Thursday, May 10, 2018
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
Ex-CIA Officer: Obama Intel Chief’s Attacks on Trump Putting National Security at Risk
For supporters of President Donald Trump, it’s the Deep State at its most dangerous.When former President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan took to MSNBC in March to insinuate that the White House is vulnerable to specific, personal blackmail by Russian President Vladimir Putin, liberals hailed it as the kind of “truth to power moment” they needed to tarnish the Trump presidency as fundamentally flawed.
But a veteran of the Cold War’s shadowy front lines is fighting back.
In an interview with The Washington Times published Monday, Daniel Hoffman, the CIA’s former station chief in Moscow, said Brennan’s deliberate smearing of the president — without a shred of evidence to back it up — was the kind of partisan tactic that could directly damage the work of intelligence agencies in the field.
related: Confirmed: John Brennan Colluded With Foreign Spies to Defeat Trump
If Brennan really was alarmed at a potential security threat involving Trump being vulnerable to Russian pressure, Hoffman said, he could have brought it up to special counsel Robert Mueller, who has now spent almost a year investigating the possibility of “Russian collusion” by the Trump campaign.
“That way, he could avoid collateral damage to those with whom we are working, whether it’s a spy who’s risking his life to be the source of secrets for us, who’s now going to wonder whether he should be doing that because his boss Vladimir Putin has dirt on our president, or a partner liaison service, which might want to work with us against the Russia target,” Hoffman told the Times.
But that isn’t what Brennan chose to do at all. Instead, he sat on the set of the rabidly anti-Trump “Morning Joe” program and said something about the president of the United States that had to chill any American.
“I think he is afraid of the president of Russia,” Brennan said. “…I think one can speculate as to why. That the Russians may have something on him personally that they could always roll out and make his life more difficult. Clearly, I think it’s important for us to be able to improve relations with Russia, but the fact that he has had this fawning attitude toward Mr. Putin, has not said anything negative about him, I think continues to say to me that he does have something to fear and something very serious to fear.”
(Check out the video on RealClear Politics here. Brennan’s sneering attititude make the words even worse than they appear in print. And he doesn’t look like he’s guessing.)
Brennan later tried to walk back that damning statement, telling The New York Times in an interview after the appearance that his words had been entirely speculative.
“I do not know if the Russians have something on Donald Trump that they...
Comey’s tortured Trump collusion logic can’t be real. Here’s a little taste of the crazy cake.
That’s at least according to the logic of numerous Trump opponents, including former FBI Director James Comey.
“It’s always struck me as strange whenever someone continually denies something; it makes me interested. So his continual denial of something that’s being investigated by some of the best people in the country is strange,” Comey said at a Washington Post Live event on Tuesday.
Comey has made similar comments about Trump during a tour to promote his new book, “A Higher Loyalty.”
Trump’s repeated pushback on the Steele dossier raises the possibility that the salacious document is accurate, the former FBI chief has said.
The Kremlin is blackmailing Trump with video footage of him engaged with prostitutes during a 2013 stay at a Moscow hotel, the dossier claims. Comey says in his book Trump denied the allegation during several meetings they had in 2017. Comey found it peculiar Trump seemed so fixated on the dossier, which Democrats funded and former British spy Christopher Steele wrote, he said.
But Trump had reason to be “obsessed” with the dossier’s allegations, Washington Examiner columnist Eddie Scarry wrote.
“Yes, Trump was ‘obsessed’ because he was preoccupied with thoughts about prostitutes in his conversations with Comey, a man who on their first encounter — immediately brought up prostitutes!“ Scarry wrote in an April 21 column.
The backstory is it was Comey who broached the topic of Russian prostitutes with Trump. During a Jan. 6, 2017, briefing at Trump Tower, Comey told the then-president-elect about the existence of the dossier and its salacious allegations.
It is “unlikely” the Kremlin has compromising material on Trump, Comey has said in interviews for his book tour. But at the same time, he has harped on Trump’s denials about the dossier and collusion, suggesting they could be indicators of deception.
Comey is not the only Trump critic to use the same line of reasoning.
News outlets like CNN and MSNBC have run numerous segments making hay out of what they say is Trump’s overly emphatic denials about...
Why Pope Francis's Call to Ban Weapons Would Destroy the West
"Do we really want peace? Then let's ban all weapons so we don't have to live in fear of war," said the pontiff.
While on the surface, the disappearance of all weapons might suggest the inability to do violence, in reality, it would mean the certain annihilation of the West as a civilization.
For starters, the pope seems to forget that violence and the things that motivate it – hate, envy, rapacity, and plain old evil – do not need weapons. Had he turned to the book he claims to represent, the Bible, he would have seen that the first act of violence, of murder – that of Cain against his brother, Abel – did not require weapons, just a violent and envious will. The brothers "were in the field [when] Cain rose against Abel his brother and killed him." Genesis 4 does not shed light on how this first fratricide occurred, but it was most assuredly done without a formal weapon – maybe a large rock, a branch, or simply Cain's bare hands.
And it is from here that one understands why the West would be swept away without weapons and walls – another defense mechanism Pope Francis wishes to see eliminated. The same hate, envy, and rapacity that some non-Western peoples have for the West – understood in the context of a "clash of civilizations" – would remain, but there would be little to stop it, deter it, or keep it at bay.
Contrary to first appearances, were all weapons around the world instantly to disappear, that would not lead to an even playing field, where, if it comes to it, men limited to fighting with their fists would more or less maintain the status quo. For starters, in a world still largely defined by civilizations, the people of the West are much fewer in number than those of the rest of the – mostly third and desperate – world.
This is especially on display in the West's interaction with Islam. One need only look to Western European nations, where the interplay of emasculated Western males and aggressive Muslim migrants is on constant display. Thanks to the latter, Sweden has become the rape capital of the world. That is not because Muslims use weapons, or are stronger, or are more numerous – they are still a tiny minority – but because many Swedish men have been so indoctrinated in passivity that they are not even able to protect their...
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