Prepare to Discover That Michael Flynn WAS NOT Unmasked – But Everyone Else Was

It appears we are about to find out if one of my long-standing theories about surveillance of Michael Flynn is correct.  Flynn was not “unmasked”, because he was the direct target.

For three years the official media account of how the intelligence community gained the transcript of incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn talking to Ambassador Sergey Kisliyak on December 29th, 2016, surrounded “incidental collection” as a result of contact with an agent of a foreign power.

Meaning the Flynn call was picked up as the U.S. intelligence apparatus was conducting surveillance on Russian Ambassador Kisliyak.

If this version of events were accurate (it’s not), it would fall under FISA-702 collection: the monitoring of a foreign agent (Kislyak) who has contact with a U.S. person (Flynn).

In order to review the identity of the U.S. person, a process called ‘unmasking’, a 702 submission must be made. As NSA Director Rogers said: that submission, the unmasking, leaves a paper/electronic trail.  However, I do not think that is what happened, here’s why:

Back in 2017 Senator Lindsey Graham questioned former DAG Sally Yates and former DNI James Clapper.  Within the questioning, Sally Yates tipped her hand.  There was never an unmasking of Flynn because Flynn was a target; it was not incidental collection. WATCH:

Sally Yates doesn’t directly say Flynn was a target, but by now we all know he was a target of the FBI investigation.  As a result of Flynn being the actual target he would be directly identified within the intelligence documents because the investigation would be about him, and not incidental. But there’s more…

In the three years following this testimony, there was nothing that would deliver the answer as to: who unmasked General Michael Flynn? The reason why is simple, Flynn wasn’t unmasked – because he was the target of authorized active surveillance.

Here’s another way we know.

♦ First, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok were watching that hearing where Senator Lindsey Graham was questioning Sally Yates and James Clapper.  As they discussed in their text messages the issue of “unmasking” is irrelevant.  “incidental collection” is the “incorrect narrative”:

The “incidental collection” is an “incorrect narrative” because the collection was not incidental.  Flynn was actively being monitored.  Flynn was an active target in an ongoing FBI counterintelligence investigation.  Flynn was THE target.

♦ Second, more evidence of Flynn under active surveillance is found in the Mueller report where the special prosecutor outlines that Flynn was under an active investigation prior to the phone call with Ambassador Kislyak:

Mary McCord was the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the DOJ National Security Division, after John Carlin left in October of 2016.  McCord knew about the active FBI investigation of General Flynn. [McCord was also the person who Sally Yates took with her to the White House to confront White House Counsel Don McGahn about the Flynn call and FBI interview.]

It is now admitted by public document releases that Flynn was under investigation during the President-elect transition period when the Kislyak phone call took place.

Put it all together and…. (1) There was never an unmasking request because the collection was not incidental…. (2) Because the intercept was not incidental. (3) Because the intercept was part of the multi-year FBI ongoing investigation of Michael Flynn which included surveillance.

If my three-year hunch is correct, the lack of incidental collection is why FISA-702 doesn’t apply; and why there’s no paper trail to a Flynn unmasking request.  The intercept was not ‘incidental‘ because the intercept was the result of direct monitoring and authorized surveillance being conducted on Michael Flynn.

However, the unmasking of Trump campaign officials as noted by the concerns of Devin Nunes; which directly relates to the documents that Ric Grenell may have just presented to Attorney General Bill Barr; is an even bigger issue.

Because Flynn was an active target of the FBI counterintelligence investigation, anyone who came in contact with the target would be identified as U.S. Person 1, 2, 3 etc.

Anyone and everyone who came in contact with Flynn would be masked in the intelligence reports; Flynn would not.  So when there are mountains of “unmaskings” of Trump campaign officials, those would apply to anyone who came in contact with Flynn.  That is what shocked Devin Nunes as he outlined the unmasking requests:

March 27, 2017, then House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Devin Nunes, held a brief press conference and stated he was provided intelligence reports brought to him by unnamed sources including ‘significant information’ about President-Elect Trump and his transition team.

These reports included unmaskings of President Trump campaign officials; and included Donald Trump himself….  You know what that means:

1.) …”On numerous occasions the [Obama] intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.”

2.)  “Details about U.S. persons associated with the incoming administration; details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting.”

3.) “Third, I have confirmed that additional names of Trump transition members were unmasked.”

4.) “Fourth and finally, I want to be clear; none of this surveillance was related to Russia, or the investigation of Russian activities, or of the Trump team.

“The House Intelligence Committee will thoroughly investigate surveillance and its subsequent dissemination, to determine a few things here that I want to read off:”

• “Who was aware of it?”
• “Why it was not disclosed to congress?”
• “Who requested and authorized the additional unmasking?”
• “Whether anyone directed the intelligence community to focus on Trump associates?”
• “And whether any laws, regulations or procedures were violated?”

“I have asked the Directors of the FBI, NSA and CIA to expeditiously comply with my March 15th letter -that you all received a couple of weeks ago- and to provide a full account of these surveillance activities.”

Does that make sense now?

When candidate Trump brought Lt. General Michael Flynn into the campaign, he essentially brought in a person who was under an ongoing FBI investigation.

Everyone that Flynn then came in contact with then became a “U.S. Person” identified in the intelligence reports.  Those U.S. Persons were then unmasked.

That’s why so many unmaskings.

Flynn was the infection that authorized additional persons to be reviewed and unmasked. The research therein shows up to NSA Director Mike Rogers when the NSA auditor notes a significant uptick in FBI searches of the NSA database. From Rogers position this is what he would see:

However, what Rogers would not see is the unmasking taking place at FBI for the people being searched.

This video of questioning again by Senator Graham shows the dynamic. (A) Rogers notes the FBI would likely have more incidental collection and subsequent unmasking as an aspect of their investigative search functions; and (B) He wouldn’t know because that’s outside of his compartment.

If my long-standing hunch is correct, we’ll soon find out that: (1) Michael Flynn was the walking surveillance infection; (2) those who Flynn came into contact with will cross-reference to the 702 “About” queries; and (3) the FBI reports on those Flynn contacts will contain the unmasked names of the various Trump campaign officials that Barr might soon release.

The FBI did not need a Title-1 FISA surveillance warrant against Flynn because they were already conducting regular Title-3 surveillance on him as a potential domestic national security risk. Thus it was all Flynn’s calls being monitored, not just Sergey Kislyak.

We’ll soon find out if my hunch has been correct…

Why More Testing Won’t Solve The COVID-19 Crisis

Inherent limitations of the tests we currently have make it unlikely that applying testing to the entire population is going to be very useful.

Dr Anish Koka writing at The Federalist

The elite-level consensus has been for some time now that the solution to all things COVID-19 is testing. The fancy group of talking heads who make the rounds daily on cable news certainly seems convinced more testing would have avoided the scale of the current crisis and that more testing will allow a safe exit from the current lockdown that has 30 million Americans unemployed.

Surprisingly little attention seems to have been paid to some practical matters related to trying to test tens of millions of Americans. Many are laser focused on creating an infrastructure to do testing, but have spent little time on discussing obstacles that relate to the current capability of the available tests.

We Have Two Kinds of Tests

At the moment there are two types of tests: real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and serologic testing. RT-PCR detects the virus’s genetic code, while serologic testing detects antibodies the body makes in response to the virus. Both forms of testing have limitations that are important to consider when trying to evaluate the accuracy of tests.

Diagnostic tests have traditionally been evaluated based on sensitivity and specificity. Sensitivity refers to the probability a test will return a positive result in someone who has the disease being tested for, while specificity refers to the probability a test will return a negative result in someone who does not have the disease being tested for.

A poorly sensitive test will miss a lot of people who actually have a disease, while a poorly specific test will say a lot of patients have a disease when they actually don’t. So a very accurate test should have a high degree of sensitivity as well as specificity.

Yet even a test that appears to be very good by these metrics may end up being almost useless because test performance is highly dependent on the underlying suspicion of disease. This is mostly why doctors don’t recommend getting tested for everything just because you can. Even cancer screenings are targeted to try to ensure the screened population is at higher risk of disease because there may be more harm than good if 20-year-olds were to start getting mammograms en masse.

Understanding why requires understanding that sensitivity and specificity, while important, are less important to patients than predictive values. Patients want to know the probability they have a disease if their test is positive or negative. Sensitivity and specificity are simple probabilities that tell you how the test performs in people whose disease status is already known. Converting these numbers to predictive values requires knowing the underlying prevalence of the disease in the population being tested.

Let’s Illustrate With an Example

As an example, let’s imagine an island of 1,000 individuals with a prevalence of lupus of 10 percent. This means 100 patients have lupus on the island (0.1 x 1,000). If we use the sensitivity and specificity from above (90 percent sensitive, 95 percent specific), 90 of the 100 patients are true positives, and 855 (0.95 x 900) patients are true negatives. This leaves 10 false negatives, and 45 false positives.

This means that this particular test will have 135 positive tests. But only 90 will be truly positive, the remaining 45 are false positives, which gives a 66 percent chance that a positive test means actually having the disease. Uninspiring probabilities, to say the least.

The situation can be improved markedly by greatly improving how specific a test is to reduce the number of false positives, but even a test that is 99 percent specific requires a prevalence of disease more than 10 percent for the test result to be meaningful.

The problem for coronavirus testing is that it is likely circulating in most places in the United States in very small single-digit numbers, except for a small number of ZIP codes located in a few hotspots in the country like certain counties in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan.

Why The Other Kind of Testing Also Has Problems

Our current testing does include RT-PCR, which is nearly 100 percent specific. This means everyone who tests positive with this test has the virus, but unfortunately the test has been found to have a high rate of false negatives, so a negative test doesn’t rule out disease.

PCR also only speaks to disease status at the time of the test. It’s possible a PCR-negative patients acquires the virus the following day. Complicating matters even further is that we may shed viral RNA that PCR can detect for up to six weeks after an infection, although it is definitely not the case that this means people are infectious for six weeks.

Source: JAMA.

Antibody tests to date have not been robustly validated in part because this is hard to do. Finding true positive and negative controls is challenging. Antibody tests are also negative early in the course of disease because the body has not had time to produce enough detectable antibody, and may be falsely positive if they crossreact with other commonly circulating coronaviruses that are known to cause the common cold.

So inherent limitations of the tests we currently have make it unlikely that applying testing to the entire population is going to be very useful. Testing for high-risk patients like health-care workers and symptomatic patients is important, not because it will be perfect for the individual patients, but because it can track outbreaks of disease in the population.

This Means Test-Based Contact Tracing Won’t Work Well

These considerations make it even harder to understand how test-based contact tracing and isolation will be effective. If we test too broad of a population, we are likely to make life unnecessarily difficult for a vast number of Americans who would face the risk of isolation based on an inaccurate test, and spend vast public health resources doing contact tracing for no good reason.

Even if the tests performed much better than they do currently, the architecture that is being discussed to do contact tracing has major unresolved issues. The cool-sounding idea is to use smartphones to track who citizens come into contact with. Theoretically, once a patient tests positive, a list of other phones and citizens the patient came into contact with over the prior 48 hours could easily be tracked.

Practically speaking, this would require a large proportion of patients (upward of 60 percent) in a population to download and use the app, and there would be a high probability of false positives generated by phones that ping each other through walls or ping the runner jogging by you in the park six feet away. It’s also notable that Singapore, a very small country with a population of 5 million, is in the midst of a significant outbreak that forced a widespread lockdown despite its widely praised app-based contact tracing.

Testing Isn’t a Panacea at All

Much of the enthusiasm to test more comes from those that link countries with high testing rates to low death rates. In doing so, proponents conveniently ignore that the various countries also differ in size, density, geographic location, population demography, connectedness, and travel/social distancing policies.

Also ignored is the amount of testing currently taking place in the United States. New York is testing at a rate five times higher than South Korea. At the moment, testing capacity in most of the country actually exceeds the demandfor testing.

Source.

Testing is vital to tracking outbreaks in communities and informing policy locally and nationally, but it is profoundly unclear that reaching some magic higher threshold of testing is the answer to our problems.

Grassley on Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and the Russia Investigation

 
Article by streiff in "RedState":

Yesterday, Iowa Senator Charles Grassley took to the floor of the Senate to lambaste the actions of the Justice Department in the Flynn case. And he didn’t stop there.





The clear aim of Grassley’s speech was to bash the handful of assclowns who nearly pulled off what can only be described as a coup d’etat using false and forged evidence to unleash an open-ended and unfocused investigation of the Trump administration that was designed to find something to prosecute rather than prosecute something they had found. This is the key part of the speech.

On January 5, 2017, the day after Strzok moved to keep the Flynn case open, President Obama met with Director Comey, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, Vice President Biden, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice. In that meeting they briefed Obama on the Russia investigation. It’s unclear to what extent they discussed the details of the investigation amongst each other. Given all that we know now regarding the fake foundation to the inquiry, it’s time we asked: what did Obama and Biden know and when did they know it?

Some of this is obviously tied to Obama’s direct and personal involvement in engineering the Flynn investigation. But a good part, in my view, is tied to the 2020 campaign.

Biden, as we all know, is a weak and morally degenerate man who inspires no one. His sole selling points for the election are a) the Democrat establishment likes me, b) I’m not Trump, and c) I’m not Trump. I think everyone, particularly those flinging about polls showing Biden in the lead everywhere, knows that Biden will probably get beaten like a rented mule unless he is rescued by some deus ex machina. Now that Mueller has failed and impeachment has failed and Wuhan virus panic is looking like an own goal for the Democrats, that mechanism to save Biden is Barack Obama.

There is a belief, I don’t know if it is a belief so much as a superstition, that Obama endorsing Biden and working on his behalf will bring out the same Obama coalition to vote for Joe “the Love Finger” Biden…just like it worked for Hillary Clinton. The fact that Obama is going to get directly involved was teased by Obama himself when a ‘leaked” tape of a meeting he had with his inner circle of catchfarts made its way into the hands of royal stenographer Michael Isikoff.

The message seems to be that if Obama wants to come out of retirement and interject himself into the campaign, he shouldn’t expect to be treated like an illegal combatant not a former president. To that end, I find it hard to believe that Mexico demanding some hard answers for the illegal gunrunning operation managed by Eric Holder and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is an accident.

Obama should listen up and pay attention. Does he really want his role in setting off an orgy of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Syria explored? Does he want hearings on how he gave Libya to al Qaeda? How will the side deals he cut with Russia to remove US ballistic missile defense from Europe in exchange for Russia using its ‘good offices’ to get Iran to negotiate a very favorable, one might say infamously corrupt, nuclear deal?

Obama does need to answer for his role in the Russia Hoax, but that can wait until a second Trump term. For right now, a brush-back pitch is exactly what is needed to help Trump and the GOP win heavily in 2020.

In the last several weeks, a lot of information relating to the FBI’s Russia investigation has been declassified and made public. That’s in large part thanks to Attorney General Barr and Acting Director Grenell. Their acts of transparency are finally shining a light on the dark corners of the federal government. They’re doing what they ought to do and I encourage them to keep it up.

 

In the last several weeks, we’ve also seen a lot of denial from some quarters in the media about the information that’s been released. Also, last week, former President Obama said the rule of law is at risk because of the Justice Department’s dismissal of the Flynn case.

 

I believe the opposite is true. The rule of law is at risk if the federal government can get away with violating the constitution to do what they did to Lt. Gen. Flynn. And when it comes to those violations and other misconduct by former government officials, Obama and the mainstream media pundit circle are silent.

 

I’ve heard no comment from Mr. Obama about independent Inspector General findings that Andrew McCabe lied under oath to federal investigators multiple times. Or about how DOJ prosecutors falsely told the court that they had produced all Brady material to Flynn. Or when the federal government surveilled an American citizen connected to the Trump campaign without probable cause and based on intelligence the FBI knew was questionable at best.

 

Since 2017, I’ve aggressively pursued the Flynn investigation to find out more about why the FBI decided to interview Flynn, make him a subject of an investigation, and then why the Justice Department eventually charged him. From the beginning, I’ve wanted to know the facts of the case. And from the beginning, none of what I found looked right.

 

Having done good government oversight for over 40 years, I know a government foul up when I see it.

 

The public knows a lot more than it did in 2017 when the news first broke about the Flynn case. For example, we know that on January 4, 2017, the FBI wrote a closing memorandum on Flynn, who was codenamed Crossfire Razor by the FBI, that said the Intelligence Community could find no derogatory information on him.

 

On the very same day the FBI was ready to close the Flynn case, Peter Strzok asked another FBI agent, “Hey if you haven’t closed Razor don’t do it yet.”

 

The case was still open at that moment and Strzok asked that it be kept open “for now.” Strzok then messaged Lisa Page saying that Razor still happened to be open because of some oversight and said “Yeah, our utter incompetence actually helps us. 20 percent of the time…”

 

During the course of my oversight activities of the FBI, I’ve uncovered and made public large amounts of Strzok’s and Page’s messages. When reviewing all the faults and disasters of the Russia investigation, these text messages are very important. They are the free expression of these top FBI employees’ mindset, unencumbered by rules or decorum. They give us a look at what the drivers of the Russia investigation actually believed.

 

In August 2016, just after the FBI opened the Russia investigation, Page said, “Trump’s not ever going to become president, right? Right?!?”

 

She’s the one who edited Flynn’s 302 summary along with Strzok, which contradicted the original 302.

 

Strzok responded, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

 

Their animus towards Trump helps to explain why they cut corners and didn’t follow regular protocol in running their inquiry.

 

On January 5, 2017, the day after Strzok moved to keep the Flynn case open, President Obama met with Director Comey, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, Vice President Biden, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice. In that meeting they briefed Obama on the Russia investigation. It’s unclear to what extent they discussed the details of the investigation amongst each other. Given all that we know now regarding the fake foundation to the inquiry, it’s time we asked: what did Obama and Biden know and when did they know it?

 

During the course of my oversight, I acquired an email from Susan Rice. She sent herself an email on Obama’s last day in office – January 20, 2017. That email memorialized the alleged contents of the January 5, 2017, meeting with Obama.

 

As I noted in 2018 when I made that email public, I found it odd that among her activities in the final moments of the final day of the Obama administration that she would write herself an email about a meeting that happened weeks prior about one investigation. According to Rice, Obama wanted everything done “by the book.” Of course, that never happened.

 

She also said, in part, “The President (as in Obama) asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team.”

 

Then, one week later, on January 12, 2017, somebody in the Obama administration leaked the Flynn/Kislyak call to the Washington Post that ignited rumors about Flynn’s associations with Russians and a possible violation of the arcane Logan Act. A perfectly timed leak. One that would help create the fake foundation to interview Flynn.

 

Well, twelve days later, on January 24, 2017, Strzok interviewed Flynn in the White House. Prior to that interview, Comey chose not to follow normal protocols to inform the White House that the FBI intended to interview an employee. Usually you work through the White House counsel to have discussions for approvals and who would be present.

 

Comey even bragged about getting away with skirting these rules. When he was asked in a 2018 interview about how he did it, Comey said, “I sent them. Something I probably wouldn’t have done or even gotten away with in a more organized investigation, a more organized administration.”

 

According to Comey’s former assistant, Comey said, “We just decided, you know, screw it” in reference to them breaking protocol.

 

That’s hardly “by the book.”

 

Flynn was never told what he was being secretly interrogated for and the whole thing was done without an attorney present. Now we know that the FBI had no real investigative purpose to interview Flynn.

 

We also know, based on FBI notes, that agents apparently interviewed Flynn to trick him in a lie so that they could prosecute him or get him fired. Keep in mind, the FBI had prepared to close the case weeks before.

 

The FBI already had the transcript of the Flynn/Kislyak call. They knew exactly what was discussed, so what was the point of interviewing Flynn if they already had the transcript?

 

Well, lucky for Strzok, the FBI had not technically closed the Flynn case yet so he figured they could lay a trap for Flynn. In so doing, they didn’t warn him he was under investigation. They went around the Justice Department and bypassed White House interview protocols.

 

Under Comey’s leadership, the FBI abused governmental power in ways the Founders and Framers feared most. The Russia investigation is a textbook example of what not to do. At every step of the investigation, the government sought evidence to advance it, never got the evidence they needed, and advanced the investigation anyway.

 

That is an abuse of power!

 

Let’s recall that Comey also leaked his memos of his private discussions with President Trump to get a special counsel appointed. He had a plan. It worked. We had Mueller for two years and more than $30 million. Mueller found no collusion, and no obstruction. That’s exactly the same information that the House Intelligence Committee’s 50 plus depositions told us. And those were done in 2017. Mueller finished in 2019. That’s more than $30 million just to reinvent the wheel.

 

Now, with respect to Comey, I think it’s monumentally important to point out a piece of his testimony from 2017 before the House Intelligence Committee. Comey said the following,

 

“…we had an open counterintelligence investigation on Mr. Flynn, and it had been open since the summertime, and we were very close to closing it. In fact, I had – I think I had authorized it to be closed at the end of December, beginning of January.”

 

Comey leaked his memos so that the public would know that the President allegedly said to him that he hoped Comey would let the whole Flynn thing go.

 

That’s what the hook was to getting a special counsel appointed.

 

Not once in Comey’s memos did he mention that by the time that conversation occurred, he had already authorized the Flynn case to be closed. Don’t you think that’s a material fact that would put the proper context on his interactions with Trump?

 

Attorney General Barr is exactly right. What the FBI did to Flynn cannot be justified by any angle of review. What the FBI did is flout the rules, the law and the Constitution.

 

That’s where the outrage ought to be. Not on the dismissal of the case but on the fact the case was brought in the first place and a good man’s life was destroyed.

 

Mueller had all these facts. He had the documents. Had the Brady material. He had the FBI notes and contradictory 302 summaries. He had the emails. He had all the information that showed Flynn was set up, targeted, and pressured to plead guilty in a secret side deal between the Mueller team and his former lawyers only because he was running out of money and the government was coming after his son.

 

Flynn did what he did to save his family from financial ruin and his son from reputational ruin. He did what any father would do for his family.

 

If it can happen to Flynn it can happen to you. And in some ways it also happened to Carter Page and the illegal surveillance on him.

 

We’re in a constant battle between liberty and tyranny. My fellow Americans, let’s use the Russia investigation and all its shortcomings to forever guard against the tyranny of the federal government.

 

https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2020/05/12/835637/ 

'Too tough to die' shipwreck discovered in Pacific

The U.S.S. Nevada survived Pearl Harbor, Normandy, Okinawa, and two nuclear tests—but the recent discovery of its wreckage raises new questions about what ultimately brought it down.

 Even as world wars go, the U.S.S. Nevada was a resilient ship: It was the only battleship to get underway during the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, surviving bombs and torpedoes before the burning vessel was beached and later repaired. It trained its guns on German positions at Normandy on D-Day, and went on to support the invasions of Okinawa and Iwo Jima. At the end of the war, U.S.S. Nevada was selected as the central target for the first nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, where it survived a 23-kiloton aerial detonation (the bomb missed), as well as a second underwater detonation. Finally, on July 31, 1948, following a four-day naval gunfire exercise, the toughest ship of the Second World War was deliberately sunk in the Pacific by the U.S. Navy.

 

Now, thanks to archival research and underwater survey of more than 100 square miles of seafloor, the remains of the Nevada have been located 65 nautical miles southwest of Pearl Harbor. The announcement was made today in a press release. The discovery is the result of collaboration between the cultural resources management firm SEARCH Inc. and the marine robotics company Ocean Infinity.

The remains of the Nevada are located at a depth of more than 15,400 feet—nearly three miles—beneath the Pacific Ocean. An initial survey of wreckage indicates that the battleship came to rest upside down on a muddy plain, with a debris field that stretches some 2,000 feet from the hull. The bow and stern of the vessel are missing.

"It's really a great thing that they found it," says Richard Ramsey, who served as a boatswain's mate on the Nevada from Normandy through Okinawa and Iwo Jima.
 It took four and a half days to sink the U.S.S. Nevada. The 575-foot-long battleship, painted bright orange from its earlier role as a nuclear test target, was towed out of Pearl Harbor to sea, where a classified explosive was detonated in its hull. Then it was pummeled with shells launched from cruisers and bombs from planes during a multi-day naval exercise. Finally, on July 31, 1948, a single torpedo dropped by an American plane allegedly did what the Germans and Japanese could not: send Nevada to the bottom of the sea.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/05/uss-nevada-shipwreck-discovered-pacific/

The President Of The United States Should Not Wear A Mask

by David Marcus writing at The Federalist

On April 30, 1789, George Washington was inaugurated at Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York City. Today a statue of the father of our nation stands almost upon the exact spot. The 1883 depiction of Washington by John Quincy Adams Ward shows the hero of the Revolution staring out at the nation and the people he must now lead; his face is dressed in a look of determination. The image of the president matters, and that is why today President Trump should not be wearing a face mask in public.

Scolds have been on a rampage over the past few days regarding Trump’s unwillingness to don the face covering that has come to define our current moment of Chinese virus. Some, like Nancy Pelosi argue that Trump is setting a bad example for Americans; others say he is fueling a politicization of masks that harms public health. What Trump is really doing is projecting American strength and health at a time when strong leadership is needed.

The fact is that optics matter in politics and governance. One image can come to capture an entire politician or presidency. Gerald Ford falling down stairs or Michael Dukakis wearing an absurdly oversized tank helmet are but two famous examples. Is it reasonable or fair that these images came to define these men? Maybe not, but this isn’t about fairness, it’s about public perception.

An image of Donald Trump wearing a protective face mask while performing his duties, behind the Resolute Desk, or in the White House briefing room would be a searing image of weakness. It would signal that the United States is so powerless against this invisible enemy sprung from China that even its president must cower behind a mask. That simply should not happen.

Beyond the astonishingly awful optics of a president of the United States wearing a medical mask there is a practical reason for the commander in chief to forego them at public events. Masks are inimical to communication. Many of us have experienced the phenomenon of smiling at someone at the grocery store only to realize that the gesture is hidden and therefore unseen.

When the president is performing public duties one of the primary things he is doing is communicating with the country. To attempt to do so while wearing a mask would communicate only one thing, fear of the virus. A mask is never simply a mask; whether religious, theatrical, or mythical, a mask always fundamentally changes those who wear it.

There are two forces that must be brought to bear to fight any crisis like this virus, compliance and defiance. Americans have largely and wisely complied with lockdowns and stay-at-home orders thus far, but many are eager to defy irrational alarmism that cannot contemplate a return to normal life, one in which we may be in each others company again and see each other’s faces.

It is absolutely right for the President of the United States to model this defiance. Not a defiance of facts of science, but of the idea that this Chinese virus must fundamentally alter our lives and appearances forever. By bearing his face he sends a much needed gesture indicating that yes, we will get back to normal. Should Trump put on the mask he will never take it off. It will be the enduring image of his presidency, an image of defeat in the face of crisis.

In that year 1789, when George Washington stood aloft on the balcony of Federal Hall and became the nation’s first president an influenza epidemic was, as it happens, crippling New York City. But in the then capital of the country, James Madison labored away at the Bill of Rights, Alexander Hamilton fixated on the nation’s finances and the people of New York went about their business.

By the dictates of the current mood and moment, George Washington probably should have been wearing a mask as he swore to uphold the constitution. The statue on that spot today should hide his visage in the aim of public safety. But this is a thing we can scarcely imagine, nor should we wish to. This is a time when we need President Trump to exhibit strength, to help give the nation courage and perseverance, neither he, nor any other president, can effectively do that behind a mask.

Is Obama’s Long History of Playing Dirty Finally Catching Up With Him?

The unraveling of the Michael Flynn case and ongoing investigation into Obama’s Justice Department should put an end to the preposterous claim that his administration was “scandal-free.”

Julie Kelly for American Greatness

As it became clear Mitt Romney would be the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, the Obama campaign fired up its Chicago-style machine to attack the incumbent president’s election foe. Team Obama identified several Romney donors to smear publicly; one was a wealthy businessman from Idaho.

A former Democratic Senate staffer, according to a 2012 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, contacted an Idaho courthouse seeking the divorce records of Frank VanderSloot, who had donated $1 million to Romney’s campaign. The operative was traced to a professional opposition research shop based in Washington, D.C.

The name of the outfit? Fusion GPS. “Fusion GPS is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, who wouldn’t say who is paying him for this high-minded slumming but said in an email that Mr. VanderSloot was a ‘legitimate’ target because of ‘his record on gay issues,’” the Journal wrote.

As we now know, that would not be the last time Obama loyalists would hire Fusion GPS to oversee its dirt-digging operation. Nor was it the first time Obama sought to unseal divorce records to ruin a political opponent.

Obama’s pathway to winning the Illinois U.S. Senate seat in 2004 was cleared after divorce records of his Democratic primary opponent, who had been in the lead, were made public just weeks before the election. After Obama won the primary, the Chicago Tribune sued to get the divorce settlement of Jack Ryan, Obama’s Republican opponent, unsealed. (Many suspect at the behest of Obama advisor and longtime Tribune columnist David Axelrod.) Embarrassing details sank Ryan’s candidacy and he dropped out of the race. Obama won the seat with 70 percent of the vote.

No one wins the presidency without using hardball tactics to get there. Barack Obama is a special case, however, because the media not only covered for him but aided his scorched-earth tactics while he alternated between feigning either innocence or ignorance. This lasted during his two presidential campaigns and eight years in the White House.

The same pattern has been playing out the last four years. In May 2016, the Democrats hired Fusion GPS again to destroy Barack Obama’s rival, Donald Trump. But this time, the artillery would involve the world’s most powerful law enforcement agency, a secret court, and the full complicity of the national news media.

And as the biggest scandal in American political history has unfolded, Obama’s media accomplices have denied, excused, and/or justified his involvement while desperately creating other scandals to serve as diversions. To date, the former president has not faced one question about what he knew and when he knew it. His vice president, safely bunkered in his home studio away from uninvited media scrutiny, is enjoying the same protection despite Joe Biden’s known participation in the Trump-Russia collusion ruse.

Obama’s unmatched political good luck, however, might finally have run out. Fox News Channel’s Ed Henry reported that acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell delivered more secret documents to the Justice Department last week that could prove “Barack Obama knew about a lot of this with Michael Flynn a lot earlier than we know.”

That news jives with recent revelations pointing to Obama’s behind-the-scenes management in the targeting of Flynn, a one-time Obama intelligence official who landed on the president’s unforgiving hit list. According to court documents, Obama himself was the source of the leak about the infamous call between Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

In her August 2017 interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s lawyers, former acting Attorney General Sally Yates revealed that President Obama notified her about the Flynn-Kislyak call “on January 5, 2017 while in the Oval Office,” the notes detail. That briefing, held for the ostensible purpose of discussing the intelligence community assessment on Russia’s election interference, also included Joe Biden, James Clapper, James Comey, John Brennan, and Susan Rice.

“After the briefing, Obama dismissed the group but asked Yates and Comey to stay behind. Obama started by saying he had ‘learned of the information about Flynn’ and his conversation with Kislyak about sanctions,” Yates told investigators. “At that point, Yates had no idea what the president was talking about.” Turns out, Obama and Comey were setting her up to pursue the bogus Logan Act allegations, which she did.

Yates’s bombshell is just the latest proof to tie “No Drama” Obama to the collusion hoax. During that same briefing, Comey, Clapper, and Obama discussed how to present the so-called “pee tape” claim in the Steele dossier to President-elect Trump the next day. Comey said Obama raised his eyebrows up and down “like a Groucho Marx thing” when his FBI director explained how he would spook the incoming president with the salacious accusation.

Obama’s awareness of Comey’s activities, in fact, can be traced back months before Election Day. The report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed that Comey discussed the counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign with Obama in the Oval Office sometime in August 2016. (Rice, Clapper, and Brennan also attended that same meeting.)

And of course, we already know, thanks to texts between FBI lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in the summer of 2016, that the “White House is running this,” and the “[president of the United States] wants to know everything we are doing.”

This overwhelming and shocking evidence, however, has been of no interest to marquee media organizations such as CNN and the New York Times while a handful of conservative outlets, including American Greatness, and anonymous Twitter accounts have done the heavy lifting.

But it seems like Obama might be getting a little nervous. Yahoo Newsreporter Michael Isikoff, the same dutiful Democratic Party scribe that published the first dossier-sourced article about the FBI’s interest in Carter Page, posted a “leaked” tape of the former president complaining about the Flynn case.

“The news over the last 24 hours I think has been somewhat downplayed, about the Justice Department dropping charges against Michael Flynn,” Obama is heard saying. “That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic—not just institutional norms—but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”

Obama’s attempted damage control could be coming too late for him. Trump spent most of the weekend suggesting on Twitter and in interviews that the wagons are circling around his predecessor. “He got caught, Obamagate!” the president tweeted Sunday. The hashtag #ObamaGate dominated Twitter for most of Sunday into Monday.

But Obama and his cronies have more to worry about than Trump’s mean tweets. U.S. Attorney John Durham is moving “full throttle” on his criminal investigation into Obama Administration officials, according to Fox News. Durham’s inquiry is so far-reaching that other U.S. attorneys now are involved. “They farmed the investigation out because it is too much for Durham and he didn’t want to be distracted,” said one source.

It could be that Obama’s arrogance and sense of political invincibility, bolstered by years of media swooning, finally has caught up with the one-time community organizer. The unraveling of the Flynn case and continued investigation into Obama’s Justice Department will put an end to the preposterous claim that his administration is “scandal-free.” Quite to the contrary, the history books will have to tell the story of the most scandal-ridden presidential administration of all time—and it won’t be Donald Trump’s.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Biden’s Inauguration-Eve Trip to Ukraine

What was Joe Biden doing 

in Kyiv on January 17, 2017?

Joseph Duggan for American Greatness

It is highly unusual for an outgoing vice president to travel abroad during the days before the beginning of the new administration. An examination of the National Archives reveals no foreign travel on the part of Dick Cheney between the 2008 election and the Obama-Biden inauguration, nor any foreign travel by Vice President Al Gore before the Bush-Cheney inauguration in 2001.

During the time before the inauguration, the outgoing vice president’s duty to the American people is to help the president, the president-elect, and the vice-president-elect with an orderly transition. The closer to inauguration day, the more important it becomes to handle sensitive details diligently.

This was a duty that Joe Biden decided was subordinate to his desire to travel abroad.

Three days before the Trump-Pence inauguration, Biden was halfway around the world meeting with the leaders of a foreign government. Biden’s trip not only took him away from his duties in Washington, it also consumed the attention of many senior presidential, vice-presidential, and State Department staff—for the days before, during, and after the trip—who should have been giving their undivided attention to the transition.

For Biden, the vice president’s absence from the White House during one of the most important weeks of his official responsibilities, and subjecting himself and senior White House staff to jet lag during the inauguration itself, were reasonable costs for the United States to pay in exchange for his presence in a faraway foreign country.

That country was Ukraine.

What was Biden doing in Kyiv on January 17, 2017?

He was creating an opportunity for himself to speak, unmonitored, with the bosses of a corrupt country whose natural gas company was paying his miscreant son more than $83,000 a month in phony “consulting” fees.

What Biden was doing, above all, was not talking on the phone.

Everyone now knows that a U.S. president or vice president who speaks on a “secure” phone line with a foreign leader can have his top secret conversation leaked, distorted, and, in Donald Trump’s case involving another president of Ukraine, made into a basis for a bogus impeachment process.

Whatever Biden had to say in Kyiv, he knew he did not want it overheard by the many bureaucratic busybodies—the Munchkins, we used to call them in the Reagan State Department—who manage to listen in or receive transcripts of these highly sensitive communications. Only by getting face to face in Kyiv with his Ukrainian contacts could Biden be certain of his ability to conduct such communications with them without anyone else, in our government or theirs, knowing about it.

One might recall the hysteria that has broken out on occasions at multilateral conferences when President Trump was reported to be in conversation alone with Russian President Vladimir Putin and an interpreter—no bureaucrats allowed.

Our mainstream media, the left-wing leviathan, and their well-compensated RINO manservants such as Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner, have acquired a newfound taste for the methods of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy. They are shocked—shocked!—when President Trump speaks alone and off the telephone with a foreign leader who is known not to have American interests at heart.

Normal people know that every president should do this. It’s called statecraft. When Trump does it, the press and the RINOs call it treason, or corruption, or both.

So by these standards, what is one to think of Biden’s strange trip to Ukraine on the eve of the Trump inauguration?

The cover story was that Biden was in Kyiv to give a speech exhorting Ukrainians to repent and renounce their centuries-old habit of public corruption. Think about it: A man who in three days would have no power gave a public speech demanding that his corrupt hosts—people who only fear overwhelming power—give up their addiction to corruption. Preposterous.

Biden delivered his fire-and-brimstone sermon in Kyiv, but why? The gesture made as much sense as Biden going to Harvey Weinstein’s front lawn with a bullhorn urging the Democratic Party megadonor to forsake lechery, put on sackcloth and ashes, and embrace celibacy for the glory of the Kingdom of God.

The truth is that we will never know the identities of every person with whom Biden spoke when he was in Kyiv in January 2017. No one apart from the direct interlocutors—not even the Vindman twins—will ever know everything that Biden and his Ukrainian friends had to say to one another 72 hours before the Trump inauguration.