RUTHFULLY YOURS

ABC news reports (May 17) that “The life of a spy placed by Israel inside ISIS is at risk tonight, according to current and former U.S. officials, after President Donald Trump reportedly disclosed classified information in a meeting with Russian officials last week. The spy provided intelligence involving an active ISIS plot to bring down a passenger jet en route to the United States, with a bomb hidden in a laptop that U.S. officials believe can get through airport screening machines undetected. The information was reliable enough that the U.S. is considering a ban on laptops on all flights from Europe to the United States. The sensitive intelligence was shared with the United States, officials say, on the condition that the source remain confidential.”

This is the latest information from a story that broke 48 hours ago (May 15) when the Washington Post reported that “Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian foreign minister.” The story claims its source is: “according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.” Further it noted “provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted.” The article also claimed the classified information was “code word information.” (articles elaborating on the level of classification didn’t expand the knowledge of the source of it, at the Atlantic or at BBC).

The New York Times story on May 15th notes “President Trump boasted about highly classified intelligence in a meeting with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador last week, providing details that could expose the source of the information and the manner in which it was collected, a current and a former American government official said Monday.” The NYT piece notes that they have obtained more information, “was about an Islamic State plot, according to the officials. A Middle Eastern ally that closely guards its own secrets provided the information.” They note the Washington Post piece “did not address whether he talked about the Islamic State plot itself. Beyond angering a partner and calling into question the ability of the United States to keep secrets.” They add “Mr. Trump discussed the contents of the intelligence, not the sources and methods used to collect it. The concern is that knowledge of the information about the Islamic State plot could allow the Russians to figure out those details.”

Islamists, forming inherently political movements, insist to policy-makers and the media that Islam is homogenous and that their Islamist organizations speak on behalf of all Muslims, despite their clear lack of any mandate.

Politicians and journalists — by speaking at Islamist conferences, or treating the Muslim community as a homogenous bloc represented by self-appointed groups such as MAS or ICNA — actually serve to legitimize extremist Islamist leadership.

Now it falls to national and state governments to stop working with Islamists, and to support genuinely moderate Muslims instead.

Last month, Keith Ellison’s name disappeared from a list of speakers at one of the largest conferences in the Muslim calendar. The annual event, which took place in Baltimore from April 14-16, was organized by the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and the Muslim American Society (MAS).

In December 2016, Ellison also withdrew from the convention’s sister-conference, the “MAS-ICNA conference,” after reports about extreme clerics sharing the stage.

April’s conference was no different. Speakers included Siraj Wahhaj, an imam who addresses Muslim events across the country every week, and is a former advisory board member of the Council on American Islamic Relations. Wahhaj has preached:

“I don’t believe any of you are homosexual. This is a disease of this society. … you know what the punishment is, if a man is found with another man? The Prophet Mohammad said the one who does it and the one to whom it is done to, kill them both.”

Elsewhere, Wahhaj cites the death penalty for adultery, advocates chopping off the hands of thieves, and tells Muslims:

“Take not into your intimacy those outside of your race. They will not fail to corrupt you. Don’t you know our children are surrounded by kafirs [disbelievers]. I’m telling you, making the hearts of our children corrupt, dirty, foul.”

Other listed speakers included Abdul Nasir Jangda, who advocates sex-slavery and gives husbands permission to rape their wives; Suleiman Hani, who claims that “Freedom of speech is a facade” used to stifle “objective discussion” of the “Holocaust and Jews”; Mohammad Elshinawy, who claims that women who fail to wear the hijab will contract breast cancer; and Yasir Qadhi, whose violent homophobia was recently the subject of an investigative report by The Times.

Such extremism is not confined to the speakers. The organizing bodies, MAS and ICNA, are not ordinary Muslim organizations, but Islamist groups with long-standing ties to extremism at home and abroad. Senior MAS-ICNA official Ahmed Taha, the organizer of the December conference, is a strident anti-Semite. He published a text on social media that states, “O Muslim, O servant of God. There is a Jew behind me, come kill him.”

MAS was founded in 1993 by operatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, while ICNA has identified itself as an American front for Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), a South Asian Islamist group that Bangladeshi officials have linked to terrorism. One of the other listed speakers at the ICNA-MAS conference was, in fact, Yusuf Islahi, a member of the Central Advisory Council of the Indian branch of Jamaat-e-Islami. According to the academic Irfan Ahmad, Islahi claims that Jews were behind the 9/11 attacks, as part of a conspiracy to defame Islam.

As America finds itself increasingly exposed to the homegrown Islamist terror that has, in recent years, increasingly gripped Western Europe, politicians and law enforcement are starting to ask how Muslim communities have come to be represented by such extremist groups.

Seventy-five years ago (June 4-7, 1942), the astonishing American victory at the Battle of Midway changed the course of the Pacific War.

Just six months after the catastrophic Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. crushed the Imperial Japanese Navy off Midway Island (about 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu), sinking four of its aircraft carriers.

“Midway” referred to the small atoll roughly halfway between North America and Asia. But to Americans, “Midway” became a barometer of military progress. Just half a year after being surprised at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy had already destroyed almost half of Japan’s existing carrier strength (after achieving a standoff at the Battle of the Coral Sea a month earlier).

The odds at the June 1942 battle favored the Japanese. The imperial fleet had four carriers to the Americans’ three, backed up by scores of battleships, cruisers, and light carriers as part of the largest armada that had ever steamed from Japan.

No military had ever won more territory in six months than had Japan. Its Pacific Empire ranged from the Indian Ocean to the coast of the Aleutian Islands, and from the Russian-Manchurian border to Wake Island in the Pacific.

Yet the Japanese Navy was roundly defeated by an outnumbered and inexperienced American fleet at Midway. Why and how?

American intelligence officers — often eccentric and free to follow their intuitions — had cracked the Japanese naval codes, giving the Americans some idea of the Japanese plan of attack at Midway.

American commanders were far more open to improvising and risk-taking than their Japanese counterparts. In contrast, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto created an elaborate but rigid plan of attack that included an invasion of the Aleutian Islands as well as Midway.

But such impractical agendas dispersed the much larger Japanese fleet all over the central and northern Pacific, ensuring that the Japanese could never focus their overwhelming numerical advantages on the modest three-carrier American fleet.

The U.S. Navy was also far more resilient than its Japanese counterpart.

A month earlier at the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japanese suffered damage to one of their carriers and serious aircraft losses on another. The American carrier Lexington was sunk, and the Yorktown was severely damaged.

During the last eight years, the far left and their cohorts in the Democratic Party were successfully on their way to transforming our Constitutional Republic from a country of laws into a country of men. They arrogantly believed the last election was theirs to be had with Hillary Clinton at the helm to continue Obama’s legacy of “leading from behind.” Their mission is the “transformation of our free market, our sovereignty, and our culture to a Socialist/Communist New World Order. They didn’t count on billionaire Donald Trump, who had never before held office, to throw a wrench into their radical agenda by injecting himself into our body politic, and in return they are waging a relentless coup to have him removed from office.

They have termed this coup “The Resistance” and with the aid of our activist judicial system, educational institutions, Hollywood, the press, and social media; they are leading a full blown war against President Trump on various fronts. With the aid of the propaganda media establishment, akin to the old Soviet Union’s Pravda, they proudly obstruct President Trump’s every move. Their aim is impeachment, but to impeach they need to have grounds; thus, they have concocted a conspiracy theory of Russian collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians without a shred of evidence to support that theory.

Not a day goes by without an accusation by Democrats in search of a crime. When President Trump used an Executive Order to initiate his travel ban from countries known to be hotbeds of Islamic terrorism, the Left used the courts to stop his ban from taking effect. Although President Trump had the statutory authority to execute the ban pursuant to section 1182(f) and 1185 (a) of Title 8, they succeeded in halting the ban by filing their lawsuits in Federal District Court within the far left 9th Circuit (the most overturned court in the country), dominated by Clinton and Obama appointed judges, well known for its judicial activism and disregard of Constitutional principles. Consequently, Muslim refugees who cannot be vetted for lack of documentation continue to stream onto our shores and increase the risk of terror attacks on the mainland.

Currently the left is up in arms over the firing of former FBI Director, James Comey. The ACLU recently announced they will lead an investigation into the firing; yet not a word was heard from the ACLU when Bill Clinton fired FBI Director, William Sessions in 1993. It was only a few months ago when the likes of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid called for Comey’s resignation. Socialist Maxine Waters from the left leaning state of California stated just a few days ago ” I don’t support Trump firing Comey, I would support Hillary Clinton firing Comey.” What we are witnessing is a schizophrenic narrative and a Democratic Party meltdown.

And if that isn’t enough, our college campuses are actively silencing those who support President Trump with physical assaults, threats, and intimidation. Institutions of learning should provide an environment for the free exchange of ideas, but instead, young Conservatives are threatened with poor grades should they express support for President Trump and his conservative agenda. There is no diversity of thought on today’s college campuses. It is fascism and group think that has taken root and those who differ are singled out as outcasts to be ridiculed and shunned at best or physically and verbally assaulted at worst.

The leak Tuesday of James Comey’s notes of a February conversation with Donald Trump is a classic of the former FBI director’s operating method that puts the Trump Presidency in peril and raises serious ethical questions about Mr. Comey’s behavior. Let’s step back from the immediate furor and examine the legal and political merits.

According to Mr. Comey’s memo to himself, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Comey in a one-on-one Oval Office meeting to “let this go,” referring to any investigation of former National Security AdviserMichael Flynn. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” says the memo, parts of which were read to the New York Times by a Comey associate. “He is a good guy.”

The White House issued a statement denying Mr. Comey’s account of the meeting, adding that “the president has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end any investigation, including any investigation involving General Flynn.” Mr. Trump’s many enemies are nonetheless calling this obstruction of justice, and perhaps grounds for impeachment.

***

The first question is how this squares with Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s testimony last week that there has been no attempt to interfere with the FBI’s Russia probe. The Times reports that Mr. Comey spread word among his colleagues of his Trump conversation, and Mr. McCabe is a Comey loyalist. Perhaps a Flynn criminal probe is separate from the Russia-Trump investigation, but it isn’t clear what Mr. Trump knew in February.

The more important issue is why Mr. Comey failed to inform senior Justice officials and resign immediately after the conversation. If he really thought Mr. Trump was attempting to obstruct justice, the director knows he had a legal obligation to report it immediately. He certainly had a moral duty to resign and go public with his reasons.

Yet the Times reports that Mr. Comey merely wrote the notes to himself and informed a few others. One explanation is that perhaps Mr. Comey didn’t view Mr. Trump’s comments as amounting to obstruction.

This isn’t the first time James Comey placed himself at the center of a partisan attempt to oust a top Republican. He did the same thing in 2007.

The revelation by fired former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey’s close friends that he has kept meticulous records detailing President Donald Trump’s alleged attempts to improperly influence an ongoing FBI investigation has sent Washington into a tailspin. Did Trump really threaten a sitting FBI director in a private meeting? Did the former FBI director accurately record what happened? Could this be the beginning of the end of Trump?

At the moment, untangling fact from fiction is difficult, given that the event Comey allegedly describes took place only between Comey and the president. With no ability at this time to independently verify either man’s account, we are instead left with a he-said/he-said explanation of events, which means the credibility of the two men involved becomes the prime determinant of one’s view of the situation.

The narrative from the Acela corridor media establishment is that Trump is a known liar and Comey is a honest public servant above reproach, so clearly Comey’s word must be believed, the total absence of any other corroborating evidence notwithstanding. An examination of Comey’s history as the consummate Beltway operator, however, raises questions about whether the towering former U.S. attorney, deputy attorney general, and FBI director is as open and forthright as his allies would have you believe.

In fact, the current episode is not the first time Comey and his associates plotted to oust a sitting Republican official through highly orchestrated political theater and carefully crafted narratives in which Comey is the courageous hero bravely fighting to preserve the rule of law. To understand how Comey came to be FBI director in the first place, and how he operates in the political arena, it is important to review the last scandal in which Comey had a front-row seat: the 2007 U.S. attorney firings and the fight over the 2004 reauthorization of Stellar Wind, a mass National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program designed to mitigate terrorist threats in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

The pivotal scene in the Comey-crafted narrative, a drama that made Comey famous and likely paved the road to his 2013 appointment by President Barack Obama to run the FBI, occurred in a Beltway hospital room in early 2004. In Comey’s view, Comey was the last honest man in Washington, the only person standing between a White House that rejected any restraints on its power, and the rule of law protecting Americans from illegal mass surveillance.

A former White House counsel and attorney general with extensive first-hand experience dealing with Comey, however, paints a very different picture of what happened in that hospital room, and disputes numerous key details. In this account, Comey’s actions showcase a duplicitous, secretive schemer whose true loyalties were not to the officials to whom he reported, but to partisan Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). To fully understand and appreciate Jim Comey’s approach to politics, the writings and testimony of Alberto Gonzales, who served as both White House counsel and attorney general during the events in question and is intimately aware of Comey’s history of political maneuvering, is absolutely essential.