Tag Archives: Treason

News

Obama commutes sentence of government employee who leaked classified information

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Obama speaks to the Human Rights Campaign
Obama speaks to the Human Rights Campaign

The non-partisan The Hill reports.

Excerpt:

President Obama on Tuesday commuted the prison sentence of former Army [private] [Bradley] Manning, according to the White House.

Manning was convicted in 2013 of leaking classified information about U.S. national security activities that were later disclosed by WikiLeaks.

[…]Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said he doesn’t agree with Obama’s decision to release Manning early.

“I think on the larger issue of criminal justice reform, the president is really undermining our political capital by granting clemency at an unprecedented rate,” Cornyn said. “People say, well why should we change the sentencing rules in criminal justice reform if the president can just do it with a flick of his pen?”

While it’s the president’s right to commute sentences, Cornyn said, it’s not a wise move.

[…]Obama has relied on his 2014 clemency initiative to advance his goal of shortening sentences for non-violent offenders he views as unjust.

The president has mostly doled out commutations and pardons to people convicted of drug crimes who received lengthy mandatory minimum sentences under requirements that have since been scaled back by Congress.

Obama has granted commutations to 1,385 federal inmates as president, more than the total number given by the past 12 presidents combined. He has also pardoned 212 people.

The White House is expected to announce another round of clemency grants on Thursday, officials said.

Bradley Manning is a gay man, and he received sex-reassignment surgery at taxpayer expense thanks to the Obama administration.

Gay rights groups and anti-American legal groups petitioned the far-left President to pardon the convicted traitor, and that’s what Obama did, since he is funded by far-left groups and must dance to their tune.

What do we learn from this?

Well, this story continues a pattern of behavior by Democrats in which they side with criminals, terrorists, and enemies against the interests of America, of America’s allies and the safety of American citizens. It is a pattern.

Ben Shapiro explains in this article for Daily Wire:

Manning wasn’t Obama’s only controversial commutation: he also commuted the sentence of General James E. Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who lied to reporters about leaking information about the Stuxnet virus directed by Israel against the Iranian nuclear program; Obama commuted Oscar Lopez Rivera, an FALN terrorist who was convicted to a 55-year sentence for seditious conspiracy, forced robbery, and firearms charges.

[…]Obama Hates The National Security Community. Manning revealed documents to WikiLeaks that damaged American national security severely. According to the Associated Press, as The Weekly Standard notes, “The government presented [an] uncontested written statement that former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden asked for and received from an associate the Afghanistan battlefield reports that WikiLeaks published. The material was found on digital media seized in the May 2011 raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, [lead prosecutor Maj. Ashden] Fein said. Bin Laden was killed in the raid.” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) rightly stated, “I don’t understand why the president would feel special compassion for someone who endangered the lives of our troops, diplomats, intelligence officers, and allies.” And Obama’s other commutations reveal a deep disdain for our allies and our defense community: FALN is a terrorist organization, and the leak of the Stuxnet virus information only helped Iran.

This is what Obama and his Democrat allies learned in their non-STEM college courses at leftist universities: America is evil, and America’s enemies are good. That’s why Democrats bend over backwards to release terrorists from Guantanamo Bay prison, to give assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels (which are then used to murder law enforcement and border security personnel), to abandon our security personnel in Benghazi, to give billions of dollars to assist Iran to develop nuclear weapons, to embolden aggressive invasions by Russia into Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014), to cut our military spending (e.g. – stop production of F-22 Raptor, mothball our aircraft carriers), and cripple our armed forces with political correctness. And so on.

News

Detainee released by the Democrats is now top recruiter for Islamic State (ISIS)

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Neville Chamberlain Obama: peace in our time
Neville Chamberlain Obama: peace in our time

Since the prison at Guantanamo Bay is in the news lately, it might be worth reviewing the Obama administrations actions related to radical Islamic terrorism to see whether Democrats can be serious about protecting America.

Here is a typical case of the Obama administration releasing radical Islamist terrorists from Gitmo.

Investors Business Daily explains:

Last year, the president claimed he only freed five Taliban leaders to free “POW” Bowe Bergdahl, whom he portrayed as a hero. But now the Army says Bergdahl’s a deserter. We smell a rat, and it’s not just Bergdahl.

The Army on Wednesday charged Sgt. Bergdahl with desertion and endangering the safety of a command, which carries a life prison term.

The findings of the military’s six-month investigation corroborate an internal 2009 Army report that found Bergdahl had a history of walking off his post and more than likely deserted. That’s why the Pentagon never listed him as a POW.

The report said he shipped his laptop back home to Idaho, and left a note expressing his disillusionment with the war, before ending up in the arms of the Taliban.

Obama had access to this intelligence long before he made his Taliban deal. So why did he trade a known deserter — and likely enemy sympathizer, if not collaborator — for five enemy commanders that he acknowledged posed a national security risk? And why did he glorify Bergdahl as a war hero?

To justify the release from Gitmo of five hardened terrorists who would never have been released otherwise and to help close down Gitmo.

The goal is not to improve security, it’s to make it easier to close the prison.

And here’s another case reported by the Weekly Standard from earlier this week:

A former detainee hold at Gitmo has been arrested for ties to the Islamic State.

“Spanish and Moroccan police on Tuesday arrested four suspected members of a jihadi cell that sought to recruit fighters for the Islamic State group, including one described as a former Guantanamo detainee who once fought with militants in Afghanistan,” reports the Associated Press.

“Three people were arrested in Spain’s North African enclave city of Ceuta while a Moroccan was arrested in the Moroccan border town of Farkhana, next to Melilla, Spain’s other North African enclave, statements from the two nations’ interior ministries said.

“One of those detained in Ceuta was the former Guantanamo detainee who was not named by Spanish authorities but described as ‘a leader who was trained in handling weapons, explosives and in military tactics.’ After being captured in 2002 and held in Guantanamo, he was returned to Spain in 2004, said Interior Minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz.”

Obama says that closing Gitmo would actually strengthen our national security. He cites no experts for this, and he has no evidence that it’s true – it just sounds nice to him, is all.

The truth is that releasing Islamic terrorists actually drives up recruitment of more terrorists.

Here’s Andrew C. McCarthy to explain, in National Review:

The second driver of terrorist recruitment is the perception that the jihadists are winning, the conviction that they will ultimately prevail. Osama bin Laden wooed young Muslims with the wisdom that people are always drawn to the strong horse and shun the weak one. While Islamic State “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi follows up each jihadist atrocity by seizing more territory and enslaving more subjects, the president of the United States follows each jihadist atrocity — Benghazi, Paris, and now San Bernardino — by releasing more jihadists from Gitmo.

It’s not Gitmo driving recruitment. It’s our president.

In truth, Muslims don’t care a whit about Guantanamo Bay. I prosecuted one of the world’s most notorious terrorists in the mid ’90s, the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, who formed the cell that carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York. He got the gold-plated due process of a civilian trial and all the trimmings of top-shelf civilian prison — no Gitmo for him. And you know what? Islamic supremacists continue to condemn his incarceration and jihadists have killed scores of people to try to extort his release. They don’t care where we detain jihadists; they care that we detain jihadists.

Does Obama think we should release all the terrorists in federal penitentiaries, too? You know, to depress recruitment . . .

Because it is Islamic supremacism and the perception of victory that draws young Muslims to the jihad, the brute fact is: It’s not detaining terrorists at Gitmo that spurs recruitment; it’s releasing them. Muslims who wage war against America and are held in our prisons become icons of the jihad. They rise from obscurity to legend, and their status imbues them with authority to command attacks, raise funds, and attract recruits.

The real concern of the left in all of this is NOT to protect America from threats such as radical Islamic terrorism. The real desire is to attack and punish those who make radical Islamists feel bad about what they are doing. Obama wants everyone to accept terrorists as just as moral as we are. Releasing them is his way of saying that they did nothing wrong – which is what he really believes. If anyone is in the wrong, Obama thinks, it’s we Americans. We somehow provoked these innocent terrorists… get off your high horse, and remember the Crusades. That’s his worldview. Terrrorism is your fault, and these innocent terrorists are the real victims, and that’s why we need to release them.

News

Former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli: Hillary broke the law

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Hillary Clinton tweets support for jailing Christians
Hillary Clinton tweets support for jailing Christians who refuse to obey the law

Well, there were some more revelations on the weekend about Hillary’s use of a private, unsecure e-mail server. She used the private e-mail server to bypass the security regulations of her employer, so that she could communicate secretly without having her e-mails be the subject of inquiries.

Here’s the latest from leftist Reuters: (H/T JoeCoder)

The U.S. Defense Department has found an email chain that Hillary Clinton did not give to the State Department, the State Department said on Friday, despite her saying she had provided all work emails from her time as secretary of state.

The correspondence with General David Petraeus, who was commander of U.S. Central Command at the time, started shortly before she entered office and continued during her first days as the top U.S. diplomat in January and February of 2009.

You might remember that David Petraeus was critical of the administrations foreign policy decisions – at least until news of his affair with his biographer came to light, silencing him.

More:

News of the previously undisclosed email thread only adds to a steady stream of revelations about the emails in the past six months, which have forced Clinton to revise her account of the setup which she first gave in March.

[…]The email arrangement has drawn criticism from political opponents who accused the Democratic presidential front-runner of sidestepping transparency and record-keeping laws and of potentially exposing classified information to hackers.

Forget “potentially”. As I pointed out before, every single e-mail on her server is in the hands of foreign governments who don’t like us very much. That’s not my opinion, that’s the opinion of a former Deputy Director of the CIA.

Anyway, more from the original article:

[…]As recently as Sunday, she told CBS when asked about her emails that she provided “all of them.”

[…]The emails with Petraeus also appear to contradict the claim by Clinton’s campaign that she used a private BlackBerry email account for her first two months at the department before setting up her clintonemail.com account in March 2009. This was the reason her campaign gave for not handing over any emails from those two months to the State Department.

The Petraeus exchange shows she started using the clintonemail.com account by January 2009, according to the State Department.

Clinton’s spokesmen, who did not respond to questions, have acknowledged that other work emails from later in her tenure were also missing from the record Clinton handed over. They have declined to say why.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now examining Clinton’s server as it looks into the possible mishandling of classified information between Clinton and her staff.

Now, let’s get a legal assessment of all of this from former attorney general of Virginia, Ken Kuccinelli.

He writes:

Clinton originally denied that any of her emails contained classified information, but soon abandoned that claim. So far, 150 emails containing classified information have been identified on her server, including two that included information determined to be Top Secret.

She then fell back on the claim that none of the emails in question was “marked classified” at the time she was dealing with them. The marking is not what makes the material classified; it’s the nature of the information itself. As secretary of state, Clinton knew this, and in fact she would have been re-briefed annually on this point as a condition of maintaining her clearance to access classified information.

Then there’s location. Clinton knowingly set up her email system to route 100 percent of her emails to and through her unsecured server (including keeping copies stored on the server). She knowingly removed such documents and materials from authorized locations (her authorized devices and secure government networks) to an unauthorized location (her server).

Two examples demonstrate this point.

When Clinton would draft an email based on classified information, she was drafting that email on an authorized Blackberry, iPad or computer. But when she hit “send,” that email was knowingly routed to her unsecured server — an unauthorized location — for both storage and transfer.

Additionally, when Clinton moved the server to Platte River Networks (a private company) in June 2013, and then again when she transferred the contents of the server to her private lawyers in 2014, the classified materials were in each instance again removed to another unsecured location.

Next we have the lack of proper authority to move or hold classified information somewhere, i.e., the “unauthorized location.”

While it’s possible for a private residence to be an “authorized” location, and it’s also possible for non-government servers and networks to be “authorized” to house and transfer classified materials, there are specific and stringent requirements to achieve such status. Simply being secretary of state didn’t allow Clinton to authorize herself to deviate from the requirements of retaining and transmitting classified documents, materials and information.

There is no known evidence that her arrangement to use the private email server in her home was undertaken with proper authority.

Finally, there’s the intent to “retain” the classified documents or materials at an unauthorized location.

The very purpose of Clinton’s server was to intentionally retain documents and materials — all emails and attachments — on the server in her house, including classified materials.

The intent required is only to undertake the action, i.e., to retain the classified documents and materials in the unauthorized fashion addressed in this statute. That’s it.

It borders on inconceivable that Clinton didn’t know that the emails she received, and more obviously, the emails that she created, stored and sent with the server, would contain classified information.

I have no doubt that Hillary Clinton would sell out the interests of her country in a heartbeat, if it meant improving her own political situation. We have to judge candidates by their past actions. That’s what she’s done, and that’s what she’d do. I have friends in the military and in law enforcement who are impacted by politicians with loose lips. I don’t want a traitor as commander-in-chief.