Posts Tagged ‘Denis McDonough’

Unmasking the Unmaskers (Including Slow Joe)

Thursday, May 14th, 2020

Hey remember how Joe Biden swore up and down he wasn’t behind the Michael Flynn unmasking scandal? Well, guess what?

Former vice president Joe Biden appears on a declassified list of Obama administration officials who requested the unmasking of former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The list, obtained by CBS News, shows that Biden’s office made its request to see Flynn’s identity on January 12, 2017 — the same day that Washington Post columnist David Ignatius broke news of Flynn’s calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. While the NSA says it “cannot confirm” that those listed personally saw the information, the list also names former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, former CIA director John Brennan, and former FBI director James Comey.

Wow, it’s like they got the band back together!

Power in particular sought to obtain Flynn’s redacted identity at least seven times, including twice before Flynn’s phone call with Kislyak, despite swearing under oath she “didn’t recall” doing so, which only makes sense if she’s suffering from Biden-levels of cognitive decline.

Here’s the actual list in convenient Tweet form:

Other names on the list:

  • Obama chief of staff Denis McDonough
  • Deputy chief of mission Kelly Degnan (and Trump’s ambassador to Georgia…for now)
  • Director of Obama White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs Patrick Conlon
  • Principal deputy director of National Intelligence Stephanie O’Sullivan
  • Deputy director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Integration Michael Dempsey
  • Obama Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew
  • Acting assistant secretary of the Treasury Arthur “Danny” McGlynn
  • Acting deputy assistant of the Treasury Mike Neufeld
  • Deputy secretary of the Treasury Sarah Raskin
  • Undersecretary of the Treasury Nathan Sheets
  • Acting undersecretary of the Treasury Adam Szubin
  • NATO advisor Robert Bell
  • Defense adviser for Russia at NATO Lt. Col. Paul Geehreng
  • Deputy defense adviser for NATO James Hursh
  • Deputy chief of U.S. Mission at NATO Lee Litzenberger
  • Deputy secretary of Energy Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall
  • Permanent NATO representative Douglas Lute
  • Political officer at NATO Scott Parish
  • Political adviser at NATO Tamir Waser
  • Ambassador to Russia John Tefft
  • Ambassador to Turkey John Bass

    • Looks like it was easier to unmask General Flynn than it was to get tickets to Hamilton.

    Why so many people at Treasury for an ostensible national security matter? Why so many at NATO? Did they think Flynn was going to sell Putin defense plans (presumably after killing moose and squirrel)?

    First Biden said “I know nothing about those moves to investigate Michael Flynn.” Except that proved to be not true: “I thought you asked me about whether or not I had anything to do with him being prosecuted.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    Remember that we’ve known most of the details of the scandal for quite some time. Rep. Nunes laid it out in his memo in 2018.

    Speaking of Nunes, he’s talking about criminal indictments for Mueller’s team. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    Obamagate is real:

    Democrats and their allies, who like to pretend that President Obama’s only scandalous act was wearing a tan suit, are going spend the next few months gaslighting the public by focusing on the most feverish accusations against Obama. But the fact is that we already have more compelling evidence that the Obama administration engaged in misconduct than we ever did for opening the Russian-collusion investigation.

    It is not conspiracy-mongering to note that the investigation into Trump was predicated on an opposition-research document filled with fabulism and, most likely, Russian disinformation. We know the DOJ withheld contradictory evidence when it began spying on those in Trump’s orbit. We have proof that many of the relevant FISA-warrant applications — almost every one of them, actually — were based on “fabricated” evidence or riddled with errors. We know that members of the Obama administration, who had no genuine role in counterintelligence operations, repeatedly unmasked Trump’s allies. And we now know that, despite a dearth of evidence, the FBI railroaded Michael Flynn into a guilty plea so it could keep the investigation going.

    What’s more, the larger context only makes all of these facts more damning. By 2016, the Obama administration’s intelligence community had normalized domestic spying. Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, famously lied about snooping on American citizens to Congress. His CIA director, John Brennan, oversaw an agency that felt comfortable spying on the Senate, with at least five of his underlings breaking into congressional computer files. His attorney general, Eric Holder, invoked the Espionage Act to spy on a Fox News journalist, shopping his case to three judges until he found one who let him name the reporter as a co-conspirator. The Obama administration also spied on Associated Press reporters, which the news organization called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion.” And though it’s been long forgotten, Obama officials were caught monitoring the conversations of members of Congress who opposed the Iran nuclear deal.

    Want to guess who TeamBiden is spinning the revelation? Would you believe that it’s all because of…racism?

    Boom!

    In any case, it’s time for subpoenas and indictments to start flying…

    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Obama Scandals | No Comments »

    My Take On Foreign Policy’s Takedown of Obama’s Foreign Policy

    Monday, September 15th, 2014

    This piece in Foreign Policy has been making the rounds. It talks at length, in an inside-baseball manner, of how the Obama Administration’s feckless and incompetent behavior has damaged America’s interests around the world.

    A taste:

    The problem is that in seeking to sidestep the pitfalls that plagued Bush, Obama has inadvertently created his own. Yet unlike Bush, whose flaw-riddled first-term foreign policy was followed by important and not fully appreciated second-term course corrections, Obama seems steadfast in his resistance both to learning from his past errors and to managing his team so that future errors are prevented. It is hard to think of a recent president who has grown so little in office.

    That’s why many in the right wing of the blogsphere have been singing its praises. And indeed, many of the criticisms leveled are devastatingly on-target. However, I have a somewhat orthogonal take on the piece, and what it’s actually trying to do.

    Consider all of the foreign policy debacles either not covered by the piece at all, or else only mentioned in passing:

  • Benghazi
  • Or, for that matter, any of the embassy attacks
  • The failure to address the challenge presented by radical Islam (three mentions of terrorism, mainly critical of Bush’s handling, and one of the Islamic State)
  • The Iranian nuclear program
  • Gaza (and, in fact, Israel is only mentioned once in passing)
  • Egypt is mentioned only once in passing
  • Ukraine is only mentioned in passing.

    • Broadly speaking, two viewpoints run through the piece, each of which acts, in their own way, as exercises in blame-shifting:

  • An inside-Foggy Bottom view of the embarrassing amateur-hour actions of Obama appointees screwing everything up.
  • “It’s not Hillary’s fault!”

    • As an example of the latter, take this sentence:

    “Concentrating power in the White House increases the likelihood of groupthink, especially in second terms like this one, when many of the stronger and diverse voices in the administration have left and have not been replaced by equally strong and diverse successors.”

    Hear that, John Kerry? That’s the sound of Hillary shoving a shiv right between your ribs.

    The groundwork for most (if not all) of the foreign policy failures of the Obama Administration’s second term were laid in its first. Clinton’s emphasis on “soft power” over the military, the premature withdrawal from Iraq, the failure to obtain a status-of-forces agreement there, the counterproductive-to-disastrous regime change in Libya, the lack of any strategy for the “Arab Spring” (and subsequent failure to stem the entirely predictable turn toward radical Islamization several Arab Spring countries took), the failure to foresee a post-Mubarak Egypt, the asinine embrace of Morsi’s obviously despotic Muslim Brotherhood government, the obvious failure of the “reset” with Russia; all occurred or had their seeds planted when Hillary was Secretary of State, and all have contributed mightily to America’s global loss of prestige and respect.

    But the whitewashing of Hillary Clinton’s record is no surprise, given that the author, David Rothkopf, “joined the Clinton Administration in 1993 as Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade Policy and Development.”

    I’m also guessing that Susan Rice was among the sources for the piece, given that he follows criticism of her for calling the German Foreign Minister a “M@therf@cker” with the softball “It is a particularly frustrating Achilles’ heel for someone who is well known among her friends as having the capacity to be very warm, humorous, and engaging,” which just reeks of assuaging a source. (Really, has any serious policy profile of any high Republican administration official every used the phrase “very warm, humorous, and engaging”?)

    I also get the impression from this and other bits of Hillary apologia that she really, really has it in for former Deputy National Security Adviser and current White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough (he’s the guy that looks like Lurch in that “watch us kill Bin Laden” photo). Note that I’m not taking sides in this dispute; it’s entirely possible that both of them suck…

    The piece is worth reading for showing that even the long-time deep state apparatchiks at Foggy Bottom feel embarrassed at the Obama Administration’s gross foreign policy incompetence. But it also needs to be taken with several grains of salt as yet-another piece of battlespace preparation for Hillary 2016…

    Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch | No Comments »