Category Archives: Failed foreign policy

2010: Remember When Obama Pulled U.S. Spies From China

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Of course you don’t, one had to be quite the investigator of journalism to know it much less remember it.

So….why you ask? Hold on….there is a pattern and story here.

Image result for u.s. spies in china  Image result for trump with jinping

2010: The White House National Security Council recently directed U.S. spy agencies to lower the priority placed on intelligence collection for China, amid opposition to the policy change from senior intelligence leaders who feared it would hamper efforts to obtain secrets about Beijing’s military and its cyber-attacks.

The downgrading of intelligence gathering on China was challenged by Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair and CIA Director Leon E. Panetta after it was first proposed in interagency memorandums in October, current and former intelligence officials said.

The decision downgrades China from “Priority 1” status, alongside Iran and North Korea, to “Priority 2,” which covers specific events such as the humanitarian crisis after the Haitian earthquake or tensions between India and Pakistan.

The National Security Council staff, in response, pressed ahead with the change and sought to assure Mr. Blair and other intelligence chiefs that the change would not affect the allocation of resources for spying on China or the urgency of focusing on Chinese spying targets, the officials told The Washington Times.

White House National Security Council officials declined to comment on the intelligence issue. Mike Birmingham, a spokesman for Mr. Blair, declined to comment. A CIA spokesman also declined to comment.

*** Image result for u.s. spies in china Cyberwarzone

Directors of CIA in that time frame:

Leon Panetta 2010

Mike Morrell (acting) 2011

David Petraeus 2011

Mike Morrell (acting) 2012

John Brennan 2013

Mike Pompeo, current director

***

Killing C.I.A. Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations

NYT/WASHINGTON — The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.
Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.
But there was no disagreement about the damage. From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.’s sources. According to three of the officials, one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building — a message to others who might have been working for the C.I.A.
Still others were put in jail. All told, the Chinese killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 of the C.I.A.’s sources in China, according to two former senior American officials, effectively unraveling a network that had taken years to build.
Assessing the fallout from an exposed spy operation can be difficult, but the episode was considered particularly damaging. The number of American assets lost in China, officials said, rivaled those lost in the Soviet Union and Russia during the betrayals of both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, formerly of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., who divulged intelligence operations to Moscow for years.
The previously unreported episode shows how successful the Chinese were in disrupting American spying efforts and stealing secrets years before a well-publicized breach in 2015 gave Beijing access to thousands of government personnel records, including intelligence contractors. The C.I.A. considers spying in China one of its top priorities, but the country’s extensive security apparatus makes it exceptionally hard for Western spy services to develop sources there.
At a time when the C.I.A. is trying to figure out how some of its most sensitive documents were leaked onto the internet two months ago by WikiLeaks, and the F.B.I. investigates possible ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russia, the unsettled nature of the China investigation demonstrates the difficulty of conducting counterespionage investigations into sophisticated spy services like those in Russia and China.
The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. both declined to comment.
Details about the investigation have been tightly held. Ten current and former American officials described the investigation on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing the information.
Investigators still disagree how it happened, but the unsettled nature of the China investigation demonstrates the difficulty of conducting counterespionage investigations into sophisticated spy services. Credit Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press..Photo by: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press..
The first signs of trouble emerged in 2010. At the time, the quality of the C.I.A.’s information about the inner workings of the Chinese government was the best it had been for years, the result of recruiting sources deep inside the bureaucracy in Beijing, four former officials said. Some were Chinese nationals who the C.I.A. believed had become disillusioned with the Chinese government’s corruption.
But by the end of the year, the flow of information began to dry up. By early 2011, senior agency officers realized they had a problem: Assets in China, one of their most precious resources, were disappearing.
The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. opened a joint investigation run by top counterintelligence officials at both agencies. Working out of a secret office in Northern Virginia, they began analyzing every operation being run in Beijing. One former senior American official said the investigation had been code-named Honey Badger.
As more and more sources vanished, the operation took on increased urgency. Nearly every employee at the American Embassy was scrutinized, no matter how high ranking. Some investigators believed the Chinese had cracked the encrypted method that the C.I.A. used to communicate with its assets. Others suspected a traitor in the C.I.A., a theory that agency officials were at first reluctant to embrace — and that some in both agencies still do not believe.
Their debates were punctuated with macabre phone calls — “We lost another one” — and urgent questions from the Obama administration wondering why intelligence about the Chinese had slowed.
The mole hunt eventually zeroed in on a former agency operative who had worked in the C.I.A.’s division overseeing China, believing he was most likely responsible for the crippling disclosures. But efforts to gather enough evidence to arrest him failed, and he is now living in another Asian country, current and former officials said.
There was good reason to suspect an insider, some former officials say. Around that time, Chinese spies compromised National Security Agency surveillance in Taiwan — an island Beijing claims is part of China — by infiltrating Taiwanese intelligence, an American partner, according to two former officials. And the C.I.A. had discovered Chinese operatives in the agency’s hiring pipeline, according to officials and court documents.
But the C.I.A.’s top spy hunter, Mark Kelton, resisted the mole theory, at least initially, former officials say. Mr. Kelton had been close friends with Brian J. Kelley, a C.I.A. officer who in the 1990s was wrongly suspected by the F.B.I. of being a Russian spy. The real traitor, it turned out, was Mr. Hanssen. Mr. Kelton often mentioned Mr. Kelley’s mistreatment in meetings during the China episode, former colleagues say, and said he would not accuse someone without ironclad evidence.
Those who rejected the mole theory attributed the losses to sloppy American tradecraft at a time when the Chinese were becoming better at monitoring American espionage activities in the country. Some F.B.I. agents became convinced that C.I.A. handlers in Beijing too often traveled the same routes to the same meeting points, which would have helped China’s vast surveillance network identify the spies in its midst.
Some officers met their sources at a restaurant where Chinese agents had planted listening devices, former officials said, and even the waiters worked for Chinese intelligence.
This carelessness, coupled with the possibility that the Chinese had hacked the covert communications channel, would explain many, if not all, of the disappearances and deaths, some former officials said. Some in the agency, particularly those who had helped build the spy network, resisted this theory and believed they had been caught in the middle of a turf war within the C.I.A.
Still, the Chinese picked off more and more of the agency’s spies, continuing through 2011 and into 2012. As investigators narrowed the list of suspects with access to the information, they started focusing on a Chinese-American who had left the C.I.A. shortly before the intelligence losses began. Some investigators believed he had become disgruntled and had begun spying for China. One official said the man had access to the identities of C.I.A. informants and fit all the indicators on a matrix used to identify espionage threats.
After leaving the C.I.A., the man decided to remain in Asia with his family and pursue a business opportunity, which some officials suspect that Chinese intelligence agents had arranged.
Officials said the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. lured the man back to the United States around 2012 with a ruse about a possible contract with the agency, an arrangement common among former officers. Agents questioned the man, asking why he had decided to stay in Asia, concerned that he possessed a number of secrets that would be valuable to the Chinese. It’s not clear whether agents confronted the man about whether he had spied for China.
The man defended his reasons for living in Asia and did not admit any wrongdoing, an official said. He then returned to Asia.
By 2013, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. concluded that China’s success in identifying C.I.A. agents had been blunted — it is not clear how — but the damage had been done.
The C.I.A. has tried to rebuild its network of spies in China, officials said, an expensive and time-consuming effort led at one time by the former chief of the East Asia Division. A former intelligence official said the former chief was particularly bitter because he had worked with the suspected mole and recruited some of the spies in China who were ultimately executed.
China has been particularly aggressive in its espionage in recent years, beyond the breach of the Office of Personnel Management records in 2015, American officials said. Last year, an F.B.I. employee pleaded guilty to acting as a Chinese agent for years, passing sensitive technology information to Beijing in exchange for cash, lavish hotel rooms during foreign travel and prostitutes.
In March, prosecutors announced the arrest of a longtime State Department employee, Candace Marie Claiborne, accused of lying to investigators about her contacts with Chinese officials. According to the criminal complaint against Ms. Claiborne, who pleaded not guilty, Chinese agents wired cash into her bank account and showered her with gifts that included an iPhone, a laptop and tuition at a Chinese fashion school. In addition, according to the complaint, she received a fully furnished apartment and a stipend.
*** Just to be sure China had a real handle on all CIA operatives in country, what came next? The OPM hack, remember that one?
Enter China’s Unit 61398
The program used by China:

In part from Wired: The US-CERT team moved into OPM’s sub-basement and among the first moves was to analyze the malware that Saulsbury had found attached to mcutil.dll. The program turned out to be one they knew well: a variant of PlugX, a remote-access tool commonly deployed by Chinese-­speaking hacking units. The tool has also shown up on computers used by foes of China’s government, including activists in Hong Kong and Tibet. The malware’s code is always slightly tweaked between attacks so firewalls can’t recognize it.

By Tuesday the 21st, having churned through a string of nearly sleepless days and nights, the investigators felt satisfied that they’d done their due diligence. Their scans had identified over 2,000 individual pieces of malware that were unrelated to the attack in question (everything from routine adware to dormant viruses). The PlugX variant they were seeking to annihilate was present on fewer than 10 OPM machines; unfortunately, some of those machines were pivotal to the entire network. “The big one was what we call the jumpbox,” Mejeur says. “That’s the administrative server that’s used to log in to all the other servers. And it’s got malware on it. That is an ‘Oh feces’ moment.”

By controlling the jumpbox, the attackers had gained access to every nook and cranny of OPM’s digital terrain. The investigators wondered whether the APT had pulled off that impressive feat with the aid of the system blueprints stolen in the breach discovered in March 2014. If that were the case, then the hackers had devoted months to laying the groundwork for this attack.

Leaping forward in details:

Once established on the agency’s network, they used trial and error to find the credentials necessary to seed the jumpbox with their PlugX variant. Then, during the long Fourth of July weekend in 2014, when staffing was sure to be light, the hackers began to run a series of commands meant to prepare data for exfiltration. Bundles of records were copied, moved onto drives from which they could be snatched, and chopped up into .zip or .rar files to avoid causing suspicious traffic spikes. The records that the attackers targeted were some of the most sensitive imaginable.

The hackers had first pillaged a massive trove of background-check data. As part of its human resources mission, OPM processes over 2 million background investigations per year, involving everyone from contractors to federal judges. OPM’s digital archives contain roughly 18 million copies of Standard Form 86, a 127-page questionnaire for federal security clearance that includes probing questions about an applicant’s personal finances, past substance abuse, and psychiatric care. The agency also warehouses the data that is gathered on applicants for some of the government’s most secretive jobs. That data can include everything from lie detector results to notes about whether an applicant engages in risky sexual behavior.

The hackers next delved into the complete personnel files of 4.2 million employees, past and present. Then, just weeks before OPM booted them out, they grabbed approximately 5.6 million digital images of government employee fingerprints.

Then comes, a little too late and thin on substance in February 2015:

President Obama Speaks at the White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection

Is all this fix yet? Hah…not even close. Then we need to ask why are we trusting China with North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile program? Do we have spies in Iran? North Korea? Any new operatives in China?

Scary eh?

 

Moscow’s Igor Sergun: Cong. Rohrabacher to your ‘Like Button’

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One part of this Moscow mess began in 2012, when the FBI held a private session with Congressman Dana Rohrahacher, (CA), Mike Rogers, Michigan, and according to one former official, Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger, telling them they were the targets of Russian influence and possible targets of recruiting.

Of note, Igor Sergun died in January of 2016, but his operations were already underway.

Image result for igor sergun

Sergun is credited as an important figure in the renaissance of the GRU, which had suffered deep staff and budget cuts prior to his arrival. Under Sergun, the agency regained political power within the Russian government as well as control over the Spetsnaz special forces, making it “crucial in the seizure of Crimea and operations in the Donbas,” as well as “as the lead agency for dealing with violent non-state actors.”

Perhaps the United States should take a hard look at the actions Ukraine has taken regarding Russian intrusion.

Poroshenko this week ordered Ukrainian Internet providers to block Vkontakte and Odnoclassniki. The sites are similar to Facebook and are two of the most popular social networking sites in the former Soviet space.

More than 25 million Ukrainians, in a country of about 43 million people, use the Russian sites to connect with friends, join groups and use the online messaging systems.

Poroshenko said the new restrictions were necessary to further protect Ukraine from Kremlin hybrid warfare, including disinformation campaigns, propaganda and military attacks. The two neighbors and former Soviet republics have been embroiled in a brutal, three-year war that has killed more than 10,000 people and displaced about 1.7 million eastern Ukrainians.

Supporters of the ban said it would also protect Ukrainians from the Russian security services’ ability to monitor and gather metadata from the sites’ users. Ukrainian government officials said the sites are closely monitored by Russia’s FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. More here from LATimes.

One must take the time to see the evidence the domestic intelligence agencies and private cyber companies along with data analysis experts are uncovering and studying. Further, since we citizens cannot attend meetings, some in classified settings that are held in Congress and we don’t get any information from the investigations, there are some interviews with professionals that are sounding the alarm bells.

Are you sick of Russia and hearing about Putin? Sure you are, but so is our government and other global leaders, rightly so. You are going to have to understand some facts and buckle in….there is more to come. Until the United States crafts a policy, decides on responses and pass legislation, Russia has nothing to stop their actions. What actions?

In part from Time: On March 2, a disturbing report hit the desks of U.S. counterintelligence officials in Washington. For months, American spy hunters had scrambled to uncover details of Russia’s influence operation against the 2016 presidential election. In offices in both D.C. and suburban Virginia, they had created massive wall charts to track the different players in Russia’s multipronged scheme. But the report in early March was something new.

It described how Russia had already moved on from the rudimentary email hacks against politicians it had used in 2016. Now the Russians were running a more sophisticated hack on Twitter. The report said the Russians had sent expertly tailored messages carrying malware to more than 10,000 Twitter users in the Defense Department. Depending on the interests of the targets, the messages offered links to stories on recent sporting events or the Oscars, which had taken place the previous weekend. When clicked, the links took users to a Russian-controlled server that downloaded a program allowing Moscow’s hackers to take control of the victim’s phone or computer–and Twitter account.

As they scrambled to contain the damage from the hack and regain control of any compromised devices, the spy hunters realized they faced a new kind of threat. In 2016, Russia had used thousands of covert human agents and robot computer programs to spread disinformation referencing the stolen campaign emails of Hillary Clinton, amplifying their effect. Now counterintelligence officials wondered: What chaos could Moscow unleash with thousands of Twitter handles that spoke in real time with the authority of the armed forces of the United States? At any given moment, perhaps during a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, Pentagon Twitter accounts might send out false information. As each tweet corroborated another, and covert Russian agents amplified the messages even further afield, the result could be panic and confusion.

***

Americans generate a vast trove of data on what they think and how they respond to ideas and arguments–literally thousands of expressions of belief every second on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Google. All of those digitized convictions are collected and stored, and much of that data is available commercially to anyone with sufficient computing power to take advantage of it.

That’s where the algorithms come in. American researchers have found they can use mathematical formulas to segment huge populations into thousands of subgroups according to defining characteristics like religion and political beliefs or taste in TV shows and music. Other algorithms can determine those groups’ hot-button issues and identify “followers” among them, pinpointing those most susceptible to suggestion. Propagandists can then manually craft messages to influence them, deploying covert provocateurs, either humans or automated computer programs known as bots, in hopes of altering their behavior.

That is what Moscow is doing, more than a dozen senior intelligence officials and others investigating Russia’s influence operations tell TIME. The Russians “target you and see what you like, what you click on, and see if you’re sympathetic or not sympathetic,” says a senior intelligence official. Whether and how much they have actually been able to change Americans’ behavior is hard to say. But as they have investigated the Russian 2016 operation, intelligence and other officials have found that Moscow has developed sophisticated tactics.

In May 2016, a Russian military intelligence officer bragged to a colleague that his organization, known as the GRU, was getting ready to pay Clinton back for what President Vladimir Putin believed was an influence operation she had run against him five years earlier as Secretary of State. The GRU, he said, was going to cause chaos in the upcoming U.S. election.

What the officer didn’t know, senior intelligence officials tell TIME, was that U.S. spies were listening. They wrote up the conversation and sent it back to analysts at headquarters, who turned it from raw intelligence into an official report and circulated it. But if the officer’s boast seems like a red flag now, at the time U.S. officials didn’t know what to make of it. “We didn’t really understand the context of it until much later,” says the senior intelligence official. Investigators now realize that the officer’s boast was the first indication U.S. spies had from their sources that Russia wasn’t just hacking email accounts to collect intelligence but was also considering interfering in the vote. Like much of America, many in the U.S. government hadn’t imagined the kind of influence operation that Russia was preparing to unleash on the 2016 election. Fewer still realized it had been five years in the making.

Putin publicly accused then Secretary of State Clinton of running a massive influence operation against his country, saying she had sent “a signal” to protesters and that the State Department had actively worked to fuel the protests. The State Department said it had just funded pro-democracy organizations. Former officials say any such operations–in Russia or elsewhere–would require a special intelligence finding by the President and that Barack Obama was not likely to have issued one.

After his re-election the following year, Putin dispatched his newly installed head of military intelligence, Igor Sergun, to begin repurposing cyberweapons previously used for psychological operations in war zones for use in electioneering. Russian intelligence agencies funded “troll farms,” botnet spamming operations and fake news outlets as part of an expanding focus on psychological operations in cyberspace.

One particularly talented Russian programmer who had worked with social media researchers in the U.S. for 10 years had returned to Moscow and brought with him a trove of algorithms that could be used in influence operations. He was promptly hired by those working for Russian intelligence services, senior intelligence officials tell TIME. “The engineer who built them the algorithms is U.S.-trained,” says the senior intelligence official.

Soon, Putin was aiming his new weapons at the U.S. Following Moscow’s April 2014 invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. considered sanctions that would block the export of drilling and fracking technologies to Russia, putting out of reach some $8.2 trillion in oil reserves that could not be tapped without U.S. technology. As they watched Moscow’s intelligence operations in the U.S., American spy hunters saw Russian agents applying their new social media tactics on key aides to members of Congress. Moscow’s agents broadcast material on social media and watched how targets responded in an attempt to find those who might support their cause, the senior intelligence official tells TIME. “The Russians started using it on the Hill with staffers,” the official says, “to see who is more susceptible to continue this program [and] to see who would be more favorable to what they want to do.”

Finish reading this remarkable report here. There is much more detail, including cyber operations, candidates, analysis and concocted political scandals. If one wonders why there is yet no evidence presented yet by the FBI and what the members of Congress are told, you now have a clue. This investigative process is a very long one and attributions as well as analysis is cumbersome and heavy on expert resources.

 

 

 

The Left Loves those Terrorists

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Let’s begin with the Palestinian Authority:

Palestinian Authority schools named after terrorists and Nazi collaborators

28 PA schools named after terrorists

3 PA schools named after Nazi collaborators

by Itamar Marcus

The PA Ministry of Education has named at least 28 schools after terrorists and an additional 3 schools after Nazi collaborators. Significantly, the PA Ministry of Education is directly and solely responsible for the naming of schools:

“The naming of schools and changes are the responsibility of the Minister of Education, by a direct decision of the Ministry or the Name Committee.” [Ma’an, independent news agency, Aug. 26, 2015, see also WAFA, official Palestinian Authority news agency Aug. 25, 2015]

By naming schools after terrorists, the Palestinian Authority is telling its children most emphatically that terrorists who have murdered Israeli civilians are role models and heroes. PMW has found evidence that in practice, students who attend such schools refer to terrorists as personal heroes whom they look up to and aspire to emulate.

The following are schools the Palestinian Authority has named after terrorists

Terrorist Dalal Mughrabi led the most lethal terror attack in Israel’s history, known as the Coastal Road massacre, in 1978, when she and other Fatah terrorists hijacked a bus on Israel’s Coastal Highway, killing 37 civilians, 12 of them children, and wounding over 70.

Image result for Dalal Mughrabi

The PA has named three schools after terrorist Dalal Mughrabi.

1. The Dalal Mughrabi High School for Girls – Gaza

2. The Dalal Mughrabi High School for Girls – Al-Shuyoukh, Hebron

3. The Dalal Mughrabi Elementary School for Girls – near Hebron

The PA has named two schools after terrorist Shadia Abu Ghazaleh.

4. The Shadia Abu Ghazaleh School for Girls – Gaza

5. The Shadia Abu Ghazalah High School for Boys – Jabaliya  (Read the full report here)

***

How about this cat that Obama released? Image result for oscar rivera faln  New York Daily News

Convicted Puerto Rican Terrorist, Whose Prison Sentence Obama Commuted, to Enjoy Hero’s Welcome

Oscar Lopez Rivera, the convicted domestic terrorist whose prison sentence Obama commuted, will be released Wednesday and return to New York City. He will also be given a hero’s welcome during the city’s annual Puerto Rican Day parade next month.

Rivera was serving a decades-long sentence for his role in terrorist attacks while serving as a member of the violent, far-left militia known as the Armed Forces of National Liberation, or FALN. The group sought to gain Puerto Rican independence by using violence and Marxist tactics, so naturally, Obama took a shine to Rivera.

The Free Beacon summarizes: Lopez Rivera was originally convicted of crimes committed while he was a member of the Armed Forces of National Liberation, known by its Spanish acronym FALN, a leftist, violent separatist group that sought complete independence for Puerto Rico.

During the 1970s, FALN claimed responsibility for more than 100 bombings across New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. One of the bombings, at the Fraunces Tavern in New York in 1975, killed four people and injured more than 60 others.

For his crimes, Lopez Rivera was sentenced in 1981 to 55 years in prison for “seditious conspiracy” and other felonies, and an additional 15 years in 1988 “for conspiracy to escape; to transport explosives with intent to kill and injure people; and to destroy government buildings and property,” according to CNN.

Lopez Rivera was not charged directly for involvement in FALN attacks, but rather for plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. His prison sentence would have expired in 2051 had it not been commuted by more than 30 years.

[…] Upon Lopez Rivera’s release, many will welcome him as a beloved son. He will be celebrated across Puerto Rico and Chicago this week, and on June 11, he will be recognized as Procer de la Libertad–National Freedom Hero–during New York City’s annual Puerto Rican Day parade.

Many Puerto Ricans also celebrated Lopez Rivera. But victims of FALN’s bombings feel differently.

“I’ve had long hours in the middle of the night trying to figure out what I am missing, why he has all this support,” Diane Berger Ettenson said of Lopez Rivera. Ettenson was six months pregnant when her husband was killed at Fraunces Tavern.

“Every time I have to defend my father’s life, it takes a little more of my life away,” said Joseph Connor, who was 9 when his father was killed, also at Fraunces Tavern.

“My kids never met my dad, but they certainly had to deal with this. We never asked for it.”

Pillar of tolerance and compassion (and also creator of the Broadway musical, Hamilton), Lin-Manuel Miranda, said of Rivera: “One can disagree or agree with him politically, but he is a symbol of resolve and conviction.” He also claimed to have sobbed “with gratitude” after Obama commuted the terrorist’s sentence. The Left’s hypocrisy is particularly ripe in this instance, and we can expect more adulation for the terrorist to be heaped on him during the festivities next month.

Meanwhile back on a college campus:

How about this commencement speaker?

Taxpayer-Funded College Hosts Sharia-Loving Commencement Speaker With Ties To Terror Group

Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour will be this year’s commencement speaker at the taxpayer-funded City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.

“I am delighted to confirm that Linda Sarsour will indeed speak at our June 1 commencement at the Apollo Theater,” said Barbara Aaron, chief of staff to CUNY Graduate School of Public Health dean Ayman El-Mohandes, in a statement sent to The Daily Caller.

Sarsour, one of the main organizers behind January’s Women’s March on Washington, is the former executive director of the Arab American Association of New York.

Linda Sarsour via Facebook

Linda Sarsour via Facebook

The FBI has alleged that Salah Sarsour, who resides in Milwaukee, raised money for Hamas

In December 2016, Sarsour spoke at the 15th annual convention of the Muslim American Society and Islamic Circle of North America. More detail here from DailyCaller.

Where is the Outrage on Erdogan’s Visit to DC?

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Notice in the video the men dressed in black suits, further notice the capitol police, they look like Keystone cops. What is also curious, all foreign dignitaries are protected while in country by our diplomatic security staff….see any? As an aside, 2 Secret Service agents were injured however.

Image result for turkey protests dc

In fairness, John McCain expressed outrage:

Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) on Thursday morning called for throwing the Turkish ambassador out of the United States in response to Turkish officials beating a crowd of protesters in Washington this week.

McCain started his interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” with his call to remove the Turkish diplomat.

“I’m still outraged at this Turkish beating,” McCain said. “We should throw their ambassador the hell out of the United States of America.”

“This is the United States of America, this isn’t Turkey, this isn’t a third-world country, and this kind of thing cannot go un-responded to diplomatically and maybe in other ways,” McCain continued.

Host Joe Scarborough asked what the United States could do in response to the attack on protesters by Turkish security officials.

McCain again advocated throwing out the Turkish ambassador and said the guards had orders from someone to attack the protesters. The senator called for charges against those involved.

“You cannot have that happen in the United States of America,” McCain said. “People have the right in our country to peacefully demonstrate and they were peacefully demonstrating.”

More detail and background…..

IPT: The man with the bullhorn already had been knocked to the ground, repeatedly kicked and beaten. Then the man with a mustache, wearing a sharp suit and a handgun on his hip, raced up and launched a fierce kick, hitting the man with the bullhorn square in the face.

The man with the bullhorn was protesting visiting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The man with the mustache is an Erdogan bodyguard. This beat-down, captured on video by the Voice of America, took place Tuesday, just 1.4 miles from the White House, where Erdogan met with President Trump.

Nine people were injured, including two who required hospitalization. A similar, but smaller brawl broke out last year when Erdogan was greeted by protesters outside a speech at the Brookings Institution.

The State Department issued a statement Wednesday saying it would tell the Turkish government that it is “concerned by the violent incidents …. Violence is never an appropriate response to free speech, and we support the rights of people everywhere to free expression and peaceful protest.”

It’s difficult these days for stories outside the White House’s struggle to contain the Russia investigation to gain much traction.

But events in and near the White House Tuesday should not get lost in the shuffle. Even without the violence by Erdogan’s goon squad, his White House visit should concern those who expected the Trump administration to follow through on its tough talk about confronting radical Islam.

For all the talk about naming radical Islamic terrorism where it exists, there appears to have been no mention of Turkey’s ongoing support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its terrorist offshoot Hamas. Rather, President Trump publicly lauded Erdogan, saying it was an honor to host him and that he looked forward to working together to create Middle East peace.

Erdogan is a favorite of U.S.-based Islamists, especially those with Muslim Brotherhood links, like Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Executive Director Nihad Awad. That may be due, at least in part, to his view that Hamas is not a terrorist group, but a national liberation movement.

Erdogan provided a safe haven for Hamas operative Salah Arouri even after Arouri was implicated in the deadly kidnapping of three Israeli teens that led to the summer 2014 war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. In that conflict, Erdogan predicted that Israel would “drown in the blood that they shed,” and likened the Jewish state to Adolph Hitler: “Just like Hitler tried to create a pure Aryan race in Germany, the State of Israel is pursuing the same goals right now.”

Arouri was asked to leave Turkey only last year, as part of an effort to restore diplomatic relations between Israel and Turkey – relations Erdogan severed in 2010.

But that doesn’t mean Erdogan has turned a corner. In February, Turkey hosted a meeting of Hamas officials and affiliates. Last week, Erdogan repeated the baseless claim that Israel is an apartheid state, asking, “What’s the difference in Israel’s current practices from the racist and discriminatory policies implemented towards the blacks in America in the past, and in South Africa more recently?”

The ignorant talking point ignores the equal voting rights enjoyed by Israeli Arabs. The International Committee of the Red Cross rejected Erdogan’s rhetoric outright: “There isn’t a regime here that is based on the superiority of one race over another; there is no disenfranchisement of basic human rights based on so-called racial inferiority.”

In addition, Erdogan was slow to stem the tide of foreign fighters crossing his border in order to join ISIS in Syria. When he does act, he often targets U.S.-backed Kurdish forces fighting ISIS – a stateless minority Turkey oppresses.

While Erdogan and Trump praised each other publicly, ABC reports that “they made little progress to deal with their sharp differences on issues like terrorism and Syria.”

Erdogan, meanwhile, has purged tens of thousands of government employees, teachers and jailed scores of journalists in a clamp-down on any potential opposition. His crackdown is not limited to his own borders, as European critics have been targeted for arrest and surveillance.

Under his rule, Turkey’s secular education system has been weakened as religious training schools known as imam hatipgrew more than 15 times in enrollment since 2003. His radical Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) wants Turkey to be governed by an Islamist authority that demands adherence to strict religious tenets.

The White House meeting lasted about 20 minutes, McClatchy reports. Beforehand, 81 members of Congress issued a statement urging the president to raise Erdogan’s human rights abuses in the meeting.

“Erdogan and his allies have mounted an assault on the rule of law, particularly using sweeping state of emergency authorities to stifle fundamental rights including free speech, undermine the independence of the judiciary, and quash any opposition to their undemocratic actions,” they wrote.

There is no indication whether that topic was discussed. After the meeting, Erdogan expressed appreciation for the president’s hospitality. That’s fine, but the failure to openly challenge Erdogan’s increasingly Islamist, authoritarian direction is disappointing. Turkey’s help is needed in the fight against ISIS. But if the United States intends to confront radical Islam, it missed a golden opportunity on Tuesday.

President Trump did ask that Turkey release jailed American pastor Andrew Brunson, the White House readout of the meeting said. The two leaders also plan to meet again next week during the president’s first official international trip.

Unless he challenges Erdogan then, the lasting images of this will be the unprovoked violence Erdogan’s armed bodyguards inflicted on peaceful demonstrators in the heart of the nation’s capital instead of a direct and honest challenge to Erdogan’s ongoing and egregious support for Islamist terrorists.

Will Mueller’s Russian Probe Include Viktor Medvedchuk?

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Primer: Remember the media told us and the polls told us Hillary would win. When Trump prevailed, the left went into action in earnest and that is being aided by television and print media. All things Russia will be in our daily lives for a long while and there is good cause for that. There are truths that are being omitted, frankly we need complete truth, wherever it leads. For the sake of the country and gaining any kind of confidence in political leaders, the double edged sword will draw blood.

So, here we go and will Robert Mueller and his team perform and provide a final report that is honest, complete and true? America needs President Trump to succeed, of this there is no question. There is a legislative agenda that must advance.

Read on.

Image result for viktor medvedchuk

When it comes to Moscow’s long term operation to bring Ukraine under Russian influence, Medbedchuk is Putin’s man. Viktor Medvedchuk continues to work diligently to keep Ukraine from any membership into the European Union or NATO. As an aside, Viktor is also the god-father to Putin’s daughter Darina.

With historical targets by the Kremlin to hold power over Ukraine, Medvedchuk was trusted by the KGB/FSB using all the normal KGB tactics.

Viktor is a Russian oligarch with extravagant taste and is said to be worth $800 million.

yacht Royal Romance

Superyacht Royal Romance, owned by Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk

P4-GEM Viktor Medvedchuk

Medvedchuk’s private jet with registration P4-GEM

So, why is Medvedchuk important? He has some nasty history inside Ukraine. Further, those members of the Trump campaign and transition team had communications with Medvedchuk. Would one of those on the Trump team be Paul Manafort? Yes, glad you asked. Manafort was tapped to aid Yanukovych’s victory as Prime Minister of Ukraine until matters fell apart and he fled Ukraine for Russia. Manafort was in country when this occurred and stayed in Ukraine to rally old supporters and create a new party that would oppose pro-Westerner Poroshenko and alter the parliament. That black ledger discovered by a Ukraine government investigations shows that Manafort was paid $12.7 million for his work.

A side note, the law firm Wilmer Hale, is where Reginald Brown is representing Paul Manafort, happens to be the same law firm that now independent counsel for the Russian probe, Robert Mueller worked. So, is this new independent investigation a ploy due to history and conflicts of cases and legal representation? Humm, let’s continue.

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Exclusive: Trump campaign had at least 18 undisclosed contacts with Russians: Sources

Michael Flynn and other advisers to Donald Trump’s campaign were in contact with Russian officials and others with Kremlin ties in at least 18 calls and emails during the last seven months of the 2016 presidential race, current and former U.S. officials familiar with the exchanges told Reuters.

The previously undisclosed interactions form part of the record now being reviewed by FBI and congressional investigators probing Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election and contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

Six of the previously undisclosed contacts described to Reuters were phone calls between Sergei Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, and Trump advisers, including Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, three current and former officials said.

Conversations between Flynn and Kislyak accelerated after the Nov. 8 vote as the two discussed establishing a back channel for communication between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin that could bypass the U.S. national security

bureaucracy, which both sides considered hostile to improved relations, four current U.S. officials said.

In January, the Trump White House initially denied any contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. The White House and advisers to the campaign have since confirmed four meetings between Kislyak and Trump advisers during that time.

The people who described the contacts to Reuters said they had seen no evidence of wrongdoing or collusion between the campaign and Russia in the communications reviewed so far. But the disclosure could increase the pressure on Trump and his aides to provide the FBI and Congress with a full account of interactions with Russian officials and others with links to the Kremlin during and immediately after the 2016 election.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment. Flynn’s lawyer declined to comment. In Moscow, a Russian foreign ministry official declined to comment on the contacts and referred Reuters to the Trump administration.

Separately, a spokesman for the Russian embassy in Washington said: “We do not comment on our daily contacts with the local interlocutors.”

The 18 calls and electronic messages took place between April and November 2016 as hackers engaged in what U.S. intelligence concluded in January was part of a Kremlin campaign to discredit the vote and influence the outcome of the election in favor of Trump over his Democratic challenger, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

Those discussions focused on mending U.S.-Russian economic relations strained by sanctions imposed on Moscow, cooperating in fighting Islamic State in Syria and containing a more assertive China, the sources said.

Members of the Senate and House intelligence committees have gone to the CIA and the National Security Agency to review transcripts and other documents related to contacts between Trump campaign advisers and associates and Russian officials and others with links to Putin, people with knowledge of those investigations told Reuters.

The U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday it had appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate alleged Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential campaign and possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Mueller will now take charge of the FBI investigation that began last July. Trump and his aides have repeatedly denied any collusion with Russia.

‘IT’S RARE’

In addition to the six phone calls involving Kislyak, the communications described to Reuters involved another 12 calls, emails or text messages between Russian officials or people considered to be close to Putin and Trump campaign advisers.

One of those contacts was by Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch and politician, according to one person with detailed knowledge of the exchange and two others familiar with the issue.

It was not clear with whom Medvedchuk was in contact within the Trump campaign but the themes included U.S.-Russia cooperation, the sources said. Putin is godfather to Medvedchuk’s daughter.

Medvedchuk denied having any contact with anyone in the Trump campaign.

“I am not acquainted with any of Donald Trump’s close associates, therefore no such conversation could have taken place,” he said in an email to Reuters.

In the conversations during the campaign, Russian officials emphasized a pragmatic, business-style approach and stressed to Trump associates that they could make deals by focusing on common economic and other interests and leaving contentious issues aside, the sources said.

Veterans of previous election campaigns said some contact with foreign officials during a campaign was not unusual, but the number of interactions between Trump aides and Russian officials and others with links to Putin was exceptional.

“It’s rare to have that many phone calls to foreign officials, especially to a country we consider an adversary or a hostile power,” Richard Armitage, a Republican and former deputy secretary of state, told Reuters.

FLYNN FIRED

Beyond Medvedchuk and Kislyak, the identities of the other Putin-linked participants in the contacts remain classified and the names of Trump advisers other than Flynn have been “masked” in intelligence reports on the contacts because of legal protections on their privacy as American citizens. However, officials can request that they be revealed for intelligence purposes.

U.S. and allied intelligence and law enforcement agencies routinely monitor communications and movements of Russian officials.

After Vice President Mike Pence and others had denied in January that Trump campaign representatives had any contact with Russian officials, the White House later confirmed that Kislyak had met twice with then-Senator Jeff Sessions, who later became attorney general.

Kislyak also attended an event in April where Trump said he would seek better relations with Russia. Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, also attended that event in Washington. In addition, Kislyak met with two other Trump campaign advisers in July on the sidelines of the Republican convention.

Trump fired Flynn in February after it became clear that he had falsely characterized the nature of phone conversations with Kislyak in late December – after the Nov. 8 election and just after the Obama administration announced new sanctions on Russia. Flynn offered to testify to Congress in return for immunity from prosecution but his offer was turned down by the House intelligence committee.