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BEIRUT: The U.S. has omitted Iran and Hezbollah from its list of terror threats, according to an annual security assessment published by the Times of Israel Monday. The unclassified report, titled ‘Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community’ was presented to the U.S. Senate by James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence on February 26. The report has excluded Iran and Hezbollah from its list of terror threats to U.S. interests, after both had been included as threats in previous years. In a 2014 report the National Intelligence director said that Iran and Hezbollah continue to directly threaten the...

For years, many Republicans and conservatives have charged that President Barack Obama was shielding embarrassing intelligence and policy details about Iran in order to support the nuclear deal reached last year. With Donald Trump's upset victory, the party of Lincoln will have an opportunity to declassify and disclose this information. While no decisions have been made, two early picks to Trump's cabinet suggest this is going to happen. Let's start with retired general Michael Flynn, the next president's choice to be national security adviser. Flynn served for two years as Obama's director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to...

Thursday's cordial meeting between President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama was a reassuring ritual of democracy. But Obama was far from convincing when he told Trump "we are now going to do everything we can to help you succeed." There are some highly disparate ideas here about what constitutes success, both foreign and domestic. There are also big areas in which one might reasonably wonder if Obama and his team are in a quandary over the prospect of a Trump administration inheriting the internal records of the most transparent administration ever. Take, for instance, the Iran nuclear deal, Obama's...

Wednesday, January 12, 2011 INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING Strategy site to Obama: End alliance with Israel WASHINGTON — A newsletter-publisher said to have ties with the Obama administration has called on Washington to end its strategic alliance with Israel. George Friedman, publisher of Stratfor, has published a book that called on the Obama administration to reorder U.S. foreign policy. Friedman has argued that the key element of the proposal required the end of U.S. strategic ties with Israel and bolstering of cooperation with the Islamic world, particularly Iran and Pakistan. "The United States must quietly distance itself from Israel," Friedman says in...

Attorney General Loretta Lynch is declining to comply with an investigation by leading members of Congress about the Obama administration’s secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year, prompting accusations that Lynch has “pleaded the Fifth” Amendment to avoid incriminating herself over these payments, according to lawmakers and communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Who paid Bill Clinton's $2.5 million commission and $500k speaking fee for brokering the sale of 20% of America's uranium deposits to Russia? You are speaking about a really interesting deal that ended up giving Vladimir Putin and the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. ..."

Secretary of State John Kerry said he will meet with Chinese leaders next week for the annual U.S.-China Economic and Security Dialogue and then hold “a dinner at Mount Vernon” for them. Kerry will be hosting the Chinese at Mount Vernon, the Virginia estate of George Washington, less than three weeks after the Office of Personnel Management announced that the personnel files of some four million current and former federal employees had been hacked, reportedly by the Chinese. The secretary of State mentioned his upcoming meetings and dinner with the Chinese at Mount Vernon specifically in response to a question...

https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/788484460652167168/photo/1

Thursday Sept. 26, 2002; 5:14 p.m. EDT Illinois Dem: KKK Membership OK for Congress Rep. Jan Schakowski, D-Ill., said Thursday that Ku Klux Klan members should be allowed to serve in Congress as long as they had resigned from the domestic terror group and had publicly renounced its beliefs. Asked if she thought leading Senate Democrat Robert Byrd's past Klan membership should have disqualified him from serving in the Senate, Schakowski told nationally syndicated radio host Sean Hannity, "No, not if you've totally rejected it - my goodness." "I think (Byrd) would agree that participation in the KKK is pretty...

The US government already had to crack down on one Swiss bank, UBS, fining it $780 million earlier this year for illegally aiding American citizens in evading their taxes. Now, it’s Credit Suisse in the crosshairs for helping clients in Iran, Libya, Sudan, and other countries perform illegal transactions. The bank has since “accepted and acknowledged responsibility for its criminal conduct” and is now settling with New York City, New York State, and the federal government on fines totaling nearly $1 billion. According to the Wall Street Journal: “The men announced a $536 million settlement by Credit Suisse, one of...

An anti-Israel activist who served as an expert witness on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in a recent terrorism trial was hosted for a meeting with senior White House officials, according to visitor logs released by the Obama administration and media reports.Michael Sfard, an anti-Israel activist who has reportedly been paid by the PLO to serve as an expert witness in terrorism trials against it, met in December 2014 with a senior White House National Security Council (NSC) member for a meeting about the Middle East, according to the logs and reports.Sfard, a lawyer, serves as the legal...

Shahbandar: For Putin, the Cold War did not end; it has been merely re-branded Sometimes, as Ronald Reagan discovered, embracing escalation is the only way to step back from the brink Oubai Shahbandar is a former Department of Defense official, serving under President Bush and President Obama, and currently serves as a Strategic Communications Advisor to the Syrian Coalition. The opinions in this article belong to the author.

The State Department acknowledged Wednesday that someone in its public affairs bureau made a “deliberate” request that several minutes of tape be cut from the video of a 2013 press briefing in which a reporter asked if the administration had lied about secret talks with Iran. The embarrassing admission by State Department spokesman John Kirby came three weeks after another spokesperson insisted that a “glitch” had caused the gap, discovered only last month by the reporter whose questioning had mysteriously disappeared. “This wasn’t a technical glitch, this was a deliberate step to excise the video,” Kirby told reporters. Kirby said...

An email exchange between Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and John Anzalone of Anzalone Liszt Grove Research shows the former apparently condemning the Iran deal. In the email Anzalone shares a 2015 BuzzFeed article about the Iran nuclear deal in which Sen. Mark Kirk is quoted predicting that the agreement will lead to nuclear war in the Middle East. Anzalone emailed Podesta the link to the article along with Kirk’s quote: “This agreement condemns the next generation to cleaning up a nuclear war in the Persian Gulf… This is the greatest appeasement since Chamberlain gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler.” “Yup,” Podesta...

Obama just lost another one of his top advisers. His legislative affairs director has stepped down, creating challenges to passing the president's agenda in his final year in the White House, according to The Hill. Chief of Obama's legislative affairs operation, Katie Beirne Fallon is leaving after two years on the job. Fallon, a former aide to Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), was instrumental in helping Obama score victories in trade, budget and Iran nuclear deal agreements last year. Obama called Fallon a "close adviser" and a "good friend," in a statement on Friday. "Republicans and Democrats...

A former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the FBI says played a role in a 1996 terrorist attack that killed 19 U.S. servicemen, accompanied Iraq’s prime minister to the White House on Monday, attending an event at which President Obama trumpeted the end of the Iraq War. Hadi Farhan al-Amiri, transportation minister in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government, was part of the delegation that visited the White House to discuss Iraq’s future and Iran’s influence there, among other topics. -excerpt - Louis J. Freeh, who served as FBI director in the Clinton administration and the early months...

Key documents relating to the Obama administration’s secret negotiations with Iran, including a $1.7 billion cash payment, are being stored at a highly secure site on Capitol Hill, preventing the public and many in Congress from accessing them, according to multiple sources who described the situation to the Washington Free Beacon. The documents are not technically classified but are being kept in a “secure reading space” where the majority of congressional officials cannot access them. Those cleared are forced to relinquish their cellular devices and are barred from taking notes, undermining the ability of staffers to brief their lawmakers on...

A CNN poll comprised of 472 registered voters believes Gov. Mike Pence won last night’s vice presidential debate. A no-brainer, really. Sen. Tim Kaine was disrespectful, erratic and rehearsed compared to the calm, eloquent and poised Pence. What’s crazy though, is that the poll consisted of more Democrats than Republicans. 41% of people identified as Democrats, to 30% Republican. Think about that. From CNN: Interviews with 472 registered voters who watched the vice presidential debate conducted by telephone (landline and cell) by ORC International on October 4, 2016. The margin of sampling error for results based on the total sample...

Why did the Obama administration, according to top Iranian officials, sign a secret pact with Iran? The pact pledged to lift sanctions off of two financial banking institutions that would now be able to openly do business with Iran. Is it necessary to reiterate that Iran is the number one exporter of terror? They pay $25,000 to the family of many of the suicide bombers that seek to kill Israelis. They are also attempting to dramatically increase their own terror capacity through the development of deliverable nuclear payloads. The Iranians have also since revealed that these two banks were the...

The Wall Street Journal has a shocking report that adds fuel to the fire over the $1.7 billion in cash paid to the Iranians to get the hostages released. On the same day the cash payment arrived in Tehran, the U.S. secretly agreed to back a U.N. effort to lift sanctions on two Iranian banks accused of assisting Iran's ballistic missile program.