Obama administration
March 31, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley

Now on the scene of the fallen Francis Scott Key Bridge, the U.S. Naval Institute reports, is the Chesapeake, a crane barge with a 1,000-ton lift capacity. Originally called the SUN 800 the crane was built to assist in the construction of the Hughes Glomar Explorer, a deep-sea drill-ship platform, “built by the CIA to recover the 3,000-ton Soviet Golf II ballistic missile submarine K-129, which sunk in 1968.”As this account notes, “the
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October 4, 2023 — Scott Johnson

Winston Churchill was a magnanimous man of exemplary character, yet Stanley Baldwin tested his limits. As Richard Langworth recounts, Churchill held Baldwin responsible for Britain’s lack of preparedness to go to war with Germany when the crisis inevitably came. During the blitz, when informed that a German bomb had fallen on Baldwin’s house, Churchill quipped, “What base ingratitude.” (Martin Gilbert has a different version of the story in Finest Hour.)
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March 3, 2023 — Scott Johnson

Matt Taibbi has now contributed thread number 17 to the Twitter Files series beginning with the tweet below. The thread comes in 50 parts that can be accessed here. 1. TWITTER FILES #17New Knowledge, the Global Engagement Center, and State-Sponsored Blacklists pic.twitter.com/8LuoKY9zzA — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 2, 2023 Taibbi has separately summarized each of the 17 threads here at his Racket News site. He summarizes the current installment as
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October 6, 2020 — John Hinderaker

Last week, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified information to the effect that U.S. intelligence agencies “obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.” Ratcliffe also indicated at that time that CIA Director John
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May 7, 2019 — Scott Johnson

We continue our preview of the new (Spring) issue of the Claremont Review of Books hot off the press. It went into the mail on Monday and is accessible online to subscribers now. Buy an annual subscription including immediate online access here for the modest price of $19.95. If you love trustworthy essays on, and reviews of books about, politics, history, literature and culture, the CRB may be for you.
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April 12, 2019 — Scott Johnson

Kim Strassel devotes her weekly Wall Street Journal column today — “Barr brings accountability” (behind the Journal’s column) — to the news that Attorney General William Barr is undertaking a review of the surveillance of the Trump presidential campaign conducted by the FBI and intelligence agencies under the Obama administration. As we have frequently observed, we weren’t meant to learn a blessed thing about this surveillance. Strassel picks up this
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January 29, 2019 — Scott Johnson

Obama administration CIA Director John Brennan lied notoriously and repeatedly to Congress, yet he remains at large. He is not under indictment. The FBI has not sent a heavily armed battalion to raid his home and take him into custody in front of his friends at CNN. Is there any dispute about Brennan’s lies? I don’t think so. Looking around for a summary of Brennan’s lies, I find Victor Davis
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July 20, 2018 — Scott Johnson

Following former Obama administration CIA Director John Brennan on Twitter, we see his animus nakedly on display. He is demented by hatred. Is this really the public role a former Director of the CIA is to be playing? Below is his most recent effusion on Twitter. Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing short of treasonous.
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May 15, 2018 — Scott Johnson

According to former Communist Party voter and Obama CIA Director John Brennan, the dodgy Steele Dossier played no role whatsoever in the intelligence community assessment of Russian interference in the election. Brennan so testified before Congress under oath and emphatically asserted elsewhere including an interview with Chuck Todd. Now comes Paul Sperry to report, however, that “retired National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers stated in a classified letter to Congress
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March 14, 2018 — Scott Johnson

We want to keep up with the serious journalism that helps us understand the synthetic Trump-Russia collusion scandal that is the subject of the unending Mueller project. The synthetic scandal is of course the sign of a true Obama administration scandal. Drawing on the work of Andrew McCarthy and Lee Smith, Michael Doran now gives us “The real collusion story.” It is necessary reading. Doran’s essay provides a marked contrast
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February 28, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff

Daniel Horowitz convincingly ties the Parkland shooting to the culture of leniency towards criminals, also known as the jailbreak agenda. He writes: The jailbreak agenda is definitely on display in the Broward County law enforcement agencies. It turns out that Broward County has been promoting a program, funded in part by the federal government, to incentivize local officials to do everything they can to keep juveniles out of jail. .
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February 27, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff

In December, the Senate was on the verge of confirming Chai Feldblum for another term as a commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Feldblum, a leading gay rights advocate, is the architect of the Obama administration’s aggressive LGBT policy. While strong conservative nominees, including ones for top positions at the Department of Justice, have been on hold for the better part of a year, Feldblum was all set to
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January 3, 2018 — Scott Johnson

There is no one whose opinion I wanted more than that of former Assistant United States Attorney Andrew McCarthy on “Fear and loathing at the DoJ.” He knows what he is talking about. I am grateful that he took the time to read the post, watch the video of Howard Root’s account of the criminal case against him (Howard, that is), and comment via Twitter (below). Andy’s tweet to his
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December 22, 2017 — Scott Johnson

Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election of 2016 has given us a temporary reprieve from the sophisticated and destructive operators of the Obama administration. Faithfully reflecting Obama, they combined malice, stupidity and self-regard in roughly equal measure in the discharge of their responsibilities. I offer recent comments from former members of the Obama administration as Exhibits A, B, and C. Exhibit A: Former Obama senior advisor
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December 21, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff

Remember a few years ago when Democrats and the mainstream media were moaning about how businesses were hoarding cash and buying back stock instead of investing? The economy had recovered and business was starting to boom, we were told. Yet, corporations weren’t expanding and/or investing, and this was preventing the Obama recovery from being glorious. Why were corporations being so churlish? For most on the left and in the mainstream
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November 1, 2017 — Scott Johnson

The Obama administration suppressed the release of the trove of al Qaeda documents seized in the May 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbotabad lair. It released a grand total of 571 documents and sat on the rest. Why so shy? Today the Trump administration released hundreds of thousands of the documents as well as images and computer files recovered in the raid. Tom Joscelyn and Bill Roggio provide an
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October 28, 2017 — Scott Johnson

Now we know that the Trump Dossier was not just a product funded by Democrats, but was commissioned by the general counsel of the Clinton presidential campaign. After the Trump campaign collusion hysteria fomented by Democrats and their media friends roughly since the election, we learn that Russian disinformation (as it seems to me) disseminated by the friends of Vladimir Putin (i.e., the Russian officials identified by alphabetic descriptors in
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