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The CIA’s top officer in Kabul was exposed Saturday by the White House when his name was inadvertently included on a list provided to news organizations of senior U.S. officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit with U.S. troops. The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list that did not include the individual, who had been identified on the initial release as the “Chief of Station” in Kabul, a designation used by the CIA for its highest-ranking spy in a country. The disclosure marked a rare instance in which a CIA officer working overseas had his...

President Obama on Friday appointed longtime White House aide Kristie Canegallo as deputy chief of staff for policy implementation, to oversee issues that include the continuing rollout of the Affordable Care Act and better integration of technology in classrooms. The move, which comes three days before senior White House health-care adviser Phil Schiliro will step down, aims to institutionalize some of the changes chief of staff Denis McDonough made in the wake of the health-care law’s botched debut last fall. [....] Unlike many of Obama’s top advisers, who came to their jobs through politics, Canegallo started as a civilian Pentagon...

White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett pulled back Friday morning from comments she made suggesting that House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) had made a commitment to President Obama to take up immigration legislation this summer. Jarrett had told an investors conference in Las Vegas on Thursday that she believes that Boehner will allow a comprehensive immigration reform bill, or a package of bills, to come up for a vote after a series of GOP primaries this summer in order to avoid spoiling the chances of some Republican incumbents. Her comments echo the long-held beliefs of some observers of the...

House Speaker John Boehner’s staff says he has not made a commitment to the White House to move an overhaul of the immigration laws this year, pushing back against comments made this week by a senior advisor in the Obama administration made this week. Valerie Jarrett told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that she thinks there’s a window “this summer, between now and August, to get something done. “We have a commitment from Speaker Boehner, who’s very frustrated with his caucus,” Jarrett told the newspaper. Michael Steel, a spokesman for the Ohio Republican, said Boehner has not made a commitment to...

President Barack Obama's top adviser and confidant told a group of global elites on Thursday in Las Vegas, Nevada that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has made a commitment to the White House to try to pass amnesty legislation this year. After hailing the Senate's amnesty bill that the Congressional Budget Office determined would lower the wages of American workers, Valerie Jarrett, Obama's senior advisor, told attendees at the yearly invitation-only SkyBridge Alternatives Conference that Boehner would help the White House make a push get immigration reform enacted in the next three months. “I think we have a window this...

WASHINGTON — — When has a secretary of state been involved in so many disastrous, self-initiated negotiations? First, John Kerry convenes — against all advice and holding no cards — Geneva negotiations to resolve the Syria conflict and supposedly remove Bashar Assad from power. The talks collapse in acrimony and confusion. Kerry's response? A second Geneva conference that — surprise! — breaks up in acrimony and confusion. Then, even as Russian special forces are taking over Crimea, Kerry goes chasing after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov — first to Paris, then Rome, then London — offering a diplomatic "off-ramp." Lavrov...

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday that Israel’s announcement of 700 new apartments for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem precipitated the bitter impasse in peace negotiations last week between Israel and the Palestinians. While Mr. Kerry said both sides bore responsibility for “unhelpful” actions, he noted that the publication of tenders for housing units came four days after a deadline passed for Israel to release Palestinian prisoners and complicated Israel’s own deliberations over whether to extend the talks. “Poof, that was sort of the moment,” Mr. Kerry said in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Still,...

Rather than make bold decisions conducive to peace, the government continues to “give the US the finger” with regard to talks with the Palestinians, Meretz MK Zahava Gal-on charged on Tuesday, reacting to statements by Secretary of State John Kerry that ascribed much of the blame for the present impasse to Israel. Kerry’s statements “are further proof that the extreme rightist… coalition has no interests in reaching an agreement, but rather is dragging out the negotiations and endangering Israel’s existential interests,” she said. “Instead of making courageous decisions, this bad government continued to give the US the finger,” she added....

John Kerry Defends His Diplomatic Efforts: ‘I May Fail – I Don’t Care’ By Ali Weinberg Apr 8, 2014 4:03pm Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State John Kerry defiantly defended his diplomatic efforts, saying that while ambitious, they were better than doing nothing. While the purpose of Tuesday’s hearing was to pick through the State Department’s budget, it was Kerry’s record that came under scrutiny as his old colleagues on the committee accused him of taking on too many responsibilities with too few results. “I think you’re about to hit the trifecta,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.,...

A State Department spokeswoman expressed surprise Thursday to hear that a purported “fatwa” by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei prohibiting nuclear weapons, which President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry periodically cite, does not appear on a list of fatwas on Khamenei’s official website. “Oh, really?” Marie Harf said during a press briefing after a reporter brought this to her attention. “I will say, just in general, I’m not an expert on the fatwa process certainly, or on the supreme leader’s website,” she said. “But what I will say, and I think what people have said, is we...

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas did not announce his walkout from the negotiations with Israel or directly turn down the package of far-reaching Israeli concessions which US Secretary of State John Kerry assembled with Binyamin Netanyahu early Wednesday, April 1. He simply turned his back on the commitment he made ahead of the talks to refrain from unilateral applications to UN bodies while they were in progress. As soon as the US Secretary flew off to Brussels, he sent out applications for “the independent Palestinian state” to join 12 UN agencies as members. This was after the Palestinian leader upped his...

I've never liked the word diss—not as a verb, much less as a noun. But watching the Obama administration get the diss treatment the world over, week-in, week-out, I'm beginning to see its uses. Diss: On Sunday, Bloomberg reported that Hasan Rouhani named Hamid Aboutalebi to serve as the ambassador to the United Nations. Mr. Rouhani is the Iranian president the West keeps insisting is a "moderate," mounting evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Mr. Aboutalebi was one of the students who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. Here's the kicker: The State Department—the very institution whose diplomats were...

The United States has proposed freeing Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in a trade-off deal in which Israel would agree to proceed with the next round of prisoner releases, including Israeli Arab prisoners, and the Palestinian Authority would agreed to extend the current peace talks, Israel’s Army Radio reported Wednesday. It said the offer had been conveyed to Israel and the PA, but there was no official confirmation. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki was quoted telling journalists accompanying Secretary of State John Kerry to a meeting with PA President Mahmoud Abbas Wednesday morning that there were currently no plans to release...

The Obama administration on Wednesday vented its anger at the Israeli defense minister’s public criticism of the U.S. and his personal insults of Secretary of State John Kerry. In a new sign of tension between top officials of the two allies as Washington tries to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal and negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program, Kerry called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to protest recent remarks by Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon. Yaalon this week accused the Obama administration of being weak on Iran and questioned its commitment to Israel’s security. Previously, Yaalon has criticized Kerry personally for...

As the U.S. Senate took up a bill to provide financial aid to Ukraine, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, rose to object to an IMF bailout Majority Leader Harry Reid attached to the legislation. In the process he blasted Reid for repeatedly demonizing the billionaire Koch brothers - Reid tried to blame the Koch brothers for halting progress on the Ukraine bill. "I'm beginning to think [the Koch brothers] are a character almost out of Dr. Seuss in the majority leader's mind, they are the grinch who stole Christmas in his telling," Cruz said. Cruz accused Reid of "using his...

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry thinks it is a “mistake” for Israel to demand that the Palestinian Authority (PA) recognize it as a Jewish state in order to achieve peace. “I think it's a mistake for some people to be raising it again and again as the decider of their attitude towards the possibility of a state and peace, and we've obviously made that clear," Kerry told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on Thursday, when asked to clarify the official position of the Obama administration on the issue, according to the Breitbart website. He further said that the...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com - John Kerry’s Empty PromisesPosted By Ari Lieberman On March 6, 2014 @ 12:40 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 16 Comments Just days after his monomaniacal boss blindsided Israel with a scathing one-sided attack against the Jewish state, John Kerry assured a very skeptical AIPAC audience that he would not allow the West Bank to turn into another Gaza. Unfortunately, there is ample precedent to suggest that when it comes to Israel (or for that matter, Ukraine) international or U.S. assurances don’t amount to a hill of beans.In 1951, Egypt closed the Gulf of Eilat...

Schumer at AIPAC 2014NY Senator Charles Schumer railed Monday against the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, saying that the movement is a modern form of anti-Semitism. “It is very suspicious that those who boycott Israel don’t want to boycott anywhere else in the world,” Sen. Schumer told AIPAC. “I believe that those who call for boycotts of Israel without calling for boycotts of other neighboring nations are practicing, whether they know it or not, whether they admit it or not, a modern form of what we call anti-Semitism.” “The word that describes all of these acts is a very simple one:...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com - Obama’s Convoluted PrioritiesPosted By Ari Lieberman On March 3, 2014 @ 12:23 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 13 Comments As President Obama greets world crisis after crisis with confused vacillation and impotence, a recent Gallup poll unsurprisingly suggests that Americans no longer believe that their president commands respect from foreign leaders. And why should they? The President’s foreign policy has proved to be an exercise in defeatist isolationism, where tyrants are appeased and allies are thrown to the wolves.In Ukraine, a nation where democracy advocates risk losing to the forces of extremism and where...

VIDEO AT LINK On Fox News Channel’s “Special Report” on Tuesday, network senior political analyst Brit Hume concurred with a statement Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) had made earlier in the day about the failings of the President Barack Obama’s foreign policy under the direction of Secretary of State John Kerry. According to Hume, much of what the Obama administration had aimed to accomplish was reliant on Russia, which as of now has a relationship with the United States in disrepair.