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November 2016

Hillary Clinton Gave Visa to Egyptian TERRORIST to Visit State Department, White House to Lobby for Blind Sheikh Release By Patrick Poole

In June 2012, Hillary Clinton’s State Department issued a visa to enter the United States to Hani Noor Eldin — an avowed member of the Egyptian terror group Gamaa Islamiya.

Gamaa Islamiya had been designated by the U.S. as a terror organization since October 1997 during the Clinton administration.

According to U.S. law, Eldin’s request for a visa must be denied.

But not only was Eldin allowed into the U.S., he was escorted into Hillary’s State Department where he met with Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Under Secretary Robert Hormats. Eldin was then received at the White House by Denis McDonough, who was Obama’s deputy national security advisor at the time, and is currently the White House chief of staff.

According to published reports, Eldin used these meetings as an opportunity to press Obama administration officials to release from federal prison the leader of his terror group, the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman. Rahman is serving a life sentence for his leadership role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the planned follow-up “Day of Terror” plot targeting New York landmarks.

(That case was prosecuted by my friend and PJ Media colleague, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy.)

Those meetings resulted in serious Obama administration discussions about transferring the blind sheikh back to Egypt, then under control of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi. Morsi had vowed to pressure the U.S. for the blind sheikh’s release while Eldin was in Washington, D.C.

The blind sheikh’s transfer was only stopped when members of Congress began asking about the deal. The possibility of his transfer was publicly denounced by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who presided over the blind sheikh’s trial as a federal district court judge.

When Congress asked about Eldin’s visit to the U.S., then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano vowed that more foreign terrorists would be allowed in for such situations.

Questions were initially raised about how Eldin was allowed in the country and the details of his visit to Washington, D.C. when the story broke from reporter Eli Lake, who interviewed the terror group member. Eldin had no problem admitting he was a member of the banned Gamaa Islamiya:

It was supposed to be a routine meeting for Egyptian legislators in Washington, an opportunity for senior Obama administration officials to meet with new members of Egypt’s parliament and exchange ideas on the future of relations between the two countries.

Instead, the visit this week looks like it’s turning into a political fiasco. Included in the delegation of Egyptian lawmakers was Hani Nour Eldin, who, in addition to being a newly elected member of parliament, is a member of the Gamaa Islamiya, or the Egyptian Islamic Group — a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. The group was banned under former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and is now a recognized Islamist political party. Its spiritual leader, Omar Abdel Rahman — also known as the “blind sheik” — was convicted in 1995 of plotting attacks on New York City landmarks and transportation centers, and is serving a life sentence in a North Carolina federal prison.

Eldin, according to his Facebook page, was born in 1968 and resides in Suez, near the canal that unites the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea. He was arrested in 1993 on terrorism charges after members of Gamaa Islamiya got into a shoot out with Egyptian security officials at a mosque. He has proclaimed his innocence in the shooting and says he was arrested because of his political activism against Mubarak.

In an interview, Eldin confirmed he is a member of Gamaa Islamiya. By U.S. law, that means he would be denied a visa to enter the country. Nonetheless, he says, he got a visa from the State Department. A State Department spokesman said, “We have no information suggesting that he or anyone else in the delegation is a member of the Egyptian Islamic Group.”

The State Department blamed the visit on the U.S. government-funded Wilson Center, which then turned around and blamed the State Department:

While in Washington, Eldin also visited the Wilson Center, a think tank that specializes in foreign policy issues. A State Department spokesman said the delegation was “invited to Washington by the Wilson Center. I refer you to the Wilson Center for any additional information on their visit.”

A spokesman for the Wilson Center, however, said the delegation was selected by the State Department. “We can’t speak to the background of Eldin,” said Drew Sample the media relations coordinator for the Wilson Center. “The Wilson Center was one of the places on the delegation’s Washington visit. We did not invite these people, the State Department arranged the visit.”

Yes, the President May Fire the FBI Director By Andrew C. McCarthy

As readers of my columns know, I am a fan of Peter Schweizer, who runs the Government Accountability Institute and is author of the crucially important Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. The book is an exhaustively researched account of the Clinton Foundation scheme, and media reporting indicates that it triggered the FBI’s investigation of the Foundation’s pay-to-play scheming.

Mr. Schweizer is the first to admit (maybe I should say, to brag) that he is not a lawyer or a constitutional scholar. He’s a first-rate investigative journalist. In that spirit, I want to rebut a legal error I’ve heard him make in a couple of interviews over the last few days, most recently when interviewed by Rush Limbaugh this afternoon. Apparently making some errant assumptions based on the fact that the FBI director, by statute, has a ten-year term, he has opined that the FBI is an agency independent of the executive branch; therefore, he concludes, the FBI director does not work for, and may not be fired by, the president.

This is incorrect.

In our system, law enforcement is an executive power. The FBI is thus an executive branch agency. Indeed, far from independent, it is a part of the Justice Department; the FBI director is subordinate to the attorney general in the chain-of-command.

Under the Constitution, all executive power is endowed in one official, the president of the United States. Every official who wields power in the executive branch thus wields it at the pleasure of the chief executive. The president may terminate any executive officer, even those who have been confirmed by Congress, for any reason or no reason. The FBI director is no different.

It is true that Congress has given the FBI director a ten-year term, but it is best thought of as a presumptive ten-year limit. There are two explanations for it.

The first is J.Edgar Hoover. After his legendary (and notorious) 43-year tenure, Congress and the Ford White House decided that such awesome power should not be in a single set of hands for so long. In 1976, a law was enacted limiting the director’s term to ten years.

WILL ISRAEL FACE AN AMBUSH AT THE UN AFTER THE U.S. ELECTIONS?

“Israeli diplomats gird for the possibility that President Obama may try to force a diplomatic resolution for Israel and the Palestinians at the United Nations. The White House has been unusually tight-lipped about what, if anything, it might have in mind. But our sources say the White House has asked the State Department to develop an options menu for the President’s final weeks.

One possibility would be to sponsor, or at least allow, a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction, perhaps alongside new IRS regulations revoking the tax-exempt status of people or entities involved in settlement building… Mr. Obama may also seek formal recognition of a Palestinian state at the Security Council. This would run afoul of Congress’s longstanding view that ‘Palestine’ does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood, including a defined territory and effective government, though Mr. Obama could overcome the objection through his usual expedient of an executive action, thereby daring the next President to reverse him.

Both actions would be a boon to the bullies in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, while also subjecting Israeli citizens and supporters abroad to new and more aggressive forms of legal harassment. It could even criminalize the Israeli army-and every reservist who serves in it-on the theory that it is illegally occupying a foreign state. Does Mr. Obama want to be remembered as the President who criminalized Israeli citizenship?

The worst option would be an effort to introduce a resolution at the U.N. Security Council setting ‘parameters’ for a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. The French have been eager to do this for some time, and one option for the Administration would be to let the resolution pass simply by refusing to veto it. Or the U.S. could introduce the resolution itself, all the better to take credit for it…

America’s “Arab Spring” by Nonie Darwish

President Obama appears to have been told that if all these secular dictators could be brought down, a magnificent Arab Spring would blossom. This was, it seems, precisely the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood: to get America’s help to topple the dictatorships — then mostly military and secular — but then to replace them with themselves, Islamists.

After Egypt took down the Muslim Brotherhood, the goal of establishing the Islamic Caliphate in Egypt simply moved to Syria, the only Arab nation where a secular Muslim leader had survived the Arab Spring.

Promoting Islam also seems to have been a major factor in Obama’s equation for America. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed suit, hosting several closed-door conferences on “Defamation of Religion,” to suppress free speech and internationally criminalize any criticism of Islam with fines and prison. She would rather blame terrorism on free speech than on the violent tenets of Islam.

This escalating subversion should be reason enough for all Western democratic countries permanently to part company with the United Nations. Its history of corruption is neither new nor surprising, or that it is run anti-democratic “club of dictators” whose interests are opposite to ours.

The goals of U.S. President Barack Obama in the Middle East ended the rule of most of the “secular” Arab leaders in the area. His views may have come, partly at least, from propaganda on why Muslim people supposedly lacked freedom there. Obama appears to have been told that if all these secular dictators could be brought down, a magnificent Arab Spring would blossom.

This was, it seems, precisely the goal of the Muslim Brotherhood: to get America’s help to topple the dictatorships — then mostly military and secular — but then to replace them with themselves, Islamists.

No reason to assume Hillary’s troubles are behind her… By Victor Davis Hanson

Hillary Clinton was resting, running out the clock, sitting on a supposed large lead and hoping that the election was sooner than later.

Now after the latest Weiner disclosures, she is crisscrossing the country, terrified of collapsing polls, and wishing that she had three more weeks rather than just one.

With the Clintons, farce is the desert to scandal:

the profiteering Clinton Foundation as a humanitarian treasure;

Hillary the former corporate attorney as child and little-guy crusader;

Bill Clinton, both sexual predator and feminist hero.

Hillary didn’t just delete e-mails under congressional subpoena; she insisted that some 33,000 e-mails were mostly about yoga and Chelsea’s wedding – sort of like saying that one can beat 31 trillion-to-one odds of turning $1,000 into a $100,000 cattle-futures profit in no time by merely reading the Wall Street Journal. Until Friday, FBI director James Comey, in Hillary’s eyes, was a sober and judicious public servant who had rightly seen insufficient cause for her indictment. Now she believes that he is a rank Republican politico seeking to rob her of her presidency.

Clinton thought that she had survived Wikileaks, the Project Veritas ambush tapes, the hacked Colin Powell e-mails, the DNC disclosures, and so on – mostly because of Donald Trump’s self-inflicted wounds, some vicious-if-clever Democratic Party operatives, and a series of Democratic-planted IEDs about Trump’s foul mouth that exploded at preplanned and opportune moments.

Yet no one thought discredited deviant Anthony Weiner could much harm Hillary – except of course “conspiratorial” Donald Trump. He warned months ago that Clinton aide Huma Abedin might have been passing on classified materials to her dissolute husband. Because Weiner couldn’t repress his electronic libido with young girls, he ended up on the FBI’s radar – and by extension his smartphones, tablets, computers, and by further extension supposedly his estranged wife’s confidential communications. It was thought that Weiner might have stopped his sexting addiction when he lost his House seat, when he lost his mayor’s race, when he lost his wife, when he lost his jobs – or, at the very least, before he might lose Hillary (who supposedly fixed Abedin up with Weiner) her election.

Hillary’s team dared Comey to put up incriminating e-mails or shut up about investigating Hillary, hoping that the Obama Justice Department might quash any request for court-ordered warrants. But that demand assumed that Weiner is a loyal Clintonista and will put his fealty to Hillary and the Democrats above his own fear of federal prison and its supposed cultural intolerance for supposed predators. For now, the Clinton attack on the FBI might be not only futile but stupid – antagonizing her inquisitor, without the ability to apply pressure to silence him – if Weiner voluntarily surrenders his warrant-less communications to obtain some sort of deal.

The Myth of Jews and Slavery By Alex Grobman, PhD

One of the enduring myths against the Jews is that they played a key role in the slave trade. The British newspaper Independent recently reported that Jackie Walker, the vice-chair of the left-wing Labor Party–linked movement, wrote on her Facebook page: “I’m sure you know, millions more Africans were killed in the African Holocaust and their oppression continues today on a global scale in a way it doesn’t for Jews…and many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade which is of course why there were so many early synagogues in the Caribbean.”

Her attack now appears on the website of Jews For Justice For Palestinians whose demands include “ending Israel’s illegal occupation and settlement of Palestinian land, including its illegal blockade of Gaza; and [demanding Israel] acknowledge its responsibility in the creation of the Palestinian refugees, and its obligation to negotiate a just, fair and practical resolution of the issue.”

In addition to being accused of having been part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and of owning slaves, Jews are also charged with being involved in creating the Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation, sharecropping, the labor movement, unions and general mistreatment of black people in the U.S.

If we are to respond to this fabrication, we need to know the facts. This canard of Jewish involvement in the slave trade has been debunked by a number of historians as well as the Council of the American Historical Association (AHA). Historian Seymour Drescher, a noted expert on slavery and antislavery movements, found, “It is unlikely that more than a fraction of 1 percent of the twelve million enslaved and relayed Africans were purchased or sold by Jewish merchants even once… At no point along the continuum of the slave trade were Jews numerous enough, rich enough, and powerful enough to affect significantly the structure and flow of the slave trade or to diminish the suffering of its African victims.”

German Police Detain Migrant on Terror Suspicions Case underlines what authorities say is the uncertain terror threat posed by migrant wave By Ruth Bender

BERLIN—German police detained an asylum seeker suspected of plotting an attack for Islamic State, the federal prosecutor’s office said Thursday, the latest evidence of a mounting terror threat posed by the arrival last year of hundreds of thousands of migrants into the country.

The 27-year-old man, identified by federal prosecutors as Ashraf Al-T., allegedly received approval from an ISIS operative in Syria to carry out an attack on Germans in the near future, the prosecutor’s office said.

The man was taken into custody in Berlin late Wednesday, and his apartment in the city’s Schöneberg district was searched, according to the prosecutor. By the end of the day Thursday, the suspect will go before an investigating judge with the federal supreme court, who will decide if there is sufficient evidence to keep holding the man.

The nationality of the suspect who arrived in Germany in 2015 remained unclear. Police initially identified the man as Syrian but an official familiar with the case said he might in fact be a Tunisian who used Syrian identification.

The arrest adds to escalating tension in Germany over the security risks arising from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to open the country’s doors to nearly 900,000 asylum seekers in 2015 alone.

As the wave of migrants entering the county peaked late last year, authorities brushed aside suggestions that the surge could include attackers linked with ISIS. A year later, a lengthening list of arrests and a series of attacks by refugees have led officials to reassess the threat and raise alarms about security.

“It is very good [that] this man was taken off the streets,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said. “Security services had been watching him for some time.”

Officials said it was still unclear how far along plans were for an attack but authorities still felt compelled to act, said Bernd Palenda, head of the state intelligence agency in Berlin.

“As we had no overview over the risks—what might be done and when it might start—we acted fast,” said Mr. Palenda, CONTINUE AT SITE

America’s Best Arab Ally Faces a Crumbling Region It is a paramount American interest for things in Jordan to remain as they are.By Sohrab Ahmari

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is losing his nerve. After a year of silence, the self-proclaimed caliph of Islamic State released an audio recording Wednesday in which he urged his fighters to stand firm in Mosul as the U.S.-backed coalition closed in. “The value of staying on your land with honor is a thousand times better than the price of retreating with shame,” he thundered.

Next door, Jordanians watch the Mosul operation with enthusiasm and unease. As Information Minister Mohammad al-Momani puts it in an interview in Amman this week, “To us the Mosul operation is a cornerstone in the whole fight against terrorism.” Mosul also raises discomfiting questions about what form jihadism will take after Islamic State is defeated, and how that might threaten Jordan, America’s most reliable Arab ally.

Roiling Amman now are reports that many Islamic State fighters are “shaving their beards” to blend in as coalition forces draw near. An estimated 2,500 Jordanians have joined Islamic State, and alarms rang last week after the jihadist army overran half of Rutba, a city about 70 miles from the Jordanian border in western Iraq. “These groups are rooted now in Syria and Iraq, and Jordan will be a target once the space in Syria and Iraq closes,” says counterterror analyst Amer al-Sabaileh.

This is why border security is foremost among Amman’s priorities. Some 1.5 million refugees from the wars in Syria and Iraq have already flooded Jordan, straining resources and patience in a small nation that unlike many of its neighbors isn’t blessed with oil wealth. Jordanians recognize the magnitude of the risk if even a minuscule fraction of the newcomers is linked to Islamic State. They aren’t keen to accept more.

The upside is that officials here have a good sense of what goes on beyond their frontiers. The Obama administration has been a relatively decent steward of the Amman-Washington alliance, and thanks in part to U.S. assistance, the Jordanian security apparatus is battle-ready for any territorial attempts. “We’ve been at war with Daesh in our northern and eastern borders for four years,” says Mr. Momani, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “So we are in a strong position to defend our borders.”

Jordan also faces an internal threat underscored by two Islamic State assaults in June against military and intelligence targets that killed 11 soldiers and officers in total. In coming years Jordan will likely face an uptick in such attacks, the product of the “collapse of ISIS and the rise of ISIS 2.0,” says Mr. Sabaileh, the terrorism analyst. Both the remnants of the old Islamic State and its successor group, he says, will have an incentive to stage brutal, sophisticated attacks—the former to demonstrate it is still in the game, the latter to prove its jihadist chops. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Clinton Campaign at Obama Justice Emails on WikiLeaks show a top federal lawyer giving Hillary a quiet heads up. By Kimberley A. Strassel

The most obnoxious spin of the 2016 campaign came this week, as Democrats, their media allies and even President Obama accused the FBI of stacking the election. It’s an extraordinary claim, coming as it does from the same crew that has—we now know—been stacking the election all along in the corridors of the Justice Department.

This is the true November surprise. For four months, FBI Director James Comey has been the public face of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server. He played that role so well, putting the FBI so front and center, that the country forgot about Mr. Comey’s bosses. Revelations this week build the case that President Obama’s politicized Justice Department has been pulling strings and flacking for Mrs. Clinton all along.

One piece of evidence comes from WikiLeaks, in a hacked email between the chairman of the Clinton campaign, John Podesta, and Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik. It was sent in May of 2015 via a private Gmail account, which has become the favored way for Obama employees to hide communications from the public. “Heads up,” Mr. Kadzik warned, informing the campaign about a coming hearing and a recent legal filing about Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Don’t let Mr. Kadzik’s fancy title fool you: He is a Clinton partisan. Before joining the Justice Department in 2013, Mr. Kadzik spent 30 years at the (now-closed) law firm Dickstein Shapiro, engaging Democratic causes—and Clinton causes. Mr. Kadzik’s wife, Amy Weiss, was deputy press secretary in Bill Clinton’s White House and a communications director for the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Kadzik also represented the DNC. Campaign-finance records show the two variously donated to Hillary’s Senate leadership PAC, to her 2008 presidential campaign and to her current campaign.

Mr. Kadzik is also an old buddy of Mr. Podesta’s. The two go back to Georgetown Law School. When Marc Rich was lobbying Bill Clinton for a pardon, according to a 2002 House Oversight Committee report, the fugitive financier recruited Mr. Kadzik “because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.” Mr. Kadzik even represented Mr. Podesta, during the Monica Lewinsky saga. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Costs of Clinton Her policies are further left than Obama’s, and you know her ethics.

Americans go to the polls next week facing what millions believe is the worst presidential choice of their lifetimes. As we wrote after Donald Trump won the Indiana primary in May, the New Yorker and Hillary Clinton are both deeply flawed. But one of them will be the next President, so in the next two days we’ll try to summarize the risks—and the fainter hopes—of each candidacy in turn.
***Start with Mrs. Clinton because the costs of her Presidency are easier to see in advance. To wit, she would continue President Obama’s progressive march to a French-style welfare and regulatory state. On nearly every domestic issue, she has embraced Mr. Obama’s agenda and moved left from there.

She wants higher taxes, more spending on entitlements that are already unaffordable, more subsidies and price controls in ObamaCare, more regulations on businesses of all kinds, more limits on political speech, more enforcement of liberal cultural values on schools and churches.

The greatest cost of this would be more lost years of slow economic growth. The U.S. economy hasn’t grown by 3% in any year since 2005, and the explanation from Mrs. Clinton’s economic advisers is that America can’t grow faster and inequality is a bigger problem in any case. More income redistribution is their patent medicine.

But as we’ve seen with the rise of nativism and protectionism, the costs of slow growth are corrosive. Flat incomes lead to more social tension and political enmity. The fight to divide a smaller pie would get uglier in a country that was once accustomed to rising possibilities. Imagine the 2020 election after four more years of 1% growth.

Some Republicans say Mrs. Clinton would be more willing to negotiate with them than Mr. Obama has been. That’s a low bar, and during the 2016 campaign she hasn’t thrown a single policy olive branch to Republicans. None. Her current agenda may reflect her real beliefs going back to her activist days before the failure of HillaryCare caused her to adopt some New Democratic coloration. In 2017 she would also have Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders pulling her to the left.

Mrs. Clinton would also be less restrained by the courts. Mr. Obama has remade most of the federal appellate bench, and the Supreme Court is on the cusp. A Hillary victory means progressive judicial domination for a generation or more. This would mean more green lights for the abusive rule by regulation that has characterized Mr. Obama’s second term—and little chance to block the likes of his immigration order or Clean Power Plan.

Mrs. Clinton’s clearest advantage over Mr. Trump is on foreign policy, where she has shown more respect for America’s role in maintaining global order. She has sometimes shown more hawkish instincts than Mr. Obama, but then she also embraced his worst mistakes: the reset with Russia that badly misjudged Vladimir Putin, the nuclear deal with Iran, the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, and the abandonment of Libya after Europe and the U.S. toppled Moammar Gadhafi.

Even if she wants to revive U.S. leadership abroad, however, there is the question of means. Her entitlement expansions and higher taxes would squeeze the economic growth and budget space needed to finance more defense spending. This is Western Europe on the installment plan.