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China Buying Private Schools in America

The death of knowledge and the death of outrage…..exactly who in government approves these transactions?

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  • In December 2017, two different Chinese investment firms bought primary schools and at least one secondary school in the United States.
  • Foreign nationals can obtain F-1 visas to attend U.S. schools beginning in kindergarten and running through graduate and post-graduate education.
  • In 2018, 39,904 Chinese F-1 students were attending secondary schools in the United States.
  • The strong demand among Chinese nationals for a U.S. secondary education reportedly comes from their families’ belief that attending an American high school will increase the likelihood that those students will be subsequently accepted to U.S. colleges and universities.

CIS: An almost two-and-a half year-old article in China Daily detailed an interesting phenomenon: Chinese investors purchasing private K-12 schools in the United States “in the hopes of cashing in on Chinese students’ quest for admission into a US college.” That report not only highlights an interesting pathway for foreign students to obtain a student visa to attend U.S. colleges and universities, but it also shines a light on the F-1 nonimmigrant student visa program at the primary and secondary level.

The article explained that in December 2017, “Primavera Capital, a China-based private equity firm, paid about $500 million for the Stratford School system, which operates schools throughout California.” That same month, Newopen Group, a “Chinese education company”, bought Florida Preparatory Academy for an undisclosed amount.

Stratford School - Preschools - Santa Clara, CA - Reviews ... Santa Clara/ The Stratford School system website has a slogan on their home page: A CLASSROOM OF COLLABORATION CAN CHANGE THE WORLD. There are 25 campuses in California

According to its website, Primavera Capital Group, which has offices in Beijing and Hong Kong, has a heavy presence of Goldman Sachs alumni, many of whom themselves have degrees from elite American universities (including Harvard, Columbia, NYU, and my alma mater, the University of Virginia).

Newopen USA is described as “a subsidiary of the Chongqing, China, based Newopen Group”. LinkedIn describes a “Chongqing Newopen Education Group” as “the most influential and valuable education group in China”, which “manages 2 universities, 5 middle schools, 2 affiliated primary schools, 31 kindergartens” (Florida Preparatory Academy is not on the list).

The website for that organization is largely in Mandarin (the English-language version does not load), but the Google Translate version states that it was established in 1993 and “currently has 2 universities, 13 primary and secondary schools, [and] 31 kindergartens”; its educational sites include Los Angeles and Florida — logically Florida Preparatory Academy.

Stratford School’s website lists 30 separate locations, five in Southern California and 25 in the greater Bay Area (including in tech-heavy San Jose, Palo Alto, and San Francisco). Those locations offer differing levels of education, from pre-school through eighth grade (a high school is planned), as well as summer camps. Its curriculum “introduces learning and innovation skills through STEM based learning. Anchored in science and math, the STEM classroom emphasizes critical thinking, authentic problem solving, creativity, and innovation.”

Florida Preparatory Academy, “a coeducational college-prep school for grades 5-12” founded in 1961, describes itself as “a premier day and boarding school in Melbourne, Florida.” Among other programs (including an “English Language Program … designed for International Students that are learning English as a new language”), it offers a “unique dual enrollment opportunity at Florida Institute of Technology and Eastern Florida State College”.

Notably: “Any high school senior completing six or more credits at Florida Tech with a 3.0 overall GPA is guaranteed … [a]dmission to Florida Tech upon completion of the full-time undergraduate admission process.” Such admission would facilitate, if not guarantee, the extension of F-1 status for foreign students.

Florida Preparatory Academy is not cheap, at least for students who live there full time: seven-day boarding students (likely the vast majority of F-1s) pay $40,500 in tuition, room, and board (before uniforms). Day students, by comparison, only pay $14,200.

Returning to the China Daily article, I would note that a key point for the investments by Primavera and Newopen in those institutions is to tap into the market of parents in China who want to put their children on a path to higher education in the United States. That article notes: “The strong demand comes from the Chinese families’ belief that the experience at US secondary schools will increase their children’s chances of being accepted to US universities.”

Although we generally think of F-1 student visas in the context of colleges and universities, those visas are also available for foreign nationals to study in the United States at a private K-12 school, or a public high school, as well. Study at a public high school is limited to 12 months for an F-1, and the foreign student must reimburse the costs of tuition (dependents of F-1s, known as “F-2s”, can study wherever they like, including public school), but there is no limit on the amount of time that a foreign student can attend a private K-12 school.

The first step to obtaining that visa is acceptance by a school approved by the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP, which is administered by ICE), followed by that school’s issuance of a Form I-20 and the filing of an application by the student at a U.S. embassy or consulate for an F-1 visa.

The list of SEVP certified schools runs 272 pages, and includes the middle schools run by Stratford Schools in Sunnyvale, San Jose, and Fremont, as well as Florida Preparatory Academy. Tuition at the three Stratford schools runs $23,510 per year, and there is no boarding option, raising the question of where F-1 middle school students live.

There are, by my count, at least 200 elementary schools on the list (the level of education offered for many is not entirely clear, and I am basing my count on the number identified as “elementary”) and at least 75 middle schools (again, they are not all identified as such, and there are likely many more).

The number of high schools is similarly not clear from the SEVP list (not all identify themselves as such), but one report stated that 2,800 U.S. high schools hosted international students in 2016.

How many Chinese students are in pre-college programs in the United States? I was unable to find the number of those at the primary school level, but the report, “Globally Mobile Youth: Trends in International Secondary Students in the US, 2013-2016”, from the Institute of International Education (IIE), states that in 2016, there were 59,392 secondary school students in the United States on F-1 visas (an additional 22,589 were exchange students on J-1s).

Of that number, 33,275 (56 percent) were from China. According to SEVP, by 2018 (the last year for which reporting was available) there were 39,904 F-1 students at the secondary school level from that country — an increase of almost 17 percent in two years.

Consistent with excerpts above from China Daily, the IIE report states: “A common perception among international secondary students and their families is that a U.S. educational experience at the secondary level will make them more competitive applicants to American colleges and universities.” Given the increase in F-1 secondary students from China, and the actions of Primavera Capital and Newopen Group, that perception is likely correct.

With respect to the fact that F-1 students at public high schools are limited to one year of study, the report notes that some “students may seek to transfer to a private school after completing their public school experience or come to a public school for just their senior year and then apply to a college or university in the United States.” And, relevant to the Florida Preparatory Academy/Florida Tech “dual enrollment opportunity”, the report states:

There have also been instances of higher education institutions establishing affiliated international high schools on their campuses to aid higher education recruitment. These expanding models widen the opportunities for international students to receive a U.S. high school education that provides a clear pathway to U.S. higher education.

In summary, F-1 student status is not limited to college and university students, but is available to foreign nationals beginning in kindergarten. For many foreign nationals — and in particular students from China — K-12 education in the United States, while an expensive endeavor, is a pathway to higher education. At least two different firms have put money on it.

Meet Doug Letter, Pelosi’s go to Lawyer

In litigation against President Trump, look no further than Douglas Letter hired almost two years ago by Speaker Pelosi. Whether it is the House seeking access to Donald Trump’s private tax records, coordinating impeachment operations, filing amicus briefs, border wall litigation, benefits to illegal aliens and getting legal citizenship or most of all gaining the redacted Mueller investigation documents, Letter has been involved in an estimated 31 case actions at the behest and approval of Nancy Pelosi.

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Doug Letter was hired in December of 2018 and came with a resume that included serving as the Director of the Civil Division Appellate Staff at the Department of Justice where he spent 40 years. He is a senior litigator at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center. After graduating from of Berkeley Law School, he joined the DoJ and argued more than 200 cases before the Supreme Court. Additionally, he was the White House Associate Counsel to President Clinton, the Deputy Associate Attorney under Janet Reno and Senior Counsel to Eric Holder.

Meanwhile, the House Republicans have hired Charles (Chuck) Cooper. At least 20 House Republicans are suing Nancy Pelosi on the matter of proxy voting. It should be noted that the proxy vote on the issue of re-upping the FISA legislation was pulled late in the day allegedly because President Trump said he would veto the bill. Gotta wonder if it was really due to the lawsuit.

Chuck Cooper, the Other Lawyer in Gay-Marriage Case - WSJ photo

Charles Cooper and and Doug Letter for sure know each other from their time at the Department of Justice. Cooper represented big names such as Jeff Sessions during the recusal on Russian interference. Then there was John Ashcroft and John Bolton where it was slated that he was possibly scheduled to testify during the impeachment inquiry.

Cooper began working too in the Civil Rights Division at the DoJ in 1981 as was appointed Assistant Attorney General at the Office of Legal Counsel during the Reagan administration. Cooper’s law firm in private practice of Cooper and Carvin had legal alumni such as Senator(s) Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz along with Victor Wolski a Federal judge and Solictor General Noel Francisco. Cooper has argued 7 cases before the Supreme Court and previously clerked for Justice William Renquist.

The House Republicans lawsuit is found here.

House Democrats installed the new rules on proxy voting on a largely party line vote of 217 to 189. Republican argued that the move bucks the chamber’s institutional history and sets a dangerous precedent.

On Wednesday, the House Rules Committee is slated to hold the chamber’s first remote hearing under the new rules. Each panel must hold a practice hearing, followed by two virtual sessions. Once those steps are completed, a panel can hold a markup by video conference as well.

The House Ways and Means Committee is also slated to hold its first remote hearing later Wednesday.

At this time, the panels can use Cisco Webex to hold the virtual hearings.

For much of the past two months, the chamber’s regular business largely came to a halt, and has since only held a handful of votes related to coronavirus legislation. The chamber’s meeting of what is now 431 members and additional support staff have proved particularly problematic amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Sanction China by Stopping World Bank Loans to CCP

Decoupling the United States from China is a convoluted and complicated process. Some lawmakers make it sound easy by just terminating manufacturing agreements by U.S. companies and bring it stateside. Ah but hold on…it is important to know some other details that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are not telling you.

Consider the items below:

1.  Commerce Department official warned Congress recently that China is raising billions of dollars in U.S. capital markets and the activity could undermine American security.

Nazak Nikakhtar, assistant secretary for international trade at the Commerce Department, testified last month that Chinese companies raised $48 billion from American capital markets from 2013 through the end of last year.

Ms. Nikakhtar told the congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission that 172 Chinese companies in September were listed on the three largest U.S. exchanges — Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange and the NYSE American — with a total market capitalization of more than $1 trillion. More here.

Confucius Institutes and U.S. Exchange Programs: Public ...

2. Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and two Chinese nationals who were researchers at Boston University and a Boston hospital were charged by the U.S. Justice Department with lying about their purported links to the Chinese government. But hold on, it is much worse. China has a real impact on all levels of the U.S. education system. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a 96 page report describing the Confucius Institute and how those agreements work with domestic universities. Further, major universities failed to report the other monies they receive from China among other countries. It is shocking how foreign money has infiltrated the U.S. education system and to learn which country does what and how much, click here.

China moon landing: Spacecraft makes first landing on moon ...

3. China launched its Long March 5B rocket into space. This is an effort by China to build a modular space station. It did however fall out of orbit falling for the most part into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa near the Ivory Coast. Additionally, as China continues to launch at least 12 more space operations it already has landed on the dark side of the moon. China and Russia are in fact collaborating on lunar operations including for shared bases. Russia’s operations coordinating with China are centered and funded by Roscosmos for Space Activities and the Skulkovo Foundation. This is the foundation where Hillary Clinton created U.S. technology (Silicon Valley) and Skulkovo via the Clinton Foundation via a major donor known as Viktor Vekselberg. This is the other scandal of technology transfer(s) to rogue nations.

4. We are already somewhat versed in Chinese complicity in the pandemic and the World Health Organization but lets go to the World Bank shall we? As of early 2019, China was sitting on cash reserves of some $3 trillion. It is the world’s second-largest economy, behind the U.S. It directly lends more money to other nations each year than the $2 billion or so it borrows from the World Bank annually. The World Bank, based in Washington, D.C., was established after World War II to help European countries rebuild. Its mission has evolved over the years and is now to finance development in low- and middle-income countries with the goal of eliminating extreme poverty.

“From a pure economic vantage point, there is no good reason for the World Bank to continue making loans to China,” says Eswar Prasad, a professor of economics at Cornell University.

“The Chinese don’t need the money,” Prasad says. “There is a glaring optics problem.” He adds that the argument could be made that the money lent to China could be put to better use elsewhere.

And it’s not as if the World Bank has an infinite amount of money to parcel out. Its lending budget, drawn from reserves, donations and the interest it earns on capital, is limited. So a dollar lent to China is a dollar that is not available for a project somewhere else in the world. The Trump administration, which regularly beats up on China, accusing it of manipulating global trade rules for its own benefit, has blasted the World Bank for lending too much to China.

Prasad says the World Bank’s lending to China is becoming “untenable” and will have to stop fairly soon.

Bert Hofman, the World Bank’s country director for China, says the amount of money China is borrowing each year from the global bank is just a small fraction of what the country is investing each year in domestic programs. And he believes that a motivation for China’s borrowing goes beyond money.

“The reason they still borrow is because they feel that the expertise of the World Bank is valuable to them,” Hofman says.

World Bank loans come with advisers and auditors who help implement (and monitor) bank-funded projects.

China gets access to international experts. The World Bank remains engaged with China and is able to see how new projects play out in this booming middle-income country. Hofman sees it as a win-win.

Prasad agrees that there are still some good reasons for the World Bank to remain engaged with China. Many of the bank’s loans to China are for projects addressing climate change and mitigating pollution from the country’s booming factories.

“The risk the World Bank faces is that if it only lends to very poor countries, it might end up not having much of a role to play in the large, fast-growing emerging-market economies,” Prasad says. “So the World Bank, in a bid to remain relevant and push its agenda on issues such as climate change and social development, has continued to lend to China.” More here.

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The World Bank said its board adopted a new plan to aid China with $1 billion to $1.5 billion in low-interest loans annually through June 2025, despite the objections of U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and several U.S. lawmakers.

World Bank approves $300mn for agriculture reforms in ...

Mnuchin told a House Financial Services Committee hearing that the Treasury’s representative on the board had objected on to the plan on Wednesday, adding he wants the World Bank to “graduate” China from its concessional loan programs for low- and middle-income countries.

The five-year lending strategy plan was published on Thursday afternoon after the World Bank’s board “expressed broad support” for the multilateral development lender’s engagement in China’s structural and environmental reforms.

The World Bank said its lending would decline over the “country partnership framework” plan, in line with reformsagreed under a $13 billion capital increase agreed in 2018.

The World Bank loaned China $1.3 billion in the fiscal 2019 year ended June 30, down from about $2.4 billion during fiscal 2017. The new plan calls for lending to “gradually decline” from the previous five-year average of $1.8 billion.

“Lending levels may fluctuate up and down from year to year due to normal pipeline management based on project readiness,” the World Bank said in its plan.

*** So we have a collection of reparation options due to the pandemic when it comes to China, we have a building space battlefield, we have corruption within China and now we have the U.S. at major odds with the Chinese Communist Party’s in violation of the One Country, Two Systems Act of 1997 with regard to Hong Kong. Secretary of State Pompeo declared to Congress that Hong Kong was no longer autonomous with The CCP which is correct but this will spark continued hostilities between the two nations even as naval conflicts continue in the South China Sea.

None of this will be easy but the reader should know more details to assess what may be ahead in global relations.

 

The Kill Shot Against Gen. Flynn was Not Russia, it was Iran

RussiaGate was concocted. RussiaGate was globally choreographed. But it was never about Russia, the real covert truth and story is Iran.

Lee Smith has confirmed what I knew in my gut to be true. Smith authored titled The Plot Against the President. I read it and Smith was gracious enough to come on my radio show to discuss the book, which you must read. Congressman Devin Nunes knew in his gut the RussiaGate story did not compute either.

A huge high five to Nunes and Smith and on with the story. It is a long one. Once you sit back and read it all, the clue, tips and indicators begin to fall into place. But we must go back several years for context, patterns and the cunningness of politicians and powerplayers.

1. Remember the first set of WikiLeaks cables where it was determined that Hillary had her staff collect as much oppo-research as possible on her adversaries and foreign dignitaries such that she had to go on an apology tour after the cables were published?

2. Remember the scandal that surrounded Sharyl Attkisson and the computer intrusion(s) she experienced during the Obama administration that she is still fighting legally? She too wrote a book titled Stonewalled telling that story.

3. Remember the journalists that collaborated with Edward Snowden, one being Barton Gellman? By the way I have zero use for what Snowden did but there is an interesting part of the story that Gellman tells in The Atlantic magazine. He too was a victim of major computer intrusions perhaps more significant than that of Sharyl Attkisson.

4. Remember when President Obama had to apologize to German Chancellor Merkel and and French President Hollande for surveilling their phones?

5. Remember when Eric Holder had to admit he issued subpoenas for journalists phone and email records?

6. Remember when the Obama administration ‘scooped-up’ the communications between members of Congress and Israeli leaders during the Iran nuclear deal talks?

7. Remember when CIA Director, John Brennan spied on Senator Dianne Feinstein staffers working the on the torture reports, lied about it and then had to admit it?

8. Remember Operation Cassandra that was shut down completely by the Obama White House? The Former DEA Special Agent on this operation and I have become friends in the last couple of years. This was a global investigation into Hezbollah, narcotics and used cars. (This too included Bruce Ohr)

Okay, so the rest of the story. It is a big one but it holds all the truths. Again, a HUGE hat tip to Lee Smith and Devin Nunes.

*** It started in 2009, took of in a big way in 2012 and Oman was the back channel.

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Barack Obama warned his successor against hiring Michael Flynn. It was Nov. 10, 2016, just two days after Donald Trump upset Hillary Clinton to become the 45th president of the United States. Trump told aide Hope Hicks that he was bewildered by the president’s warning. Of all the important things Obama could have discussed with him, the outgoing commander in chief wanted to talk about Michael Flynn.

The question of why Obama was so focused on Flynn is especially revealing now. The Department of Justice recently filed to withdraw charges against the retired three-star general for making false statements to the FBI in a Jan. 24, 2017, interview regarding a phone call with a Russian diplomat. The circumstances surrounding the call and subsequent FBI interview have given rise to a vast conspiracy theory that was weaponized to imprison a decorated war hero and a strategic thinker whose battlefield innovations saved countless American lives. There is no evidence that Flynn “colluded” with Russia, and the evidence that Flynn did not make false statements to the FBI has been buried by the bureau, including current Director Christopher Wray.

So if the Obama administration wasn’t alarmed by Flynn’s nonexistent ties to Russia, why was he Obama’s No. 1 target? Why were officials from the previous administration intercepting his phone calls with the Russian ambassador?

The answer is that Obama saw Flynn as a signal threat to his legacy, which was rooted in his July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Flynn had said long before he signed on with the Trump campaign that it was a catastrophe to realign American interests with those of a terror state. And now that the candidate he’d advised was the new president-elect, Flynn was in a position to help undo the deal. To stop Flynn, the outgoing White House ran the same offense it used to sell the Iran deal—they smeared Flynn through the press as an agent of a foreign power, spied on him, and leaked classified intercepts of his conversations to reliable echo chamber allies.

In March 2017, after seeing evidence of the Obama administration’s surveillance of Trump associates, Congressman Devin Nunes said it had nothing to do with Russia or the FBI’s ongoing Russia investigation, or similar Russia probes conducted by congressional committees. Nunes’ contention was difficult to make sense of at the time. Wasn’t everything about Russia and whether or not there was, as Congressman Adam Schiff said, more than circumstantial evidence of collusion?

In fact, as Trump prepared to take office after his 2016 upset victory, the Obama White House was focused on the Middle East. “Russia collusion” was the narrative that Hillary Clinton operatives seeded in the media and fed to the FBI to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. After the election, the Obama team took it over and used it to hobble the incoming administration.

That Obama has publicly criticized the Justice Department’s decision to withdraw its case against the retired general shows how personal the anti-Flynn campaign still is for the former president. In leaking his supposedly off-hand comments to Michael Isikoff, a journalist whose work was central in pushing the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory, Obama was effectively taking credit for pushing the larger anti-Trump operation that grew out of the anti-Flynn campaign. While the Russia collusion story was a handy instrument for many to advance all manner of personal and political interests, for Obama the purpose of Russiagate was simple and direct: to protect the Iran deal, and secure his legacy.

Obama and his foreign policy team were hardly the only people in Washington who had their knives out for Michael Flynn. Nearly everyone did, especially the FBI. As former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s spy service, and a career intelligence officer, Flynn knew how and where to find the documentary evidence of the FBI’s illegal spying operation buried in the agency’s classified files—and the FBI had reason to be terrified of the new president’s anger.

The United States Intelligence Community (USIC) as a whole was against the former spy chief, who was promising to conduct a Beltway-wide audit that would force each of the agencies to justify their missions. Flynn told friends and colleagues he was going to make the entire senior intelligence service hand in their resignations and then detail why their work was vital to national security. Flynn knew the USIC well enough to know that thousands of higher-level bureaucrats wouldn’t make the cut.

Flynn had enemies at the very top of the intelligence bureaucracy. In 2014, he’d been fired as DIA head. Under oath in February of that year, he told the truth to a Senate committee—ISIS was not, as the president had said, a “JV team.” They were a serious threat to American citizens and interests and were getting stronger. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers then summoned Flynn to the Pentagon and told him he was done.

“Flynn’s warnings that extremists were regrouping and on the rise were inconvenient to an administration that didn’t want to hear any bad news,” says former DIA analyst Oubai Shahbandar. “Flynn’s prophetic warnings would play out exactly as he’d warned shortly after he was fired.”

Flynn’s firing appeared to be an end to one of the most remarkable careers in recent American intelligence history. He made his name during the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where soldiers in the field desperately needed intelligence, often collected by other combat units. But there was a clog in the pipeline—the Beltway’s intelligence bureaucracy, which had a stranglehold over the distribution of intelligence.

Flynn described the problem in a 2010 article titled “Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan,” co-written with current Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger. “Moving up through levels of hierarchy,” they wrote, “is normally a journey into greater degrees of cluelessness.” Their solution was to cut Washington out of the process: Americans in uniform in Iraq and Afghanistan needed that information to accomplish their mission.

“What made Flynn revolutionary is that he got people out in the field,” says Shahbandar, who served in Iraq under Flynn in 2007-08 and in Afghanistan in 2010-11. “It wasn’t just enough to have intelligence, you needed to understand where it was coming from and what it meant. For instance, if you thought that insurgents were going to take over a village, the first people who would know what was going would be the villagers. So Flynn made sure we knew the environment, the culture, the people.”

Influential senior officers like Gens. David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal credited Flynn for collecting the intelligence that helped defeat al-Qaida in Iraq in 2007. In 2012, he was named DIA chief. The next year he secured access for a team of DIA analysts to scour through the documents that had been captured during the 2011 operation to kill Osama bin Laden.

“The bin Laden database was unorganized,” says a former senior DIA official. “There had been very little work on it since it was first captured. The CIA had done machine word searches to identify immediate threats, but they didn’t study it for future trends or strategic insight.” Flynn arranged for a team from United States Central Command, based in Tampa, Florida, to come up to Washington. The subject of their investigation was a potentially sensitive one. “We were looking for ties between al-Qaida and Iran,” says Michael Pregent, a former Army intelligence officer who was working on the bin Laden documents as a contractor. “We’re arguing with everyone—NSA, whoever else—telling them what we wanted and they kept saying ‘there’s nothing there, we already went through it.’ The CIA and others were looking for immediate threats. We said ‘we’re DIA, we’re all-source analysts and we want everything to get a full picture.’”

Just as the CENTCOM team was preparing for their trip to Northern Virginia, they were shut down. “Everything was set,” says Pregent. “we had our hotel reservations, a team of translators, and access to all of the drives at the National Media Exploitation Center. Then I get a call in the middle of one of the NCAA basketball tournament games from the guy who was running our team. He said that [CIA Director John] Brennan and [National Security Adviser Susan] Rice pulled the plug.”

The administration was, it appears, clearing space for Obama to implement his big foreign policy idea—the Iran nuclear deal. Another aide, Ben Rhodes, had said in 2013 that the Iran Deal was the White House’s key second-term initiative. Evidence that Tehran was coordinating with a terror group that had slaughtered thousands in Manhattan and at the Pentagon would make it harder to convince American lawmakers of the wisdom in legitimizing Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

What was the information about al-Qaida’s ties to Iran that Flynn wanted his CENTCOM team to get out? According to published news reports, the bin Laden database included “letters about Iran’s role, influence, and acknowledgment of enabling al-Qaida operatives to pass through Iran as long as al-Qaida did its dirty work against the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.” One of those letters showed that “Al-Qaeda was working on chemical and biological weapons in Iran.”

After decades of anti-Iran campaigning, Republicans were expected to oppose Obama’s deal, but didn’t have the numbers to stop it in the Senate. What concerned the White House therefore was their own party. Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill were uneasy about the deal, as were large numbers of Jewish voters—more than half of whom identify as Democrats.

Jewish organizations offered two major objections to the deal: First, the outlines of Obama’s nuclear deal suggested that it might legalize a bomb pointed at the Jewish state. Second, in striking an agreement with Iran, the White House might normalize relations with a regime that embodies anti-Semitism.

In return, Obama confronted Iran Deal skeptics in his own party with a hard choice—either support the deal, or you’re out. There would be no room in the Democratic Party for principled disagreement over the keystone of Obama’s foreign policy legacy. Opponents were portrayed in harsh, uncompromising terms: They had been bought off, or were warmongers, or Israel-firsters.

In a meeting of Senate Democrats in early 2015, Obama had his eye on New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez when he spoke of pressures “from donors and others” to reject the deal. Menendez was offended. He said he’d “worked for more than 20 years to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and had always been focused on the long-term implications.”

The way that Obama framed it, it was only the money laid out against the initiative by lobbyists and donors that kept Americans from seeing how excellent his deal truly was. “If people are engaged, eventually the political system responds,” Obama told Jon Stewart. “Despite the money, despite the lobbyists, it still responds.”

Obama kept talking about money, donors, and lobbyists as if a secret cabal was tossing bags of dark foreign cash around Washington. What he was referring to was the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—an American organization run by American Jews to promote America’s alliance with its most important Middle East ally.

AIPAC’s leadership trusted Obama to do the right thing. They described him as a great friend of Israel and assured themselves he wouldn’t put the Jewish state in danger by giving the bomb to a regime that regularly called for its destruction. But Obama didn’t trust AIPAC or the capacity of the American people to recognize the excellence of the Iran deal, which is why he kept the deal and its contents hidden from public view for as long as possible.

In 2012, the administration began secret negotiations with Iran. At the same time, the administration called off a multi-agency task force targeting the billion-dollar criminal enterprise run by Iran’s Lebanese ally, Hezbollah. The administration told Congress that the nuclear deal would not grant Iran access to the U.S. financial system, but a 2018 Senate report showed how the Obama White House lied to the public and was secretly trying to grant Iran that access. The Obama administration had misled Congress about secret deals it made regarding verification procedures, and then secretly shipped $1.7 billion in cash for Iran to distribute to its terror proxies.

The administration’s promise that the deal would prevent Iran from ever getting a bomb was validated by their communications infrastructure: The messaging campaign brought together friendly journalists, newly minted arms-control experts, social media stars, and progressive advocacy groups like the regime-friendly National Iranian American Council (NIAC). As Obama’s top national security communications lieutenant Ben Rhodes told The New York Times: “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

One strategy employed by Rhodes’ echo chamber assets was to engage critics in esoteric debates over details of the Iran deal. For instance, how many centrifuges would Iranian reactors be allowed to spin? Had Iran’s supreme leader declared a genuine fatwa against nuclear weapons? Was this or that nuclear site a military facility?

Among the handful of honest reporters covering the deal, most didn’t have enough information, time, or energy to continue fighting a wall of static noise. And that was the point of Obama’s media campaign—to drown out, smear, and shut down opponents and even skeptics. Thus, echo chamber allies purposefully obscured the core issue. The nature of the agreement was made plain in its “sunset clauses.” The fact that parts of the deal restricting Iran’s activities were due to expire beginning in 2020 until all restrictions were gone and the regime’s nuclear program was legal, showed that it was a phony deal. Obama was simply bribing the Iranians with hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief and hundreds of billions more in investment to refrain from building a bomb until he was safely gone from the White House, when the Iranian bomb would become someone else’s problem. The Obama team thought that even the Israelis wouldn’t dream of touching Iran’s nuclear program so long as Washington vouchsafed the deal. They called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “chickenshit.”

If Obama was just kicking the can down the road, why did he expend so much effort to get the deal? How was it central to his legacy if it was never actually intended to stop Iran from getting the bomb? Because it was his instrument to secure an even more ambitious objective—to reorder the strategic architecture of the Middle East.

Obama did not hide his larger goal. He told a biographer, New Yorker editor David Remnick, that he was establishing a geopolitical equilibrium “between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran.” According to The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, another writer Obama used as a public messaging instrument, realignment was a “great strategic opportunity” for a “a new regional framework that accommodates the security needs of Iranians, Saudis, Israelis, Russians and Americans.”

The catch to Obama’s newly inclusive “balancing” framework was that upgrading relations with Iran would necessarily come at the expense of traditional partners targeted by Iran—like Saudi Arabia and, most importantly, Israel. Obama never said that part out loud, but the logic isn’t hard to follow: Elevating your enemy to the same level as your ally means that your enemy is no longer your enemy, and your ally is no longer your ally.

Obama demonstrated to Jerusalem the gravity of his intentions every time an administration official leaked reports of Israeli raids on Hezbollah and other Iranian allies in Syria and Lebanon. That put the Israelis on the defensive, and also showed the Iranians that Obama could and would bring Israel to heel. Therefore, Tehran should trust him.

“Obama wants this as the centerpiece of his legacy,” an American diplomat told the press in Vienna where Secretary of State John Kerry and his team came to terms with the Islamic Republic. “He sees himself as a transformative president in the Reagan mold,” said a former Obama adviser, “who leaves his stamp on America and the world for decades to come.”

For all of Obama’s talk of money and lobbies, he was himself creating a large international constituency for the deal. Sanctions on Iran had kept foreign companies out of the country for decades, but the promise of new markets for major industries, like energy and automotive, had European and Asian industry chomping at the bit. The American president not only promised to relieve sanctions, but also to help drum up business by assuring the world that it was safe to invest in Iran. John Kerry was keen to turn the State Department into Iran’s Chamber of Commerce.

Obama’s talk of the pro-Israel lobby only got louder as his negotiators came closer to striking the deal. He was talking about the Jews, and to them. If they didn’t back the deal, the sewers would spill over with traditional anti-Semitic conceits about Jewish money and influence, dual loyalties, Jews leveraging their home country on behalf of their co-religionists, and fomenting war. This wasn’t a fringe White nationalist figure, but a popular two-term Democrat. John Kerry said it outright: If Congress failed to pass the deal, it would put Israel at risk of being “more isolated and more blamed.” There was no alternative to the deal, said Kerry, except war.

Jewish community leaders complained about how the debate over the deal was being framed. “If you are a critic of the deal, you’re for war,” a senior official at a pro-Israel organization told me at the time. “The implication is that if it looks like the Jewish community is responsible for Congress voting down the deal, it will look like the Jewish community is leading us off to another war in the Middle East.”

Nonetheless, Obama kept hammering away at his chosen messaging. In a speech at American University he argued there are only two choices: The Iran Deal or war. The one government that did not think this is “such a strong deal” was Israel.

If the smear campaign targeting Iran Deal opponents as rich, dual-loyalist, right-wing warmongers was the public face of Obama’s push for the deal, there was an even less savory component hidden within the advanced technology of the U.S. Intelligence Community: The administration was spying on its domestic opponents, American legislators, and pro-Israel activists. Noah Pollak—formerly head of the Emergency Committee for Israel, a nonprofit organization that opposed the nuclear agreement with Iran—says, “I was warned that my conversations with senior Israeli officials were possibly being monitored.”

Speaking to me for my 2019 book The Plot Against the President, Pollak said that “the administration did things that seemed incontrovertibly to be responses to information gathered by listening to those conversations.” He continued: “At first we thought these were coincidences and we were being paranoid. Surely none of us are that important. Eventually it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on via the Israeli officials we were in contact with.”

A 2015 Wall Street Journal story provided details of the administration’s domestic espionage operation. “The National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups,” explained writers Adam Entous and Danny Yadron. “That raised fears—an ‘Oh-s— moment,’ one senior U.S. official said—that the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress.”

The names of Americans are minimized in transcripts of intercepted foreign communications to protect their privacy. For instance, an American swept up in an intercept might be referred to as a “U.S. Person.” It is not illegal or even necessarily improper for U.S. officials to deminimize, or “unmask,” their identities and find out who “U.S. Person” is, provided there are genuine national security reasons for doing so.

The story the Journal tells is evidence Obama officials knew what they were doing was wrong. In the account shaped by the Obama team, responsibility fell on the shoulders of the National Security Agency, responsible for the bulk of America’s signals intelligence. White House officials “let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold,” according to the Journal story. “We didn’t say, ‘do it,’” a senior U.S. official said. “We didn’t say, ‘don’t do it.’”

Any use of NSA intercepts to target Jewish organizations and anti-Iran Deal legislators would not be an innocent mistake. Obama aides would know they were abusing surveillance programs ostensibly pointed at Israeli officials if they used them to know which US lawmakers and pro-Israel activists were planning to oppose the deal, what they were saying, and who they were talking to. Indeed, it appears that to get in front of the possibility that their domestic spying operation would be exposed, Obama officials leaked it to friendly reporters in order to shape the story to their advantage: OK, yes, we heard, but only by accident. And in any case, it was the NSA that passed it on to us.

In June 2015, a month before the deal was struck in Vienna, Michael Flynn was on Capitol Hill testifying about Iran and the deeply flawed deal on the table. He described Iran’s destabilizing actions throughout the region, how the regime killed American troops in Iraq and later Afghanistan. He warned about Iran’s ties to North Korea, China, and Russia. Flynn emphasized that Iran’s “stated desire to destroy Israel is very real.” He said Obama’s Iran policy was one of “willful ignorance.”

As the 2016 election cycle approached, a number of Republican candidates solicited his advice—including Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Ted Cruz. In a sense, the retired general chose Trump as much as Trump chose him. At the time, the candidate’s understanding of what he called “the swamp”—a confederation of bureaucrats, elected officials, consultants, and contractors enriching themselves at the expense of the American taxpayer, was mostly theoretical. From Trump Tower in New York City more than 200 miles away, Washington sure looked wasteful. But Flynn had detailed knowledge of how the Beltway worked.

The two hit it off and Flynn traveled with the candidate regularly. He was vetted for the vice presidency, but Trump decided instead on Mike Pence, a congressman from Indiana who could help win both the evangelical and the Midwestern vote. Still, outside of Trump’s own family, Flynn was his closest adviser. The foreign policy initiatives he articulated were the president-elect’s and when he spoke to foreign officials, he was speaking for Trump.

Flynn not only made it clear that he wanted to undo the Iran Deal, he also broadcast his determination to find the documents detailing the secret deals between Obama and Iran, and to publicize them. With Flynn on the march, the outgoing administration was keen to shield the JCPOA. Obama diplomats consulted with their European counterparts and gave the clerical regime more sanctions relief, even after the Senate agreed with a 99 to 0 vote to renew the Iran Sanctions Act. Kerry called his Iranian counterpart to tell him not to worry.

Notably, Russia weighed in on the Obama team’s side. It would be “unforgivable,” according to the Russian Foreign Ministry, if the incoming Trump administration forfeited the JCPOA. The White House agreed to let Russia export more than 100 tons of uranium to Iran—enough to make more than 10 bombs, according to some estimates. “The point was to complicate any effort to tear up the deal,” says a senior U.S. official involved in the fight over the JCPOA. “It gave Iran an insurance policy against Trump.”

By early December 2016, only weeks after Trump’s surprise election, the anti-Flynn campaign was well underway. A December 3, 2016, New York Times article portrayed Flynn as a martinet who brooked no disagreement, and insisted his subordinates corroborate the intelligence assessments he sought. In his worldview, wrote the Times, “America was in a world war against Islamist militants allied with Russia, Cuba, and North Korea.” The piece carried the bylines of Matthew Rosenberg, Mark Mazzetti, and Eric Schmitt, with additional reporting by Adam Goldman and Michael S. Schmidt—reporters who would share in the Times’ 2018 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

Parts of the Times story were then recycled in a joint statement signed by progressive advocacy groups allied with the Obama White House in the Iran deal fight, like MoveOn.org and J Street, demanding Trump withdraw his appointment of Flynn. Among other concerns, the statement cited Flynn’s work on behalf of Turkish interests and, incongruously, his ostensibly negative views on Muslims, as expressed in his book—as well as his position on Iran.

A one-time USIC lawyer and editor at the national security bureaucracy blog Lawfare, who was destined to become a leading Russiagate conspiracy theorist, highlighted sections from Flynn’s book on social media. “Shocking,” tweeted Susan Hennessey. It had only been a year and a half since the Obama team had steamrolled congress to win the JCPOA and now their communications infrastructure had swung into action again to protect the Iran Deal from the Trump White House.

It was in this early December 2016 period when the Iran deal spying and media operation merged into Russiagate. The structure of the two operations was identical—only some of the variables had changed. Opponents were no longer tagged as Israel-firsters, now they were Putin assets. The message, however, was the same. Opponents are not simply wrongheaded, or mistaken, or even dumb—rather, they are disloyal; agents of a foreign power.

Clandestine spying targeting Flynn began no later than Dec. 2. That day, DNI James Clapper and U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power unmasked Flynn’s name from a classified U.S. intercept of communications between Russian officials. It seems the Obama officials were interested in a Trump Tower meeting Flynn and Jared Kushner held with Russia’s U.S. Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The envoy then reported his meeting to Moscow, communications that U.S. officials appear to have leaked to Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima, and Adam Entous, who had moved over from The Wall Street Journal.

Leaking information from classified intercepts is a felony. Concerned U.S. officials’ use of the press to illuminate government crimes and abuses is a keystone of the American political process. However, the many times that Flynn’s name was illegally leaked from intercepts during the transition period and the first several weeks of the new administration shows that the classified information passed to journalists was not whistleblowing but was instead an aspect of the political surveillance operation targeting the Trump team.

According to a recently declassified document, there were 39 Obama officials who unmasked Flynn’s identity a total of 53 times. Power led the list with seven unmaskings of Flynn—a small part of her sum total of more than 330 unmaskings between 2015-16, making her, according to former Congressman Trey Gowdy, the “largest unmasker of U.S. persons in our history.”

Power was one of 30 Obama officials who unmasked Flynn between Dec. 14-16. The list includes Clapper, Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, as well as six other Treasury officials including Patrick Cronin, the director of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis—Treasury’s intelligence shop. It appears they were interested in a Dec. 15 meeting in which Flynn, Kushner, and Steve Bannon hosted the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan.

Obama’s former National Security Adviser Susan Rice also unmasked Flynn for this meeting, though she’s not on the declassified Flynn unmasking list. She said that she was irked Emirati leadership had come to the United States without notifying the Obama White House. Rice’s description of her emotional state may well be accurate, though it doesn’t explain why she requested the identities of presidential transition officials.

But it’s not hard to figure out why she and 30 other Obama officials wanted to know about that meeting. Spying on the Trump team’s conversations with Arab officials would tell them how the next administration’s Middle East policies would affect Obama’s, especially the JCPOA. Seven Treasury officials spying on the same meeting suggests they wanted to know about Trump’s plans for Iran sanctions. Sure, John Kerry told the Iranians not to worry about sanctions, but what could the Obama team do to counter Trump if he was planning to restore them?

On Dec. 22, Flynn spoke with Russian Ambassador Kislyak about the vote scheduled to take place at the United Nations the next day. The Obama team had coaxed Egypt into introducing U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, holding that Israel was occupying the territories it had taken in the June 1967 war. Israel, according to 2334, was in “flagrant violation” of international law. Under the terms of the resolution, even the Western Wall of the Temple Mount was an illegal Israeli settlement.

President-elect Trump got Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi on the phone on Dec. 22 and convinced him to withdraw the proposal. But the transition team knew someone else would sponsor the resolution. Flynn was speaking with foreign officials from Israel, Egypt, and Senegal—which at the time held one of the rotating positions on the security council. Flynn later told the FBI that he knew the math and at least five countries had to abstain to block the resolution and he didn’t think his calls would affect the final vote. He compared the exercise to a battle drill, to see how quickly he could get foreign officials on the phone.

The FBI knew that Flynn had called Kislyak, too. It’s not clear when the bureau learned of the call but they asked him about it during his pivotal Jan. 24 interview. Flynn said he didn’t try to influence the Russian envoy, but just wanted to know where the Russians stood.

The next day UNSCR 2334 passed 14-0, with Samantha Power casting a vote to abstain, forsaking America’s customary role of blocking anti-Israel actions at the U.N. Obama had reinforced his regional realignment strategy by balancing opposing forces—weakening Israel and empowering the Palestinians. That’s the generous reading. It was the 44th president’s parting shot at America’s most important regional ally.

Within the week, Obama aides were zeroing in on Flynn. The outgoing White House claimed it wanted to know why Putin announced on Dec. 30 that he would refrain from responding to the expulsion of dozens of Russian diplomats. The FBI said it had an answer—the bureau had a record of a phone call between Kislyak and Flynn from the day before Putin made his decision public.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe writes in his 2019 book, The Threat, that he was alerted to the information by an analyst and passed it on to Comey, who told Clapper, who briefed Obama. Comey corroborated McCabe’s account in congressional testimony, while Clapper swore under oath that he did not brief the president.

Clapper may be telling the truth. The unmasking list shows that Obama officials were listening in on Flynn’s conversations in real time. It’s possible Obama didn’t need Clapper to tell him about the call. According to former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, Obama knew about the Flynn-Kislyak call no later than Jan. 5, when he was discussing it in an Oval Office meeting. She says Comey was the only other official present—which contradicts Susan Rice’s account. Obama’s former National Security Advisor said she and Vice President Joe Biden were also there.

This week, acting DNI Richard Grenell declassified a previously redacted passage from an email Rice sent to herself on inauguration day 2017 regarding the Jan. 5 meeting. The newly unredacted section showed that Obama was fully read into the anti-Flynn operation.

According to the Rice email, Obama asked if the FBI director was saying that they “should not pass sensitive information related to Russia to Flynn.” Obama knew at the time there was no evidence that Flynn had any untoward relationship with Russia—the FBI had been investigating the allegations for more than four months and found “no derogatory information” on Flynn.

On Jan. 7, the DNI official who gave Obama his daily intelligence briefing requested to have Flynn’s name unmasked, making the information accessible to numerous Obama officials with whom the briefing was shared, and thus expanding the pool of possible sources.

Adam Entous was offered the leak of the Dec. 29 call early on. “I didn’t know what to make of it,” the writer, now at The New Yorker, told a Georgetown audience. “There were divisions within the newsroom. At that point, I’m at The Washington Post. There are divisions about this: Why is it news that Michael Flynn is talking to the Russian ambassador? He should be talking to the Russian ambassador.”

Then the leak was offered to Entous’ Post colleague David Ignatius. “This is something a columnist can do, unlike me as a news reporter,” said Entous. “He was able to just throw this piece of red meat out there.” Indeed, it’s how the Obama team intended to bloody the waters. On Jan. 10, according to Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell, Clapper told Ignatius to “take the kill shot on Flynn.” Ignatius published the leak in his Jan. 12 column, describing Flynn’s Dec. 29 conversation with Kislyak. “According to a senior U.S. government official,” wrote Ignatius, “Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials … What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions?”

The story ignited the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, which was intended to damage Flynn while disguising the nature and purpose of the campaign. The criminal leak of a classified intercept was evidence that the Obama White House was spying on the transition team, and for the same reason they’d spied on lawmakers and pro-Israel activists—to know the plans of Iran deal opponents.

To conceal their illegal surveillance of the incoming NSA and other Trump officials, Obama aides repurposed Hillary Clinton’s Trump-Russia collusion narrative, which had fed dozens of pre-election news reports and won the FBI a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. Now the media had the Trump White House on the defensive, identifying likely “points of collusion” everywhere, while covering up Obama’s spying operation.

The outgoing administration caught another break when the transition team made an unforced error. Days after the Ignatius story broke, Vice President Mike Pence said on TV that Flynn had assured him there was no talk of sanctions. Either Pence had misunderstood, or Flynn didn’t explain himself clearly enough. Later Flynn took responsibility for the mix-up. He was sorry he’d put Pence “in a position,” and he “should have said, ‘I don’t know. I can’t recall,’ which is the truth.” Flynn further elaborated on the call with Kislyak: “It wasn’t about sanctions. It was about the 35 guys who were thrown out.” Flynn said that he told the Russian envoy when they come to office, “’We’ll review everything.’ I never said anything such as, ‘We’re going to review sanctions,’ or anything like that.”

There was no promise to relieve sanctions on Russia and tamper with Obama’s policy before Trump came to office, never mind collusion. But the discrepancy between Pence’s statement and the transcript of Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak gave Comey and McCabe a window of opportunity. On Jan. 24, they sent two FBI agents to interview Flynn at the White House. They came back and reported that they didn’t think Flynn lied. That didn’t matter either. The FBI edited the record of the interview.

Meanwhile, Flynn continued to do the job the president had chosen him for. After Iran conducted a ballistic missile test and its Yemeni proxies attacked a Saudi naval ship, he announced in the White House press room: “As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice.” Former Obama aides fumed: The Trump administration had no choice but to stay in the JCPOA. Then they flipped through the dog-eared pages of the Iran Deal playbook and pushed into the press rumors regarding the loyalties of a combat veteran who served his country in uniform for more than three decades. Had Michael Flynn sold out his country to Russia?

On Feb. 9, Entous finally got his chance to publish the leaked intercept of the Kislyak call. He and Washington Post colleagues Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima found nine current and former U.S. officials to confirm that Flynn had discussed sanctions with the Russian. It went unremarked that the article provided evidence of yet another leak of Flynn’s name from a classified intercept, and thus proof of a massive spying operation targeting the Trump team.

Trump had been warned. Obama was serious when he told him not to bring on Flynn. The new president’s hand was forced, and the national security adviser left the White House on Feb. 13. Within the year, prosecutors from Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation threatened to charge Flynn’s son with lobbying violations if he didn’t plead guilty to making false statements to the FBI.

By then, Russiagate was in overdrive—one of the most destructive conspiracy theories in U.S. history was well on its way to poisoning minds around the country. It appeared to cast an even deeper spell on the elite urban classes whose peers in the press and government had fueled it in the name of “resisting” Trump. And yet only a small fraction of those who imagined themselves to have the inside story of the Trump team’s secret collusion with Russia to defeat Clinton understood the origins of the fantasy world they had been engulfed by.

Russiagate was not a hoax, as some conservative journalists call it. Rather, it was a purposeful extension of the Obama administration’s Iran Deal media campaign, and of the secret espionage operation targeting those opposed to Obama’s efforts to realign American interests with those of a terror state that embodies the most corrosive forms of anti-Semitism.

It’s not hard to see why the previous president went after Flynn: The retired general’s determination to undo the Iran Deal was grounded in his own experience in two Middle Eastern theaters of combat, where he saw how Iran murdered Americans and threatened American interests. But why Obama would choose the Islamic Republic as a partner and encourage the tactics typically employed by third-world police states remain a mystery. (reprinted in full from The Tablet)

 

 

 

Legislation to Regain US Control of Critical Minerals from China

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, today introduced the Onshoring Rare Earths Act of 2020 or ORE Act, legislation to end U.S. dependence on China for rare earth elements and other critical minerals used to manufacture our defense technologies and high tech products by establishing a supply chain for these minerals in the U.S., including by requiring the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to source these minerals domestically.

Upon introducing the legislation, Sen. Cruz said:

“Our ability as a nation to manufacture defense technologies and support our military is dangerously dependent on our ability to access rare earth elements and critical minerals mined, refined, and manufactured almost exclusively in China. Much like the Chinese Communist Party has threatened to cut off the U.S. from life-saving medicines made in China, the Chinese Communist Party could also cut off our access to these materials, significantly threatening U.S. national security. The ORE Act will help ensure China never has that opportunity by establishing a rare earth elements and critical minerals supply chain in the U.S.”

*** Rare earth mineral deal inked by US and Australia — what ... photo

Noted by Forbes:

A whole slate of new bad behaviors by China’s repressive regime have been laid bare by the COVID-19 crisis. There were already plenty of complaints before the pandemic began, but the coronavirus seems to be supercharging the pressure on U.S. companies to reduce their Chinese sourcing. One of the biggest recent challenges in that regard has been China’s dominance in mining and processing critical rare earth minerals. These are vital building blocks for everything from smart phones, EV batteries and medical imaging machines to advanced defense weaponry, so our reliance on a less-than-friendly nation for our supply presents a huge political and economic risk. But right now China controls 90% of global rare earth production.

It’s amazing good fortune, then, that out in the barren scrub of Far West Texas 85 miles east of El Paso, an unassuming 1,250-tall mountain called Round Top holds the promise of making America largely self-sufficient in these critical minerals. The mountain contains five out of six light rare earths (such as neodymium), 10 out of 11 heavy rare earths (dysprosium, for example), and all five permanent magnet materials. What’s more, Round Top has large deposits of lithium, critical for batteries in EVs and power storage. More here.

See the U.S map here.

The global map is here.

According to the United States Geological Survey, as of 2018, China produced around 80% of world demand for rare earth metals (down from 95% in 2010). Their ores are rich in yttrium, lanthanum, and neodymium.

Since August of 2010, fears over Chinese dominance of crucial rare earth supplies have lingered as China restricted export quotas of the metals with no official explanation, immediately sparking debate over decentralization of world rare earth production.

Rare earth element mines, deposits, and occurrences photo

Great quantities of rare earth ores were found in California in 1949, and more are being sought throughout North America, but current mining is not significant enough to strategically control any portion of the global rare earths market (the Mountain Pass mine in California still has to ship its minerals to China to be processed).

Rare earths are traded on the NYSE in the form of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that represent a basket of supplier and mining stocks, as opposed to trading in the metals themselves. This is due to their rarity and price, as well as their almost strictly industrial consumption. Rare earth metals are not considered a good physical investment like precious metals, which hold low-tech intrinsic value.

*** How did this happen?

In part:

Economically, the biggest changes happened in the 1990s and early 2000s, starting when the United States conferred permanent “Most Favored Nation” status on China.

These decisions proved disastrous.

“Prior to that, we could only give China [Most Favored Nation status] one year at a time because we had a law that said you can’t give a communist country permanent [Most Favored Nation] trade treatment,” said Mulloy. “Each year, if China wasn’t behaving properly, we could take it away.”

“It was a terrible mistake to give it up because we were unable to manage or govern the Chinese after that,” agreed Halper.

The next shoe to drop came with China’s inclusion in the World Trade Organization.

The U.S. only approved China’s entry on the condition that we could continue to punish what we considered unfair trade practices by China or anyone else. But when that position was challenged within the World Trade Organization, we agreed not to penalize anyone unless we won a dispute at the World Trade Organization.

We handcuffed ourselves and we’ve been handcuffed ever since. What was once an $80 billion trade deficit is now at $4.5 trillion. It should have been foreseeable, but Wall Street and multinational corporations, which foresaw big returns from China, lobbied Congress hard to get these things approved.