Tag Archives: Barack Obama

News

Democrats oppose release of #FISAMemo detailing surveillance abuses #ReleaseTheMemo

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The Memo "raises serious questions about... the Obama DOJ"
The memo “raises serious questions about… the Obama DOJ and Comey FBI”

OK, I’m not following this story too closely, but I think what I’m hearing is that the Clinton campaign funded a company called Fusion GPS, which produced a Trump-Russia dossier. And this dossier was then used to get surveillance warrants on Trump campaign staff, in order to help Hillary Clinton win the election. And apparently, there’s a memo that documents exactly how this was done, and the Republicans are trying to release it to the public, while the Democrats are trying to cover it up.

The Daily Caller talks about what’s IN the memo:

National security journalist and Fox News contributor Sara Carter reportedThursday that the memo shows “extensive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse.”

The memo also contains information about the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as well as the infamous Trump-Russia dossier.

Carter also writes that sources told her “they would not be surprised if it leads to the end of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation into President Trump and his associates.”

She also reports that an unnamed congressional member told her “(w)e probably will get this stuff released by the end of the month.”

The article has some tweets by Congressmen Louie Gohmert, Ron DeSantis, etc.

And more:

A number of other Republican lawmakers sounded off about the contents of the classified intelligence memo.

Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry told Fox News, “You think about, ‘is this happening in America or is this the KGB?’ That’s how alarming it is.”

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz said, “I believe the consequence of its release will be major changes in people currently working at the FBI and the Department of Justice.”

Gaetz also issued a statement on his congressional website Thursday calling for the document to be released to the public, writing, “The House must immediately make public the memo prepared by the Intelligence Committee regarding the FBI and the Department of Justice. The facts contained in this memo are jaw-dropping and demand full transparency. There is no higher priority than the release of this information to preserve our democracy.”

How bad are the contents of the memo?

Here’s the latest from Fox News:

A four-page memo circulating in Congress that reveals alleged United States government surveillance abuses is being described by lawmakers as “shocking,” “troubling” and “alarming,” with one congressman likening the details to KGB activity in Russia.

Speaking with Fox News, the lawmakers said they could not yet discuss the contents of the memo they reviewed on Thursday after it was released to members by the House Intelligence Committee. But they say the memo should be immediately made public.

“It is so alarming the American people have to see this,” Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan said.

“It’s troubling. It is shocking,” North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows said. “Part of me wishes that I didn’t read it because I don’t want to believe that those kinds of things could be happening in this country that I call home and love so much.”

Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz said he believed people could lose their jobs after the memo is released.

“I believe the consequence of its release will be major changes in people currently working at the FBI and the Department of Justice,” he said, referencing DOJ officials Rod Rosenstein and Bruce Ohr.

“You think about, ‘is this happening in America or is this the KGB?’ That’s how alarming it is,” Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry said.

The House Intelligence Committee on Thursday approved a motion by New York Rep. Pete King to release the memo on abuses of FISA, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to all House members.

[…]The vote Thursday morning on releasing the memo to lawmakers was along party lines, with Democrats voting against making it available for all members.

I probably should get ahead of myself, but I am really hoping that some of the Democrats in the DOJ and FBI end up in the slammer. We have a problem with corruption in the government. It’s a problem that will get immeasurably better if we put some Democrats in jail for the crimes they’ve committed. I’m so anxious to see these secular leftists who thought that they were above the law get justice. Government is not intended to be as a weapon against the advocates of limited government. This is not the Soviet Union.

News

Obama administration ignored pro-democracy protesters, gave Iran dictators $1.7 billion

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Neda Agha-Soltan - pro-democracy protester who was killed by Iradian dictatorship
Neda Agha-Soltan – pro-democracy protester who was killed by Iradian dictatorship

Since we are seeing Trump reach out to pro-democracy protesters in Iran, it’s worth remembering how Obama responded to them in 2009.

First, here’s what happened in Iran in 2009, just after Obama was elected president.

The radically leftist BBC reports:

The doctor who tried to save an Iranian protester as she bled to death on a street in Tehran has told the BBC of her final moments.

Dr Arash Hejazi, who is studying at a university in the south of England, said he ran to Neda Agha-Soltan’s aid after seeing she had been shot in the chest.

Despite his attempts to stop the bleeding she died in less than a minute, he said.

Video of Ms Soltan’s death was posted on the internet and images of her have become a rallying point for Iranian opposition supporters around the world.

[…]Dr Hejazi said he saw Ms Soltan, who he did not know, with an older man who he thought was her father but later on learned was her music teacher.

“Suddenly everything turned crazy. The police threw teargas and the motorcycles started rushing towards the crowd. We ran to an intersection and people were just standing. They didn’t know what to do.

“We heard a gunshot. Neda was standing one metre away from me. I turned back and I saw blood gushing out of Neda’s chest.

“She was in a shocked situation, just looking at her chest. Then she lost her control.

“We ran to her and lay her on the ground. I saw the bullet wound just below the neck with blood gushing out.

“I have never seen such a thing because the bullet, it seemed to have blasted inside her chest, and later on, blood exiting from her mouth and nose.

“I had the impression that it had hit the lung as well. Her blood was draining out of her body and I was just putting pressure on the wound to try to stop the bleeding, which wasn’t successful unfortunately, and she died in less than one minute.”

Here’s the video:

Here’s how Obama responded to the pro-democracy protesters in 2009, according to the far-left extremist New York Times:

President Obama said Tuesday that it would be counterproductive for the United States “to be seen as meddling” in the disputed Iranian presidential election, dismissing criticism from several leading Republicans that he has failed to speak out forcefully enough on behalf of the Iranian opposition.

[…]With protesters filling the streets of Tehran to denounce the declared outcome of the election, administration officials said they were wary of doing anything that would allow the declared victor, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to portray the protests as American-led.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, offered some of the sharpest critiques of Mr. Obama’s tempered response.

“He should speak out that this is a corrupt, flawed sham of an election,” Mr. McCain said in an interview Tuesday on NBC’s “Today” show. “The Iranian people have been deprived of their rights.”

The UK Telegraph explains that this was not a free and fair election:

Iran has seen thousands demonstrate following the election, prompting the regime to respond to public anger on Tuesday by offering a partial recount of votes in last week’s election.

Supporters of both men have staged demonstrations, each drawing tens of thousands of people, but the event in support of the president was heavily promoted on state television, with all six channels urging Iranians to attend.

The rival protest, by contrast, was officially banned and the regime tried to stop its opponents from communicating by blocking text messages and email accounts.

Later on in his failed presidency, Obama would send $1.7 billion in cash to Iran to help them develop nuclear weapons, so they could destroy Israel a little faster. He made sure to include $400 million in unmarked bills, so that future administrations would not be able to back out of the “deal”.

It came out recently that Obama was so desperate to give the Iranian regime this money, that he actually stopped an investigation into drug-smuggling by Iran’s terrorist ally, Hezbollah.

The Stream reports on the story, which was broken by the far-left Politico:

President Barack Obama torpedoed a DEA-led effort to stop Hezbollah from smuggling cocaine into the country. POLITICO broke the bombshell news Sunday night. The reason for allowing the Iran-backed terror group’s criminal enterprise to continue? Obama’s desperate desire for better relations and a nuclear deal with Iran.

The DEA teamed with dozens of agencies here and abroad in 2008 after discovering Hezbollah had grown beyond Middle East politics and thuggery into international crime. The special task force was called Project Cassandra. For eight years Project Cassandra worked to unravel Hezbollah’s drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa.

Hezbollah isn’t just smuggling cocaine. A November piece in The Hill noted, “Hezbollah’s involvement in producing and selling counterfeit medicines such as Captagon — a powerful amphetamine — is well documented.” Captagon is dubbed “chemical courage.” It was the drug of choice for ISIS. As Canada’s CBC reported, Captagon is “widely used by fighters in the Syrian civil war for its ability to make people alert, fearless and ready to kill with abandon.”

Project Cassandra traced the crime syndicate to “the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.”

This is the same Iran that imprisons Christian women in dirty prisons, funds Hezbollah terrorists, sends aid to Islamic terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen, and backed the corrupt Syria dictatorship. And more. I don’t have space to write all of what they do, but they’re one of the worst countries on the face of the planet. Not the people – but the Islamist dictators who run the show.

Trump came out and expressed support for the Iranian protesters, for which he received widespread support from lawmakers and former government officials.

Right now, half of the American public is so ignorant of national security and foreign policy that we elected an imbecile to the White House in 2008 and 2012. The idiots elected an idiot, and it was a disastrous eight years for liberty and peace. All I can say right now about Iran is at least the bleeding has stopped now that the grown-ups are back in charge.

News

Trump defeated ISIS: Islamic State has now lost 98% of their territory

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Islamic State operates in the red areas now, green = retreats
Islamic State retreats: light and dark green = previous ISIS areas, red = current ISIS areas

(Source: U.S. State Department via Business Insider)

I spent some time during my winter vacation reading through a whole bunch of military history books… “Lone Survivor”, “13 Hours” and “Red Platoon”.

In Thirteen Hours, I found out how the embassy in Benghazi was attacked, and then defended by security personnel at a nearby CIA outpost. The security personnel requested assistance over and over, and explained carefully that this was a planned terrorist attack, with pre-sighted indirect fire from mortars. All the requests for support were ignored by the Obama administration. Later on, Obama’s friend Susan Rice came out to assure us that the Obama administration had not failed to protect the ambassador, because the planned terrorist attack was just some minor protest violence caused by a YouTube video.

In Red Platoon, I found out about how U.S. forces were attacked in Eastern Afghanistan, near Pakistan, but no reinforcements were available because the entire army and air force was off looking for Private Beau Bergdahl, the deserter who Obama traded five Taliban commanders to get back. Is trading five experienced Taliban commanders for one deserter with the rank of Private a good deal? I don’t think so. Bergdahl was later convicted of desertion, by the way. At the time of the swap, Obama’s friend Susan Rice assured us that Bergdahl served honorably and was worth the five Taliban commanders.

In Lone Survivor, I found out about how how a 4-man team of Navy SEALs were discovered by Afghanistan civilians while conducting surveillance on a Taliban commander. Because they were afraid of the progressive mainstream media, and limited by the Obama administration’s pro-terrorist rules of engagement, they had to release the civilians. In gratitude for their lives, the civilians then immediately reported them to a nearby Taliban base. As a result, 3 of the 4 Navy SEALs were killed in action, and the fourth grievously wounded. He is very careful in the book to explain the costs of the mainstream media’s pro-terrorist bias, and the damaging effects of the Obama administration’s pro-terrorist rules of engagement (ROE).

Elsewhere, the pro-LGBT Obama administration gave convicted traitor Private Bradley Manning a free taxpayer-funded sex change, and then pardoned him for giving away our most important military secrets to WikiLeaks. Then Team Obama gave Iran a big boost in their development of nuclear weapons, including $400 million in untraceable cash. This is the same Iran that was killing our soldiers via IEDs in Iraq.

This is a snapshot of how the Obama administration handled foreign policy and national security during their eight-year reign of error. This is not even to mention the disasters in Syria, Egypt and Libya. It was the worst foreign policy presidency ever. And remember, Obama inherited a victory in Iraq, after George W. Bush’s successful surge. Obama turned that victory into a defeat by retreating prematurely instead of winning the peace. ISIS was created by Obama’s withdrawal from the battlefield.

Things have changed now that Donald Trump took over. He immediately gave the military more autonomy to go after our enemies, and now after one year, we have the results.

Fox News reports:

ISIS has lost 98 percent of the territory it once held — with half of that terror group’s so-called “caliphate” having been recaptured since President Trump took office less than a year ago, U.S. military officials said Tuesday.

The massive gains come after years of “onerous” rules, when critics say the Obama administration “micromanaged” the war and shunned a more intensive air strategy that could have ended the conflict much sooner.

“The rules of engagement under the Obama administration were onerous. I mean what are we doing having individual target determination being conducted in the White House, which in some cases adds weeks and weeks,” said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, the former head of U.S. Air Force intelligence. “The limitations that were put on actually resulted in greater civilian casualties.”

[…]The latest American intelligence assessment says fewer than 1,000 ISIS fighters now remain in Iraq and Syria, down from a peak of nearly 45,000 just two years ago. U.S. officials credit nearly 30,000 U.S.-led coalition airstrikes and regional partners on the ground for killing more than 70,000 jihadists. Meanwhile, only a few thousand have returned home.

The remaining ISIS strongholds are concentrated in a small area along the border of Syria and Iraq. ISIS, at one point, controlled an area the size of Ohio.

During the Obama administration, a lot of evil things were happening at the hands of evil men in the Middle East. I would like the American people to vote with their minds instead of with their feelings. Foreign policy and national security should be important, and they are certainly too important to be trusted to the radical left. We can do better than blame-America-first Democrats.