04/7/17

Another Dan Rather Scandal

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

Ever since his forced resignation in disgrace, Dan Rather has continued on a downward spiral. His career, such as it is, has been kept alive by appearances on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC, where he takes potshots at his former employer and President Donald Trump. It is a sad spectacle.

Rather has now suffered another major embarrassment. The former anchorman of the CBS Evening News has been accused by a website devoted to exposing military corruption of falsely claiming to have been a member of the U.S. Marine Corps.

The editor-in-chief of the website www.MilitaryCorruption.com, retired U.S. Army Major Glenn MacDonald, says he stumbled across a published photo of Rather in a dress blue Marine Corps uniform in his book Rather Outspoken and decided to investigate the claim. The photo caption, “as a young Marine,” clearly indicates Rather had been a member in good standing of the Marine Corps.

But the truth, MacDonald says, is that Rather left the Marines before completing boot camp and the photo was obtained under questionable circumstances.

It has been known for years that Rather was discharged before he finished basic training. Those facts were established by investigator B.J. Burkett in his book Stolen Valor.

MilitaryCorruption.com took the story one important step further.

“In our exclusive story, we interviewed a senior retired Marine noncommissioned officer who was in around the same time as Rather claimed to have been in the Marines,” MacDonald said. “He told us the photo in question probably was the result of a policy the Corps had then of putting a blue blouse (from dress uniform) and ‘white cover’ (the saucer cap) on each ‘boot’ several weeks into their training to make sure the Marines had head shots of members of each training cycle to use for the Marine yearbook each successful Jarhead received at completion of USMC boot camp.”

That is the photo that Rather somehow obtained to use in his book so he could claim to be a “young Marine.”

“Dan Rather has written several biographical books over the past 40 years, but this was the first time the Texan climbed out on a limb and portrayed himself in print as a onetime member of the Corps,” reported MilitaryCorruption.com “It was a risky move, as Dan knows he didn’t graduate from boot camp.”

MacDonald said the photo used by Rather in his book was Marine Corps property, not his to use for self-promotion. So how did Rather get his hands on his photo, especially when he failed to graduate back in 1954?

We left questions about this with Rather’s new website, www.newsandgutsmedia.com, but have not received a response.

MacDonald tells AIM that the story has to be set straight for the sake of all of those who did serve. “I remembered all the Marines I had known over the years, some of them now dead, who would spin in their graves to know such a self-righteous phony was trying to trick Americans into thinking he was once part of their beloved Corps,” he said.

MilitaryCorruption.com reports that Rather had been verbally referring to himself as having been a Marine, or in the Marines, and “he must have figured at this stage of his career that he could get away with publishing the photo and deliberately deceiving the public.”

Ironically, Rather was forced out of his job at CBS after having been exposed by bloggers for using fake documents to misrepresent the military service of then President George W. Bush.

In the case of the Dan Rather-as-Marine story, notes WorldNetDaily, Rather has published fake news about himself.

Strangely, Rather was played by actor Robert Redford in the movie, “Truth” about the CBS phony documents scandal. Rather still insists he got the story right.

Almost as bizarre as Rather, Redford played reporter Bob Woodward in a movie about the Nixon Watergate scandal and wrote a recent column for The Washington Post, “45 years after Watergate, the truth is again in danger.”

In the column, which blasted President Trump’s treatment of the press, Redford said, “Sound and accurate journalism defends our democracy. It’s one of the most effective weapons we have to restrain the power-hungry.”

The column appeared before Trump’s claim about being wiretapped by the Obama administration was confirmed in revelations about the Watergate-style surveillance of Trump officials implicating former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

04/6/17

Latest Obama-Rice Scandal Comes into Focus

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

What started out last year as an investigation by the Obama administration into Russian interference in our presidential elections has turned into the latest scandal involving both former President Barack Obama and his national security adviser, Susan Rice. The media are in full panic mode, attempting to keep the focus of the investigation on President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, while trying to shield Obama and Rice from the consequences of their actions.

What has become clear during the past week is that the focus of the investigation should clearly be shifting from alleged collusion between President Trump’s associates and the Russian government, in order to influence the election—for which no evidence has emerged—to the role of the Obama administration in surveilling, incidental or otherwise, unmasking and leaking information about the Trump campaign and transition teams, for which all sorts of evidence has emerged.

The question for the Republicans, who control every congressional committee as well as the executive branch, is whether or not they have the fortitude and integrity to ignore the pressure from the corrupt, liberal media and to expand or re-direct the investigation wherever the new evidence compels them to go.

The latest development is the unmasking of former national security adviser Susan Rice. Rice was outed this week as someone who requested the unmasking of people associated with Trump’s campaign and transition team.

As Accuracy in Media reported in a recent special report, “Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice has now been implicated in illegally unmasking Trump campaign and post-election Trump transition officials in monitored conversations, according to Bloomberg News and Fox News. The story was originally broken by Mike Cernovich, who has more of the details including the cover-up of Rice’s role by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who was trying to protect Rice and Obama.”

In fact, Cernovich later revealed that his sources were people inside both Bloomberg and The New York Times “who revealed that both Eli Lake (Bloomberg) and Maggie Haberman (NYT) were sitting on the Susan Rice story in order to protect the Obama administration.”

The media went into full protection mode. A panel on CNN’s 360 With Anderson Cooper was confident that Rice had done nothing “improper.” Why? Jim Sciutto, CNN’s chief national security correspondent, who worked at the Obama State Department when Susan Rice was UN Ambassador, defended Rice, saying that this story was “largely ginned up, partly as a distraction.” CNN’s Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo also dismissed the story, with Lemon saying that the Susan Rice story is a “fake scandal ginned up by right-wing media and Trump,” and that he wasn’t going to be baited into covering it. What little coverage it received on the three broadcast networks’ evening news shows was focused on Rice’s claim that she had done nothing “improper.”

Comments made in February and March by former Obama administration official Evelyn Farkas, but only noticed and highlighted last week, did a lot to shift the narrative. But the establishment media refuse to acknowledge that shift, and are determined to keep Trump, House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) and Russia as the villains of what everyone agrees is an enormous scandal, if only they could agree on what that scandal is.

“It was more actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration,” said Farkas on MSNBC on March 2. She also said that “The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump’s staff’s dealings with Russians that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence” (emphasis added).

Farkas’ comments appear to serve as confirmation that the Obama administration was spying on Trump’s staff during the 2016 election. That was reinforced through the reporting of Fox News’ Adam Housley, who wrote that “Susan Rice, former national security adviser under then-President Barack Obama, requested to unmask the names of Trump transition officials caught up in surveillance.” He added that “The unmasked names, of people associated with Donald Trump, were then sent to all those at the National Security Council, some at the Defense Department, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan—essentially, the officials at the top, including former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes.” According to Housley, “The names were part of incidental electronic surveillance of candidate and President-elect Trump and people close to him, including family members, for up to a year before he took office.”

Note that Farkas said “we” when referring to intelligence issues, and the Trump staff’s Russian contacts. As the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, she left the Obama administration in 2015, yet she was boldly talking about intelligence matters and informing the Hill while out of office.

As for leaks, she told MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, “That’s why you have the leaking: people are worried.”

As that story was swirling, accusations that Rice had been requesting the names of intelligence officials listed in an intelligence report began to emerge, including a Wall Street Journal report that said Ms. Rice “examined dozens of other intelligence summaries that technically masked Trump official identities but were written in such a way as to make obvious who those officials were,” making the masking essentially meaningless. “Unmasking does occur, but it is typically done by intelligence or law-enforcement officials engaged in antiterror or espionage investigations. Ms. Rice would have had no obvious need to unmask Trump campaign officials other than political curiosity.”

Former prosecutor and National Review contributor Andy McCarthy wrote that “the reported involvement of former national-security adviser Susan Rice in the unmasking of Trump officials appears to be a major scandal—it suggests that the Obama White House, of which she was a high-ranking staffer, abused the power to collect intelligence on foreign targets, by using it to spy on the opposition party and its presidential candidate.”

He said that while it may not have broken the law, “The issue is not technical legality, it is monumental abuse of power.”

Before Rice was outed for her involvement in the unmasking and possible distribution of the information obtained from the intelligence community, she had denied having any knowledge of “the intelligence community’s alleged incidental surveillance of Trump’s transition team” when she appeared with Judy Woodruff on the PBS Newshour on March 22.

After the articles appeared this week citing Rice’s role, she went to the friendly confines of an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Rice acknowledged her role in requesting the unmasking of certain people picked up in the incidental surveillance, but claimed it was normal, and nothing improper or illegal was done. “Imagine if we saw something of grave significance that involved Russia or China or anybody else interfering in our political process and we needed to understand the significance of that, for us not to try to understand it would be dereliction of duty.”

But Rice has a history of making provably false statements to protect Obama. Her comment about a “dereliction of duty” reminded me of her role in the Obama administration’s cover-up following the terrorist attacks in Benghazi. Yes, she lied on five Sunday talk shows about what led to the attacks on September 11 and 12, 2012. But in addition, our Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi identified another dereliction of duty: the Obama administration’s failure to send in the military to attempt to rescue the Americans who were under attack at the CIA Annex near the Special Mission Compound. Four Americans died in the attacks, others were wounded.

Rice also lied for the Obama administration when she said that Bowe Bergdahl, a deserter in Afghanistan who the Obama administration traded for five high-ranking Taliban terrorists, had served in the military “with honor and distinction.” This latest controversy further highlights why I recently questioned Susan Rice as an appropriate person to criticize President Trump’s credibility, which she did in an op-ed in The Washington Post. Rice must be put under oath to explain what she did with the names that were unmasked, who she was communicating with about it, and what Obama knew and when he knew it.

Roger Aronoff

Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi. He can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Roger Aronoff.

04/4/17

Watergate-style Wiretapping Confirmed

Accuracy in Media

A Special Report from the Accuracy in Media Center for Investigative Journalism; Cliff Kincaid, Director.

A very disturbing report has come out from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Fox News that Hillary Clinton and six top staffers kept their Top Secret and/or Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) clearances after she left her Secretary of State position in 2013. And they also kept their physical access to TS/SCI facilities and databases, which required those TS/SCI clearances, possibly up through the 2016 election and beyond.

The facilities are called SCIFs, Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, pronounced “skiffs,” which are vault-like secure buildings or rooms for protecting the most sensitive intelligence and defense data.

Hillary and her cronies may still have their SCIF clearances and access even today in 2017. The State Department has stonewalled Senator Grassley, Fox News and Judicial Watch for months, refusing to answer questions about such outrageous continued access to the most highly sensitive secrets by the most reckless and irresponsible official in all of history.

The Hillary staffers with continued SCIF access for bogus “memoir research” and book writing for their boss include Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan.

This raises the ominous possibility that the Obama administration deliberately spread raw wiretap intercepts of Donald Trump phone calls and communications throughout the government in Obama’s twilight days so that Hillary’s people could do the leaking of the intercepts, thus giving Obama officials “plausible deniability.” The Obama people could deny that “they” leaked anything, if it was Hillary people with illegal and potentially criminal SCIF access who may have done the leaking.

Intelligence sources tell Fox News that there was unprecedented “surveillance of Trump and people close to Donald Trump including some supporters for up to a year before inauguration,” disseminated through NSA channels with names “unmasked,” and circulated to the highest officials in the Obama administration—the National Security Council, Defense Department, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, and others.

Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice has now been implicated in illegally unmasking Trump campaign and post-election Trump transition officials in monitored conversations, according to Bloomberg News and Fox News. The story was originally broken by Mike Cernovich, who has more of the details including the cover-up of Rice’s role by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who was trying to protect Rice and Obama.

The wiretap surveillance summaries obtained by Rice “contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as who the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.”

Thus they were illegal, Watergate-style wiretapping of political opponents, contrary to Bloomberg News’ pro-Obama spin.

This needs to be a high-priority matter of investigation.

The Farkas Farce

Obama and Hillary officials, recently out of government, retain contacts and access to remaining colleagues still in place within intelligence agencies and national security positions. These are holdovers who have yet to be removed by the Trump administration.

Former Obama defense official Evelyn Farkas was caught redhanded and flatfooted over her March 2 revelation to MSNBC that she had known about and encouraged the leaks (“that’s why you have the leaking!” she said) and the spread of raw NSA-type intercepts of unmasked names of “Trump folks” that The New York Times had just headlined (NYT: “intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump associates”).

Fox News caught Farkas dead to rights and then caught her lying when exposed, trying to deny what she said on videotape, which had been broadcast to the world. She said (twice) that she had encouraged “former colleagues” to leak secret intelligence on Russia and Trump “folks;” and then when caught she deleted the words “former colleagues” in her new narrative and substituted “the Hill” (Congress).

Farkas even dragged out the phony Obama-Hillary claim that “17 intelligence agencies unanimously” agreed that Russia interfered with the U.S. elections, omitting the fact that the 17 agencies never actually signed off on the words put in their mouths by the DNI and Obama’s strong-arm political hacks, but instead stayed silent.

She also neglected to mention that very few of the 17 alphabet-soup miscellaneous agencies have any special expertise in cybersecurity and broad governmental responsibility—basically it’s only the NSA and Homeland Security. The rest of the 17 use cybersecurity merely to protect their own agencies, not U.S. elections, for example. Coast Guard intelligence can hardly be an expert at cybersecurity or Russian hacking of U.S. elections.

State Department intelligence—one of Farkas’ 17—is the same agency that failed to protect the United States from Hillary’s unsecured private email server.

Farkas fell prey to the ever-changing leftist media narrative. On March 2, the narrative (in The New York Times article shown on the MSNBC Morning Joe screen) was that courageous Obama intelligence officials sought to thwart the evil cover-up of this Trump-Russia wiretap intelligence by the incoming Trump administration—which had not done anything at all, not even taken office yet in December/early January.

Republican Counterattack

But then on March 4, the White House and Republicans pushed back on the criminal illegality of this massive leak factory of the most highly classified intelligence possessed by the U.S. The left then changed the narrative to bury their previous proud admissions of felony leaking of wiretap intercept intelligence of Trump for political purposes.

Former Obama official Evelyn Farkas was trapped. She had embraced the old narrative too quickly and too enthusiastically, and was left out on a limb that was cut off. The new narrative deep-sixed the “heroic wiretap leakers” narrative, and they pretended that the wiretapping never happened and that The New York Times had never said it happened.

The new media narrative was that Trump was lying about Obama wiretapping him, always with the reductio ad absurdum caricature lurking in the background of images of Obama personally shimmying up the telephone pole to physically wiretap Trump’s phones and no one else’s.

The new fake narrative is designed to evade the actual legal meaning (under FISA law, etc.) of “wiretapping” as mainly the interception of digital data streams of voice (phone calls), emails, texts, etc., or “broad surveillance.” “Wire communication” is the statutory language of FISA, contrary to the lying media’s acid attacks on President Trump who used “wire tapped” in quotes. It is still called “wires” under the FISA law.

Suddenly the lying media can no longer remember the technical details of “warrantless wiretapping” in NSA spying on Americans that they obsessed over, in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations, and their outrage over this NSA intrusion into our privacy.

The Media Flip-Flop

Orwell described this process in 1949 in his classic novel of totalitarian government, 1984. The previous history is regularly put down the “memory hole” by the lying Ministry of “Truth,” to be destroyed so that a new contradictory history, a new narrative, is published as if nothing was amiss. The lying leftist media today is Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth.”

We are watching this happen right in front of our eyes, and we see the flip-flop literally from one day to the next. On March 2 and 3, the narrative was the heroic Obama wiretappers of Trump spreading and leaking the classified wiretap data. On March 4, President Trump tweets his protest of this Obama wiretapping of political opponents that targeted him, and the fake media’s new narrative flipped, feigning ignorance of what it said literally the day before.

The fake “Trump dossier” of bogus intelligence that was fabricated by a supposedly “ex” British agent Christopher Steele—alleging Trump collusion with Russia and nasty sex acts—lurks behind all of the political theater staged by the lying fake media and the Democrat deceivers. The FBI is now reported to have been using the (fake) “Trump dossier” as its investigative “roadmap.”

Devious Half-Denials

Britain’s GCHQ, the counterpart of our NSA wiretap surveillance agency, issued a devious partial denial laced with insult designed to distract: “Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.” (emphasis added)

GCHQ only denies “wiretapping” (within their scare quotes) of “the then president-elect” Trump—thus from the November 8 election to the January 20 inauguration.

They do not deny they “wiretapped” candidate Trump prior to November 8 or President Trump after January 20. Judge Napolitano specifically reported that the GCHQ spying was against “candidate” Trump as well as “president-elect” Trump, and GCHQ chose to deny only the latter, not the former.

They do not deny spying on Trump’s associates, who are not mentioned.

How slick. The GCHQ “denial” is priceless, deceptive and evasive.

Even more troubling is the fact that GCHQ director Robert Hannigan suddenly and unexpectedly resigned on January 23 after only two years on the job. Was he sacked in advance of a possible emerging scandal over the wiretapping surveillance of Trump? A GCHQ (partial) denial of wiretapping Trump coming from the new director’s spokesman on March 17 might be positioned to enable them to say later that they were not fully apprised of the former GCHQ director’s actions. A no-firing, no-disciplinary resignation can be suddenly changed into a was-fired, was-disciplined sacking if ever needed. How convenient.

Keep in mind that the GCHQ traces its history back to its wartime origins at Bletchley Park, where codebreakers parsed every word of meaning in order to crack the German Enigma codes. They know that words have meanings.

Codebreaking often turns on subtle nuances of wording. Nautical language in a partially deciphered message, for example, is a clue that the rest of message deals with ships and navies, thus helping codebreakers to decrypt the rest of the intercepted message. GCHQ knows how to exploit those word tricks to their advantage. They made no mistake in their weasel-worded half-denial of wiretapping Trump. It was no careless slip of the tongue verbiage.

NSA Doubletalk

Equally devious was NSA Director Mike Rogers in his testimony on March 20 to the House Intelligence Committee that he and the NSA did not ask the British to “wiretap” Trump. But that is not what Judge Napolitano said (see quote below). This “wiretap” wording leaves it ambiguous as to whether he means the ridiculous climbing-the-telephone-pole physical “wiretap,” or what President Trump and sane people mean—the digital tapping of voice and data streams at an NSA computer console.

Like GCHQ, NSA chief Rogers dropped Trump’s associates from his narrative so his answer was solely about Trump personally being “wiretapped.” And Rogers says he has seen “no evidence” that Obama officials asked the British to wiretap Trump, without explaining how he could possibly know about all the activities of all of Obama’s officials.

In any case, that’s not what Judge Napolitano said on March 14: His three sources said very plainly that Obama officials went directly to the British, bypassing the NSA, bypassing the “chain of command” of the NSA and NSA Director Rogers, etc. This bypassing of the NSA was apparently illegal and a felony. It was a convenient setup for NSA director Rogers to deny that he had anything to do with it or even to “know” about it. And did he ever suspect it without directly “knowing” it was being done?

Judge Napolitano said all that legal NSA procedure was bypassed:

“Three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command. He didn’t use the NSA. He didn’t use the CIA. He didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use Department of Justice. He used GCHQ.

“What the heck is GCHQ? That’s the initials for the British spying agency. They have 24/7 access to the NSA database.

“So by simply having two people go to them saying, ‘President Obama needs transcripts of conversations involving candidate Trump, conversations involving president-elect Trump,’ he’s able to get it, and there’s no American fingerprints on this.” (emphasis added)

AIM has confirmed Judge Napolitano’s account from one of his three sources and found other confirmation of the likely procedure used, from a former NSA/CIA contractor. Judge Napolitano was suspended by Fox News for a week for revealing the GCHQ spying on Trump, but returned saying he and his sources stood by what he had reported.

FBI Director James Comey likewise made a devious half-denial to the House Intelligence Committee on March 20: He testified that the FBI internally has no information about wiretapping of Trump, nothing “inside the FBI.” What about “outside the FBI?” He did not say the NSA or CIA or DNI, etc., had no information, only his own agency.

But it is standard operating procedure within the U.S. Intelligence Community, or “IC,” that when highly sensitive intelligence is shared with other agencies within the IC, “sources and methods” are normally concealed or masked. If the FBI received such wiretap surveillance data on Trump from the NSA, CIA or British GCHQ they would not necessarily know it came from wiretap surveillance because that fact itself is a sensitive “source and method” and would be redacted, disguised or masked.

As we have pointed out at AIM, it has been long-standing procedure pursuant to “UKUSA” intelligence agreements that British GCHQ staff physically stationed at NSA headquarters in Maryland use NSA computer terminals and other equipment to spy on U.S. citizens designated by the NSA—or now, it appears, designated through the direct intervention of high-level Obama officials, thus bypassing the NSA itself.

Former DIA intelligence officer Mike Pregent has explained how a process of “reverse targeting” is used to turn “incidental collection” of NSA-type wiretap surveillance into direct targeting, as in the case of Trump. This ruse bypasses the need for new FISA warrants by repurposing old existing blanket FISA warrants for essentially global surveillance. The intercepted raw data on Russians are scrutinized for Trump data, which is then unmasked, spread and leaked.

It is Watergate by digital burglary.

04/2/17

First They Came for Judge Napolitano

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

An admitted CIA mouthpiece writing for The Washington Post receives classified information and publishes it. He remains in good standing at the paper. Yet the Senior Judicial Analyst for Fox News offers his informed opinion that the British helped conduct surveillance on President Trump and is suspended for several days from on-air appearances.

This action by Fox News reflects disrespect for someone who has worked for the channel since 1998. It sends a message that the intelligence community, here and abroad, cannot be investigated.

Since the British NSA, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), had issued a denial of what Napolitano had said, the feeling of most of the media (and the management of Fox News Channel) was apparently that this was the Gospel and must not be challenged.

The scalp of Judge Napolitano will forever be nailed to the wall of Fox News, setting an example of what happens when the establishment narrative about Russia and Trump is undermined. Napolitano was made into an example of what happens when the intelligence agencies are embarrassed.

We understand that journalists use intelligence officials as anonymous sources and therefore accommodate them. But when a commentator like Napolitano breaks the mold with information that embarrasses the intelligence community, he must be supported, not punished with a suspension. Otherwise, the notion of a free and independent press is a joke.

Meanwhile, an anchor for Fox News, gay activist Shepard Smith, makes a mockery of conservative values on a regular basis and continues to enjoy the blessings of the channel’s owners. This is what happens when a conservative channel takes its conservative base for granted and moves to the left in order to appear more acceptable to the rest of the media. Smith was actually designated to declare on the air that Napolitano’s report was incorrect. No details were offered on what investigations were done, if any, to question the sources behind his claims. One source came forward to validate what the judge had said.

His “return” was instructive and quite uncomfortable. Host Bill Hemmer offered a lame joke that Napolitano “had a few quiet days” and “likely needed them.” Napolitano said he stood by his report that the British played a role in the surveillance, “and the sources stand by it.”

Meanwhile, over at The Washington Post, CIA mouthpiece David Ignatius is still on the payroll of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire owner of the paper with CIA and NSA connections. Little is said or reported about this curious arrangement.

The Post is an example of the corporate marriage between the media and intelligence establishments. It has become a weapon in the arsenal of the Democratic Party and the Obama officials still ensconced in the intelligence agencies.

As we should all know by now, Ignatius received an illegal leak of classified information about conversations involving Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, and reported them in the paper. Both the leak and the publication of the information constitute potential felonies under the law.

Ignatius continues to write from the viewpoint of those who want to use anonymous sources to destroy the Trump presidency. His latest column is a blast at the courageous head of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), for continuing to probe the issues of illegal leaks and illegal surveillance of the Trump team. Ignatius knows the trail leads to his desk and then to a high-ranking Obama official in the CIA, NSA or FBI.

His obvious conflict of interest is cause for concern among anyone with a remote sense of journalistic ethics.

But the Post, whose owner Jeff Bezos does business with the CIA and NSA, looks the other way.

Incredibly, Ignatius tried to turn the tables on Nunes, saying, “He needs to demonstrate that he’s the chairman of a bipartisan oversight panel trusted with the nation’s secrets, rather than a conduit for information from the Trump White House.”

For the record, nobody knows the identity of the source that provided evidence to Nunes of improper or illegal surveillance of the Trump team. It is completely absurd, however, for Ignatius to posture as someone concerned about the protection of “the nation’s secrets.”

Our column, “Investigate and Prosecute the Press,” remains as valid today as when we published it.

In a promotional advertisement trying to drum up subscriptions, the Post declares, “Democracy needs great journalism. Great journalism needs you.”

Bezos ought to be indicted for false advertising and consumer fraud. He ought to be invited to testify after Nunes is done with Ignatius.

Indeed, Ignatius ought to be hauled in front of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and grilled on his relationship with the anonymous sources who provided him with classified information.

Nunes just might have the guts to do this. But it’s clear that the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr (NC), is in over his head, and is letting the ranking minority member, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), virtually run the hearings on the Senate side.

In their “Statement on Inquiry into Russian Intelligence Activities,” Burr and Warner didn’t indicate any effort would be undertaken to discover the source of the illegal leaks and whether surveillance of the Trump team had taken place.

No wonder the Post wants to destroy Nunes. He is standing in the way of the establishment reasserting the primacy of their narrative on the Russians and Trump. They got Napolitano’s scalp; now they want to get that of Nunes.

Call 202- 225-4121 and support Rep. Nunes, urging him to hold the media and the intelligence community accountable for illegal leaks of classified information.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

03/30/17

A Fake Bill to Promote Fake News

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

One of the more newsworthy aspects of the Democratic Party’s turnabout on Russia has been the introduction by Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) of a bill to investigate Russian propaganda outlet RT (Russia Today) as a foreign agent. In fact, broadcaster Jerry Kenney had filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice back in 2011 alleging that RT and Al Jazeera were both violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by not disclosing in their propaganda broadcasts that they are agents of foreign powers.

However, former President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, which supervises FARA, took no action.

Kenney told us, “Shaheen’s sudden concern about foreign influence operations rings a little hollow to me. Her bill seems more like a political prop to keep alive the fake news story of a Russia-Trump unholy alliance. It is a fake bill to perpetuate fake news.” He added, “As far as I know, the Department of Justice has all the tools it needs to enforce FARA. What it hasn’t had, at least under Obama, was the will to enforce it.”

Accuracy in Media has noted that RT hosts Thom Hartmann and Ed Schultz are not Trump supporters or conservatives, but in fact are progressives connected to the Democratic Party. Schultz used to work for MSNBC.

In a brief interview I had with Hartmann, he refused to say how much the Kremlin paid him for his show on RT, “The Big Picture.” He then grabbed my camera.

In a January 19 article, we noted that AIM has published literally dozens of stories over the years about RT’s service to the Moscow regime. We asked, “So why didn’t the Obama Justice Department act on TV producer Jerry Kenney’s complaint that RT should register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and be labeled as foreign propaganda? That’s what the law requires.”

The answer is that RT didn’t become a problem for the liberals and the Democrats until they perceived that Moscow’s agents had deserted their cause, and that the Russian angle could be used for partisan political purposes against Republicans.

In that AIM article, I also noted that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) dismissed my well-documented 2012 complaint about RT’s open support for libertarian Ron Paul in the 2012 Republican presidential primary. We cited evidence that RT was funded by the Kremlin and prohibited under law from intervening in U.S. elections. The FEC dismissed the complaint, saying RT was a legitimate press entity and a U.S. corporation with First Amendment rights.

Where was the outrage over that ruling?

The stated purpose of the Shaheen bill, the Foreign Agents Registration Modernization and Enforcement Act (S.625), is “to preserve the integrity of American elections by providing the Attorney General with investigative tools” to crack down on foreign agents who unlawfully influence our political process.

“We have good reason to believe that RT News is coordinating with the Russian government to spread misinformation and undermine our democratic process,” said Shaheen. “The American public has a right to know if this is the case.”

The American public who have been reading AIM already know. Plus, RT once aired its own video showing Vladimir Putin reviewing its broadcast operations in Moscow.

It’s no secret that RT is Moscow-financed and run.

Kenney commented, “Now that the Democrats have lost the White House, Shaheen is shocked to see that foreign influence operations are going on here. Where has she been for the last few years as Obama’s DOJ refused to investigate Vladimir Putin’s Russia Today, Qatar’s Al Jazeera and Communist China’s CCTV (China Central Television)?”

Kenney notes that these foreign propaganda operations are packaged as “news” and have been airing on 30 taxpayer-supported public educational TV stations via the MHz Network Worldview, a network offering “international news and entertainment” in English. “To my knowledge, these ‘news’ channels still have not registered or published disclosures as required by FARA, even though there is ample evidence in the public domain that they are actually foreign government propaganda operations,” he says.

If Shaheen is so concerned about foreign influence, he went on to say, “why didn’t she do something to stop the FCC’s recent rule change that fast tracks 100 percent foreign ownership of America’s radio and TV broadcasters? In all fairness to Senator Shaheen, the Republicans didn’t oppose it, either.”

Kenney said that if the politicians in Washington are really serious about foreign influence operations in the U.S., they could veto the new FCC rule by using the Congressional Review Act.

The Shaheen bill has only three co-sponsors, with one, Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a Republican. Young’s involvement as a Republican fellow-traveler makes it a piece of “bipartisan legislation.”

If Shaheen is serious about exposing RT’s ties to Russia, perhaps she could ask fellow progressive Thom Hartmann to provide testimony about RT, including the facts and figures about his Moscow funding that he won’t talk about publicly.

It would be easy enough for him to show up at a Senate hearing. His “Big Picture” program is filmed live and broadcast from the RT America studios in Washington, D.C.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

03/30/17

When Ted Koppel Was a Serious Thinker

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

As someone who goes back decades with Accuracy in Media, I remember the days when Ted Koppel, then with ABC News and host of “Nightline,” would cover serious matters and treat his conservative critics with respect. So Koppel’s attack on Sean Hannity of Fox News was a shocker. Something has happened to journalism, and the problem is not with Hannity, it’s with Koppel.

Koppel, now with CBS, attacked Hannity as being “bad for America” because of his opinionated Fox News channel program. But there was a time when Koppel was open to criticism. AIM founder Reed Irvine had many friendly confrontations with Koppel over various issues. When Reed died, Koppel said, “Reed Irvine was, at times, a harsh critic of the television news industry and me in particular, but throughout the many years that I knew him, he was never anything but courtly and personally gracious. Just as I would insist that all other enterprises in our society benefit from the presence of a critical and fearless press, so too the press benefits from being held to high and occasionally harsh standards. Reed Irvine fulfilled that function to the greater good of all.”

All of a sudden, however, Koppel has decided to go on the attack against conservatives. He is not alone. You can frequently find the rants of the disgraced former anchorman of the CBS Evening News, Dan Rather, on obscure left-wing websites like Reader Supported News. In one of his latest posts, Rather says of President Trump, “… the Russian shadow continues to darken.” This is funny, considering that one of AIM’s investigations of Rather concluded that he had become a vehicle for Russian Communist propaganda when he used the CBS Evening News to broadcast the charge that AIDS had been manufactured by the Pentagon. This was before his career ended in disgrace after being caught using fake documents to smear President George W. Bush.

Now a “special contributor” to the CBS “Sunday Morning” program, Koppel’s confrontation with Hannity was described by CBS as being about the “polarization of politics and the media in the Age of Trump.” The show’s website said that Koppel “charged Fox News host Sean Hannity with contributing to the increased antipathy toward opposing viewpoints that is prevalent in America.” Hannity’s “crime” is offering conservative news and opinion.

Conservative news and commentary are facts of life that should be studied and understood, not ridiculed as beyond the pale. Conservative blogs began the process of unraveling Rather’s smear of Bush, leading to the destruction of the CBS newsman’s career. Hannity offers news and opinion that fill a void and meet the demands of his audience.

As a long-time news analyst, I find it refreshing that at least some professors are taking the rise of conservative journalism seriously and treating it as a subject to be studied. In a “Call for Book Chapters on Conservative News,” professors Anthony M. Nadler and A.J. Bauer are calling on academics and others to contribute essays on the growth and influence of conservative news and opinion outlets.

“Conservative news has become a tremendously powerful platform in the United States, wielding a vast influence on the terms of political discourse,” they note.

Nadler is an Assistant Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College and is the author of Making the News Popular: Mobilizing U.S. News Audiences (2016, University of Illinois Press). Bauer is a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow and Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University.

It may be the case that liberal academia is looking for an antidote to the success of conservative news and information. But the success of shows like Sean Hannity’s are something to be studied, not mocked as “bad for America.”

“Crucially,” notes Bauer, “reported trust in major news media in the U.S. differs greatly along partisan lines.” This reflects the fact that conservative Americans have rejected the liberal media, and have looked for and found alternatives.

In his preliminary draft for the full project proposal, Bauer writes, “While it is obvious that conservative news cultures have been powerful and among the forces shaping the circulation and norms of political discourse, critical media studies has largely let the story of conservative news slip past its view.”

In other words, the liberals in the media and academia did not see this coming. They didn’t understand the powerful forces of conservative media as a reaction to the liberal media monopoly that is now in the process of disintegrating.

Ted Koppel is in a position to understand and study this phenomenon. Instead, Koppel highlights a “polarized America.” He had a chance to understand the phenomenon of conservative news and opinion, but decided instead to attack it.

It’s “bad for America” when liberals in the media abandon the debate and try to smear their opponents. We didn’t expect this from Koppel.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

03/28/17

Trump Continues Obama Policies

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

The Heritage Foundation article, “We Don’t Have to Choose Between Putin and George Soros,” is a very effective rebuttal to claims in the media that conservatives who oppose the influence of billionaire George Soros in foreign affairs are therefore siding with another billionaire, Russian ruler Vladimir Putin. The author, Mike Gonzalez, looks into the global struggle playing out on the international stage between these two major figures, and how conservatives are smeared as members of the Putin camp by liberal media outlets like Politico.

Gonzalez focuses on the small country of Macedonia, where “Soros and the U.S. Embassy have thrown their support behind parties contending against the conservative party VMRO—imperfect as many political parties around the world no doubt are, but very much pro-U.S. and pro-NATO.” Gonzalez examines Soros’s far-left agenda of open borders, abortion on demand and homosexual/transgender rights, and comments, “If for lack of a conservative alternative, VMRO turns to Putin to counter this far-left agenda coming from outside the country, that is our fault—and Soros.”

It is “our fault,” he says, because the State Department continues to facilitate Soros operations to transform the culture and politics of foreign countries.

Of course, President Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson can change this, but they have been resistant to putting conservatives in place to change the course of U.S. foreign policy.

Gonzalez had previously examined how Soros money was corrupting the political process in Macedonia, with the assistance of the U.S. State Department. He noted that the Obama-appointed U.S. ambassador in the capital of Skopje, Jess Baily, has shown a political bias against the Macedonian conservative party, VMRO, and was promoting a left-wing coalition.

Republican members of the U.S. House and Senate had asked Baily to explain reports that his embassy had selected Soros’ Open Society Foundations as the main implementer of U.S. Agency for International Development projects in Macedonia. The State Department’s response “was thin on details regarding funding for Soros’ foundation and groups it controls,” Gonzalez reports.

Gonzalez has put his finger on a dialectical maneuver that plays into Putin’s hands. In response to official U.S. support for “liberal progressive policies around the world,” conservatives and moderates in foreign countries believe they have nowhere else to go except Putin, the former KGB officer now operating undercover as a religious conservative touting traditional values and national identity.

The U.S., not Putin, should be promoting Western values. But Obama’s State Department promoted a form of cultural imperialism that reflected the “fundamental transformation” of the United States. That is, multiculturalism, gay rights, abortion rights and even the rights of prostitutes!

Then there is Soros’ long-standing pro-drug legalization agenda, as we documented 12 years ago in our special report, “The Hidden Soros Agenda: Drugs, Money, the Media, and Political Power.” The leftist billionaire is accelerating his activities in Latin America on behalf of pro-drug interests.

In Costa Rica, for example, conservatives are alarmed by the push to legalize marijuana under the cover that the drug supposedly has “medical benefits.” One of them told me, “What we fear is that drug traffickers will shield themselves under regulations included in the medical marijuana bill if it passes, making it easier for them to send illegal substances to other countries, including the U.S.” He said the U.S. embassy in Costa Rica has been alerted to how Soros-backed organizations are putting pressure on the country’s Congress to pass a so-called medical marijuana bill. “We hoped for a change of mentality from the U.S. Embassy since President Trump was elected,” this source added, “but these officials are from the Obama administration and they stopped communicating with us after we mentioned Soros.”

In his column, “Vetting Trump’s Foreign Policy Team,” my colleague Roger Aronoff examined some of Trump’s high-profile picks and concluded that “…Trump needs to do a better job of filling key positions and vetting the people who are making and carrying out his policies. Otherwise, his administration could turn out to be a disaster.”

Looking at various selections in the foreign policy and national security fields, Aronoff asks, “Are these rookie mistakes or does Trump not care if his campaign promises regarding Israel, combating the Islamic jihadis, and ripping up the Iran deal go unfulfilled?”

Incredibly, as Aronoff notes, Trump himself “has signaled his unwillingness to fill many of his political appointee posts” with committed conservatives.

By continuing Obama’s policies and keeping Obama personnel in place, as Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation demonstrates, Trump is actually furthering the foreign policy goals of Putin. If this continues, it will constitute a form of collusion between the Trump and Obama administrations.

Perhaps that was the goal of the so-called “silent coup” all along—to keep in place the Soros policies financed by the Obama administration. If so, it appears that Trump has lost another big battle that will make his health care defeat seem like small potatoes.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

03/26/17

Free Judge Napolitano!

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

BuzzFeed, described by Wikipedia as “a liberal American internet media company based in New York City,” is in the “donor spotlight” at the national news museum in Washington, D.C., known as the Newseum. The “honor” demonstrates how the media have changed and how low they have sunk.

A virtual property of Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal, BuzzFeed has been a cog in the anti-Trump media machine.

The “donor spotlight” designation is strangely appropriate, since BuzzFeed disclosed the so-called “Trump Dossier” used by the intelligence community to smear President Trump. “The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors,” the social media site acknowledged while spreading the dubious claims.

By contrast, the John Peter Zenger exhibit located in the Newseum highlights a printer whose publication used the weapon of truth. The Newseum tells us, “German immigrant John Peter Zenger became a free-press hero before there was a First Amendment. On Nov. 17, 1734, the newspaper publisher was jailed for printing truthful articles in his New-York Weekly Journal accusing British Colonial governor William Cosby of being corrupt.”

The “Trump Dossier” released by BuzzFeed was concocted by a former British intelligence agent, and turned over to James Comey’s FBI. Around that time, in July of 2016, notes columnist Lawrence Sellin, the FBI launched its investigation of the unproven connections between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Comey told Congress that the Bureau has been actively investigating possible links between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin since “late July” of 2016.

“What a coincidence,” writes Sellin, a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the U.S. Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. This means that “the FBI investigation was based on highly questionable evidence” for which former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele reportedly “paid intermediaries who in turn paid sources for the information he used in the report.” In other words, he says, they were third-hand rumors from unidentified individuals. Sellin adds, “Remarkably, along with Trump’s political opponents, the Obama-Comey FBI planned to pay Steele to continue his work.”

The British link is significant. While Fox News commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano has been suspended for suggesting that the British NSA, known as GCHQ, had access to the surveillance information used against Trump, the two organizations do in fact have a history of working closely together.

This is shaping up as an example of how the Deep State operates, writes Sellin. In this case, intelligence arrangements are made “that open the possibility for government officials to skirt inconvenient national laws in order to surveil citizens and then use the products of that surveillance for political purposes.”

For raising necessary questions about this arrangement, Napolitano was reportedly banned from Fox News. He is the modern-day John Peter Zenger. However, his March 16 column, “Did Obama Spy on Trump?” is still on his website and looks increasingly relevant every day that passes.

This has been a major black mark for Fox News. Still, Fox News personalities like Sean Hannity are trying to cover the deepening scandal involving Obama administration surveillance of Trump and his associates.

The role that has been played by Comcast and its properties in the anti-Trump campaign is a teachable moment that allows us to reflect on the meaning of the First Amendment and how modern media have left behind the legacy of John Peter Zenger.

In contrast to Zenger, who used the weapon of truth against public officials, BuzzFeed used lies that were apparently devised for partisan political purposes by a foreign operative.

Referring to Comcast and others, Trump adviser Peter Navarro said during the campaign, “Donald Trump will break up the new media conglomerate oligopolies that have gained enormous control over our information, intrude into our personal lives, and in this election, are attempting to unduly influence America’s political process.”

BuzzFeed has been forced to apologize to one of those named in the Trump Dossier, in preparation for a suit filed against them.

By contrast, Zenger was found not guilty of seditious libel after his attorney, Alexander Hamilton, said, “It is not the cause of one poor printer, but the cause of liberty.”

Rather than being given a distinction as a valued donor, perhaps an exhibit in the Newseum should highlight BuzzFeed as an example of the politically-correct corporate media that today makes a mockery of First Amendment values.

At the same time, the Newseum should consider embracing the cause of freeing Judge Napolitano.

There’s no money in doing so. It would just be the right thing to do. It would be a reaffirmation of First Amendment values.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

03/25/17

Media Lose Another Round to Trump

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

On the same day that the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal warned that President Donald Trump was going to go down in history as a “fake president,” in part because of his “false tweet” about the “wiretapping” of Trump Tower, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee disclosed evidence of the wiretapping, also known as surveillance.

The Journal editorial, “A President’s Credibility,” will probably not be followed up by an editorial on the Journal’s lack of credibility.

The anti-Trump editorial followed “conservative” Fox News undermining its own commentator, Judge Andrew Napolitano, whose sources said that the surveillance was conducted by the British to give U.S. intelligence officials plausible deniability. Napolitano was apparently suspended.

But thanks to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the chairman of the committee, Trump has been vindicated, media credibility has suffered another blow, and the inquiry is taking a very interesting turn. It is now turning to the question of what President Barack Obama knew and when he knew it, and what role FBI Director James Comey has been playing in the cover-up.

At Monday’s hearing, Comey said, “With respect to the President’s tweets about alleged wiretapping directed at him by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets and we have looked carefully inside the FBI. The Department of Justice has asked me to share with you that the answer is the same for the Department of Justice and all its components. The department has no information that supports those tweets.”

The evidence cited by Nunes suggests that Comey lied. Who is he protecting? It looks like Obama and/or his top aides.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) had asked Comey: “Did you brief President Obama on any calls involving Michael Flynn?” Comey replied, “I’m not gonna get into either that particular case, that matter, or any conversations I had with the President. So I can’t answer that.”

This is critical because Flynn’s name was improperly “unmasked” and was then illegally leaked to David Ignatius of The Washington Post, resulting in Flynn’s forced resignation as national security advisor.

When Gowdy asked Comey if he could assure the American people that the illegal leak of classified information in the Flynn case was going to be investigated, the FBI director replied, “I can’t but I hope—I hope people watching know how seriously we take leaks of classified information. But I don’t want to confirm it by saying that we’re investigating it. And I’m sorry I have to draw the line, I just think that’s the right way to be.”

Here was an obvious case of illegal conduct, but the director would not confirm an investigation. Yet he confirmed an investigation of Trump and his associates, without any evidence of wrongdoing, and won’t discuss what he told President Obama about the investigation.

“I have confirmed that additional names of Trump transition team members were unmasked,” Nunes said in his statement on the surveillance. He added, “To be clear, none of this surveillance was related to Russia or any investigation of Russian activities or of the Trump team.” Nunes then outlined some of the key issues regarding the surveillance:

Who was aware of it?
Why it was not disclosed to Congress?
Who requested and authorized the additional unmasking?
Did anyone direct the intelligence community to focus on Trump associates? and
Were any laws, regulations or procedures violated?

The Journal’s editorial attacking Trump’s credibility has backfired. We now know, according to Nunes and the whistleblower who came forward with this information to his committee, that a massive cover-up has been underway involving the intelligence community, including the FBI. Unraveling the cover-up may lead into the oval office—not Trump’s, but Obama’s.

The Journal editorial said Trump’s claim about wiretapping or surveillance had been “repudiated by his own FBI director.” Now that FBI director has been repudiated.

The Journal also condemned the Trump White House for accepting “an unchecked TV claim that insulted an ally,” a reference to Napolitano’s report about British involvement in the surveillance.

What is “unchecked” is the “public denial” from the British Government Communications Headquarters. Why should the British be believed, when there have been decades of collaboration between the GCHQ and the NSA?

The Journal suggested that Trump was clinging to the claim of surveillance “like a drunk to an empty gin bottle.” Leaving aside the defamatory nature of this innuendo, it would appear that the bottle is not only full but that there is more to come.

At this stage in the investigation, responsible media should encourage more whistleblowers to come forward, so that former Obama White House officials, including possibly Obama himself, can be put under oath and grilled about their knowledge of the surveillance.

As for Comey, he joins the Journal’s editorial page writers on the list of people who have completely lost their credibility and can’t be trusted. He should resign and be replaced.

Regarding Fox News, the network should reinstate Judge Napolitano and establish a special unit to investigate the FBI and the intelligence community. Sean Hannity shouldn’t be the only Fox News personality trying to get to the bottom of this Watergate-type scandal.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

03/23/17

Vetting Trump’s Foreign Policy Team

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

President Donald Trump fared much better in the House Intelligence Committee hearing on Monday than the left-wing, establishment media would have you believe. The American Spectator’s George Neumayr captured the essence of the findings: “…the core claim underlying Trump’s tweets is true: people acting on the authority of Obama opened an investigation into Trump’s campaign, then criminally leaked mention of it to friendly news outlets in an attempt to derail his election. When is Obama going to apologize for that?”

But for weeks now, CNN and MSNBC have been calling Trump a liar, saying that there is no evidence to support his tweets, and demanding that he back down and apologize for his accusations against former President Barack Obama.

But Trump is also taking hits from people who have generally supported him, but who feel he is failing to live up to his promises. One such example is a recent column by Ann Coulter, who criticizes Trump for supporting the Ryan-Trump American Health Care Act as the replacement for Obamacare, and for his slow start on getting control of the illegal alien issue and border security. Coulter says that “This is starting to look like every other Republican administration.” Yes, his administration is just two months old, so maybe it’s too early to judge on those issues.

Another issue that is raising concern is how Trump is doing on foreign policy and national security matters. Does President Trump need additional assistance in vetting his nominees to administration posts? An examination of his national security appointees raises the question of whether his team knows what questions to ask, and if they are properly vetting his staff.

The political activities of former Defense Intelligence Agency director Michael Flynn, who also served a short time as national security advisor to Trump, demonstrate the administration’s inadequate scrutiny. Flynn resigned for “withholding the full story of his communications with Russia’s ambassador,” reported The New York Times. But that wasn’t the end of the conflicts of interest. After leaving office, Flynn retroactively registered as a foreign agent working on behalf of Turkish interests; he had earned $530,000 for that work. If Trump’s team wasn’t aware of this, they should have been, just by paying attention to the public record, including a column that came out on Election Day that read like a paid advertorial for the Turkish government.

Although Flynn’s contract ended in November, the Times reported that a transition lawyer and a White House lawyer told Flynn that it was “up to him” whether to disclose his activities.

Trump’s pick for Defense Secretary, retired Marine General Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, initially selected as undersecretary of defense for policy Anne Patterson, who inspired Egyptian protests due to her support for the Muslim Brotherhood. “She [Patterson] came under fire for cultivating too close a relationship with the regime and for discouraging protests against it—and White House officials are voicing concerns about those decisions now,” reports Politico. Criticism of Patterson, and an uncertain confirmation process, led Mattis to withdraw this nomination.

Personnel is policy, and Trump ultimately holds the reins of power in the administration—if he does not abdicate that responsibility. Calling on 46 U.S. attorneys to tender their resignation was a good first step, and in keeping with past presidents.

But President Trump has signaled his unwillingness to fill many of his political appointee posts. “A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint, because they’re unnecessary to have,” Trump told Fox News. He continued, “You know, we have so many people in government, even me. I look at some of the jobs and it’s people over people over people. I say, ‘What do all these people do?’ You don’t need all those jobs.”

That’s clearly true, but unfortunately, when key personnel spots go unfulfilled, the administration is ceding power to the bureaucracy, which may, in turn, empower those still loyal to Obama and intent on crippling the Trump presidency. “If you don’t have a philosophy, if you don’t have a view, the risk is extraordinarily high that the bureaucracies at the State Department, the CIA, the Defense Department will co-opt the new secretary, the new head of the agency,” argued former UN ambassador John Bolton, speaking as a guest on the Breitbart News Daily show. “The bureaucracy’s policies will become their policy, and then if the White House doesn’t resist, they’ll become the administration’s policy.”

Lee Smith of The Weekly Standard wrote a much talked about piece last week for The Tablet titled, “Will Obama’s Foreign Policy Wizards Save Trump?” “What’s really bizarre is that the Trump team keeps blaming damaging leaks to the press on Obama holdovers—when the Trump team is hiring Obama holdovers,” writes Smith. “They may have caught Anne Patterson before she got past the velvet rope, but Obama people staff key positions elsewhere, on Israel, Iran, ISIS, and Syria issues. Which makes sense, since the policies they are tasked with carrying out are so far exactly the same as they were under Obama.”

By leaving in place Obama political appointees President Trump risks that these people will work to undermine his stated agenda. For example, Michael Ratney, former U.S. consul to Jerusalem, who Conservative Review describes as “one of John Kerry’s closest confidantes,” now heads “the Israeli-Palestinian portfolio at the State Department.”

Smith describes another Obama holdover, “Yael Lempert, a National Security Council staffer from the Obama administration that the Trump team decided to keep on.” Smith quotes a former Clinton official who said that Lempert “is considered one of the harshest critics of Israel on the foreign policy far left. From her position on the Obama NSC, she helped manufacture crisis after crisis in a relentless effort to portray Israel negatively and diminish the breadth and depth of our alliance. Most Democrats in town know better than to let her manage Middle East affairs. It looks like the Trump administration has no idea who she is or how hostile she is to the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

Are these rookie mistakes or does Trump not care if his campaign promises regarding Israel, combating the Islamic jihadis, and ripping up the Iran deal go unfulfilled? On the plus side, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley is doing great things to re-define America’s role in that institution, after eight years of Susan Rice and Samantha Power occupying America’s seat at the UN.

Trump’s new national security advisor, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, has stated that he believes that radical Islamic terrorism is a perversion of Islam—not an outgrowth of the principles contained within that religion. The New York Times reports that McMaster “told his staff” that “‘radical Islamic terrorism’ was not helpful because terrorists are ‘un-Islamic.’” That newspaper heralded this as McMaster rejecting “a key ideological view of other senior Trump advisers and signaling a potentially more moderate approach to the Islamic world.” Trump himself doesn’t hesitate to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism.” Shouldn’t they be on the same page?

What this demonstrates, in fact, is McMaster’s blindness toward the roots of Islamic terror. As long as he remains the national security advisor to Trump, his rhetoric should be considered sanctioned by the administration.

Even more disturbing are rumblings that Trump may renege on his promise to “rip [the Iran deal] up.” In an opinion column for CNN, “Why Trump won’t tear up Iran nuclear deal,” David Andelman argues that “you don’t hear that ‘rip it up’ language any longer. And you won’t.” Reuters reports that the Trump administration is using the same messaging to the Board of Governors as used under Obama: “Iran must strictly and fully adhere to all commitments and technical measures for their duration.” Lee Smith pointed out that “former National Iranian American Council (NIAC) staffer Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, Obama’s NSC director for Iran, is now on the policy-planning staff in Trump’s State Department.” NIAC is effectively the Iran Lobby in the U.S.

If Iran is supposed to honor their commitments in the unsigned deal, will Trump also uphold the misguided U.S. political commitments as well? Trump’s pick to head the CIA, former Representative Mike Pompeo (R-KS), has called this agreement “nothing more than a press release and just about as enforceable.”

It is the media’s responsibility to hold Trump accountable for keeping his promises to the American people, instead of working to undermine his policies. But Trump needs to do a better job of filling key positions and vetting the people who are making and carrying out his policies. Otherwise, his administration could turn out to be a disaster.