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Byron York: Justice Department withholds majority of FBI texts by Byron York

Posted By on January 28th, 2018

The Justice Department has given Congress less than 15 percent of the texts between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page – and that is all Congress is likely to get, at least until department experts finish an effort to recover an unknown number of previously lost texts that were sent and received during a key five-month period during the Trump-Russia investigation.

There is much confusion over some basic facts of the Strzok-Page texts. How many are there? How many relate to the two most politically-charged investigations in years, the Trump-Russia probe and the Hillary Clinton email investigation? How many have been turned over to Congress? And how many are left to be turned over to Congress?

The answers are complicated, but here is what I have been able to figure out from conversations with the Justice Department and Capitol Hill investigators.

The Justice Department has identified about 50,000 Strzok-Page texts. But that is apart from the texts between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017 that were declared missing a week ago but are now being recovered. So, the total is apparently 50,000 plus the currently unknown number of formerly missing texts.

But that number refers only to the Strzok-Page texts that were sent and received on FBI-issued Samsung phones. There are a number of instances in the texts in which the two officials say that they should switch the conversation to iMessage, suggesting they continued to talk about FBI matters on personal Apple phones. For investigators, those are particularly intriguing texts – what was so sensitive that they couldn’t discuss on their work phones? – but the number of those texts is unknown. And of course, they have not been turned over to Congress.

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Clinton, Podesta And Others In Senate Crosshairs Over Dossier; Given Two Weeks To Respond Profile picture for user Tyler Durden by Tyler Durden

Posted By on January 28th, 2018

GOP Congressional investigators have written six letters to individuals or entities involved or thought to be involved in the funding, creation or distribution of the salacious and unverified “Trump-Russia dossier” believed to have been inappropriately used by the FBI, DOJ and Obama Administration in an effort to undermine Donald Trump as both a candidate and President of the United States.

Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SCS) wrote six Judiciary Committee letters requesting information from: John Podesta, Donna Brazille, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Robbie Mook, the DNC, and Hillary For America Chief Strategist Joel Benenson.

A brief refresher of facts and allegations:

The DNC and Hillary Clinton’s PAC was revealed by The Washington Post to have paid opposition research firm Fusion GPS for the creation of a dossier that would be harmful to then-candidate Donald Trump.
Fusion commissioned former UK spy Christopher Steele to assemble the dossier – which is comprised of a series of memos relying largely on Russian government sources to make allegations against Donald Trump and his associates.
According to court filings, Fusion also worked with disgraced DOJ official Bruce Ohr, and hired his CIA-linked wife, Nellie Ohr, to assist in the smear campaign against Trump. Bruce Ohr was demoted from his senior DOJ position after it was revealed that he met with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson as well as Christopher Steele – then tried to cover it up.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, denied under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee that he knew about the dossier’s funding, while Clinton’s former spokesman, Brian Fallon, told CNN that Hillary likely had no idea who paid for it either.
Current and past leaders of the DNC, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) also denied knowledge of the document’s funding.

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Hillary Clinton reportedly shielded a top adviser who was accused of sexual harassment during her 2008 campaign Eliza Relman

Posted By on January 27th, 2018

A senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign was kept on the campaign team at Clinton’s request after he was accused of sexually harassing a young aide.
Burns Strider was Clinton’s faith adviser and was later fired from his position at Correct the Record, an independent pro-Clinton group, for alleged harassment.

A senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign was kept on the campaign team at Clinton’s request after he was accused of sexually harassing a young aide, The New York Times reported Friday.

Four sources with knowledge of the situation told The Times that Clinton’s campaign manager recommended that the adviser, Burns Strider, be removed from the campaign, but Strider instead underwent counseling and received reduced pay for several weeks. The young woman was moved to a different position.

Strider was Clinton’s faith adviser, a co-founder of the American Values Network, and personally sent Clinton daily scriptures for several months during her first presidential bid. Five years after the campaign, he was selected to lead Correct the Record, an independent pro-Clinton group, and was fired after allegations that he sexually harassed a young female staffer there.

Clinton’s legal representatives did not deny the harassment allegations or reporting that Clinton rejected the advice of her campaign manager in their statement to The Times.

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The Islamization of Germany in 2017: Part II July – by Soeren Kern

Posted By on January 27th, 2018

“We must expect further attacks by individuals or terror groups. Islamist terrorism is the biggest challenge facing the BfV and we see it as one of the biggest threats facing the internal security of Germany.” — Hans-Georg Maaßen, President of Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence agency.

Nearly half (45%) of all crime suspects in Berlin in 2016 were migrants, according to official statistics published by the Berliner Morgenpost.

Thieves broke into an immigration office in the Moabit district of Berlin and stole up to 20,000 blank passports and other immigration documents as well as official stamps and seals.

Around 30,000 rejected asylum seekers have disappeared and the government has no idea where they are, according to Bild.

“One cannot kill millions of Jews so you can bring millions of their worst enemies in their place.” — German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld.

The following is a chronological survey of some of the main stories about Islam and Islamism in Germany during the second half of 2017. Part 1 of this series can be found here.

JULY 2017

July 4. Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence agency warned that Salafism is the “fastest-growing Islamic movement in Germany.” Its annual report revealed that the number of Salafists in Germany jumped to 9,700 in 2016, up from 8,350 in 2015; 7,000 in 2014; 5,500 in 2013; 4,500 in 2012; and 3,800 in 2011. BfV President Hans-Georg Maaßen said that Germany should brace for further jihadist attacks given growing numbers of potential Islamist militants: “We must expect further attacks by individuals or terror groups. Islamist terrorism is the biggest challenge facing the BfV and we see it as one of the biggest threats facing the internal security of Germany.”

July 5. Saleh A., Mahood B. and Hamza C., appeared in court on charges of plotting suicide bombings in Düsseldorf’s historic old town. The attack, using explosive vests, was to be financed with money extorted from the Vatican.

July 8. A hundred Islamists are now openly enforcing Sharia law on the streets of Berlin, according to local police. The self-appointed morality police involve Salafists from Chechnya, a predominantly Sunni Muslim region in Russia. The vigilantes are using threats of violence to discourage Chechen migrants from integrating into German society; they are also promoting the establishment of a parallel Islamic legal system in Germany. German authorities appear unable to stop them.

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The Feminist Movement is Failing Women By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on January 27th, 2018

It would be folly to maintain that change is not sorely needed to improve the lives of many women around the world. Clearly the West has long been in the forefront of fundamental change. In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft penned A Vindication of the Rights of Woman arguing that “middle-class women’s oppression was largely due to their deficient education.” Thus,

Girls who have been thus weakly educated, are often cruelly left by their parents without any provision; and, of course, are dependent on, not only the reason, but the bounty of their brothers [.] But, when the brother marries, . . . [his sister] is viewed with averted looks as an intruder, an unnecessary burden on the benevolence of the master of the house, and his new partner.

Yet, in 2014 in Saudi Arabia, a young woman named Nadia who was not permitted to drive had to rely on her brother to take her to work. Often he refused to take her, thus making her late and at risk of losing her position.

Nineteenth century Victorian England long treated women as subordinate and disempowered. In 1869 when John Stuart Mill published his book The Subjection of Women, he shed light on Victorian culture and argued that women should be granted more political, legal, social and economic opportunities.

Nonetheless, in modern-day Pakistan “even though [women] are legally equal to men, it is common for decisions to be taken by male heads of households or male tribal chiefs [.] Traditionally, women have fewer, if any, rights of inheritance . . . resulting in difficulties accessing land or finances.”

In America “under the leadership of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a convention for the rights of women was held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848.” The participants wrote the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, patterned after the Declaration of Independence. It “specifically asked for voting rights and for reforms in laws governing marital status.” Finally in 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted American women the right to vote.

According “to the 2015 World Economic Forum Gender Gap Report, Yemen, has the biggest average gender gap of the 145 countries surveyed. It has the largest disparities in economic participation and opportunities for men and women, and one of the greatest differences in literacy rates between genders — with 55% of women considered literate as compared to 85% of men.” Moreover, “Yemeni women . . . cannot marry or receive health care without the permission of their male guardian (usually their father) and do not have equal rights to divorce or child custody. And the legal system has few provisions for the protection of women who experience domestic and sexual violence — leaving some women vulnerable to becoming the victims of honor killings. Around 52% of girls in Yemen are married before the age of 18 [.]”

South of the border finds Honduras as the “femicide capital of the world” where “[o]n average, one woman is murdered every 18 hours in Honduras [.] With a femicide impunity rate of 90%, most of these women’s murderers are getting away with it. The lack of accountability and prosecution of perpetrators of violence against women mean that women can’t live safe, successful lives and reach their full potential.”

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Investigate Obama’s and Kerry’s Unlawful Deals with Iran By Rachel Ehrenfeld

Posted By on January 27th, 2018

Two years ago, as then-secretary of State John Kerry was boasting in Davos about Obama’s deal with Iran, he acknowledged that some of the $150 billion given to the mullahs in Tehran “will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that every component of that can be prevented.” He was right. We don’t know how much money went to fund Iran’s global terrorist activities. And we know even less about the billions in untraceable cash that was supposedly delivered to the mullahs or the recipients of that cash. How about investigating that? There should be ample evidence to prove Kerry and his boss President Obama have willfully engaged in terrorist financing and money laundering. That is unless the pertinent emails and documents related to the payments to Iran had been lost or destroyed.

After the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was implemented on January 16, 2016, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who wished to lift all sanctions on Iran, kept complaining that “On paper the United States allows foreign banks to deal with Iran, but in practice they create Iranophobia so no one does business with Iran.” As much as the Obama administration wanted to comply, it needed congressional support to do that. Thus, the Obama administration decided to circumvent U.S. anti-money laundering laws to help Iran’s economy.

Between March, 2012 and January, 2016, when the U.S. lifted the sanctions, Iranian banks had no access to the Belgium-based SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system. During that time, according to a European oil trader, “Nobody could pay the Iranians via normal lines, not even in euros.” Yet, Iran has received billions of dollars in sanctions relief as incentives to attend negotiations with the United States and others in Geneva. In August, 2012, following a major earthquake in Iran, the Obama administration issued a 45-day general license allowing “registered NGOs to send up to $300,000 to for humanitarian relief and reconstruction activities. And what assurances were there to ensure the money got to the right hands? At that time, Treasury’s spokesman John Sullivan declared, “The license specifically forbids any dealings with entities on the OFAC SDN list such as the IRGC. There is also a mandated report to the Treasury and State Departments, so we can make sure the money does not end up in the wrong hands,” he said. However, he was not asked, and he did not give any information on how the cash was transferred to Iran.

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Trump Risks Debasing American Citizenship By Angelo Codevilla

Posted By on January 27th, 2018

Because Democrats regard the millions of people who have entered, are entering, and (they hope) will continue to enter the United States illegally as a prospective bloc of captive voters, they demand we give illegal aliens “a path to citizenship.” And President Trump now seems inclined to give in to that demand.

Citizenship is what the 1965 immigration law has conferred to more than 40 million people from what we used to call the Third World, a majority of whom have in fact become the Democratic Party’s reliable supporters. So as we decide what the status of various categories of illegals should be and whether to continue or to reform our current system of legal immigration, there should be no doubt that the balance of political power in America is at stake—never mind its cultural character.

Who shall be admitted to citizenship is the question. Next to that, who we let in to do what looms small. Citizenship determines who shall rule, to what ends, and what life among us will be. Such decisions are quintessential to popular sovereignty.

We obfuscate reality if we pretend that today’s influx is a mere continuation of the hallowed heritage of American immigration; if we ignore that people who want to come to America differ in their motivation, character, and above all in relevance to our constitutional republic. What follows distinguishes the categories of people involved and asks what status we should grant to whom and for what reason.

Is It All Just Racism?
The 1924 immigration law had established small quotas for immigration from foreign countries, proportionate to the percentage of U.S citizens from those counties. Today, calling that law “racist” is commonplace. By what criterion is it “racist” for a country to decide to remain the way it is?

By the 1924 law, Americans decided to admit people like themselves, including habits of the heart and mind regarding honesty, work, women, and America itself. And if taking origin into account is racist, why was the 1965 law not racist for prioritizing and turbocharging with unlimited “family reunification immigration” by Third World people with characteristics very much different from those of Americans? What had been wrong with America that it had to be righted by injecting people as different as these have been? What change, precisely, was this injection supposed to produce?

In short, the contrast between the pre- and post-1965 approaches to immigration has to do with the different political and cultural agendas of Americans.

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Every Family Deserves a Choice in Education By Betsy DeVos, Lamar Alexander & Virginia Foxx

Posted By on January 27th, 2018

Education holds the key to unlocking the full potential of all children. A high-quality education can equip a child with the knowledge and skills needed to pursue the American dream.

Unfortunately, today millions of students remain stuck in schools that aren’t allowing them to thrive. Their parents want an educational environment that works better for their children, but are told “no” — by bureaucratic school systems, by politicians, or by those who have a stake in preserving the status quo regardless of its consequences for students.

We trust parents with all kinds of important choices for their children: what they eat, the media they consume, who they spend time with, and what happens during the 130 hours a week they are not in school. So when it comes to their children’s education, why do we refuse to give parents the freedom to choose?

National School Choice Week is a time for us to celebrate those schools and innovative learning organizations that are giving students a better chance: public charter, private, magnet, faith-based, home, districts with open enrollment, virtual, and many traditional public schools. All of these provide environments in which students can flourish.

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Why It’s Hillary’s Emails Again FBI Chief James Comey lied to the electorate in the middle of a presidential race. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Posted By on January 27th, 2018

The new year brings many a revisiting of the Hillary Clinton email server case, including one at the hands of the Justice Department inspector general (that’s where all those FBI text messages are coming from), though his inquiry likely defines the matter too narrowly to get at the really important issues.

We should also stress that some kind of a revisiting would bedevil a Clinton administration now if Hillary Clinton had been elected instead of Donald Trump.

Way back in 2014, had Mrs. Clinton returned her “personal” emails and devices to the State Department instead of destroying them, it would have closed matters for most Americans.

After all, the Obama administration knew of and condoned her private server, amounting to an implicit endorsement of her unorthodox handling of classified materials.

But she didn’t, and the administration was not about to prosecute its heir apparent, especially after she became the sole alternative to Bernie Sanders and then Donald Trump.

President Obama’s public statements on the case could not have been clearer. He essentially directed his Justice Department that Mrs. Clinton did nothing wrong, as arguably a president is entitled to do.

The part that never made sense was why FBI Director James Comey intervened to do the president’s bidding so the Justice Department wouldn’t have to.

It was unnecessary and improper. Whatever its wisdom, no serious person of either party believes the outcome was anything but predetermined. Mr. Comey simply intruded himself as a more plausible vehicle to carry out the administration’s will on the “matter” than Attorney General Loretta Lynch would have been. That much is clear by applying even the minimalist interpretation to the text messages of his lead investigator on the case, Peter Strozk, as well as other evidence surfaced by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Mr. Comey gave different reasons in public and private for his action. In closed congressional session, he pointed to intercepted Russian intelligence that he said could be used to discredit the Justice Department. That is, he relied on information from one or more U.S. intelligence agencies. It doesn’t tax the imagination to suppose Mr. Comey and fellow intelligence officials were operating on a shared premise that a Clinton presidency was inevitable and needed to be protected from email-related risks.

Since then, Obama intelligence officials have leaked intelligence and planted scurrilous innuendo about Mr. Trump, apparently aimed at giving credibility to the “collusion” narrative and discrediting his victory. But what Mr. Comey did was worse. Again, I’m not saying it was realistic or desirable that Mrs. Clinton be prosecuted, but the choice not to prosecute was a political decision that the Obama administration and Obama Justice Department had a duty to make and to own. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Thank You for Tax Reform Fourth quarter GDP shows the economy needed a growth boost.

Posted By on January 27th, 2018

The “secular stagnation” thesis is having a bad year. Readers will recall that this idea, popularized by former Obama White House economist Larry Summers, held that America is fated to endure slow economic growth. This conveniently justified the Obama era’s historic slow growth as an inevitable deus ex machina, and Mr. Summers’s policy advice was for government to borrow more money to spend on public works.

A year after the Obama economists left town, stagnation may be following them back to Harvard. The Commerce Department announced Friday that the U.S. economy grew 2.6% in the fourth quarter of 2017, below what most economists expected but the third straight quarter of solid growth.

The details of the GDP report were stronger than the top line that was reduced by the volatile categories of trade and inventories. A fall in inventories accounted for most of the decline in growth from the third quarter, but inventories ebb and flow and the measure will rebound in future quarters. Exports rose more slowly (6.9%) than imports (13.9%), which reduced the trade contribution to GDP.

Consumer spending rose a healthy 3.8% in the quarter, while business nonresidential investment climbed 6.8%. The latter continues the trend during 2017 of rising capital spending, which underperformed across the Obama years. It’s not too much to say that capital was on strike as CEOs and small-business owners tried to avoid becoming a target of new taxes or Obama regulators.