Andrew C Mccarthy Esq
180 ON RUSSIAGATE?
arab crypto coin corruption 2026
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AN --> MSNBC?
Apr. 11, 2026,
By Matt Gertz
Fox News programs that fixated on the international business interests of Hunter Biden, former President Joe Biden’s son, are utterly uninterested in the voluminous conflicts of interest between President Donald Trump and his family members and the Persian Gulf states affected by his strategically disastrous war of choice against Iran.
The president, his eldest sons, Don Jr. and Eric, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are enmeshed in a sprawling set of business deals in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar. Those deals often involve members of the royal families of those states or the entities they control.
But since just before the beginning of the year, as Trump’s saber-rattling led to U.S. military deployments and became the war launched by American and Israeli forces on Feb. 28, through April 8, Fox’s evening programs that air from 5 p.m. to midnight ET have referenced such Trump family conflicts of interest only twice — both of which were passing mentions, and neither of which came during a discussion of the Iran conflict — according to a Media Matters review of the Nexis transcript database.
No substantive evidence ever emerged that Joe Biden profited from Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.
Many of the network’s highest-rated hosts carried out a yearslong obsession with what Fox host Sean Hannity described as the “Biden Crime Family,” mentioning Biden’s son at least 13,440 times over a period of less than 16 months of Biden’s presidency. Their feverish conspiracy theory postulated that Hunter Biden had served as a “bag man” for his father, soaking up money funneled from foreign entities and kicking a share back to Joe Biden, who would then use his elected office to help his son’s business partners.
No substantive evidence ever emerged that Joe Biden profited from Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. The dealings in question largely occurred when Joe Biden was a private citizen, and the primary instance the conspiracy theorists have cited as evidence of him taking state action on behalf of one of his son’s clients — that he, as vice president, pushed for the removal of Ukraine’s top prosecutor in order to benefit one of his son’s clients — was manifestly bogus.
But Trump and his family members appear to have adopted influence-dealing on a dramatically larger scale than the Biden family was ever accused of. And the Trumps’ sprawling set of business deals with Gulf state royals and the sovereign wealth funds they control cannot be disentangled from the president’s decision-making in launching and continuing a war of choice against Iran.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE reportedly urged Trump to launch the war against Iran, and both states reportedly pressed the U.S. to protect them by escalating the conflict “until Iran is decisively defeated.” Qatar, meanwhile, traditionally serves as the regional intermediary between the Iranian regime and Western governments, and has pushed for negotiations.
Play
Former MAGA allies push back on Trump as Iran war fractures the rightMarch 25, 2026 / 10:27
Those states aren’t just U.S. allies whose views must be weighed by American leaders — their leaders have spent the past few years enriching the president’s family.
In perhaps the most noxious of the myriad entanglements, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan — an Abu Dhabi prince known as the “spy sheikh” for his leadership of the UAE’s intelligence service — secretly agreed to buy a huge stake in a crypto company partially owned by the president and his family, paying $500 million in what The Wall Street Journal described as a “hugely profitable” deal for its founders.
The dealing is so egregious that it even raised eyebrows in Trump-friendly circles. “You know what the difference is between the Biden family business and the Trump family business?” Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy asked in a February piece for National Review. “You’d have to add two digits to the sum of Biden abuses of power, foreign entanglements, and corruption alleged in the report to get near what Trump has raked in just from the UAE.”
But that’s just one of numerous business deals in the Gulf involving the president’s family.
The network’s evening programs have mentioned the Trump family’s myriad Gulf state conflicts just twice since late last year.
The Trump Organization, which the president owns and Eric and Don Jr. oversee, is partnering with a developer who has ties to the Saudi government on a series of Trump-branded real estate projects in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Oman — including a $7 billion development deal financed by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, whose board of directors is headed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Kushner’s private equity fund received a $2 billion investment from the Saudi PIF — reportedly forced through by bin Salman over the board’s objection — as well as $200 million from the UAE.
The Qatari royal family gave Trump a $400 million “super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet” to serve as Air Force One.
The Associated Press reports that Powerus, a Florida-based drone manufacturer partly owned by Don Jr. and Eric, is reportedly “trying to sell” defensive drone interceptors “to Gulf countries while they are under attack by Iran and dependent on the U.S. military led by their father.” (Powerus co-founder Brett Velicovich told the AP that the company “is doing many demos across the Middle East right now” but did not name the specific countries.)
In December 2024, Eric said of potential conflicts of interest, “I have no interaction with Washington, D.C. I want no interaction with Washington, D.C.” Don Jr. denied trading on his father’s name in a May 2025 statement to The New York Times, saying, “It’s laughable that the left-wing media thinks that I should lock myself in a padded room while my father is president and cease doing what I’ve been doing for over 25 years to earn a living and provide for my five children.” In an October 2025 CBS News interview alongside Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff, Kushner brushed off ethical concerns, saying, “What people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world.” And in November 2025, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied the president and his family are compromised by business interests, insisting it is “frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit.”
For Fox News, their word is apparently sufficient. The network’s evening programs have mentioned the Trump family’s myriad Gulf state conflicts just twice since late last year.
In the first instance, Jessica Tarlov, the Democratic co-host of the panel show “The Five,” raised the issue of “Donald Trump and his family, their corruption” while discussing the president’s poor polling performance during a Feb. 10 segment about the midterm elections.
“This story [Fox contributor] Andy McCarthy is doing a series for the National Review on it,” she said. “All the crypto money that they’re taking in from the [United Arab Emirates] and others is a really big deal.”
Play
Fox News pushing Trump’s Iran war agenda, while support for the war plummetsMarch 25, 2026 / 10:27
The only other Fox News mention of the Trump family’s conflicts of interest in the Gulf that our study found came during a segment on Trump’s planned presidential library-hotel that aired on the network’s flagship, ostensibly straight news broadcast, “Special Report.”
“Guests will be welcomed into the lobby by Air Force One, presumably the Boeing 747 gifted by Qatar,” Fox correspondent Aishah Hasnie said during the March 31 news package.
When an interviewer asked “Special Report” anchor Bret Baier last year if the news media should provide the business dealings of Trump’s sons with the same scrutiny they gave those of Hunter Biden, he replied, “100%.”
“If you’re going to play it one way, you’ve got to play it another way and you’ve got to cover all of those things,” he said.
But that’s not how things have played out on Baier’s network, even with the alleged corruption far more direct, the sums vastly larger and the potential consequences far more dire.
Matt Gertz
Matt Gertz is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive research center that monitors the U.S. media. His work focuses on the relationship between Fox News and the Republican Party, media ethics and news coverage of politics and elections.
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08/22/25 MMA
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WOW DEFLECTION ON EPSTEIN IMPLOSION OF MAGA
mma
Trump’s latest attempt to defuse the Epstein revolt: Point supporters at common enemies
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 07/21/25
President Donald Trump is seeking to reunify allies enraged by his administration’s repudiation of MAGA claims about late convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein by offering up spurious attacks on common and familiar enemies: the media — in this case Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal — and former President Barack Obama.
Trump brought together an ideologically diverse coalition and a fractured right-wing media ecosystem during his 2024 campaign based largely on their shared hatred for Democrats, liberal institutions like the press, and the left. His administration’s actions have at times sparked criticism from different factions over the handling of issues like the Russia-Ukraine war, tariffs, U.S. strikes on Iran,, and, most of all, disclosures in the Epstein case.
The president spent last week failing to tamp down discussion of the Epstein story that seemed to be fracturing the MAGA movement. He tried claiming that his political enemies had “written” the “Epstein Files,” argued that the Epstein case is “pretty boring stuff,” and even lashed out at supporters who talk about it as “weaklings” and “stupid people.” But while the propagandists at Fox News were willing to play ball, Trump’s statements backfired elsewhere, leaving many right-wing media figures and the base alike in a state of revolt.
On Thursday, however, The Wall Street Journal reported that a “bawdy” letter bearing Trump’s signature had been included in an album created for Epstein’s 50th birthday (before allegations of his sexual abuse of girls became publicly known). The document, according to the Journal, had been reviewed by Justice Department officials who handled Epstein’s case.
The Journal report could have focused the right’s attention on Trump’s voluminous ties to Epstein. But Trump redirected them at a familiar target: journalists. responded that night by calling the letter “FAKE,” denouncing the paper, and claiming that he would sue. The following day, he followed through with a defamation lawsuit seeking $10 billion in damages from the two authors of the article; the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co.; parent company News Corp and that company’s CEO; and Murdoch himself.
Trump’s lawsuit is both unprecedented and consistent with Trump’s authoritarian treatment of a free press whose criticism he seeks to curtail through corrupt means. The message it sends is straightforward: If you publish reporting that displeases the president — even if, like Murdoch, your support was crucial to his political ascension — he may try to ruin you, so don’t try it.
While the Journal’s corporate cousins at Fox News mostly avoided the story on Friday, the network’s competitors throughout the fractured marketplace of right-wing media responded by sharpening their knives and attacking the paper. Laura Loomer deemed the Journal story “totally fake,” Charlie Kirk accused the Journal of a “terrible drive-by,” and Benny Johnson claimed that the real “scandal is in who wrote the story,” referencing a baroque conspiracy theory that was circulating on the right at the time.
The same day Trump’s lawyers filed their suit, former Fox contributor and current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard offered even more grist for the right-wing media mill. In a story served up to Fox as an exclusive, Gabbard claimed to have uncovered documents proving “a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government” which aimed “to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup.” She suggested that figures including Obama “must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” and said she was referring the documents to the Justice Department. Leaving nothing to subtext, Trump subsequently posted to Truth Social an AI video featuring Obama beng arrested and imprisoned.
Those documents, however, demonstrate nothing other than Gabbard’s own ignorance and/or malice. They show that Obama received an intelligence report that Russia had not hacked election systems to change vote totals in the 2016 election — which is consistent with what the Obama administration said publicly at the time — then asked for and subsequently received another intelligence report detailing other actions taken by the Russian government in an effort to influence the election. That effort, according to the intelligence community, the Justice Department, and a Senate committee helmed at the time by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, included hacking and releasing Democratic emails.
Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy, in a withering piece at National Review, described Gabbard’s argument as a “frivolous” attempt to further Trump’s “foolish stance” that Russia had not tried to influence the 2016 election via “overwrought and misleading” language and “thundering claptrap.”
But her attacks served to reignite years of conspiracy-mongering about the Russia “witch hunt,” and thus were credibly regurgitated elsewhere on the right, including by Fox’s stars, with some echoing Gabbard’s demagogic language about purported “treason.” Trump, meanwhile, repeatedly posted Fox clips and articles from right-wing media hyping the purported scandal.
Much of MAGA media seems eager to target the Journal and Obama on Trump’s behalf. But it remains to be seen whether those influencers — or their audience — will be willing to allow the Epstein story to fade away altogether.
That said, Trump’s best hope of keeping his supporters happy may very well be increasing the scale and tempo of his authoritarian attacks — and that means there will be more to come in the months ahead.
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July 21, 2025, edition of The Benny Show, streamed on YouTube
BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): I mean, you're simply left to assume that all of it's been a lie and that they're 100% authentic, and I think most people in this audience already believe that.
But then if that's the case, then there's a lot of questions that are gonna be asked of Hillary Clinton. Now there's reports that Hillary Clinton and her team were aggressively pushing Barack Obama to launch Russiagate. We'll wait to see those documents — perhaps that's what Tulsi Gabbard is telling us is going to be dropping soon. We're not sure. But Tulsi Gabbard is saying not only are there major whistleblowers from inside the IC, but also that there's a lot more to come. And, you know, at what point do you begin to pull the threads back to Hillary Clinton? Could she potentially be culpable in any of this?
JULIE KELLY (HOST): I doubt it. I mean, you know, let's cut to the chase. No one's gonna indict Hillary Clinton. No one's gonna indict Barack Obama. So we can, I think, disabuse ourselves of that vision or —
JOHNSON: Really? You don't think Obama either?
KELLY: No. No. No. No. No. No. And, you know, of course, you got the issue with Barack Obama. What would you charge him with? We have the immunity ruling from the Supreme Court, really, a year ago that carves out only specific instances where a president in office could be held criminally liable. And I'm sure that Barack Obama, if anything came down, would be smart enough and his lawyers would figure that out. So no.
But look. I really wanna see the henchmen like Lisa Monaco — and I know I keep going back to her. But look, she also ran the Biden DOJ. So she was the one that really ran the first two invest — the two investigations into the president for classified documents and for January 6. She, I'm sure, worked with special counsel Jack Smith, was involved in his appointment. People from the DOJ leaving the Department of Justice, going to the special counsel's office — Chuck Grassley just, last week, I believe, the last several days, releasing emails showing how Tom Windom, another prosecutor who went to the DCUS attorney's office, which was in constant contact with the DOJ, I'm told, specifically Lisa Monaco's office, how he was pushing top-down the FBI to open this January 6 investigation into the president, which of course they did.
So I'm looking for a lot more records related to that as well. And so, those are the people who I think are the most likely to be held responsible, criminally liable, and the ones who should be.
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May 14, 2025, edition of National Review's The McCarthy Report
RICH LOWRY: Crypto. What's the news?
ANDY MCCARTHY: So, well, the news last night, is that an obscure company, that has a Chinese subsidiary. It's a company that, trades on, NASDAQ, and it, it has a Chinese subsidiary. It last year did such booming business that it has had zero revenue.
It only has eight employees. Again, we know this because the company trades on NASDAQ. It turned out that they raised $300,000,000 from an unidentified entity that's set up in The Virgin Islands, which is notorious for, people, because its laws allow for shell companies to be easily set up. The Virgin Islands is notorious for people who want to be anonymous in conducting financial transactions. So we have somebody who we don't know who is giving $300,000,000, bought $300,000,000 of the stock of this nondescript company with the Chinese subsidiary that doesn't apparently have any business, but somehow trades on NASDAQ.
They have gotten $300,000,000 from whoever the source is, and they've announced that they're gonna buy $300,000,000 worth of Trump's meme coin that we talked about last week, the Trump coin. This is the coin that Trump announced, three days before he was being inaugurated that his company or company that he controls, was basically going to market. And the Trump entities are enriched the more that the coin is worth, and they also make money because whether people who buy the meme coin meme coin scheme is basically a pump and dump scheme. You know, people buy a meme coin is not like as I described last week, a meme coin is not like stable coin or other cryptocurrency. It doesn't even pretend to be currency.
It's basically people are buying a memento that's associated with, you know, a person, a joke, an internet influence operation, what have you. But it's a memento of something. Trump's meme coin, the image that they put out when they began to market it three days before he was inaugurated was Trump with his fist in the air going fight, fight, fight, kind of, invoking the memory of the assassination attempt, in Butler. They began selling it. It was, I think that it was selling for 18 cents a token when they first put it out.
At one point, it went up to $75 a token. And there were they marketed, like, a thousand of these tokens. So on paper, Trump was a very rich person and may actually have, have already made over a billion dollars on this based on sales of the coin and also the way they structured it every time a buyer has a transaction in in, this meme coin, the Trump people make money. They make a transaction fee on every transfer of the meme coin. So they've made about $350,000,000 on the, on the transaction fees and their holding of the coins that they have is inflated.
If the, if the price of the coins goes up and every time there's a big purchase of the coins, obviously the value goes up. So now we have this transaction where somebody is basically giving Trump three hundred million dollars. And I think the most alarming thing about the meme coin is, again, we have all these laws against government officials taking foreign money. We have the bribery law in the constitution. We have the Emoluments Clause, but we also have, you know, campaign finance laws that make it illegal for foreigners to give American campaigns or related activities like, inauguration funds, foreigners can't contribute to them.
So something like the meme coin, which Trump sets up as a private business of his and is obviously using the presidency as leverage to increase the value of it. And because crypto, a lot of the transactions can be fairly anonymous transactions, what the people who are investigating this are finding is that the money and it's now it's been billions of dollars, but the money that's pouring into these ventures is from overseas. A lot of it comes from China. A lot of it comes from Singapore.
A lot of it comes from places in the Middle East. A lot of it comes from other places in Asia. So it's a way for foreigners to pay Trump a lot of money. And some of them have been pretty open about the fact that they're not only big buyers of this meme coin. Trump is now, the other the other meme coin thing that's gone on for the last couple of weeks is they were worried that the price of meme coin, the market in meme coin, the Trump meme coin was going to collapse because after it surged at the beginning, it's gone down.
And even though a lot of people made a lot of money, most investors have lost money. The last thing I saw this week said that the losses were probably over $3,000,000,000, but a lot of people who got in early, as is typical of a pump and dump scheme, a lot of people who got in early and then sold when the, when the value surged made a lot of money. And again, the Trump's make a lot of money because whether investors win or lose, they make the transaction fee, but they don't want they don't want the thing to collapse because they're still holding about 800,000 of these coins. They only marketed 200,000, and the value of what they're holding depends on what the market is. So what they did to try to prop up the market was have a contest where the top I think it was 220 purchasers of the Trump meme coin would be invited to a big gala dinner at Trump's Virginia golf club.
LOWRY: Yeah.
MCCARTHY: And one of the big prizes, if you were at the, like, the really high rung of people who were purchases, was you're gonna get a tour of the White House. So, I mean, it couldn't be more blatant that, that they're using.
LOWRY: [INAUDIBLE]
MCCARTHY: Yeah. Right. So, they're trying to prop up the price. And in the meantime, a lot of these people have gone public because now they've had this contest and they were trying to win the contest. Right?
So, you know, the Times has a bunch of these people who they've interviewed. And they said, yeah, I bought, like, you know, a million dollars worth of the mean coin to get into the into the contest because I'm hoping to discuss, I'm hoping to meet president Trump at the gala and talk to him about, you know, conditions in Mexico and the tariffs. And I wanna talk to him about crypto policy. Of course, they're trying to buy influence. I mean, it couldn't be more obvious that that's what they're doing.
But the alarming thing here is you have all these foreign I mean, even if the even if they weren't foreign, it would be very disturbing to have somebody who was president leveraging the power of the presidency to get people to buy stuff from him, which is obviously making him much richer. Trump's net worth, according to Forbes, this week is $5,400,000,000 between, you know, what they did to stand up, this Trump media company, the Trump media and technology group that owns, Truth Social. And what they've done with this cryptocurrency stuff, Trump's net worth has doubled in the last year or so. And that's, you know, that's when, Tish James had him on the ropes and it looked for a second like he was gonna lose everything, right?
Which is probably in part why he's so adamant to strike while the iron is hot. But this is very disturbing. There's a lot of foreign money coming into these, into the family coffers.
LOWRY: Is there any precedent for this sort of action? I would they only be Joe Biden and and his his family business? Or have we ever seen anything like this?
MCCARTHY: I don't I don't think so. I mean, I think as I said in the first column I wrote about the cryptocurrency stuff, I think the analogs here would be something like the Biden family business or the Clinton Foundation.
LOWRY: Right.
MCCARTHY: You know, the Clintons set up this foundation in large part so that foreign people could pay them a lot of money and not have to worry about the campaign finance laws.
LOWRY: Pay a lot of money, and you go to the conferences, and you spend time with former president, future presidents, I believe. .
MCCARTHY: Right. Right. And, it all looks like global good. Right? Global do-gooding.
LOWRY: It's will just be done in office while in office.
MCCARTHY: Yes. Right. That's the difference is when you were paying into the Clinton Foundation, you were trying to buy influence with very influential buy access to very influential people. And there was always a chance that Hillary could become president again. Right?
But they weren't in office. And with Biden, as scummy as that whole thing was, they actually tried to shut it down and mainly did shut it down in 2019 because he was running for president.
LOWRY: Right.
MCCARTHY: And you could tell, by the way, that Biden, you know, implausibly, how many times did he say, I don't know anything about it. That's Hunter's stuff. I don't ask him about it. I don't know anything about it. I know nothing about it.
So even though they were making what what for them was a lot of money, and they were clearly selling Biden's political influence, they at least had enough sense to say, this has nothing to do with the presidency. I'm not cashing in on my power. You know, they were trying to erase the, to the extent that there was a a a trail of clues that that was what they were doing. They were trying to, to wipe that slate clean. With Trump, he's very much right out in the open, and he's leveraging the actual power of the presidency, which is why the money is so astronomical.
I mean, look, the Biden stuff, the the House Committee trace $27,000,000 into the Biden family coffers, that's a rounding error compared to the money that we're talking about here. Yeah. And it's not surprising that that's true because there's nothing like the power of the presidency. You cannot you can obviously understand why if people think they can turn it to their advantage, that would be something, it would be worth it to them to pay a lot of money for.
LOWRY: Get pardoned. Investigations get dropped. You know? You're you're, It's happening. Some obscure question foreign policy question settled in in your favor or your pay master's favor, etcetera.
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is he worried about loss of rule of law of that trump gop will LOOK bad if they do?!
mma
April 21, 2025 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom
DANA PERINO (CO-ANCHOR): Can I ask you though, so the White House was emphatic. They said again yesterday, he is never coming back. But when you say he's not in custody, is he free to walk around, he's free to go?
ANDY MCCARTHY (LEGAL CONTRIBUTOR): We don't know. You know, what we don't know, Dana, is was this whole thing with the Senator Van Hollen last week, was that staged? You know did they let him out for a few hours and have a minder there and once Van Hollen was gone, they put him back in the prison? Or is he free to walk the streets? We don't know.
PERINO: Okay, Tom Homan also, I'm not going to play the sound because, just for time, I just want to ask you this one last thing. He says they stand by the fact that they did the right thing here. What you're suggesting is if they want an off ramp, it exists in the law that they could find it.
MCCARTHY: It always has, Dana. They don't want off ramps. What I'm worried about is they actually want to use this as a demonstration that the court can't control them and they don't have to honor due process. That's the worrisome thing about this.
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gop civil war?
fox News analyst lays into Trump for how badly he betrayed the Constitution
February 12, 2021
Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy did not mince words when he lambasted former President Donald Trump's "indelibly stained" presidency due to the poor behavior he exhibited during the final days of his time in office.
When McCarthy appeared for a podcast interview with Mediaite's Aidan McLaughlin, he discussed a number of Trump's controversies including his election fraud claims and the Capitol insurrection that opened the door for his second impeachment trial. McCarty, also a columnist at the National Review, admitted that he could not of any American president that behaved as poorly as Trump has.
"I can't think of any other president, if you (don't) just take January 6 by itself, but this whole continuum from November 3rd up until he left office, that's as bad as anything I'm aware of in American history from an American president," said McCarthy.
He also weighed in on the second impeachment trial as he noted discussed the strategy needed to prove Trump's incitement. To prove incitement in a regular criminal trial, you'd have to show that there were unambiguous calls to violence that were imminent and probable," McCarthy explained.
He went on to discuss the most "indefensible" aspect of Trump's reaction to the Capitol riots. McCarthy said, "The most indefensible thing about this episode is the hours during which the siege was going on when former President Trump didn't respond to it."
"As commander in chief of the armed forces, he had an absolute obligation to take action to repel an attack on the seat of government," he said, adding, "And what the reporting at least shows, and I don't have any reason to think the proof will come out any differently, is he was basically sitting on his hands — at best."
When asked if he believes Trump's presidency is "indelibly stained," McCarty said, "The easy answer to that question is yes," McCarthy said. "And I don't want to make it more complicated than that because in the end, it's really not."
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andrew mcc BS
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/the-roger-stone-sentencing-fiasco/
no lnx
no lnx
The Roger Stone Sentencing Fiasco
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
February 12, 2020
Some Justice Department personnel handled it questionably, but Trump’s reaction was worse.
The first thing to grasp about the Roger Stone sentencing fiasco is that Stone, even accepting the worst plausible gloss on his crimes, is a 67-year-old nonviolent first offender. If the criminal-justice “reform” fad were authentic, and not a stratagem of social-justice warriors who have taken Washington’s surfeit of useful idiots for a ride, then we could all agree that the original seven-to-nine-year sentence advocated by prosecutors was too draconian — even if it was, as we shall see, a faithful application of the federal sentencing guidelines as written.
ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
NRPLUS
But no. Like criminal-justice “reform,” theStone prosecution is more politics than law enforcement. It was the Mueller probe’s last gasp at pretending there might be something to the Russia-collusion narrative – notwithstanding that, when the “gee, it sure feels like there could be some collusion here” indictment was filed, over a year and a half after special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed, it had long been manifest that there was no Trump–Russia conspiracy.
It reads like a longer, more woke, and even more socialist version of Venezuela’s.
So, the Left has a quandary here: Do they hate Trump more than they love sentencing “reform”? We could have predicted the decision to go with hating Trump, and thus fomenting outrage over DOJ’s retraction of its original sentencing recommendation of about nine years’ imprisonment, now slashed to a far more reasonable range of four years or less. To be fair, though, Trump critics could not have been expected to resist the combination of DOJ missteps and Trump Twitter taunts that mark Stone’s sentencing, the combination that has managed to turn Mueller’s maulers into media martyrs.
Some background: In a ridiculously overblown, overcharged prosecution, Mueller slammed the ineffable Stone with seven felony counts of obstructing Congress’s Russia investigation. One of these involved tampering with a witness, left-wing radio host Randy Credico (through whom Stone sought a communications channel with WikiLeaks honcho Julian Assange).
At a certain point, Credico let it be known that he intended to cooperate with investigators. A ballistic Stone, when not uttering lunatic references to Watergate and Frank Pentangeli (the Mafioso character goaded into suicide when a plot to take out the Don fails in Godfather II), warned the “stoolie” “rat” Credico to “prepare to die” and vowed to steal his pet dog. Even in context, these seem to be puerile ravings, not real threats. (Stone added that his lawyers were anxious to “rip [Credico] to shreds,” so any murder and dognapping was apparently going to await cross-examination.) And though Stone is patently guilty of witness tampering, Credico himself told the court that he did not take Stone’s threats seriously.
Stone being the sort of Einstein who commits his obstructions in writing (the Credico contacts were mostly text messages), the jury convicted him in nothing flat. That meant DOJ would give the court its take on how the sentencing guidelines applied to the case, as it does with every convicted defendant.
The guidelines tend to be harsh if they are faithfully interpreted, but they are not binding on judges. Since the role of prosecutors is to seek justice, which often is not the maximum sentence, the best practice is for DOJ to provide a neutral explanation of how the guidelines should be calculated — the applicable enhancements and reductions. If the resulting sentencing range seems out of proportion with the offense, DOJ may suggest adjustments that raise or lower the suggested range without doing damage to the guidelines framework and the overarching purposes served by sentencing. Arguments for leniency are always made by defense counsel, and often by the U.S. Probation Department, which also prepares a sentencing recommendation for the court.
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Trump’s Wasn’t the Only Dereliction on Display During the January 6 Hearings
Steve Bannon Convicted, of Course: What to Watch for Next]
In Stone’s case, the guidelines worked a severe result. In tampering cases, a guidelines enhancement calls for a drastic increase in the sentence if the defendant threatened the witness with physical injury. This drove Stone’s “offense level” from 21 to 29 on the guidelines grid, so even though he is a first offender (offense history “Category I” in guidelines-speak), his recommended sentence zoomed to 90 to 108 months — instead of 37 to 46 months, as it would have been at offense level 21 (i.e., without the threats).
With Mueller’s shop closed down, the Stone prosecution was run out of the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia. But it was still being overseen by two Mueller staffers, Aaron S. J. Zelinsky (on loan from the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland, where he had worked for Rod Rosenstein, who, as Trump’s deputy attorney general, later appointed Mueller), and Adam C. Jed (an appellate lawyer from the Obama Justice Department who first came to public attention in 2013, arguing that the ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional). Also assigned to the case were Jonathan Kravis, a former associate White House counsel to Obama, and Michael Mirando, an experienced assistant U.S. attorney in the D.C. office.
This team of prosecutors filed a sentencing memorandum on Monday, laying out the guidelines and advising Judge Amy Berman Jackson that they called for a prison sentence of about seven to nine years (i.e., the offense-level guidelines range of 90 to 108 months). Like the indictment itself, the memo is gross overkill.
As the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross notes, the prosecutors tied Stone to “foreign election interference,” breathlessly framed as the “most deadly adversary of republican government,” even though he was never charged with any such crime — underscoring yet again that the deadliest adversary of republican government is actually domestic — viz., the politicized use of executive police powers. Far from offering any theory in mitigation of the 90-to-108-months range, the prosecutors pooh-poohed Credico’s perception that Stone’s threats were not serious, factitiously insisting that the guidelines enhancement is triggered by the threat, not whether the target is actually intimidated. Plus, prosecutors maintained, Stone’s crimes were exacerbated by his flouting of Judge Berman Jackson’s gag orders during the prosecution.
All that said, the prosecutors’ submission was an accurate (if extreme and unyielding) rendition of federal sentencing law. The enhancement that inflates Stone’s sentencing range does literally apply — even if he is not the kind of violent criminal that the guidelines commissioners had in mind when they wrote it. Prosecutors are not required to argue for clemency, though they should do so when the circumstances call for it. The Justice Department’s default position in criminal cases is that the guidelines should be applied as written, and that it is up to the court to decide whether to follow them.
While Stone awaited sentence, the prosecutors were supervised, at least nominally, by Jessie Liu, the U.S. attorney for D.C. I say “nominally” because the Trump Justice Department has always been leery about being seen as interfering in Mueller-based prosecutions. Moreover, the D.C. office was in transition while court submissions pertaining to Stone’s sentencing were being prepared.
In December 2019, President Trump announced his nomination of Liu to become the Treasury Department’s undersecretary overseeing financial sanctions on terrorists. Liucontinued running the U.S. attorney’s office, albeit with one foot out the door, until the end of January. With her Treasury confirmation hearing scheduled for February 13 (i.e., tomorrow), Attorney General Bill Barr appointed one of his top advisers, Timothy Shea (a well-regarded longtime prosecutor, litigator, and Capitol Hill staffer), to become acting U.S. attorney for D.C. on January 30. That was eleven days before the Stone team filed its sentencing submission.
How much participation Shea had in the recommendation is unclear. The New York Times reports that both he and Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen opined that the seven-to-nine-year sentencing recommendation was too severe. Yet, it does not appear that they put their foot down and instructed the Stone prosecutors to ameliorate it before the government’s submission was filed on Monday.
As is his wont, the president went bonkers on Twitter upon learning of the recommendation, calling it “horrible and very unfair” and a major “miscarriage of justice” because “the real crimes are on the other side” — i.e., the Russia-probe investigators [AKA DURHAM FAIL]— yet “nothing happens to them.” While the Justice Department was obviously aware of the president’s tweet, as well as press reporting about the harshness of the prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation, the DOJ and the White House have had no communications about the case, according to both the president and a spokeswoman for the attorney general.
Nevertheless, the DOJ made it known that the sentencing memo would be rescinded and a new one filed. That announcement prompted the recusals of all four prosecutors, some of whom are quitting the DOJ entirely and some apparently just stepping aside from the Stone case.
Late Tuesday, the DOJ filed a revised sentencing memo, which does not recommend a specific sentence but strongly suggests that a term calculated without the eight-point enhancement — i.e., between 37 and 46 months’ imprisonment — would be just. The new memo concedes that the prosecutors’ calculation in the original memo was “arguably” correct, but contends that it would be unreasonable under the circumstances. On that score, the memo relies on (a) Credico’s dismissal of the threat (though it acknowledges that this is not dispositive); (b) the fact that a sentence driven by the guidelines enhancement would be wildly out of proportion with prison terms imposed in cases similar to Stone’s; (c) Stone’s being a first-offender with no organized-crime or gang connectionsand thus not typical of the offenders the enhancement is meant to cover; and (d) Stone’s advanced age and failing health.
This is an entirely reasonable recommendation, even if the process of arriving at it has been a train wreck.
The Justice Department correctly observes that the sentence to be imposed is entirely up to the court. The DOJ’s recommendations are non-binding and frequently ignored by judges. Judge Berman Jackson has been thoroughly informed about what the non-binding guidelines say, as well as the cases for and against applying the enhancement.
Furthermore, let’s imagine that, instead of orchestrating a fiasco, DOJ had efficiently managed any internal disputes (which are not uncommon) and had filed a single memo recommending a 37-to-46-month sentence — a memo that explained both the enhancement for threatening witnesses and why applying it would be unreasonable under the circumstances. Does anyone doubt that such a recommendation would nevertheless have been panned as excessive by the president?
For now, while Trump has taken to attacking both the resigning prosecutors and Judge Berman Jackson on Twitter, it appears that former U.S. attorney Liu is taking the fall. Within hours of the prosecutors’ trumpeting their departures in grand Sally Yates style, the White House announced that the president had pulled Liu’s appointment to the Treasury Department position — even though her confirmation hearing was just two days away, and Barr had lavished praise on her upon appointing Shea as her replacement.
Liu certainly had a tumultuous tenure. Besides the thankless task of inheriting the Mueller cases against Stone and former national-security adviser Michael Flynn (the implosion of which is a story for another day), her office foolishly pursued a threadbare Mueller-generated prosecution of Greg Craig for false statements based on lobbying for Ukraine. Craig, former White House counsel to President Obama, was speedily acquitted by a jury last year. Meanwhile, there was also a mini-revolt on the Senate Judiciary Committee a few months back when the president floated the idea of elevating Liu to the No. 3 leadership slot at the DOJ — though she was vigorously defended by AG Barr, and suspicions that she lacked conservative bona fides appear overwrought (the fact that Liu may be pro-choice hardly means she would not enforce laws regulating abortion; and a claim that, 15 years ago, she opposed Justice Samuel Alito’s appointment to the Supreme Court appears to be false).
I would not suggest that Liu and others at the DOJ distinguished themselves in the Stone sentencing debacle. But at this point, the main fault lies with the president.
Yes, the Mueller probe was specious. But for his connection to Trump, Stone would never have been pursued in a collusion fever dream that Mueller’s prosecutors knew was bogus when they charged him. Yet his crimes, while exaggerated, were real. He was convicted by a jury and, under federal law, that presumptively warrants incarceration, though he could be spared by the judge (whom the president has picked a strange time to antagonize). If the president thinks that Stone and Flynn (among others) have been given a raw deal, the Constitution empowers him to pardon them, or at least commute their sentences.
If President Trump is afraid, in an election year, to take the political hit that a pardon for Stone would entail, that is understandable. But then he should bite his tongue and click out of Twitter. The Justice Department’s job is to process cases, including Mueller cases, pursuant to law. If the president wants to make those cases disappear, he has to do it himself and be accountable. His provocative running commentary only ensures that the DOJ will be accused of kowtowing to him. It also guarantees that, if the ongoing criminal probe of the Russiagate investigation eventually yields any indictments, they will be assailed as political persecutions rather than good-faith law enforcement.
NEXT ARTICLE
Understanding Why Religious Conservatives Would Vote for Trump
Andrew C. McCarthy
ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute,an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy
BS BLURB (actually oddly no blurb/endorsement?] but bought w/ countdown to Socialism
by Devin Nunes:{
}:
The real collusion:{ in the 2016 election was not between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It was between the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration.
The media–Democrat “collusion narrative,” which paints Donald Trump as cat’s paw of Russia, is a studiously crafted illusion.
Despite Clinton’s commanding lead in the polls, hyper-partisan intelligence officials decided they needed an “insurance policy” against a Trump presidency. Thus was born the collusion narrative, built on an anonymously sourced “dossier,” secretly underwritten by the Clinton campaign and compiled by a former British spy. Though acknowledged to be “salacious and unverified” at the FBI’s highest level, the dossier was used to build a counterintelligence investigation against Trump’s campaign.
Miraculously, Trump won anyway. But his political opponents refused to accept the voters’ decision. Their collusion narrative was now peddled relentlessly by political operatives, intelligence agents, Justice Department officials, and media ideologues―the vanguard of the “Trump Resistance.” Through secret surveillance, high-level intelligence leaking, and tireless news coverage, the public was led to believe that Trump conspired with Russia to steal the election.
Not one to sit passively through an onslaught, President Trump fought back in his tumultuous way. Matters came to a head when he fired his FBI director, who had given explosive House testimony suggesting the president was a criminal suspect, despite privately assuring Trump otherwise. The resulting firestorm of partisan protest cowed the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel, whose seemingly limitless investigation bedeviled the administration for two years.
Yet as months passed, concrete evidence of collusion failed to materialize. Was the collusion narrative an elaborate fraud? And if so, choreographed by whom? Against media–Democrat caterwauling, a doughty group of lawmakers forced a shift in the spotlight from Trump to his investigators and accusers. This has exposed the depth of politicization within American law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. It is now clear that the institutions on which our nation depends for objective policing and clear-eyed analysis injected themselves scandalously into the divisive politics of the 2016 election.
They failed to forge a new Clinton administration. Will they succeed in bringing down President Trump?}:
escalator/echo:
https://www.gq.com/story/spygate-conspiracy-theory-explained
escalator
no many lnx
Spygate: How Right-Wing Media Creates a Conspiracy Theory Out of Thin Air
BY JAY WILLIS
This is how conservative media transformed a small news item into a full-blown conspiracy theory that the president (apparently) believes to be true.
The plot goes like this: During the summer of 2016, on the clandestine orders of then-president Barack Obama, the FBI and CIA hatched an ambitious plan to topple the Trump campaign from the inside. In a scandal of unprecedented scope, Democratic politicians commandeered American counterintelligence resources to spy on their primary political opponent and boost Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the election. The Russia investigation that has dominated headlines for nearly two years is, in fact, a desperate smokescreen conjured up by terrified Deep State actors to conceal evidence of their own wrongdoing, and to frame the president for heinous crimes he didn't commit.
On May 8, The Washington Post reported on the White House's decision to back the Justice Department's withholding of information from House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, on the grounds that disclosure would expose the identity of "a U.S. citizen who has provided information to the FBI and CIA." The authors added, though, that the individual had been a source of information used by the special counsel's office—and that it was unclear whether Trump knew this "key fact" when his administration chose to side with law enforcement.
It didn't take long for him to find out. Almost immediately, the right-wing-media ecosystem began laundering and repackaging this news item, weaving its constituent elements together with Trumpian talking points until a full-blown conspiracy theory worthy of the president's tweets emerged on the other side. This metamorphosis is what would happen if a word cloud sourced from a Trump rally were used in a giant game of telephone—but one in which the gibberish end result were then broadcast as news to hundreds of millions of recipients.
How did this happen?
May 10
Two days after the initial report, citing "the Washington Post's unnamed law-enforcement leakers," The Wall Street Journal publishes an analysis by conservative commentator Kim Strassel. "[W]e might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign." Such a development, she writes, "would amount to spying, and it is hugely disconcerting." Strassel continues (all emphasis mine):
[W]hen precisely was this human source operating? Because if it was prior to that infamous Papadopoulos tip, then the FBI isn’t being straight. It would mean the bureau was spying on the Trump campaign prior to that moment. And that in turn would mean that the FBI had been spurred to act on the basis of something other than a junior campaign aide’s loose lips.
This is at once cautious and bold, introducing the salacious vocabulary of espionage to a detail about an intelligence source—but only, she clarifies, if the allegations are true. Strassel does not offer a reason for entertaining her hypothetical, other than her characterization of the players' accounts of the investigation as "suspiciously vague."She is, in the classic style of well-compensated public intellectuals filling up column inches, just asking questions.
That night, other journalists are happy to offer answers. On Sean Hannity's Fox News show, journalist Sara Carter, citing Strassel,tells listeners of “concern that the FBI actually had a spy within the Trump campaign.” Hannity is dumbfounded: “What? What?” he splutters. "Yes," replies Carter. Blogs like Gateway Pundit kick off the breathless hyperbole category. "Now we know why the Deep State has been working so hard to take down President Trump and the republic," said the post, linking to and block-quoting Strassel. "OBAMA DEEP STATE HAD A SPY INSIDE THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN!"
May 11
The baton is passed to Fox News, which syndicates Strassel's article and changes the headline from “About that FBI ‘source’” to “Did the FBI place a mole inside the 2016 Trump campaign?” On Fox & Friends, the president's morning program of choice, Pete Hegseth weighs in, hesitantly at first. "Did the FBI have a spy in the Trump campaign? Just asking the question. There’s an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about it." Ainsley Earhardt quotes at length from the column before positing that it means the FBI and DOJ had someone "paid to go and spy on President Trump."
On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh picks up the thread, encouraging the conflation of the FBI and President Obama. Strassel's article mentions Obama only once, and only in passing. But this is Rush Limbaugh, not a major newspaper; he can say things like this without fear of repercussions.
When I say “the FBI,” I mean the Obama administration. They infiltrated the Trump campaign with a spy, and while they had that spy implanted, they were unmasking and leaking and obtaining FISA spying warrants and conducting criminal investigations of Trump advisers. This is a big deal...For our purposes, folks, the important thing is that the Obama administration infiltrated the Trump campaign with a spy.
The buzz grows louder online. "Did the FBI have a spy in the Trump campaign?" asks Andrew McCarthy, praising Strassel's column as "essential reporting," in a National Review article that published early the next morning.Right-wing blog ZeroHedge makes an affirmative statement—“WSJ: The FBI Hid a Mole in the Trump Campaign”—out of his question. Also citing Strassel, Tucker Carlson refers to a "government spy" and a "mole" sent by "the Obama administration." His guest, NRATV personality Dan Bongino, reveals that he believes there to have been more than one spy, referring to "reporting." He does not elaborate on-air.
May 14
The week begins with lawmakers joining the fray. On Fox & Friends, GOP congressman Ron DeSantis calls for a follow-up investigation into the matter. "I know that we’re actively trying to get the underlying documents that would tell us: Did they spy on the Trump campaign or not?” he asks, implicitly treating the premises of that query as if they were beyond dispute. To Lou Dobbs on Fox Business Network, Matt Gaetz expresses unease with "reports" he'd heard "about potential human intelligence being collected on a rival presidential campaign."
These men are egged on by, among others, Rush Limbaugh,who asserts he knows the identity of the spy that the FBI "put in the Trump campaign," and Hannity, whose radio guest David Limbaugh—Rush's younger brother—opines that "an official policy inserting a confidential source into a presidential campaign" would be "unprecedented" and "worse than Watergate." Like DeSantis, he includes a soft qualifier, though: "If it happened! We have to get to the bottom of it."
May 15
Nunes appears on the Fox & Friends set, hinting that the campaign might have been "set up" by the FBI. “I believe they never should have opened a counterintelligence investigation into a political party,” he explains. And although he at first avoids using the word "spy," his hosts are happy to put it in his mouth. Steve Doocy suggests that Nunes's narrative implies that Trump was "framed," while Earhardt adds that "it makes it sound like there was a spy."
Some 12 hours later, Hannity is again agape at the "possibility of an FBI mole that was inside the Trump campaign." He runs snippets of the "stunning" Nunes interview, scarcely able to believe his ears. "The powerful tools of intelligence used to spy on an opposition party candidate, and those powerful tools used against Americans?" he muses. "No, that can't happen here."
May 16
On Laura Ingraham's show, Rudy Giuliani at once broaches the subject of the FBI "possibly placing a spy in the Trump campaign" while admitting that he doesn't know if the gossip is true. The next morning, on Fox & Friends, he’ll again dip his toes in the water before retreating to solid ground. "That would be the biggest scandal in the history of this town—at least, involving law enforcement," Giuliani warns.
He's intrigued by the possibility, though. "Maybe two spies!" he wonders aloud.
Meanwhile, outside the MAGAsphere, a New York Times article helps breathe new life into the conspiracy theory. The authors of that report—an account of the 2016 law-enforcement inquiry into the Trump campaign—note that “at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos.” Referring to the preceding week of innuendo, they characterize this detail as a “politically contentious point, with Mr. Trump’s allies questioning whether the F.B.I. was spying on the Trump campaign or trying to entrap campaign officials.”
As noted by USA Today's Brad Heath, FBI guidelines allow agents to use informants, among many other methods of information-gathering, when assessing whether a matter warrants a full criminal investigation. The Bureau's partial reliance on a "source" here isn't especially remarkable.
Furthermore, given their knowledge of the Kremlin's election-meddling efforts, it isn't difficult to understand why the intelligence community might have an interest in a campaign's ties to Russia, regardless of the candidate's political affiliation. Marco Rubio—a man not known for being fond of Hillary Clinton—said as much after reviewing the underlying evidence along with the rest of the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which found no secret political motivation for opening the inquiry. “There was a growing body of evidence that a foreign government was attempting to interfere in both the process and the debate surrounding our elections, and their job is to investigate counterintelligence,” he reasoned in comments cited by the Times. “That’s what they did.”
It doesn't matter. One little opening is all it takes. Breitbart, mentioning the May 8 Post story and Strassel's follow-up, proclaims that the Times report "confirmed" that the FBI ran a "spy operation on the Trump campaign that involved government informants, secret subpoenas, and possible wiretaps." (The article itself mentions only the FISA warrant on Page, but the headline'splural form—"wiretaps"—does its job of making things sound especially ominous.)
May 17
Other right-wing outlets aggregating the Timesreport draw the same conclusions Breitbart did. “FBI officials admit they spied on the Trump campaign,” blares The Federalist, which justifies its assertion with a helpful explanatory aside.
This paragraph [in the Times report] is noteworthy for the way it describes spying on the campaign—“at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos”—before suggesting that might not be spying. The definition of spying is to secretly collect information, so it’s not really in dispute whether a government informant fits the bill.”
Note that the write-up does not actually suggest that the FBI "planted" anyone in the campaign. But by setting out an expansive definition of "spying," articles like this one allow other publications—ones that might not so carefully define their terms—to use the word in that more specific (and more nefarious) context.
It is the National Review's coverage—assisted by cable news—that finally allows this story to reach the hallways of the Executive Residence."With the blessing of the Obama White House," writes Andrew McCarthy, again attributing the actions of law-enforcement officials to affirmative decisions of the then-president, the FBI "took the powers that enable our government to spy on foreign adversaries and used them to spy on Americans—Americans who just happened to be their political adversaries."He continues:
Obviously, Russia was trying to meddle in the election, mainly through cyber-espionage—hacking. There would, then, have been nothing inappropriate about the FBI’s opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Russia. Indeed, it would have been irresponsible not to do so. That’s what counterintelligence powers are for.
But opening up a counterintelligence investigation against Russia is not the same thing as opening up a counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign.
This is the thrust of his argument, and it is nonsensical. McCarthy seems to assume that counterintelligence investigations "against Russia" and counterintelligence investigations "against the Trump campaign" must be mutually exclusive propositions, and that under no circumstances could a Russia-related intelligence probe look at the activities of Russia-related Trump officials. (His analysis is aided by a gross oversimplification of a key provision of FISA.) It would be "irresponsible," he urges, not to investigate what Russia may have been doing. But by virtue of their affiliation with a politician, everyone on the campaign should be insulated from any attendant scrutiny.
Before his column publishes, McCarthy hops on Fox & Friends to promote it. “There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign,” he says in a strange moment of confidence and timidity. (In a fun, incestuous right-wing-media aside, while listing McCarthy's credentials, F&F co-host Brian Kilmeade adds, "Hopefully a Fox News contributor soon.") Not long afterward, Trump takes to Twitter to express his outrage, shouting out McCarthy by name for a job well done.
Donald J. Trump
?
@realDonaldTrump
Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI “SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT.” Andrew McCarthy says, “There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign.” If so, this is bigger than Watergate!
...
Law-enforcement pushback begins in earnest.Sources tell CNN that, no, the source was not placed within the Trump campaign. The Times provides even more details about the timeline, affirming that the informant spoke to campaign members only after the FBI learned of their dubious contacts with Russia. "No evidence has emerged," it reiterates, "that the informant acted improperly when the F.B.I. asked for help in gathering information on the former campaign advisers, or that agents veered from the F.B.I.’s investigative guidelines and began a politically motivated inquiry, which would be illegal."
It's too late. Because Donald Trump is president of the United States, the content of his tweets becomes breaking news regardless of its accuracy. "Trump: Justice Department planted spy in 2016 campaign," declares an AP headline that runs, among other places, in The Washington Post and U.S. News & World Report. The body text notes that Trump's "own lawyer" has said that the allegation "might not be true."But for readers inclined to believe what Donald Trump says, or for those who only saw the headline as they scrolled through their social feeds, it might as well have been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
Epilogue: May 18–20
The next day, the president tweets again, and again, with grateful acknowledgements for the hard work put in by Fox News personalities Lou Dobbs, David Asman, and Gregg Jarrett.
==
---
http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/05/05/fox-s-kilmeade-i-let-myself-down-not-following-when-trump-brought-jfk-conspiracy-fox-friends/210256
lakof direct causation problem again?
Chris Christie’s Debunked Clinton Claim About Boko Haram Comes Straight From Right-Wing Media
Research
July 20, 2016 1:05 PM EDT ››› CYDNEY HARGIS
During his speech at the Republican National Convention, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie echoed the right-wing media myth that as secretary of state, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton personally “fought” to keep Nigerian group Boko Haram off the terror watch list, which resulted in the abduction of hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls -- a claim media fact-checkers debunked.
Christie Claimed Clinton “Fought” To Keep Boko Haram Off Terrorism Watch List In Convention Speech
Christie: Because Clinton “Fought For Two Years To Keep An Al Qaeda Affiliate Off The Terrorist Watch List, ... These Terrorists Abducted Hundreds Of Innocent Young Girls.” During his speech at the July 19 Republican National Convention, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie claimed that “In Nigeria, [presumptive Democratic presidential nominee] Hillary Clinton amazingly fought for two years to keep an Al-Qaeda affiliate off the terrorist watch list,” referring to the extremist group Boko Haram. Christie argued that “because of this reckless action … terrorists abducted hundreds of innocent young girls.” From the July 19 speech:
Since the Justice Department refuses to allow you to render a verdict, let's present the case now, on the facts, against Hillary Clinton. She was America's chief diplomat. Look around at the violence and danger in our world today every region of the world has been infected with her flawed judgment.
[...]
In Nigeria, Hillary Clinton amazingly fought for two years to keep an Al-Qaeda affiliate off the terrorist watch list.
What happened because of this reckless action by the candidate who is the self proclaimed champion of women around the world? These terrorists abducted hundreds of innocent young girls two years ago.
These schoolgirls are still missing today.
What was the solution from the Obama/Clinton team? A hashtag campaign! Hillary Clinton, as an apologist for an Al-Qaeda affiliate in Nigeria resulting in the capture of innocent young women guilty or not guilty? She fights for the wrong people. [NJ.com, 7/19/16]
Right-Wing Media Previously Hyped This False Claim
Fox & Friends: Clinton “Made Sure” Boko Haram Was “Not Placed On The Terror List,” Which “Perhaps Could Have Saved These Girls Earlier." Fox hosts Steve Doocy and Elisabeth Hasselbeck blamed Clinton for refusing to designate Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), claiming that if she had done so, it "could have saved these girls earlier." From the May 8, 2014, edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends:
STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): This is really something. We've with been telling you over the last couple of days about this terrorist group called Boko Haram out in Africa, how they've killed an entire village. They have since, in the last couple of weeks, they have kidnapped 300 young girls. They're going to sell them into slavery.
BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): And prior to that, boys.
DOOCY: They burned a bunch of boys. They burned down a village. It's all bad. And now, word is, because we did not place them on the terror list, of officially known terrorist groups, it's going to be harder to go after them. And who exactly made sure that they were not placed on the terror list? Hillary Clinton.
[...]
ELISABETH HASSELBECK (CO-HOST): And the rights of women and young girls, those were pillars of what she wanted to accomplish in her time at the State Department. But right here, what she didn't actually tweet, and perhaps because it was over 140 characters, was the fact that her own State Department, as Steve just mentioned, did not place Boko Haram on the list of foreign terrorist organizations, which would have forbidden any sort of authority to increase securities to them, increase assistance to Nigerian security forces in that area, and perhaps could have saved these girls earlier. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 5/8/14]
National Review: "The Excuses Now Being Offered In Explanation Of Clinton's Dereliction Are Specious." National Review's Andrew McCarthy claimed that Clinton “protected” Boko Haram as secretary of state and that “the excuses now being offered in explanation of Clinton’s dereliction are specious" and "ridiculous." McCarthy wrote that Clinton was "appeasing Islamists." From the May 8, 2014, article:
The excuses now being offered in explanation of Clinton’s dereliction are specious. As Rogin explains, Clinton’s State Department claimed that Boko Haram was merely a local group with parochial grievances that was not a threat to the United States. Have a look, though, at the State Department’s list, here. Several of the listed groups are waging local terrorist campaigns that do not threaten our country—the Basque ETA, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Real Irish Republican Army, etc. A significant reason for having the list is to promote international cooperation against terrorism and discourage its use against anyone anywhere. The fact that a terrorist organization may have only local grievances and may not directly imperil the U.S. has never been thought a reason to exclude it from the list.
Fox News has further reported another rationale of Clinton apologists: Hillary did not want to raise Boko Haram’s profile and assist its recruiting which, they reason, would be the effect of designation by the Great Satan. That is ridiculous. The main point of having the list, and the sanctions that accompany a terrorist designation, is to weaken the organization by depriving it of assets and material support. The logic of what Clinton supporters are claiming is that U.S. counterterrorism law — much of which was put in place by the administration of President Bill Clinton — does more harm than good. Does anyone think they really believe that?
What happened here is obvious, although the commentariat is loath to connect the dots. Boko Haram is an Islamic-supremacist organization. Mrs. Clinton, like the Obama administration more broadly, believes that appeasing Islamists--avoiding actions that might give them offense, slamming Americans who provoke them--promotes peace and stability. [National Review, 5/8/14]
Hot Air: "The Responsibility For This Failure Rests Directly With Hillary Clinton." The conservative blog Hot Air wrote that “the responsibility for this failure” to designate Boko Haram a terrorist organization was Clinton’s and that the decision enabled the group to commit acts of terrorism, including the mass kidnappings. Hot Air also brushed aside Clinton's support of U.S. intervention in the Nigerian kidnappings, writing, "Now Hillary wants to fight Boko Haram with hashtags. Too bad she didn't fight them with real resources when she had the chance." From the May 8, 2014, post:
Boko Haram has wreaked havoc in Nigeria and portions of surrounding nations since 2009, when the Nigerian government tried to crack down on their arms-gathering operations. The group of Islamist terrorists had been known for much of that time to have ties to al-Qaeda, both ideological and tactical. Hundreds, perhaps thousands died in terrorist attacks from 2009 to 2013, many of them targeted for their Christianity. And yet, not until November 2013 did the US finally list Boko Haram as a terrorist group.
Why? We should ask Hillary Clinton
[...]
It’s true that not every local grievance requires a State Department designation, but Boko Haram allied itself with al-Qaeda and provided it tactical support, at least. That should have prompted State to act, especially with the consensus within the national-security communities demanding it — repeatedly. Instead, Hillary Clinton refused to act in order to keep up a pretense that “al-Qaeda was on the run.”
Now Hillary wants to fight Boko Haram with hashtags. Too bad she didn’t fight them with real resources when she had the chance. [Hot Air, 5/8/14]
Newt Gingrich: State Department Under Clinton “Wouldn’t Even List [Boko Haram] As A Terrorist Group.” Former Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich blamed Clinton for not listing Boko Haram a terrorist organization in 2015 speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit, even though. “last year Boko Haram killed more people than Ebola.” From CSPAN’s broadcast of the Iowa Freedom Summit:
NEWT GINGRICH: You see people all around the planet, this is a global war, and yet they insist on talking about it by geography. So, we’re going to really focus on Northern Syria. Well, there are thousands of jihadists who have come to Northern Syria from all around the world, over a thousands from France alone. Over 600 from Great Britain. over 100 from the United States. This is a global war. In Nigeria, Boko Haram has 10,000 fighters, and last year Boko Haram killed more people than Ebola. But the State Department, for years under Secretary Clinton, wouldn’t even list them as a terrorist group, even though their initial base camp was called Afghanistan, in honor of the Taliban. Now, you would think somewhere in here, people would get a hint. [CSPAN, Iowa Freedom Summit, 1/24/15]
Fact-Checkers Point Out Christie’s Claim Has Long Been Debunked
Politico: Clinton “Was Heeding The Advice Of Numerous Regional Experts” And There Is Doubt About “Whether The Designation Could Have Prevented” The Abduction Of School Girls. Politico fact-checked Christie’s claims about Clinton’s foreign policy record as secretary of state, noting that Clinton “was heeding the advice of numerous regional experts who argued in an open letter that” designating Boko Haram a terrorist group “could elevate the group's prestige” and that “It is not clear that the group ever pledged formal allegiance to al Qaeda, and the two groups were sometimes described as rivals.” Politico also explained that Boko Haram was designated a terrorist group a year before the Nigerian schoolgirls were abducted, “raising the question of whether the designation could have prevented their abduction.” From the July 20 Politico report:
Christie said that Clinton "fought" to keep the radical Islamist group Boko Haram off an official State Department terrorism watch list before she left government in 2012. In 2014, the group abducted hundreds of young women and girls who are still missing. Clinton, Christie concluded in perhaps his most explosive allegation, was "an apologist for an al Qaeda affiliate in Nigeria resulting in the capture of hundreds of young women."
It's true that Clinton opposed designating Boko Haram a Foreign Terrorist Organization, an act that imposes financial sanctions and other legal penalties on named groups and their supporters. While that may be hard to understand—the group already had a clear record of violence and radicalism — she was heeding the advice of numerous regional experts who argued in an open letter that doing so could elevate the group's prestige. The Nigerian government also opposed the designation.
John Kerry did name Boko Haram a terrorist organization after succeeding Clinton in 2013. But the girls were kidnapped the following year, raising the question of whether the designation could have prevented their abduction.
Finally, Christie described Boko Haram as "al Qaeda affiliate." It is not clear that the group ever pledged formal allegiance to al Qaeda, and the two groups were sometimes described as rivals. (Boko Haram publicly pledged allegiance to ISIS last year.) [Politico, 7/20/16]
CNN: “No Evidence” Clinton Personally “‘Fought’” To Keep Boko Haram Off Terror List. CNN’s Reality Check Team gave Christie’s claim a “false” rating, noting the lack of evidence that Clinton “was personally responsible for the delay in the designation.” CNN also pointed out the “delay” did not result in the kidnapping of Nigerian school girls, which occurred after Clinton left the State Department. From the July 20 fact-check (emphasis original):
Boko Haram, an affiliate of al Qaeda, was never designated a foreign terrorist organization during Clinton's leadership of the State Department. The department eventually labeled the group a terrorist organization while under Kerry in December 2013.
[...]
The kidnapping of the 200 Nigerian school girls occurred in April 2014.
While Clinton was head of the State Department at the time, Christie says she "fought" to keep them off the list and there is no evidence that she herself was personally responsible for the delay in the designation. Our verdict: false. [CNN.com, 7/20/16]
Wash. Post: “No Evidence That Clinton Played A Role Or ‘Fought’ To Keep Boko Haram Off The List” Or “That A Terrorist Designation Any Sooner Would Have Prevented” The Mass Kidnappings. Washington Post fact-checkers Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee wrote that “Christie grossly simplifie[d] a complex debate at the State Department -- which actually did not involve Clinton personally.” The Fact Checker blog noted that State Department officials conceded they could have moved faster with Boko Haram’s designation, but that “there is no evidence that Clinton played a role” and that there is also “no evidence” that the terrorist designation “any sooner would have prevented the kidnapping of the girls.” The fact check also pointed out that the hashtag campaign “came after Clinton had left the State Department.” From the July 19 article:
Christie grossly simplifies a complex debate at the State Department — which actually did not involve Clinton personally.
In 2014, the Fact Checker closely examined this issue, concluding that claims that Clinton was responsible for the decision betrays a misunderstanding of how the State Department works. Yes, Clinton was secretary of state in 2012. Designations of foreign terrorist groups are ultimately issued by the secretary of state. But the decision on how to handle the group was resolved before it ever reached her level, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.
State Department officials in 2012 vigorously debated how to treat Boko Haram, with the Bureau of Counterterrorism, headed then by Assistant Secretary Daniel Benjamin, leaning toward designation, and the Africa bureau, headed then by Assistant Secretary Johnnie Carson, urging caution. One big issue was that Nigeria was a government close to the United States — and Nigeria was adamantly opposed to the designation, arguing it risked entrenching Boko Haram. Nigerian officials also argued that a terrorist designation — which halts any flow of funds to the entity or people associated with it — would make it difficult for humanitarian aid to continue in the region where Boko Haram operated.
There was another, complicating issue: U.S. officials thought the Nigerian army had engaged in brutal human rights abuses in its efforts to fight Boko Haram. So a compromise was reached internally: The administration would name three leaders of Boko Haram as specially designated global terrorists while holding out the possibly of a broader designation of the entire group as a means of improving the behavior of Nigerian forces battling Boko Haram.
In any case, in 2013, the State Department formally designated Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organization. Officials later conceded that, in retrospect, they could have moved a bit faster, but there is no evidence that Clinton played a role or “fought” to keep Boko Haram off the list. The internal debate did not rise to her level; it was handled by the deputy secretary of state.
There is no evidence that a terrorist designation any sooner would have prevented the kidnapping of the girls. As for the hashtag campaign, that came after Clinton had left the State Department. [The Washington Post, 7/19/16]
ABC: Clinton “Publicly … Denounced [Boko Haram].” An ABC News fact check rebutted Christie’s claim that Clinton personally “fought” to keep Boko Haram off the terrorist organization list and “responded to its mass kidnapping with a ‘hashtag strategy,’” noting that she publicly denounced the group and that “she was not Secretary of State when the kidnapping happened.” From the July 19 fact check (emphasis original):
Claim: Hillary Clinton is an “apologist” for Boko Haram. She and Obama responded to its mass kidnapping with a “hashtag campaign.”
Rating: False. It is based on a true fact, that Clinton’s State Department declined to list Boko Haram as a terrorist group out of concern that doing so would raise the group’s profile. But publicly Clinton has denounced the group, and she was not Secretary of State when the kidnapping happened.
[...]
Background: In 2011, Hillary Clinton’s State Dept. declined to list Boko Haram, the terrorist group that would abduct more than 200 schoolgirls from Chibok in 2014, as a foreign terrorist organization, against the recommendations of DOJ, FBI, CIA, and lawmakers, Josh Rogin reported for The Daily Beast in 2014.
That move, however, appears to have been based on a disagreement over whether listing Boko Haram would elevate its status. A State Department official said as much to Rogin in the same story. The assertion that she is an “apologist” appears to be a rhetorical exaggeration criticizing that decision. But publicly, Clinton has denounced Boko Haram. [ABC News, 7/20/16]
==
wiki
Andrew C. McCarthy III is a columnist for National Review. He served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.[1][2][3] A Republican, he is most notable for leading the 1995 terrorism prosecution againstSheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others. The defendants were convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombingand planning a series of attacks against New York City landmarks.[4] He also contributed to the prosecutions of terrorists who bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He resigned from the Justice Department in 2003.
Contents
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- :{2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Positions:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{3:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Opinions:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{4:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Publications:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{5:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{References:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{6:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{External links:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
Education
McCarthy is a graduate of Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx in New York City. He was also educated at Columbia College and New York Law School, and has served as a professor at the latter and at Fordham University Law School.[5]
Positions
He is currently a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, serving as the director of the FDD's Center for Law and Counterterrorism. He has served as an attorney for Rudy Giuliani, and is also a conservative opinion columnist who writes for National Review and Commentary.
Opinions
He has defended the practice of waterboarding as not necessarily being torture, and as necessary in some situations to prosecute the War on Terror[6][7] whilst admitting that "waterboarding is close enough to torture that reasonable minds can differ on whether it is torture".[8]
During the 2008 presidential election campaign, McCarthy wrote a number of posts on the National Review's Corner blogstating that he thought that Democratic Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, was not serious about protecting USnational security against threats from radical Islam and elsewhere, and that Obama had a number of troubling ties and associations with leftist radicals.
In an opinion posted on the blog 'the Corner' on October 22, 2008,[9] McCarthy wrote "I believe that the issue of Obama's personal radicalism, including his collaboration with radical, America-hating Leftists, should have been disqualifying."
In May 2009, McCarthy provided details of a letter declining an invitation from Attorney General Eric Holder for a round-table meeting with President Barack Obama concerning the status of people detained in the War on Terror. McCarthy noted his dissension with the administration in their policies regarding the detainees.[10] On December 5, 2009 he came out publicly against prosecuting Islamic terrorists in civil courts rather than military tribunals, saying "A war is a war. A war is not a crime, and you don’t bring your enemies to a courthouse."[11]
McCarthy has recently spoken out against the War in Afghanistan, saying that the War benefits the Afghans while hurting American interests, and that the United States should be concerned solely with its interests.
Coupled with his national security conservatism, McCarthy also espouses strong fiscal conservative views on entitlement spending, and favors the abolition of Medicare, which he calls a fraud and a Ponzi scheme greater than that perpetrated byBernie Madoff.[12] He says that the goals of the original proponents of Medicare were to get a foot in the door with "a Trojan Horse, whose proponents wanted universal compulsory socialized medicine."
Publications
- Willful Blindness: Memoir of the Jihad (2008)
- How Obama Embraces Islam's Sharia Agenda (Encounter Broadsides, 2010) ISBN 978-1-59-403558-6
- The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America (2010)[13]
- How the Obama Administration has Politicized Justice (Encounter Broadsides, 2010)[14]
- Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy (Encounter Books, 2013) ISBN 978-1-59-403691-0
- Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama's Impeachment (Encounter Books, 2014)
- Islam and Free Speech (Encounter Broadside, 2015) ISBN 978-1-59-403748-1
References
- :{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Andrew C. McCarthy author bio". PJ Media. Retrieved 16 June 2015.
- :{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Powell, Michael (October 17, 2006). "Lawyer Sentenced for Aiding Terrorist Client; 28 Months Is Far Less Than Prosecutors Sought". Washington Post.
- :{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Fletcher, Laurel E.; et al. (February 2012). "Defending the Rule of Law: Reconceptualizing Guantanamo Habeas Attorneys".Connecticut Law Review.
- :{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Andrew C. McCarthy, Director, FDD's Center for Law and Counterterrorism". Biographies. Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Archived from the original on 2007-08-06. Retrieved 2007-09-26.
- :{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Weiser, Benjamin (2010-02-19). "Top Terror Prosecutor Is a Critic of Civilian Trials". The New York Times.
- :{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ McCarthy III, Andrew C.; May, Clifford D. (2005-12-15). "Misguided morality". USA Today. pp. A.22.
- :{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ McCarthy, Andrew. "Torture: Thinking about the Unthinkable". Commentary. 60.7 (2004): 17–24.
- :{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ [1]
- :{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Thank the Clintons for Obama ... Again".
- :{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjA0YmFlMzk3ZmFkNTQwYjFiNmM0OTExYzNhNjg5NDE=
- :{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ New York Times, 02/20/2010
- :{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ http://www.nationalreview.com/article/362915/social-security-fable-andrew-c-mccarthy
- :{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ McCarthy, Andrew (2010). The Grand Jihad. San Francisco: Encounter Books. ISBN 1-59403-377-3.
- :{Jump up:(style="-webkit-user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ McCarthy, Andrew (2010). How the Obama Administration Has Politicized Justice. San Francisco: Encounter Books. ISBN 1-59403-474-5.
External links
| Authority control |
- American columnists
- American male writers
- American political writers
- Critics of Islam
- American prosecutors
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The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) is a think tank based inWashington, D.C., focusing on national security and foreign policy. Its political leanings have been described variously as either nonpartisan[1][2][3][4][5] orneoconservative.[6][7][8][9] FDD holds events throughout the year, including its annual Washington Forum, briefings on Capitol Hill, expert roundtables for public officials, diplomats, and military officers, book releases, and panel discussions and debates within the policy community.
Contents
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- :{1.1:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Iran:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{1.2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{The Long War Journal:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{1.3:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Syria:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{3:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Select publications:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{4:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{References:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{5:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{External links:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
Research
Iran
Led by executive director Mark Dubowitz, FDD's Iran research seeks to educate "the public and political elites in both the United States and abroad about the activities of Iran and its Syrian and Hezbollah proxies". FDD says it does this through attacking Iran's "most vulnerable points: its worldwide media operations, its standing in the United States and Europe, its finances, and its efforts to support terrorist activities abroad".[10] Specifically, FDD concerns itself with the Iran's nuclear ambitions, through its Iran Energy Project[11] and Iran's human rights abuses through its Iran Human Rights Project.[12]
In 2008, FDD founded the Iran Energy Project which "conducts extensive research on ways to deny the Iranian regime the profits of its energy sector".[13] The Wall Street Journal credited FDD with bringing "the idea of gasoline sanctions to political attention."[14] FDD's bi-partisan approach to advocating sanctions legislation has earned praise from Congressmen in both parties. Congressman Howard Berman (D-CA) thanked the organization saying "FDD has been one the most committed and creative voices in Washington regarding the Iran nuclear issue and specifically Iran sanctions".[15] FDD's efforts to target the Iranian regime's finances has gone beyond energy sanctions. The organization pushed for sanctions against theCentral Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its use of Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication(SWIFT) to perform transactions. According to The Wall Street Journal, FDD "has done most of the spadework on the issue".[16]
The Long War Journal
The Long War Journal is a FDD project dedicated to reporting the Global War on Terror launched by the United States and its allies following the attacks of September 11, 2001. Under the direction of FDD senior fellows Bill Roggio and Thomas Joscelyn, this website covers stories about countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Iraq and follows the actions of al Qaeda and its affiliates.[17] According to the Columbia Journalism Review, "Roggio's greatest service, then, may be the way he picks up where the mainstream press leaves off, giving readers a simultaneously more specific and holistic understanding of the battlefield".[18]
Syria
For years, Syria has been a focus of FDD's research because of its alignment with Iran and support for organizations such as Hezbollah.[19] In 2012, as the Arab Spring spread to Syria, FDD launched "The Syria Project" to support dissident efforts in removing the Assad regime.[20] In that effort, FDD facilitated a Skype call between dissidents and U.S. journalists in 2012[21] and produced multiple studies and memos urging U.S. officials to act.[22]
Criticism
The International Relations Center features a report on the foundation on its "Right Web" website, a program of the left-wing[23][24][25][26][27] think tank Institute for Policy Studies[28] which, according to its mission statement, seeks to "check themilitaristic drift of the country". The report states that "although the FDD is an ardent critic of terrorism, it has not criticized actions taken by Israel against Palestinians that arguably fall into this category".[29] It terms the FDD a "prominent member of the web of neoconservative-aligned think tanks", including the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute andFreedom House.[30]
The political blog ThinkProgress has criticized FDD for "alarmist rhetoric and fear mongering",[31] for example in April 2002 when they aired a 30-second television ad campaign called "Suicide Strategy" that was described by critics as "conflating" Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat with the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. As FDD explained it: "a militantIslamic terrorist who 'martyrs' himself by hijacking a plane and flying it into the World Trade Center"—i.e., the September 11 attacks—"is no different from a militant Islamic terrorist who 'martyrs' himself by strapping explosives to his body and walking into a hotel"—i.e., Palestinian suicide attacks.[32]
Funding
In 2011, ThinkProgress, a progressive advocacy organization, published FDD's Form 990 documents[33] that revealed where FDD funding came from, from 2001 to 2004. Donors included:[31]
- Roland Arnall: $1,802,000
- Edgar M. and Charles Bronfman: $1,050,000
- Michael Steinhardt: $850,000
- Abramson Family Foundation (of Leonard Abramson): $822,523
- Bernard Marcus: $600,000
- Lewis Ranieri: $350,000
ThinkProgress concluded, "Most of the major donors are active philanthropists to 'pro-Israel' causes both in the U.S. and internationally. With the disclosure of its donor rolls, it becomes increasingly apparent that FDD’s advocacy of U.S. militaryintervention in the Middle East, its hawkish stance against Iran, and its defense of right-wing Israeli policy is consistent with its donors’ interests in 'pro-Israel' advocacy".[31]
Select publications
- "The Tactical and Strategic Use of Small Arms by Terrorists", Daveed Gartenstein and Daniel Trombly, October 2012.
- "Terror in the Peaceable Kingdom: Understanding and Addressing Violent Extremism in Canada", Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Senator Linda Frum, July 2012.
- "Facebook Fatwa: Saudi Clerics, Wahhabi Islam and Social Media", Jonathan Schanzer and Steven Miller, May 2012.
- The Pasdaran: Inside Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Emanuele Ottolenghi, 2011.
- Palestinian Pulse: What Policymakers Can Learn From Palestinian Social Media, Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz, 2010.
- The Afghanistan-Pakistan Theater: Militant Islam, Security & Stability, Clifford D. May and Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, 2010.
- From Energy Crisis to Energy Security, Clifford D. May and Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, 2008.
7/16 ggl
About Andrew C. McCarthy
https://andrewcmccarthy.com/about-andrew-c-mccarthy/
Andrew C. McCarthy is a bestselling author, a senior fellow at National Review ... Andy is a former Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney in New York, best known for .... FBI TO CORRECT THINGS THROUGH THE US DISTRICT COURTS FOR LAW .... States Attorney in the Southern District of New York who, as a description of his ...
Andrew C. McCarthy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Wikipedia
Andrew C. McCarthy III is a columnist for National Review. He served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. A Republican ...
Andrew C. McCarthy | American Freedom Law Center
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Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute (NRI), ... For 18 years, Mr. McCarthy was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern Districtof New York. ... he was the chief assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Southern District's ... Ambassador R. James Woolsey (Former CIA Director).
[PDF]Testimony of Andrew C. McCarthy Senate Judiciary Committee ...
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Jun 28, 2016 - District's satellite office (which oversees federal law enforcement in six ... a patriotic Muslim informant, who enabled the FBI's New York Joint Terrorism Task ... traditions of the high standards of the Office of the United States Attorney for the ...former government officials in connection with an effort to assist ...
[PDF]Andrew C. McCarthy Testimony before the Senate Judiciary ...
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Nov 17, 2015 - Southern District of New York (SDNY), one of the Justice. Department's busiest and most important district offices. I retired in 2003 as the chief assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the. SDNY's satellite ... former Senator Jon Kyl.
Andrew C. McCarthy Archive - National Review Online | National Review
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National Review
Andrew C. McCarthy III is a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern Districtof New York. He led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheikh Omar ...
Andrew C. McCarthy - The 4th of July 2016
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A ndrew C. McCarthy III is a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern Districtof New York. He led ... Andrew C. McCarthy is a bestselling author, a senior fellow at National Review Institute, and a contributing editor at National ... Contributing Editor at National Review & Fellow at NR Inst. Former Chief Asst. U.S. Attorney
###
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g2oTmSRdK8
Oct 14, 2013 - Uploaded by NewsmaxTV
Andrew C. McCarthy, former Assistant United States Attorneyfor the Southern District of New York ...
Andrew C. McCarthy Joins The Freedom Center | Frontpage Mag
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FrontPage Magazine
Sep 6, 2012 - He is a former attorney for the Justice Department's Southern District ofNew ... as the Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of the Southern District ofNew ... Andrew's first New York Times bestseller was Willful Blindness: A ...
Andrew C. McCarthy - Right Web - Institute for Policy Studies
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Right Web ‑ Institute for Policy Studies
Apr 23, 2016 - Andrew McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor who is known for his ...McCarthy worked as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New ....York: Chief Assistant for the Southern District of NY (1999-2003); U.S. ...