Free Republic

The chairman says he was invited by an unidentified intelligence official to review classified documents on the White House grounds — at the Old Executive Office Building, it appears, where the National Security Council has secure facilities for that purpose. These documents purportedly show that communications from Trump transition officials, and perhaps Trump himself, were intercepted during intelligence-agency monitoring of foreign powers; and Nunes says the monitoring in question appears unrelated to Russia’s meddling in the U.S. election. Nunes reports that the documents he was shown suggest that the Obama administration may have been using its foreign-intelligence powers to shadow...

Members of the intelligence community collected ‘incidental’ communications of the Trump transition team during legal surveillance operations, producing ‘dozens’ of reports which eventually unmasked several individuals’ identities and which were ‘widely disseminated,’ a top lawmaker said Wednesday afternoon. House Intelligence Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said none of the reports he had read mentioned Russia or Russians and he was unsure whether the surveillance occurred at Trump Tower. Nunes also was unsure if then President-elect Trump was captured by the surveillance, which occurred in November, December and January. “I recently confirmed on numerous occasions the intelligence community incidentally collected intelligence,”...

My Error: The New York Times Did Not Change Its Headline – There Were Two Headlines from the Start By Andrew C. McCarthy — March 9, 2017 I owe the New York Times an apology, and am extending it in this post. It corrects my column from earlier today, which I have asked National Review to withdraw. I accused the Times of altering the headline of an important report (pertinent to the so-called FISAgate controversy) in order to revise history in light of a shifting political narrative. I was wrong. The Times did not change the headline. Instead, the report...

What he said was probably true, but what he didn’t say was more revealing. In Monday’s Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty usefully outlined some intriguing statements made by former Obama national intelligence director James Clapper regarding the FISA surveillance controversy. Clapper’s remarks, in an interview by NBC’s Chuck Todd on Meet the Press on Sunday, are being taken as a blanket denial of the allegations that the Obama administration used the Justice Department and FBI to investigate Trump-campaign figures, potentially including Trump himself. But what Clapper said is far from a wholesale rejection of the allegations. To be sure, General Clapper’s...

So, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself. Great! Just one question: From what? Yes, yes, Sessions is a good and decent man. He is a scrupulous lawyer who cares about his reputation. Thus, in stark contrast to Obama administration attorneys general, he strictly applied — I’d say he hyper-applied — the ethical standard that calls on a lawyer to recuse himself from a matter in which his participation as counsel would create the mere appearance of impropriety. The standard is eminently sensible because the legitimacy of our judicial system depends not only on its actually being on the up...

The idea that FISA could be used against political enemies always seemed far-fetched. Now it might not be. Remember the great debate over “the Wall” following the 9/11 attacks? “The Wall” was a set of internal guidelines that had been issued by the Clinton Justice Department in the mid 1990s. In a nutshell, the Wall made it legally difficult and practically impossible for agents in the FBI’s Foreign Counter-Intelligence Division (essentially, our domestic-security service, now known as the National Security Division) to share intelligence with the criminal-investigation side of the FBI’s house. Those of us who were critics of the...

In the overwrought, partisan allegations that Attorney General Jeff Sessions committed perjury in his confirmation-hearing testimony, let’s cut to the chase: There is a good deal of political hay to be made because Sessions made a statement that was inaccurate — or at least incomplete — especially when mined out of its context....... Prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the speaker knowingly, voluntarily, and intentionally — not by accident, misunderstanding, or confusion — said something that was untrue, with a specific purpose to disobey or disregard the law. Therefore, when there is an allegation of perjury, the alleged...

National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was dismissed amid a torrent of mainstream-media reporting and disgraceful government leaks (but I repeat myself). Among the most intriguing was a New York Times report the morning after Flynn’s resignation, explaining that the former three-star Army general and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency was “grilled” by FBI agents “about a phone call he had had with Russia’s ambassador.” No fewer than seven veteran Times reporters contributed to the story, the Gray Lady having dedicated more resources to undermining the Trump administration than the Republican Congress has to advancing Trump’s agenda. Remarkably, none of...

Why Was the FBI Investigating General Flynn? There appears to have been no basis for a criminal or intelligence probe. By Andrew C. McCarthy — February 18, 2017 National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was dismissed amid a torrent of mainstream-media reporting and disgraceful government leaks (but I repeat myself). Among the most intriguing was a New York Times report the morning after Flynn’s resignation, explaining that the former three-star Army general and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency was “grilled” by FBI agents “about a phone call he had had with Russia’s ambassador.” No fewer than seven veteran Times reporters...

From time to time over the years, the eminent historian Daniel Pipes has lamented that treason, not just as a crime but as a concept, appears defunct in the West. The question of bringing treason charges against jihadists has been raised from time to time. Often its very asking proves Dr. Pipes’s point: Most radical Islamic terrorists are not American citizens; as to them, treason is not a cognizable offense because traitorous conduct is central to the crime. Even against American jihadists, a treason charge is of dubious usefulness. The 1996 overhaul of federal counterterrorism law codified crimes tailored to...

As our Monday editorial details, there is every reason to believe that the eventual ruling of the Ninth Circuit federal appeals court will control the outcome of litigation over President Trump’s temporary travel ban on both aliens from seven countries and refugees. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit is considering the Justice Department’s appeal of a temporary restraining order issued by Seattle federal district judge James Robart, which suspends the ban. The panel has announced that it will hear oral argument on Tuesday. The Ninth Circuit’s determination is likely to be dispositive because there are currently only eight justices...

In response to "Disgrace: Obama Commutes Bradley Manning's Prison Sentence" ... I emphatically agree ... -snip- First, -disgraceful for the New York Times to report ... that “Prosecutors … presented no evidence that anyone was killed because of [Manning’s] leaks." ... in cases involving classified information, the government frequently cannot reveal ... – the damage done... such revelations end up disclosing more classified information and, critically, identifying other informants and countries who have covertly provided national-security assistance to the United States. That is why it is always a gimmee for apologists of the Mannings, Snowdens, and Clintons to minimize the...

To delegitimize Trump’s victory, the Left is setting the parameters of the controversy and the terms by which it will be discussed.

While candidate Trump was demanding that the enemy be named, and me-too Hillary was thus goaded into the occasional mention of “jihadists,” Obama tried to defend his refusal to invoke radical Islam. The defense was classic Obama. Part One was flat wrong: “There’s no religious rationale,” he maintained, that would justify” the “barbarism” in which terrorists engage — something that could only be right if we ignore scripture and adopt Obama’s eccentric notion of “religious rationale.” Part Two drew on Obama’s bottomless supply of strawmen: “Using the phrase ‘radical Islam,’” he lectured, will not make the terrorist threat “go away”...

The hypocrisy oozing from the peddling of this week’s narrative about Russian “meddling” in the U.S. presidential election is thick even by the sorry standards of modern American politics. I feel entitled to be amused, having maintained, through a decade of bipartisan idiocy, that Putin’s thug-ocracy is an enemy of the United States: from the Bush-administration howler that Russia is our “strategic partner,” through eight years of the Obama-Hillary “reset”; from Obama’s mumbling as Putin annexed Crimea and other swathes of Ukraine (after Obama, as a senator, joined with senior Republicans to disarm Ukraine), through Bush’s mumbling as Putin annexed...

Populism? No thanks. I am not now, nor will I ever be, a populist. Evidently, that separates me from a growing number of commentators, including some conservatives, wistfully engaged in Washington's latest fad: over-interpreting Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election. The normally sensible Mike Lee, Republican senator from Utah, took to our pages to plead the case of "principled populism" -- which is akin to calling for a sober Bacchanalia. Not surprisingly, Senator Lee's brief doesn't get very far before strangling in its own illogic, as odes to populism inevitably do. The "characteristic weakness" of populism, he tells...

Charlotte’s revulsion over Huma Abedin’s calculated “stand by your man” routine is surely right. Still, it is amazing, as we speculate about Ms. Abedin’s political future, that the elephant in the room goes unnoticed, or at least studiously unmentioned. Sorry to interrupt the Best Enabler of a Sociopath Award ceremony but, to recap, Ms. Abedin worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef ran the Rabita Trust, a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under American law. Ms. Abedin and Naseef overlapped at the Journal of...

For more than a year, PJ Media has been reporting on the corrupt press shop inside the Department of Justice. The unit is headed byPress Harpy Tracy Schmaler. We broke a story in July about this relationship after a PJ Media public records request revealed communications between Media Matters’ Matt Gertz and Schmaler about Fast and Furious. (More on the corrupt DOJ press shop: “ Tracy Schmaler’s (and Eric Holder’s) Trip to the Tropics ,” “ DOJ Leaks to TPM Muckraker Florida Will Be Sued Over Voter Rolls ,” “Tracy Schmaler – DOJ Shrieker in Chief.“) Tracy Schmaler Today,...

Please Tell Me These FBI/DOJ ‘Side Deals’ with Clinton E-Mail Suspects Didn’t Happen The ‘side deals’ are further evidence of a highly politicized Obama Department of Justice. By Andrew C. McCarthy— October 4, 2016 Just when you think it can’t get any worse . . . According to House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.), the immunity agreements struck by the Justice Department with Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, two top subjects of the FBI’s Clinton e-mail investigation, included “side agreements.” Pursuant to these side agreements, it was stipulated that (a) the FBI would not scrutinize any documents dated...

Let’s give Iran, a certified state sponsor of terrorism, billions in cash. What could go wrong? The Obama State Department is convinced that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and his regime’s cronies are financing terrorism. How come? Well, because they conduct business in cash. In fact, in its most recent annual report on state sponsors of terrorism, State frets “that 60 percent of all business transactions [in Syria] are conducted in cash and that nearly 80 percent of all Syrians do not use formal banking services.” This has created a “vast black market,” the components of which are exploited by “some...