Showing posts with label John Brennan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Brennan. Show all posts

Friday, November 1, 2019

Paul Sperry identifies so-called whistleblower, links him to DNC Ukraine colluder Alexandra Chalupa, puts her at Obama's White House in November 2015, much earlier than previously admitted

And Ciaramella worked with a Democratic National Committee operative who dug up dirt on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, inviting her into the White House for meetings, former White House colleagues said. The operative, Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American who supported Hillary Clinton, led an effort to link the Republican campaign to the Russian government. “He knows her. He had her in the White House,” said one former co-worker, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

Documents confirm the DNC opposition researcher attended at least one White House meeting with Ciaramella in November 2015.  She visited the White House with a number of Ukrainian officials lobbying the Obama administration for aid for Ukraine. ...

In his complaint, the whistleblower charged that the president used “the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.”  Specifically, he cited a controversial July 25 phone call from the White House residence in which Trump asked Ukraine’s new president to help investigate the origins of the Russia “collusion” investigation the Obama administration initiated against his campaign, citing reports that “a lot of it started with Ukraine," where the former pro-Hillary Clinton regime in Kiev worked with Obama diplomats and Chalupa to try to “sabotage” Trump’s run for president.

More here.


Sunday, March 24, 2019

Matt Taibbi: The press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020

It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD:

Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As [Peter] Baker notes [in the New York Times], a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.” ...

The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star. That’s a hell of a long way from what this business was supposedly about at the beginning, and shame on any reporter who tries to pretend this isn’t so. ...

CNN told us Trump officials had been in “constant contact” with “Russians known to U.S. intelligence,” and the former director of the CIA ["former" communist John Brennan], who’d helped kick-start the investigation that led to Mueller’s probe, said the President was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” committing acts “nothing short of treasonous.” ...

[N]ews outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a “reckoning for the media.” Of course, there won’t be such a reckoning. (There never is). But there should be. We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm. ...

The Russiagate era has so degraded journalism that even once “reputable” outlets are now only about as right as politicians, which is to say barely ever, and then only by accident. Early on, I was so amazed by the sheer quantity of Russia “bombshells” being walked back, I started to keep a list. It’s well above 50 stories now. As has been noted by Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept and others, if the mistakes were random, you’d expect them in both directions, but Russiagate errors uniformly go the same way. ...

We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.



Thursday, November 1, 2018

Investors Business Daily has a sensible editorial on birthright citizenship


As Daniel Horowitz recently noted, the only legal justification for granting citizenship to illegals comes in a footnote to the Supreme Court's Plylor V. Doe decision. In it, ultra-liberal Justice William Brennan claimed that illegal aliens had a right to claim jurisdiction under U.S. law. But it's never really been decided as a separate issue by the Supreme Court.

So on strictly constructed constitutional grounds, Trump is right. Whether you hate him or not.

Of course, the counter-argument to that is: We have allowed this system to go on for so long without direct challenge it now has the force of law. That is a legitimate legal argument. It deserves serious consideration, either by Congress or the courts.

And that's our point. As bad as we think birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants is, any decision should be a matter of law and democratic process, not of screaming and name-calling. We have a Congress. We have a court system. The president has, in effect, challenged them to do their job. So they should do it.

If they don't, then Donald Trump, as the nation's chief executive, is well within his rights to issue an executive order if he thinks birthright citizenship represents a violation of the Constitution and threatens harm to the nation. It's his duty.

He has precedent. Axios.com quoted Trump telling reporters Wednesday that, if President Obama can "do DACA, we can do this by executive order."

Sunday, September 23, 2018

John Brennan is the Democrats' self-admitted communist, James Comey is the Republicans'

Mr. Comey Goes To Washington (New York Magazine, 20 October 2003):

Comey has been savaged by William Safire and lauded by Chuck Schumer; just what kind of Republican is he, anyway? This sets Comey howling again. “I must be doing something right!” he says. “In college, I was left of center, and through a gradual process I found myself more comfortable with a lot of the ideas and approaches the Republicans were using.” He voted for Carter in 1980, but in ’84, “I voted for Reagan—I’d moved from Communist to whatever I am now. I’m not even sure how to characterize myself politically. Maybe at some point, I’ll have to figure it out.”

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Rand Paul on John Brennan: He's unhinged, deranged, an insult to our government

Quoted here:

PAUL: “John Brennan started out his adulthood by voting for the communist party presidential candidate. He is now ending his career by showing himself to be the most biased, bigoted, over the top, hyperbolic, sort of unhinged director of the CIA we have ever had. And really it is an insult to our government to have a former head of the CIA to calling the president treasonous just because he doesn’t like him. But I realized that Brennan — I filibustered Brennan, I tried to keep Brennan from ever being the leader of the CIA. But realized that Brennan and Clapper are known for wanting to expand the authority of the intelligence agencies to grab up everyone’s information, including Americans. So I don’t have a lot of respect for these people even before they decided to go on hating the president. I dislike these people because they wanted to grab up so much power and use it against the American people. ... Some people are deranged with Trump and that’s why I think they’re crazy.”


Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Rush is right: Comey admitted his dossier meeting with Trump was an "assignment"

Rush thinks Comey got this assignment from Clapper.

Notice that Comey admits he was acting at the behest of "all the intelligence chiefs". That would include Brennan at CIA, and presumably the heads of NSA, DIA and NGIA.

Also notice how Comey characterizes this "defensive briefing" of Trump as part of the FBI's "counterintelligence" operation. He's admitting a counterintelligence operation of a presidential campaign and transition was in existence, at the behest of Obama's government, and that the briefing was part of this.

The adversarial character of all this is hardly appreciated by your average observer. 

From the transcript, here, Meet the Press, 4/29/18:

CHUCK TODD:

When you told him the contents of the Steele Dossier, did you get the impression it was the first time he'd ever heard those allegations?

JAMES COMEY:

Yes. And I didn't give him the briefing on the whole Steele Dossier. My assignment was to brief him on a small part of it that was salacious and personal. And my sense was-- I didn't get a sense that he knew about those.

CHUCK TODD:

I want to re-ask a question that Reince Priebus asked you, and you said in your memo, why include that salacious part? If it was something that you thought was, you know, not that necessary to the investigation? Or did you think it was important that he knew?

JAMES COMEY:

We thought it was important that he knew. And I say, "We," meaning all the intelligence chiefs that put together the intelligence community assessment. We thought it was important that he know, because we knew, and we don't want to be holding that back from the new president. And also, the F.B.I.'s role is counterintelligence. And so we do a defensive briefing, whether or not something's true, just to let the person who might be the target of a leverage effort, of an effort by an adversary to gain advantage over him know that we have this information.

Monday, December 4, 2017

Peter Strzok, removed by Mueller for anti-Trump bias, interviewed Hillary in July 2016 in the e-mail investigation

Now you know how Hillary wasn't prosecuted. The interview, conducted by a friendly, wasn't recorded, and Hillary wasn't reinterviewed multiple times thereafter the way Flynn was to document her in a misstatement the way Flynn was (Comey notably declined to prosecute Flynn, saying that Flynn didn't intend to lie). Days after the interview, Comey spelled out Hillary's misdeeds but declined to prosecute because she didn't intend to mislead when testifying contrary to the physical evidence.

Had both been prosecuted were Special Prosecutor Mueller still in charge of the FBI?

Reported here:

[Strzok] participated in the FBI's fateful interview with Hillary Clinton on July 2, 2016 – just days before then-FBI Director James Comey announced he was declining to recommend prosecution of Mrs. Clinton in connection with her use, as secretary of state, of a private email server. 

As deputy FBI director for counterintelligence, Strzok also enjoyed liaison with various agencies in the intelligence community, including the CIA, then led by Director John Brennan.

Friday, December 16, 2016

The Nation Magazine's James Carden wonders why liberals fawn over anonymous CIA claims when John Brennan is a known liar


The recent raft of unverified, anonymously sourced and circumstantial stories alleging that the Russian government interfered in the US presidential election with the aim of electing Republican Donald J. Trump shows that today too much of the media is all too happy to do overtly what the CIA had ... once paid it to do covertly: regurgitate the claims of the spy agency and attack the credibility of those who question it. ... CIA Director John Brennan made false statements before Congress over the CIA’s hacking into the computers of Congressional staffers.

Monday, September 26, 2016

CIA has been affirmative action employer for communists, like Obama's John Brennan

Brennan, who thinks drone strikes are legal, ethical and wise, quoted here:

"So if back in 1980, John Brennan was allowed to say, 'I voted for the Communist Party with Gus Hall' [in 1976]... and still got through, rest assured that your rights and your expressions and your freedom of speech as Americans is something that's not going to be disqualifying of you as you pursue a career in government."

Friday, May 9, 2014

Rick Santorum is right: Conservatism is about the family, and libertarianism isn't about enough

Blue Collar Conservatives, reviewed here:

A blithe attitude about economic disruption and the decline of traditional industries goes along with what Santorum sees as a philosophical overemphasis on individualism. Conservatives, he argues, have neglected an important strand of political thought in which the family is the fundamental unit of the polis.

“The basic unit of the society is the family,” he writes, not “the individual.” Liberty in America shouldn’t mean just “freedom from” coercion, he argues, but “freedom for” — for Americans to do the right thing, to choose the virtuous and Godly course. That, he explains, is the properly understood meaning of the right to “pursuit of happiness.” (He takes this up in American Patriots, his recent book of exempla from the Revolutionary period divided into defenders of life, defenders of liberty, and defenders of “the pursuit of happiness,” i.e., virtue.)

Santorum explicitly blames libertarians for the rise of individualism, but it’s hard not to feel as if he’s taking issue with most of his party. ...

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

The UK Guardian Savages Obama As An Authoritarian and Killer



[T]he three major policies of the Bush war on terror – rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention – continue to this day. But Mr Obama has also presided over a massive expansion of secret surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency. There is a ferocious crackdown on whistleblowers. He has made more government documents classified than any previous president. And he has become a true believer in drones. ...


[T]his administration is highlighting the fact that its president is a killer. In this new age of secrecy, three dozen current and former advisers are allowed to talk to the New York Times about the president's role of personally overseeing the shadow war with al-Qaida. Mr Obama has not been shy about the role he personally played in Osama bin Laden's death. His counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan makes speeches defending drone strikes as legal, ethical and wise. This administration is not on the defensive about its summary executions. It positively seeks to advertise them.


Friday, March 30, 2012

Justices Appointed By Republican Presidents Have Been Opponents Of Conservatism

In the attack on the traditional values of the American people, Republican presidents bear heavy responsibility for betraying them by their Supreme Court appointments.

Reagan is a particular disappointment. In the history of conservatism, he should assume the status more of "Democrat in recovery" than "conservative." And if it weren't for his signature on the 1986 law known as EMTALA, we might not be in this mess today.

So don't get your hopes up about Roberts and Alito on ObamaCare, let alone Kennedy.

Consider Roe v. Wade, 1973:

"In disallowing many state and federal restrictions on abortion in the United States, Roe v. Wade prompted a national debate that continues today, about issues including whether and to what extent abortion should be legal, who should decide the legality of abortion, what methods the Supreme Court should use in constitutional adjudication, and what the role should be of religious and moral views in the political sphere. Roe v. Wade reshaped national politics, dividing much of the United States into pro-choice and pro-life camps, while activating grassroots movements on both sides."

In the majority were:

Blackmun (NIXON APPOINTEE, 1970),
joined by
Burger (NIXON APPOINTEE, 1969),
Douglas,
Brennan (EISENHOWER APPOINTEE, 1956),
Stewart (EISENHOWER APPOINTEE, 1958),
Marshall,
Powell (NIXON APPOINTEE, 1971).

Or consider Lawrence v. Texas, 2003:

"In the 6-3 ruling, the Court struck down the sodomy law in Texas and, by proxy, invalidated sodomy laws in the thirteen other states where still existed, thereby making same-sex sexual activity legal in every U.S. state and territory."

In the majority were:
Kennedy (REAGAN APPOINTEE, 1988),
joined by
Stevens (FORD APPOINTEE, 1975),
Souter (BUSH APPOINTEE, 1990),
Ginsburg,
Breyer,
with concurrence by O'Connor (REAGAN APPOINTEE, 1981).

The sheep will get in line and follow their shepherd Romney this year. But if you believe that as president he will appoint anyone substantively different than this lot, fuhgehtaboudit. The Senate would never confirm such a person anyway, especially its Republican members, as disgraceful and disreputable a lot as you'll find anywhere in America.