senate a year ago during his confirmation hearings.

But finding ways to calibrate those responses so that they deter attacks without inciting a dangerous escalation has been the source of constant debate.

Mr. Trump issued new authorities to Cyber Command last summer, in a still-classified document known as National Security Presidential Memoranda 13, giving General Nakasone far more leeway to conduct offensive online operations without receiving presidential approval.

But the action inside the Russian electric grid appears to have been conducted under little-noticed new legal authorities, slipped into the military authorization bill passed by Congress last summer. The measure approved the routine conduct of “clandestine military activity” in cyberspace, to “deter, safeguard or defend 

 attacks or malicious cyberactivities against the United States.”

 In 2012, the defense secretary at the time, Leon E. Panetta, was warned of Russia’s online intrusions, but President Barack Obama was reluctant to respond to such aggression by Moscow with counterattacks.

Under the law, those actions can now be authorized by the defense secretary without special presidential approval.

“It has gotten far, far more aggressive over the past year,” one senior intelligence official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity but declining to discuss any specific classified programs. “We are doing things at a scale that we never contemplated a few years ago.”

The critical question — impossible to know without access to the classified details of the operation — is how deep into the Russian grid the United States has bored. Only then will it be clear whether it would be possible to plunge Russia into darkness or cripple its military — a question that may not be answerable until the code is activated.

Both General Nakasone and Mr. Bolton, through spokesmen, declined to answer questions about the incursions into Russia’s grid. Officials at the National Security Council also declined to comment but said they had no national security concerns about the details of The New York Times’s reporting about the targeting of the Russian grid, perhaps an indication that some of the intrusions were intended to be noticed by the Russians.

Speaking on Tuesday at a conference sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bolton said: “We thought the response in cyberspace against electoral meddling was the highest priority last year, and so that’s what we focused on. But we’re now opening the aperture, broadening the areas we’re prepared to act in.”

 President Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, said the United States was taking a broader view of potential digital targets as part of an effort to warn anybody “engaged in cyberoperations against us.”

He added, referring to nations targeted by American digital operations, “We will impose costs on you until you get the point.”

Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.

Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017 when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign minister.

Because the new law defines the actions in cyberspace as akin to traditional military activity on the ground, in the air or at sea, no such briefing would be necessary, they added.

The intent of the operations was described in different ways by several current and former national security officials. Some called it “signaling” Russia, a sort of digital shot across the bow. Others said the moves were intended to position the United States to respond if Mr. Putin became more aggressive.

So far, there is no evidence that the United States has actually turned off the power in any of the efforts to establish what American officials call a “persistent presence” inside Russian networks, just as the Russians have not turned off power in the United States. But the placement of malicious code inside both systems revives the question of whether a nation’s power grid — or other critical infrastructure that keeps homes, factories, and hospitals running — constitutes a legitimate target for online attack.

Already, such attacks figure in the military plans of many nations. In a previous post, General Nakasone had been deeply involved in designing an operation code-named Nitro Zeus that amounted to a war plan to unplug Iran if the United States entered into hostilities with the country.

How Mr. Putin’s government is reacting to the more aggressive American posture described by Mr. Bolton is still unclear.

“It’s 21st-century gunboat diplomacy,” said Robert M. Chesney, a law professor at the University of Texas, who has written extensively about the shifting legal basis for digital operations. “We’re showing the adversary we can inflict serious costs without actually doing much. We used to park ships within sight of the shore. Now, perhaps, we get access to key systems like the electric grid.”

Russian intrusion on American infrastructure has been the background noise of superpower competition for more than a decade.

A successful Russian breach of the Pentagon’s classified communications networks in 2008 prompted the creation of what has become Cyber Command. Under President Barack Obama, the attacks accelerated.

But Mr. Obama was reluctant to respond to such aggression by Russia with counterattacks, partly for fear that the United States’ infrastructure was more vulnerable than Moscow’s and partly because intelligence officials worried that by responding in kind, the Pentagon would expose some of its best weaponry.

At the end of Mr. Obama’s first term, government officials began uncovering a Russian hacking group, alternately known to private security researchers as Energetic Bear or Dragonfly. But the assumption was that the Russians were conducting surveillance, and would stop well short of actual disruption.

That assumption evaporated in 2014, two former officials said, when the same Russian hacking outfit compromised the software updates that reached into hundreds of systems that have access to the power switches.

“It was the first stage in long-term preparation for an attack,” said John Hultquist, the director of intelligence analysis at FireEye, a security company that has tracked the group.

In December 2015, a Russian intelligence unit shut off power to hundreds of thousands of people in western Ukraine. The attack lasted only a few hours, but it was enough to sound alarms at the White House.

A team of American experts was dispatched to examine the damage, and concluded that one of the same Russian intelligence units that wreaked havoc in Ukraine had made significant inroads into the United States energy grid, according to officials and a homeland security advisory that was not published until December 2016.

“That was the crossing of the Rubicon,” said David J. Weinstein, who previously served at Cyber Command and is now chief security officer at Claroty, a security company that specializes in protecting critical infrastructure.

In late 2015, just as the breaches of the Democratic National Committee began, yet another Russian hacking unit began targeting critical American infrastructure, including the electricity grid and nuclear power plants. By 2016, the hackers were scrutinizing the systems that control the power switches at the plants.

Until the last few months of the Obama administration, Cyber Command was largely limited to conducting surveillance operations inside Russia’s networks. At a conference this year held by the Hewlett Foundation, Eric Rosenbach, a former chief of staff to the defense secretary and who is now at Harvard, cautioned that when it came to offensive operations “we don’t do them that often.” He added, “I can count on one hand, literally, the number of offensive operations that we did at the Department of Defense.”

But after the election breaches and the power grid incursions, the Obama administration decided it had been too passive.

Mr. Obama secretly ordered some kind of message-sending action inside the Russian grid, the specifics of which have never become public. It is unclear whether much was accomplished.

“Offensive cyber is not this, like, magic cybernuke where you say, ‘O.K., send in the aircraft and we drop the cybernuke over Russia tomorrow,’” Mr. Rosenbach said at the conference, declining to discuss specific operations.

After Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Russian hackers kept escalating attacks.

Mr. Trump’s initial cyberteam decided to be far more public in calling out Russian activity. In early 2018, it named Russia as the country responsible for “the most destructive cyberattack in human history,” which paralyzed much of Ukraine and affected American companies including Merck and FedEx.

When General Nakasone took over both Cyber Command and the N.S.A. a year ago, his staff was assessing Russian hackings on targets that included the Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corporation, which runs a nuclear power plant near Burlington, Kan., as well as previously unreported attempts to infiltrate Nebraska Public Power District’s Cooper Nuclear Station, near Brownville. The hackers got into communications networks, but never took over control systems.

In August, General Nakasone used the new authority granted to Cyber Command by the secret presidential directive to overwhelm the computer systems at Russia’s Internet Research Agency — the group at the heart of the hacking during the 2016 election in the United States. It was one of four operations his so-called Russia Small Group organized around the midterm elections. Officials have talked publicly about those, though they have provided few details.

But the recent actions by the United States against the Russian power grids, whether as signals or potential offensive weapons, appear to have been conducted under the new congressional authorities.

As it games out the 2020 elections, Cyber Command has looked at the possibility that Russia might try selective power blackouts in key states, some officials said. For that, they said, they need a deterrent.

In the past few months, Cyber Command’s resolve has been tested. For the past year, energy companies in the United States and oil and gas operators across North America discovered their networks had been examined by the same Russian hackers who successfully dismantled the safety systems in 2017 at Petro Rabigh, a Saudi petrochemical plant and oil refinery.

The question now is whether placing the equivalent of land mines in a foreign power network is the right way to deter Russia. While it parallels Cold War nuclear strategy, it also enshrines power grids as a legitimate target.

“We might have to risk taking some broken bones of our own from a counterresponse, just to show the world we’re not lying down and taking it,” said Robert P. Silvers, a partner at the law firm Paul Hastings and former Obama administration official. “Sometimes you have to take a bloody nose to not take a bullet in the head down the road.”

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and Nicole Perlroth from San Francisco.

US Army War College Surrenders to CAIR - Raymond Ibrahim

US Army War College Surrenders to CAIR

By Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.raymondibrahim.com/2019/06/14/the-facts-why-us-army-war-college-surrendered-to-cair/

 

 

The U.S. Army War College (USAWC) has just surrendered to the demands of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) -- an “unindicted co-conspirator,” to quote the U.S. Dept. of Justice, in the largest terror funding case in American history.

The June 19, 2019 planned lecture on my book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle Barracks was canceled due to a CAIR-induced hysteria that focused on presenting me -- a native Arabic speaker of Egyptian/Middle Eastern descent -- as a “racist” and “white nationalist” who is out to incite American soldiers to murder Muslims.

Although the USAWC claims that the event has been “postponed” -- and that CAIR’s smear campaign has nothing to do with its decision -- what really happened, along with the troubling lessons learned along the way, follow:

On January 4, 2019, I received an email, portions of which follow:

Mr. Ibrahim: On behalf of the Director and Staff of the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center (USAHEC), I am honored to invite you to speak as part of the USAHEC's 2019 Perspectives in Military History Lecture Series… [W]e would like you to speak about your new book, “Sword and Scimitar.”  The Perspectives series attracts a wide audience including the U.S. Army War College students, faculty, and staff, ROTC cadets, Soldiers from regional military bases, university students and faculty, and the general public.

 

“On a personal note,” the author of the email added, “I think your new book, and a lecture based on it, will resound very well with the primary audience of our lecture programs -- the students and faculty of the U.S. Army War College.”

After I accepted the invitation, my USAWC contact reiterated: “I am excited to book you, I think your topic will be perfect for my audience.”

Aside from a few more exchanges on dates and logistics, that was that -- until CAIR got wind of the event.

I’ve already discussed what initially happened: how the leadership of CAIR’s Penn. chapter sent a letter on May 28, 2019 to USAWC Commandant Gen. John Kem and Provost Dr. James Breckenridge, urging them to cancel my event because “Raymond Ibrahim’s book…  advance[s] a simplistic, inaccurate and often prejudicial view of the long history of Muslim-West relations which we find deeply troubling”; and how CAIR did not once cite a single sentence from my 352-page book to support their accusation that it “is based on poor research.”

After media outlets began reporting on CAIR’s displeasure with the USAWC, the latter called and assured me that the event was still on.  I also received a June 5, 2019 email from my USAWC contact saying, “We are good to go for the lecture.”

Then CAIR and allies took off their gloves and got nasty.  If a formal, ostensibly rational sounding letter of “concern” would not suffice, then hysteria would have to do. 

On the very next day, June 6, 2019, CAIR issued a number of screeds, including a Press Release and a petition addressed to the USAWC by Linda Sarsour’s Islamist group, MPower Change.  The overall theme is that, if the USAWC goes ahead with my planned lecture, the “racist” military will get so riled that American soldiers will randomly begin to massacre Muslims at home and abroad.  The following is from the MPower petition (bold and underlined in the original):

Ibrahim's rhetoric… normalizes and justifies violence against Muslims, which is already a burgeoning problem for the military…  Let's tell the U.S. Army War College: If you don't rescind Ibrahim's invitation and denounce his Islamophobic rhetoric, you're not only endorsing anti-Muslim hate, but dangerously nurturing Islamophobia and white nationalism within the military…

Just a few days ago, California Rep. Duncan Hunter -- who ran an explicitly Islamophobic campaign for Congress -- casually admitted that he and his unit “killed probably hundreds of civilians... probably killed women and children in Iraq.”

Tell the U.S. Army War College: Ibrahim's lecture would push the same kind of incendiary, Islamophobic rhetoric that has led to violence inflicted on Muslim communities -- both in the U.S. and abroad.

In the midst of their lies, CAIR and MPower repeatedly present me -- an Arab-American whose parents immigrated from Egypt to evade Islamic oppression -- as a “racist” associated with “white nationalism.” But as the Investigative Project on Terrorism, which maintains a comprehensive dossieron CAIR’s shady and terrorist links, observes:

Being a “white nationalist” doesn't mean having European ancestry in Linda Sarsour's world. Her group, MPower Change, joined the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) Philadelphia chapter in charging that Raymond Ibrahim, an American Copt of Egyptian ancestry, whose people have been severely discriminated against under Islamic rule for centuries, is a "white nationalist."….  To classify Ibrahim in the same category as white supremacists who hate Muslims for being non-white is to show ignorance of the severe persecution and discrimination faced by the Coptic people under nearly 14 centuries of Islamic rule.  Copts face constant discrimination and persecution at the hands of their Muslim neighbors… [including] Jim Crow-style conditions in their homeland.

Also like the original CAIR letter of May 28, 2019, the MPower petition repeatedly asserts that “his recent book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, advances an Orientalist and inaccurate view of Islam,” without once showing how; it merely claims that “His simplistic and flawed version of history -- riddled with prejudiced stereotypes of Islam -- espouses a dangerous agenda that demonizes Muslims.”

Despite the baseless and hysterical nature of CAIR’s and its Islamist allies’ allegations, on June 10, 2019, the U.S. Army War College caved in to their demands and canceled the event.  In my last phone call with the USAWC on that same day, I suggested a compromise: turn my lecture into a debate, and pit me against any academic of CAIR’s choosing.  Even though I was under no obligation to make such a concession, it still wasn’t good enough for the USAWC.

Perhaps the most dishonorable aspect of this entire fiasco is that, in a vain effort to save face and pretend that the prestigious United States Army War College is notsurrendering to the demands of a notorious Islamist organization -- whose deceptive tactics and subversive ties are well documented (here, here, and here) -- the USAWC’s official story is that my lecture has only been “postponed,” and not because of CAIR’s demands. 

As a June 10, 2019 report notes, the USAWC’s decision to “postpone” the event “comes in the wake of strong opposition from the Muslim community to the previously scheduled appearance of author Raymond Ibrahim.  The Army War College on Monday, however, suggested that the postponement had nothing to do with the outcry from the Muslim community (emphasis added).

Reality is clear enough: for the USAWC suddenly to postpone a long-planned event only nine days before schedule -- and just a handful of days after CAIR’s smear campaign -- is not a “coincidence”; it is a clear message for all.

Incidentally, the USAWC is now learning that once you give CAIR an inch, like all bullies it will demand a mile.  Consider: in CAIR’s original letter, Jacob Bender, its Philadelphia executive director, ultimately agreed to my lecture, with one caveat, asked in all politeness: “We would ask that if Mr. Ibrahim delivers his talk that we be allowed the same format to put forth counter points to his arguments.” 

Even though the USAWC completely acquiesced by canceling the event altogether, CAIR -- having smelled blood -- has since become more aggressive and abusive to the military.  After gloating over the USAWC’s capitulation, the same Jacob Bender who would have been content just to have the opportunity to “put forth counterpoints” to me (though only after I was gone and no longer there to respond), is now saying that

The statement [to “postpone” the lecture] by the College spokeswoman falls short of repudiating Mr. Ibrahim’s racist views. A postponement is not enough -- the college should reject hate. We will continue to advocate for… [the] exclusion of anti-Muslim racist theories in the college’s programming… [W]e are ready to provide an alternative viewpoint and suggest a pool of academic analysts who can provide an objective assessment of military and historical perspectives to the US Army War College community.

In other words, if the USAWC really wants CAIR to stop verbally terrorizing it, canceling my lecture is only the first step; the USAWC next must invite a Muslim apologist to come and present a history opposite to the one I was going to present -- that is, the usual pseudohistory of an “evil” West that has long victimized a “progressive” Islam, hence “why they hate us,” and why we -- in this case, the USAWC -- have to appease them, etc., etc.  

The grand lesson of this entire debacle should be disheartening for all who care about this nation.  If an ethnic Egyptian and native speaker of Arabic, with verifiable credentials, whose extended relatives continue to be persecuted because they are Christian, can be characterized by Islamist groups with terror links as a “racist” and “white nationalist”; and if, of all places, the US Army War College, as opposed to the average “liberal” college, can so easily capitulate to such patently deceptivetactics -- the true motives of which are to keep the actual history between Islam and the West concealed from the military -- know that the hour is late indeed.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/us_army_war_college_surrenders_to_cair.html#ixzz5qqPrvQD3
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/us_army_war_college_surrenders_to_cair.html

 

 FDR’S ROLE IN PREVENTING THE RESCUE OF EUROPE’S JEWS…

WHAT WE CAN'T FORGET WHEN WE REMEMBER ANNE FRANK

by Rafael Medoff    (Dr. Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and the author of The Jews Should Keep Quiet: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust, forthcoming from The Jewish Publication Society in 2019.)

As published by the History News Network - June 9, 2019      http://hnn.us/article/172187

On grocery store checkout lines around the country this month, amidst the candy bars and zany tabloids, shoppers will find a glossy 96-page magazine called “Anne Frank: Her Life and Legacy.” Unfortunately, it fails to explain one of the most important but little-known aspects of the Anne Frank story—how her life could have been saved by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

The new Anne Frank publication, compiled by the staff of Life magazine, is filled with photographs of Anne and her family, and a breezy overview of her childhood, tragically cut short by the Nazi Holocaust. Today, June 9, would have been her 90th birthday. 

Little Anne, “thin as a wisp, curious, mercurial, and a know-it-all” at first enjoyed an idyllic life, “but outside the family circle, the world was changing,” Life recounts. Economic and social crises in Germany propelled Adolf Hitler to power in 1933, and Anne’s father, Otto, quickly moved the family to neighboring Holland for safety.

When World War II erupted in 1939, Life reports, Otto “frantically searched for ways to get his family away from the growing conflict” and “he hoped to emigrate to the United States.”

That’s all. No accounting of what happened when the Franks sought to emigrate to the United States. No explanation as to why the Roosevelt administration refused to open America’s doors to Anne Frank or countless other Jewish children. 

Just the one vague allusion to Otto’s “hope,” and then quickly back to the famous story of Anne hiding in the Amsterdam attic and writing entries in her diary.

Here’s the part of the story that Life left out.

Laws enacted by the U.S. Congress in the 1920s created a quota system to severely restrict immigration. Roosevelt wrote at the time that immigration should be sharply restricted for “a good many years to come” so there would be time to “digest” those who had already been admitted. He argued that future immigration should be limited to those who had “blood of the right sort”—they were the ones who could be most quickly and easily assimilated, he contended.  

As president (beginning in 1933), Roosevelt took a harsh immigration system and made it much worse. His administration went above and beyond the existing law, to ensure that even those meager quota allotments were almost always under-filled. American consular officials abroad made sure to “postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas” to refugees, as one senior U.S. official put it in a memo to his colleagues. They piled on extra requirements and created a bureaucratic maze to keep refugees like the Franks far from America’s shores.

The quotas for immigrants from Germany and (later) Axis-occupied countries were filled in only one of Roosevelt’s 12 years in office. In most of those years, the quotas were less than 25% full. A total of 190,000 quota places that could have saved lives were never used at all.

Otto Frank, Anne's father, filled out the small mountain of required application forms and obtained the necessary supporting affidavits from the Franks’ relatives in Massachusetts. But that was not enough for those who zealously guarded America's gates against refugees. 

Anne’s mother, Edith, wrote to a friend in 1939: "I believe that all Germany's Jews are looking around the world, but can find nowhere to go."

That same year, refugee advocates in Congress introduced the Wagner-Rogers bill, which would have admitted 20,000 refugee children from Germany outside the quota system. Anne Frank and her sister Margot were German citizens, so they could have been among those children.

Supporters of the bill assembled a broad, ecumenical coalition--including His Eminence George Cardinal Mundelein, one of the country’s most important Catholic leaders; New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia; Hollywood celebrities such as Henry Fonda and Helen Hayes; and 1936 Republican presidential nominee Alf Landon and his running mate, Frank Knox. Former First Lady Grace Coolidge announced that she and her neighbors in Northampton, Massachusetts, would personally care for twenty-five of the children.

Even though there was no danger that the children would take jobs away from American citizens, anti-immigration activists lobbied hard against the Wagner-Rogers bill. President Roosevelt’s cousin, Laura Delano Houghteling, who was the wife of the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, articulated the sentiment of many opponents when she remarked at a dinner party that “20,000 charming children would all too soon grow up into 20,000 ugly adults.” FDR himself refused to support the bill. By the spring of 1939, Wagner-Rogers was dead.

But Wagner-Rogers was not the only way to help Jewish refugees. Just a few months earlier, in the wake of Germany’s Kristallnacht pogrom, the governor and legislative assembly of the U.S. Virgin Islands offered to open their territory to Jews fleeing Hitler. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. endorsed the proposal. 

That one tiny gesture by President Roosevelt—accepting the Virgin Islands leaders’ offer—could have saved a significant number of Jews. But FDR rejected the plan. He and his aides feared that refugees would be able to use the islands as a jumping-off point to enter the United States itself.

At a press conference on June 5, 1940, the president warned of the “horrible” danger that Jewish refugees coming to America might actually serve the Nazis. They might begin “spying under compulsion” for Hitler, he said, out of fear that if they refused, their elderly relatives back in Europe “might be taken out and shot.” 

That's right: Anne Frank, Nazi spy.

In fact, not a single instance was ever discovered of a Jewish refugee entering the United States and spying for the Nazis. But President Roosevelt did not shy away from using such fear-mongering in order to justify slamming shut America’s doors.

The following year, the administration officially decreed that no refugee with close relatives in Europe could come to the United States.

Anne and Margot Frank, and countless other German Jewish refugee children, were kept out because they were considered undesirable. They didn’t have what FDR once called “blood of the right sort.” One year after the defeat of Wagner-Rogers, Roosevelt opened America’s doors to British children to keep them safe from the German blitz. Those were the kind of foreigners he preferred.

Life magazine’s tribute to Anne Frank is touching. The photos fill our hearts with pity. But by failing to acknowledge what the Roosevelt administration did to keep the Jews out, Life’s version of history misses a point that future generations need to remember: pity is not enough to help people who are trying to escape genocide.

* * *

WHY THE LIES TOLD TO SELL THE AMERICAN PUBLIC IN THE WORLD ON THE IRANIAN NUCLEAR DEAL STILL MATTER.

WHY THE LIES TOLD TO SELL THE AMERICAN PUBLIC IN THE WORLD ON THE IRANIAN NUCLEAR DEAL STILL MATTER.

Jonathan S. Tobin(June 12, 2019 / JNS)

https://www.jns.org/opinion/why-do-lies-about-the-iran-deal-matter-now/

Posting note: MIL-ED  deems this issue an important matter of American national security

With both the Europeans and Democrats hoping to thwart Trump’s efforts to pressure Tehran, Obama’s deceptions that enabled the pact strip it of legitimacy.

This past weekend, Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reported that in 2015, Hezbollah operatives were caught stockpiling explosives in London. The Iranian-backed terrorist group had more than three tons of ammonium nitrate, the same bomb ingredients that were used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Thankfully, the bomb factory was discovered before Tehran’s agents could perpetrate another mass murder. But the one person arrested in connection with the plot was never charged and ultimately released. Just as important, the public, as well as members of Parliament who were then debating whether or not to ban Hezbollah as a terror organization, was never informed of what had happened.

Why? The Iran nuclear deal had just been implemented a few months earlier and then Prime Minister David Cameron (as well as Home Minister Theresa May, who was then in charge of security matters in the United Kingdom) were more concerned with not implicating Tehran in threats to the West than in telling the truth about its role in international terrorism.

That’s not the only recent discovery of a lie told about Iran during that period.

Just last week, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations reported that the Obama administration gave Iran access to U.S. banks to convert $5.7 billion in assets for their use. This came after then-Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew promised Congress that Iran would not be allowed to use the U.S. financial system. Only a few months after Lew and his aides made that pledge, his department issued a license authorizing the conversion of Iranian assets and encouraged American banks to take part in the scheme.

The Senate report also reveals that the Obama administration took part in efforts to encourage foreign banks to aid the Iranians and then promised those involved that they need fear nothing more than a wrist slap when they violated U.S. sanctions.

We already knew about other deceptions involving the passage of the nuclear deal. There were the side deals on inspections concluded between Iran and the United States that weakened the already shaky monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program hidden from Congress. And then there was the infamous flight of a U.S. plane to Tehran loaded with $400 million in foreign currency as ransom payments, as well as two further flights containing $1.3 billion in cash.

There was also the fact that the administration quashed a federal drug probe into the $1 billion a year narcotics smuggling being operated by Hezbollah in Latin America. We didn’t learn about that until it was revealed in a Politico magazine exposé in December of 2017.

But as far as most of the anti-Trump “resistance” or its cheerleaders in the mainstream media are concerned, all we’ve heard about the London Hezbollah plot, the Treasury Department’s lies or the other stories are crickets.

Still, some would ask why any of this matters now? Obama’s been out of office for years.

But the efforts by Obama and our European allies to deceive the world about what they were doing to appease the Iranians and Iran’s involvement in international terrorism and crime are not ancient history or irrelevant efforts to chip away at the reputation of Trump’s predecessor. To the contrary, they matter very much to the discussion about efforts to tighten sanctions on Iran and force it renegotiate the nuclear deal. That’s significant because the pact not only provided Tehran with a financial windfall that helped it finance Hezbollah and other terrorists groups, but gave the Islamist regime a path to an eventual nuclear weapon once it expires in 2025.

The story of the lies told by Obama, Lew, Secretary of State John Kerry, Energy Secretary Ernest Moritz and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes (the latter two both promised “anytime, anywhere” inspections of Iranian sites that never happened) about Iran was a dismal chapter in American political history. But those deceptions should also inform our discussion of whether their legacy achievement should be preserved.

Obama said that the deal gave Iran a chance to “get right with the world.” But instead, it gave it gave it a green light to step up its support of terror, allowing it to launch a war in Yemen and to aid terror groups that have missiles aimed at Israeli cities as part of its ambition for regional hegemony.

Democrats and other Obama apologists and Trump critics say the deal still did what it set out to do by preventing Iran from going nuclear. But that, too, was a lie since the deal allowed Tehran to keep its most advanced technology and gave it a path to a weapon once the sunset clauses kicked in.

Obama’s failure in the negotiations made it imperative for his successors to correct his mistakes and to drive Iran back to the table, where it must be stripped of its nuclear options and its ability to fund terror. Trump has, much to the chagrin of Obama’s old media “echo chamber,” made real progress towards that end with reimposed sanctions that have brought Iran’s economy to a standstill and prevented the Europeans from giving it a way to evade economic restrictions on commerce.

So when the Democratic presidential candidates vow to bring the United States back into the nuclear deal and lift current sanctions, they are not only planning to empower and enrich Iran, they are also, in effect, owning the lies that were the foundation of Obama’s effort to sell it to the American people.

If we don’t hear much about these attempts to stifle the truth for the sake of bolstering the rogue regime in Tehran, it’s because Obama’s old media allies are no more interested in the truth about either the deal or Iran now that Trump’s pressure is succeeding than they were a few years ago. Yet it is precisely the truth about Iranian activities and Obama’s deceptions that can help us understand why Trump’s policy on this issue is correct.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.