A George Soros-funded organization calling itself the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) held a conference on May 25 to celebrate 14 years of existence, while preparing “to continue the fight for trans equality.” Sponsors of this special event included Amazon, Facebook, Google and the CIA.

President Donald Trump’s new director of the CIA is former Republican Congressman and self-proclaimed conservative Christian Mike Pompeo.

“The CIA was one of more than thirty organizations that sponsored an event hosted by the National Center for Transgender Equality on May 25,” confirmed Jonathan Liu, a media spokesperson for the CIA Office of Public Affairs. “Our recruitment and hiring efforts are consistent with federal law.” He referred this journalist to the CIA’s public website regarding the CIA’s policy on diversity and information about its employee groups, including the Agency Network of Gay, Lesbian Bisexual, and Transgender Officers and Allies (ANGLE).

Honorees at the event included Gavin Grimm, a gender-confused female student who identifies as “male;” Vanita Gupta, the former Obama Justice Department official who led the effort to force transgender bathrooms and locker rooms on schools as a condition of funding; and Gunner Scott of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC).

The CIA was listed as a “bronze” sponsor for $1,000 or more in contributions to the event.

Although Trump is now president and Pompeo is now the CIA director, it looks like nothing much has changed at the agency in regard to celebrating sexual perversity and special rights for various sexual minorities. The CIA website still features a statement from Obama CIA director John Brennan on the role played by the CIA’s Executive Diversity and Inclusion Council and the Center for Mission Diversity and Inclusion. Brennan’s “CIA Diversity and Inclusion Strategy” recognizes the need to hire “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Individuals.”

It’s not clear how all of this sexual diversity helps America identify and defeat its foreign enemies.

The CIA has hosted National LGBT Pride Month during the month of June for 20 years, and celebrates the “Stonewall Uprising” of June 1969, “when a courageous group of citizens at the Stonewall Inn resisted harassment and mistreatment.” In fact, the “uprising” was an anti-police riot at a Mafia-run New York City gay bar, the Stonewall Inn. The police who raided the place were getting complaints about homosexuals having sex on the streets and in public bathrooms, and their use of illegal drugs.

For those who still need convincing that transgenderism threatens the health and well-being of society, we suggest the important Gatestone Institute article, “The Gender Obsessed West Sets Itself Up for the Rise of Islam,” by Italian journalist Giulio Meotti. He describes the “gender mania” that is permeating every corner of Western societies and culture as a sign of the decline of Western civilization in the face of an escalating Islamic threat.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama’s years were marked by an “obsession” with transgender rights, Meotti points out. “Obsession with gender is a convenient distraction to avoid facing matters that are more difficult and less pleasant,” such as radical Islamic terrorism.

It was supposed to be different under Trump. CNS News reported that Pompeo, a conservative Christian before he took over the CIA, spoke at a church event in Wichita, Kansas, and declared that radical Muslims want “to wipe Christians from the face of the Earth.”

The challenge for Pompeo is clear: rather than hire and promote transgenders in order to satisfy some quota in Obama CIA Director John Brennan’s strategic hiring plan, the CIA’s job is to identify the Islamist enemy, gather intelligence on their plans to kill us, and stop them.

Of course, if Pompeo does the right thing for his agency and the country, he will face the wrath of those companies—such as Amazon, Google and Facebook—that co-sponsored the transgender celebration conference with the CIA.

He has to know that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos owns the anti-Trump Washington Post. And Pompeo knows he could meet the same fate as Trump’s Army Secretary nominee Mark Green, who was forced to withdraw when the liberal media, acting as the mouthpiece for the LGBT “community,” portrayed him as a hater because he dared to recognize transgenderism as a mental illness.

A special CIA booklet on the ANGLE group at the agency notes that when the CIA began polygraphing employees in 1948, it included a question on homosexual activity in order to identify gay employees for dismissal. That question is now considered old-fashioned.

The booklet confidently declares that an article in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence refuted “any correlation between homosexuality and espionage.” We now have the real life case of Bradley/Chelsea Manning, the convicted Army traitor and intelligence analyst whose espionage sentence was commuted by President Obama. Manning was a male homosexual before declaring himself a woman, wearing lipstick, and taking taxpayer-funded voice lessons to sound female.

Another question that has become irrelevant is whether potential employees were ever members of, or advocates for, the Communist Party. We know that question has lost its relevance because Obama CIA Director Brennan admitted, when applying for a job at the agency, that he had voted for the Communist Party candidate for president one year. He got the job anyway, and became CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia on his way up the ranks.

Perhaps an organization of communist CIA employees is now being formed and will come out of the closet.

Cliff Kincaid

My Portrait Sessions

Every time I think we have plumbed the depths of stupidity among congressional Republicans, someone comes along to prove that we are so far from the bottom that we can’t even see it.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), supposedly an up-and-coming conservative “star” in the U.S. Senate, proudly announced that the Senate Intelligence Committee had voted to give itself “blanket authority to issue subpoenas” regarding the investigation into Russian election meddling. This means the Democrats have been granted unrestricted license to go after President Trump despite what is obviously a partisan witch hunt.

How could Republicans be so stupid? We have just barely survived eight years of unrestrained criminality by Obama, two successive attorneys general –Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch– who turned the Justice Department into an extremist partisan attack machine that stood the rule of law on its head. We also endured the shenanigans of serial criminal co-conspirator, Hillary Clinton, who gave Russia a 20 percent stake in U.S. weapons-grade uranium production and auctioned off her influence as secretary of state to the highest bidder.

Unlike the Trump/Russia fantasy, these are not mere allegations. There is proof of their criminality, real proof. Not just hearsay, not just anonymous sources “leaking” documents that no one has seen, and stories whose sources they won’t publicly disclose.

Judicial Watch’s Director of Investigations, Chris Farrell, recently posted a YouTube video that describes the unprecedented depth of this documented criminality by the Obama administration as reported on by the website Circa.

A recently declassified top secret court document from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court proves it. This is the court that decides what federal agencies can and cannot do in carrying out surveillance activities against foreigners when U.S. citizens are involved. The court lays out the issue:

On October 24, 2016, the government orally apprised the Court of significant non-compliance with the NSA’s minimization procedures involving queries of data acquired under Section 702 [of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ] using U.S. person identifiers.

In plain English, this refers to the Obama administration’s illegal preoccupation with surveillance of U.S. citizens. The court goes on:

Since 2011, NSA’s minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collections under Section 702. The Oct. 26, 2016 notice informed the court that NSA analysts had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.

In other words, the Obama administration had been illegally identifying Americans and hiding the extent of its surveillance against them. At the Oct. 26 hearing, the court found that “the problem was widespread during all periods under review,” adding these activities present “a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”

The Circa article asserts, “the admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.”

Farrell states that the Obama administration “has abused and misused the National Security Agency in a way no one ever even pondered before. This is the sort of stuff that would make Richard Nixon blush. It is beyond the pale. It’s like nothing else we’ve ever seen.”

Rand Paul was quoted in the Circa article, saying, “If we determine this to be true, this is an enormous abuse of power. This will dwarf all other stories… There are hundreds and hundreds of people.”

The ACLU weighed in, but blamed it all on the intelligence agencies without mentioning the Obama administration’s abuses. As noted by Circa, “newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself and safeguard American’s privacy.” Typical of the Left, the ACLU uses these egregious abuses as an opportunity to discredit the NSA and others. But the ACLU should know it is never the bureaucrats who do this alone. They invariably are taking orders from their political bosses, in this case then President Obama.

We should have seen this coming. (Of course some of us did but the political class had its blinders on). Obama was overstepping his authority before he was even elected. In 2008, then presidential candidate Obama interfered with President Bush’s foreign policy by trying to talk Iraqis out of an agreement with Bush to keep U.S. forces in Iraq. As we now know, it was Obama’s reckless premature pullout from Iraq that returned the nation to anarchy – forcing us now to expend even more blood and treasure to help the Iraqis recapture it from ISIS. And what about Obama’s whispered promise to then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that “after my election I have more flexibility.” Flexibility for what? To surrender even more of our missile defense capability?

What about that uranium deal?

Trump has repeatedly accused Hillary of giving “20 percent of America’s uranium supply to Russia.” Snopes and PolitiFact rate the assertion as false and mostly false. We know both of those organizations skew heavily left, especially Snopes, and go out of their way to protect the Clintons. So is it true or false?

It has been widely reported that the Clinton Foundation received $145 million after Hillary Clinton allowed Russia’s nuclear energy agency to purchase a controlling interest in Uranium One, a Canada-based company that mines uranium in states containing 20 percent of U.S. capacity. Snopes and company claim Hillary was not involved in the deal, that it was delegated to then-Assistant Secretary of State Jose Fernandez, and that the State Department is only one of nine agencies on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) that decides such matters.

Regardless of who actually sat at the CFIUS table, Clinton is ultimately responsible for such decisions, and do you really think Fernandez would have made such a momentous decision without her blessing? Moreover, would the other agencies dare to vote against Hillary’s agency? Highly doubtful.

Hillary apologists also try to disassociate the Clinton Foundation’s string of receipts from Russia as though the two were entirely unrelated. Did they give the Clintons $145 million just for yucks? The New York Times, not exactly a bastion of conservatism, lays it out.

So I ask: where is the special prosecutor for Obama, Holder, Lynch and Clinton?

And what about all the leaks? Have any of those weak-kneed members of Congress used their substantial authority to compel the FBI and/or intelligence agencies to investigate and uncover the leakers? Unlike the unsubstantiated allegations about Trump, these are federal crimes.

If unproven allegations of Trump/Russian collusion in the 2016 elections are worthy of a special prosecutor, are the litany of Hillary’s activities not? These are events that actually occurred, not undocumented accusations by partisan Democrats. Ditto with Obama. If the flimsy allegations against Trump are worthy of a special prosecutor, Obama and Hillary’s crimes merit a treason prosecution. But will we even see a special prosecutor for them?

So in tribute to the many GOP imbeciles in Congress, I am starting a hashtag, #STUPIDPARTY. I hope you will use it in tweets to our illustrious Members of Congress and give them holy hell for joining Democrats in their overt effort to destroy this president and bring down his administration.