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contemplatingoutlander · 3 months ago

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The House GOP is a circus. The chaos has one source.

Republicans spent two years sabotaging the U.S. House. Another two years would be ruinous.

Dana Milbank does a masterful job of describing just how dysfunctional the House GOP members have been in the past two years.

This is a gift🎁link for the entire article. Below are some highlights:

The Lord works in mysterious ways. Six weeks after his improbable rise from obscurity to speaker of the House in late 2023, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson decided to break bread with a group of Christian nationalists. [...] “I’ll tell you a secret, since media is not here,” Johnson teased the group, unaware that his hosts were streaming video of the event. Johnson informed his audience that God “had been speaking to me” about becoming speaker, communicating “very specifically,” in fact, waking him at night and giving him “plans and procedures.” [...] Today, Johnson’s run looks anything but heaven-sent. In the first 18 months of this Congress, only 70 laws were enacted. Calculations by political scientist Tobin Grant, who tracks congressional output over time, put this Congress on course to be the do-nothingest since 1859-1861 — when the Union was dissolving. But Johnson’s House isn’t merely unproductive; it is positively lunatic. Republicans have filled their committee hearings and their bills with white nationalist attacks on racial diversity and immigrants, attempts to ban abortion and to expand access to the sort of guns used in mass shootings, incessant harassment of LGBTQ Americans, and even routine potshots at the U.S. military. They insulted each other’s private parts, accused each other of sexual and financial crimes, and scuffled with each other in the Capitol basement. They screamed “Bullshit!” at President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address. They stood up for the Confederacy and used their official powers to spread conspiracy theories about the “Deep State.” Some even lent credence to the idea that there has been a century-old Deep State coverup of space aliens, with possible involvement by Mussolini and the Vatican.

The above article was adapted from Dana Milbank's (2024) book: Fools on the HILL: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces Who Burned Down the House.

[See more below the cut.]

And this is on top of the well-known pratfalls: The 15-ballot marathon to elect a speaker, the 22-day shutdown of the House to find another speaker, the routine threats of government shutdowns and a near-default on the federal debt that hurt the nation’s credit rating. They devoted 18 months to a failed attempt to impeach Biden, which produced nothing but Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly displaying posters of Hunter Biden engaging in sex acts. One “whistleblower” defected to Russia, another worked with Russian intelligence and is under indictment for fabricating his claims, and still another is on the lam, evading charges of being a Chinese agent. As soon as Biden withdrew his candidacy, they promptly forgot their probe of Biden’s “corruption” and rushed to launch a new series of investigations into Kamala Harris (over her record on border security) and Tim Walz (over his military service and “cozy relationship” with China). After a number of failed attempts, they did impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (the first such action against a Cabinet officer since 1876) without identifying any high crimes or misdemeanors he had committed; the Senate dismissed the articles without a trial. House Republicans created a “weaponization committee” under the excitable Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), but it was panned even by right-wing commentators when it produced little more than a list of conspiracy theories from the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. They lapsed repeatedly into fits of censure resolutions, contempt citations and other pointless acts of vengeance. In all of its history, the House had voted to censure one of its own members only seven times; in the two weeks after Johnson became speaker, members of the House tried to censure each other eight times. [...] In lieu of consequential legislating, they passed bills such as the Refrigerator Freedom Act, the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act and the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards (SUDS) Act. On the House floor, the Republican majority suffered one failure after another, even on routine procedural votes. Seven times (and counting), House Republicans voted down their own leaders’ routine attempts to begin floor debates — something that hadn’t happened once in the previous 20 years.

#republicans #house gop #mike johnson #fools on the hill #118th congress #dana milbank #the washington post #gift link

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1americanconservative · 2 months ago

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About Those Trump and Harris National Security Endorsements

Military and national security endorsements speak volumes about the competence of the Trump/Vance ticket versus the ineptitude of the Harris/Walz ticket.

Mark Alexander

"There is a rank due to the United States, among nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness." —George Washington (1793)

Over the last almost eight years, we have written about Donald Trump's considerable and well-documented record of domestic and foreign policy successes. This record stands in stark contrast to the Biden/Harris regime's abysmal record of domestic and foreign policy failures.

And again this week, Joe Biden declared that Kamala Harris was fully on board with his policies,��saying, "She was a major player in everything we've done."

With "friends" like Joe Biden...

Harris affirmed that assessment when asked this week if she would "have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years." Harris replied, "There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of, and I've been a part of, of, of most of the decisions that have had impact."

Really, "not a thing"? This from the "change" candidate?

The Biden/Harris mounting record of failures is precisely why the Harris/Walz ticket has nothing else to run on other than vilifying their opponent as a "threat to democracy."

Harris has established herself as a pathological liar, which is to say she tag teams well with Tim Walz, who, on top of his stolen valor record, also has a chronic problem with the truth.

In fact, this is precisely why, since Harris booted Biden to the curb, she has not held a press conference. Instead, she has been running a scripted campaign of deception, including mostly softball fan-base interviews.

Another way we determine the integrity of the Trump/Vance ticket versus the Harris/Walz ticket is to consider their endorsements. No, I am not talking about Elon Musk's endorsement of Trump or Taylor Swift's endorsement of Harris, though such endorsements do matter.

I am referring specifically to endorsements from military and national security officials and what those endorsements say about the respective candidates.

In September, Harris announced that a consortium of leftist deep state hacks issued an endorsement letter backing her. All you need to know about the integrity of that collective endorsement is that nine of the former top intelligence officials who signed on for Harris also signed the letter claiming, just weeks before the 2020 election, that Hunter Biden's laptop was actually a "Russian disinformation" subterfuge.

That letter was used by Biden's Leftmedia publicists as justification for the biggest pre-election media blackout in modern history. The purpose, of course, was to cover up the ChiCom and Ukrainian pay-to-play influence-peddling schemes involving the "Big Guy." That subterfuge suppressed what would have otherwise been an election-altering "October Surprise."

Ultimately, of course, it was determined that the laptop and the incriminating information on it did belong to Hunter, but not until the FBI had sat on the laptop for nearly a year.

As the Washington Examiner's Jerry Dunleavy reported in August 2022, "The FBI slow-walked its investigation into Hunter Biden's laptop, including telling some bureau employees not to look at the hard drive belonging to President Joe Biden's son, according to reported whistleblower disclosures made public by a top Senate Republican." That senator is Wisconsin's Ron Johnson, the ranking member of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Notably, the aforementioned deep state signatories and others also seeded the fake "Trump/Russia collusion" conspiracy.

The Harris endorsement letter is built on the same fake Biden/Harris/Walz claims about Trump being a threat to democracy. But what is abundantly clear from the hacks endorsing Harris is this: She and Walz are a perilous threat to both Liberty and national security.

Demonstrating her profound ineptitude, when asked this week to name our most dangerous foreign adversary, Harris responded: "I think there's an obvious one in mind, which is Iran. Iran has American blood on their hands."

That would be the same Iran to which Barack Obama, Biden, and Harris have kept shoveling money. Recall that Obama/Biden loaded up a 747 freight liner with $400 million in palleted cash as part of their $1.7 billion nuclear appeasement (read: "empowerment") in the wake of the perilous Obama/Biden nuke deal.

For the record, obviously, the correct answer to the question regarding our most dangerous adversary is China. But to call out Iran and mention "blood on their hands" is astounding given this administration's bloody record in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Israel. The slaughter of thousands of men, women, and children in those countries is on Harris's hands.

But she keeps reminding everyone, "I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed."

The implications for our national security are nothing short of catastrophic.

On the other end of the national security competence spectrum, this week more than 200 former high-ranking military officers joined hundreds of other former national security and foreign policy officials (and, notably, Gold Star families) in endorsing Donald Trump in a public letter.

The letter affirms: "From a world at peace under President Trump, we are closer to a third world war than ever before under the Biden-Harris Administration. With multiple escalating wars around the world, an open border that allows terrorists to flood into the American homeland, and malign actors like China operating unabated, U.S. national security has been profoundly damaged by the failed policies of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden."

The letter also included 40 former U.S. ambassadors and hundreds of officials from prior Republican administrations.

However, if you want to read the strongest and most reasoned condemnation of Harris and affirmation of Trump, see "An Election Open Letter to All Americans" from Gen. B.B. Bell, U.S. Army (Ret.). Bell, who is also a signer of the Trump endorsement letter, is a longtime member of The Patriot Post's National Advisory Committee, and he served in uniform for almost four decades, including extended deployments overseas in both peace and war. He warned in summation, "For freedom's sake, please reject this Marxist march to insanity and thus the destruction of these United States."

Indeed.

For those contemplating casting a vote for the Harris/Walz ticket, as their body count mounts, this will be your last chance to wash the blood from your hands.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

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darkmaga-returns · 26 days ago

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“The National Security Divisions of the DOJ and FBI are the greatest domestic threats to the American people and the concept of Constitutional rule of law today.” — Scott Ritter

James Howard Kunstler

Nov 22, 2024

Okay, you’ve had enough post-election euphoria. Time to wake TF up. Rats from inside the walls of the Deep State are trying to gnaw their way into the Trump cabinet. Ever hear of an outfit called Cipher Brief? Of course not. Cipher Brief is sort of the McKinsey of blob-world (a.k.a. the “national security” network), a combination Human Relations / Public Relations firm, totally spooked-up with former CIA officers. Quite a few of the spooks who signed the infamous letter in October 2020 that said Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” are contractors there. They all knew the heinous laptop was genuine, though, and they did it anyway to queer the election for “Joe Biden.” Why? Because. . . Trump.

One Cipher Brief operative is a character named Dan Hoffman, a retired CIA “clandestine service” officer who ran the agency’s Middle East Bureau, among other things. He’s now a sometime talking head on Fox News. Hoffman has scuttled his way to the sidelines of the Trump transition team, trying to punk them on personnel. I received my own intel about Dan Hoffman and his current operations.

“Hoffman talks the talk,” I’m informed. “He was involved in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. He is 100-percent Deep State. They think he is a brother-in-arms. He is not. Hoffman and the people around him are in direct contact with Tulsi Gabbard [DNI-designate] and John Ratcliffe [CIA Director-designate]. Remember, agency ops officers are trained to be all things to all people, to manipulate them, detect their vulnerabilities, and exploit them. Their game vis-a-vis Donald Trump? To kneecap his attempts to lower tensions world-wide, stop efforts to reduce and reform the intel and defense communities, push a generally Globalist policy agenda, keep the American ‘empire game’ running so they can cash out, and keep non-Beltway Americans from having any say in our foreign policy.

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dertaglichedan · 6 months ago

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Biden DHS Board Painted Trump Supporters, Military And Religious People As Terror Threats, Docs Show

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) advisory board characterized supporters of former President Donald Trump, as well as those who are in the military and religious people, as posing potential domestic terrorism risks, according to internal documents obtained by America First Legal (AFL).

The board, called the “Homeland Intelligence Experts Group,” was created in September 2023 to provide DHS with “expert” analysis on subjects such as terrorism and fentanyl trafficking. The panel included former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former CIA Operations Officer Paul Kolbe, all of whom signed an October 2020 letter casting doubt on the legitimacy of the Hunter Biden laptop and suggesting its release was a Russian disinformation ploy.

Internal documents obtained by AFL show the board characterizing “supporters of the former president” as constituting “most of the Domestic Terrorism threat” in the United States. The documents also classified traits such as having served “in the military” and being ��religious” as “indicators of extremists and terrorism,” citing unnamed research.

Military personnel are less likely to be supporters of radical political causes than other Americans, according to a 2023 RAND Corporation study. Nevertheless, suspicions of extremism in the military were popular among Democrats in the wake of the Jan. 6 riots, as 15 Democrat lawmakers signed a letter in 2021 urging Inspector General Sean O’Donnell to “take action on this wave of violent extremism” in the military.

AFL on Thursday released the first collection of documents that detailed the committee’s desire to increase information collection on Americans, including getting “mothers” and “teachers” to report on children suspected of extremism under the pretext of “public health.” The committee cited the model of the “See Something, Say Something” campaign after 9/11, which was an initiative by the DHS to encourage American citizens to report potential terror threats.

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justinspoliticalcorner · 6 months ago

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Elie Mystal at The Nation:

There has probably never been a president who was more ignorant of the government, the Constitution, and the laws of this country than Donald Trump was in 2017. The man came to power with a child’s understanding of civics and a mob boss’s understanding of power. Instead of using the power of government to effectuate his agenda, he thought he could simply bend the law to his will. Trump was wrong, and the Department of Justice showed him why. Trump fired FBI director James Comey (whose decision to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails happened to be one of the proximate causes of his election in the first place) for his lack of loyalty. That led the DOJ to investigate Trump’s abuse of power. Trump likely assumed that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, a longtime senator and an early supporter of Trump’s vile candidacy, would put a stop to the inquiry. But to Trump’s surprise, Sessions followed department rules and norms and recused himself from the case, leaving Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to handle the investigation. Rosenstein eventually appointed former FBI director Bob Mueller as a special counsel, and while Trump was never held accountable for this crime, he learned that the Justice Department could be a threat to his lawless abuse of power.

It’s a lesson he will not have forgotten if he wins or steals a second term. Mandate for Leadership, the Project 2025 blueprint for an eventual authoritarian takeover of the federal government, contains a lot of dangerous proposals for how Trump and his ruling conservatives can remake the executive branch. The authors’ ideas for the Department of Justice reflect not only their lust for unchallenged power, but also a deep fear of the DOJ’s independence—and, more particularly, the way that independence might be used against them if the DOJ is not brought to heel. Put simply: The conservatives hope to use the DOJ to make their darkest desires legal, while at the same time taking away the best legal means to stop them. As a first step, the Project 2025 Mandate recommends hollowing out the FBI. Why the FBI? Think of it this way: If Project 2025 is basically a conservative heist plot, then the chapter on the DOJ is the part where the plotters explain how they plan to take out the security cameras and floodlights so they can proceed under the cover of darkness.

The chapter begins like the Seinfeld holiday of Festivus: with an airing of grievances that the conservatives have against the FBI, including its alleged attempts to “convince social media companies and the media generally that the story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop was the result of a Russian misinformation campaign.” There are also entire paragraphs dedicated to railing against the FBI and the DOJ for trying to halt the spread of lies about the 2020 election—and, again, if you understand who these people are, you can see why stopping the government from policing their lies is a key goal. In order to accomplish this, Project 2025 proposes pushing Congress to demote the FBI, and its director, to a lower rung on the DOJ’s organizational chart and make the director report to a political functionary. It also wants Congress to eliminate the 10-year term of the FBI director to make it easier for the president to replace the director at will, like most other political appointees. Again, Trump got burned for firing Comey, and this proposal would make sure any future FBI director is sufficiently loyal.

If the conservatives simply wanted to destroy the FBI, I might agree with them. Even a cursory knowledge of the bureau’s history shows that the FBI is problematic: a dangerous tool of the surveillance state that, more often than not, has been deployed against civil liberties, civil rights, and social progress.

The problem with Project 2025 is that it doesn’t actually want to destroy the FBI; it wants to get rid of its independence—while keeping all of the FBI’s jackbooted thuggery so that it can hurt the “right” people. The Project 2025 Mandate calls for renewing the bureau’s focus on “violent” crime—and that word choice is important, because it leaves out nonviolent crimes like bank fraud, tax evasion, bribery, and document theft—you know, all the things that Trump or his business or donor-class friends are accused of doing. The document further suggests stripping the FBI of its legal workforce—the 300 or so attorneys employed by the bureau—which would turn the FBI into an even blunter weapon than it already is, completely untethered from the Constitution or civil rights. In line with the mission of hurting the “right” people, Mandate’s chapter on the DOJ details big plans for resuming Trump’s campaign against immigrants. Those plans include deploying the power of the Justice Department against Democrats who govern in “sanctuary cities.” Indeed, there’s a whole paragraph devoted to the wild idea of using the DOJ to sue district attorneys who use their discretion in ways that the conservatives don’t like—including, though hardly limited to, refusing to help deport immigrants.

[...] Toward that end, this chapter proposes transforming the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ into a tool to fight for white supremacy instead of against it. It aims to do this by using the division to prosecute institutions and organizations that promote diversity as violating the civil rights and equal protection of whites, and it’s the logical conclusion of the conservative assault on affirmative action and DEI programs. [...]

Using the DOJ to sue companies that hire people of color or women is meant to dissuade companies from hiring people of color or women, because according to conservative whites, anytime a person of color or a woman is hired for anything, it is because of affirmative action or DEI. This section is an attempt to whitewash America through force of law, since “the market” has rejected white supremacy (at least superficially) as a sound business practice.

When you break down what Project 2025 wants to do with the Justice Department, it’s chilling and terrifying, and yet I’m also struck by how petty and mean-spirited the tone of the document is. These people are consumed by their personal grievances (against Black people, against the media, against Hunter Biden and his laptop). There are multiple passages devoted to complaining that the DOJ has prosecuted people who threaten abortion clinics and parents who threaten school boards, as if being vile and hateful toward pregnant people and schoolteachers is their most precious “freedom.” Giving these people the DOJ is like giving a chimpanzee a gun: It’s inherently dangerous even when the chimp wields it like a crooked club.

Next time, Trump will not be handing the DOJ to people like Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr—people who wanted to use the department to further the MAGA agenda but felt bound by the rule of law. Next time, Trump will let someone like Stephen Miller, a ghoul who wants the law to promote bigotry instead of eradicating it, run the Justice Department. He’ll hand it to a devout loyalist and unreconstructed racist who wants to weaken the DOJ so it can’t hurt Trump, while weaponizing it against Trump’s enemies and the vulnerable communities he has decided to harass and terrorize. Project 2025 is telling us exactly how the conservatives plan to take away the rights of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community. I beg the American people to believe them. This dystopian future isn’t a threat, it’s a certainty, should we give these people power again.

Elie Mystal wrote in The Nation that the DOJ under a 2nd Trump term would be the legal wing of the MAGA movement. The extreme MAGA movement must be crushed at all costs.

Read more HERE

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darkeagleruins · 6 months ago

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deltamusings · 2 years ago

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May have??? How about DID.

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sawbuckplus · 17 days ago

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#biden crime family #two tier justice #biden bribery #biden corruption #the hypocrisy of the left knows no bounds #hunter biden is a threat to national security #first crackhead

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mariacallous · 10 months ago

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The meeting between top US election officials and their cybersecurity partners from the federal government almost went off without a hitch. Then Mac Warner spoke up.

Warner, West Virginia’s Republican secretary of state, didn’t have a mundane logistical question for the government representatives, who were speaking at the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State in Washington, DC, on February 8. Instead, Warner lambasted the officials for what he said was their agencies’ scheme to suppress the truth about US president Joe Biden’s son Hunter during the 2020 election and then cover their tracks.

“When we have our own federal agencies lying to the American people, that’s the most insidious thing that we can do in elections,” Warner told the officials from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), who watched him impassively from the stage. “You all need to clean up your own houses.”

Neither of the officials responded to Warner, and the NASS meeting—a semiannual confab for the nation’s election administrators that deals with everything from mail-in voting to cyber threats—quickly moved on to other business. But Warner, who attended an election-denier rally after Biden’s 2020 victory and is now running for governor on a far-right platform, isn’t a fringe voice in the GOP. His impassioned speech reflected a growing right-wing backlash to the election security work of agencies like CISA and the FBI—one that now threatens the partnership that the federal government has been painstakingly building with state leaders over the eight years since Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

CISA plays a critical role in helping states run secure elections, but its work alerting social media companies to misinformation has earned it special contempt from conservatives. While most GOP secretaries of state are holding their fire about CISA’s efforts to combat online lies, Democrats and nonpartisan experts worry that that could change in the coming years. With national Republicans increasingly turning against CISA—investigating its activities and voting to slash its budget—the agency’s partnerships with GOP leaders in the states are more vulnerable than ever before.

“The hard and necessary work of securing our elections should not be a partisan issue,” says US representative Chris Deluzio, a Pennsylvania Democrat and former cyber policy scholar. “So I am very concerned that some Republican secretaries of state might undermine that work just to serve their selfish partisan interests.”

Stumbling Into Controversy

The federal program that earned Warner’s wrath began as a response to the rampant mis- and disinformation that has spread online since the 2016 election.

Determined to avoid another contest marred by viral false claims about voting processes, CISA in 2018 began coordinating conversations with social media companies and other federal agencies about the best ways to counter dangerous and destabilizing lies. During the 2020 election, through a process known as “switchboarding,” CISA alerted social media firms to complaints from state and local election officials about online misinformation, such as posts advertising incorrect voting times and locations.

It was in this spirit that FBI officials met with Twitter and Facebook executives in the lead-up to Election Day 2020 and advised them to be wary of Russian disinformation operations involving fake documents. That warning later led both companies to suppress posts about a controversial New York Post story about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.

Silicon Valley’s response to the Hunter Biden laptop story outraged conservatives, who began accusing tech companies and their federal partners of conspiring to censor speech in an effort to rig the election. In subsequent investigations, CISA found itself squarely in the crosshairs. The agency had already earned the ire of former president Donald Trump and his allies for reassuring the public about the integrity of the 2020 election, but the new controversy practically made it a pariah on the right.

In June 2023, a House Judiciary Committee report blasted CISA as “the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.” A few months later, a federal appeals court partially affirmed a district judge’s ruling that placed limits on CISA’s ability to communicate with tech companies, finding that the agency’s work to fight disinformation “likely violated the First Amendment.”

Stunned by the intense backlash, CISA stopped working with social media platforms to combat mis- and disinformation. The FBI, too, scaled back its interactions with those companies, halting briefings about foreign interference activities. “The symbiotic relationship between the government and the social media companies has definitely been fractured,” a US official told NBC News.

CISA has staunchly avoided acknowledging the reality that its reputation has been damaged.

“CISA’s election security mission is stronger than ever,” says Cait Conley, a senior adviser to director Jen Easterly who oversees the agency’s election work. “We remain engaged with election officials in all 50 states and will continue to conduct all of our work in an apolitical and nonpartisan manner.”

A GOP Split

As the controversies have eroded CISA’s bipartisan brand, Republicans who run elections have split into two camps over whether to keep working with the agency to fight hackers, online falsehoods, and polling-place threats.

West Virginia’s Warner is the indisputable flag-bearer of the anti-CISA camp. “I’ve pulled away from them,” he tells WIRED at the NASS conference, a few hours after venting his frustrations to the federal officials. “I’m not attending their briefings, because I haven’t found anything useful out of them.”

Warner says he’s proud of the “tremendous advances” that federal and state officials have made together on election security since 2016, but he warns that CISA and the FBI will continue losing conservatives’ trust until they investigate their roles in the controversies of 2020. “I’ve brought this to the attention of CISA officials,” he says, “and there’s no effort there to do this.”

Warner argues that CISA’s warnings about foreign disinformation, AI-powered deep fakes, and death threats to election officials are “distractions from the real threat to American democracy” posed by censorship.

It remains unclear how many of Warner’s colleagues agree with him. But when WIRED surveyed the other 23 Republican secretaries who oversee elections in their states, several of them said they would continue working with CISA.

“The agency has been beneficial to our office by providing information and resources as it pertains to cybersecurity,” says JoDonn Chaney, a spokesperson for Missouri’s Jay Ashcroft.

South Dakota’s Monae Johnson says her office “has a good relationship with its CISA partners and plans to maintain the partnership.”

But others who praised CISA’s support also sounded notes of caution.

Idaho’s Phil McGrane says CISA is doing “critical work … to protect us from foreign cyber threats.” But he also tells WIRED that the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), a public-private collaboration group that he helps oversee, “is actively reviewing past efforts regarding mis/disinformation” to determine “what aligns best” with CISA’s mission.

Mississippi’s Michael Watson says that “statements following the 2020 election and some internal confidence issues we’ve since had to navigate have caused concern.” As federal and state officials gear up for this year’s elections, he adds, “my hope is CISA will act as a nonpartisan organization and stick to the facts.”

CISA’s relationships with Republican secretaries are “not as strong as they’ve been before,” says John Merrill, who served as Alabama’s secretary of state from 2015 to 2023. In part, Merrill says, that’s because of pressure from the GOP base. “Too many conservative Republican secretaries are not just concerned about how the interaction with those federal agencies is going, but also about how it’s perceived … by their constituents.”

Free Help at Risk

CISA’s defenders say the agency does critical work to help underfunded state and local officials confront cyber and physical threats to election systems.

The agency’s career civil servants and political leaders “have been outstanding” during both the Trump and Biden administrations, says Minnesota secretary of state Steve Simon, a Democrat.

Others specifically praised CISA’s coordination with tech companies to fight misinformation, arguing that officials only highlighted false claims and never ordered companies to delete posts.

“They’re just making folks aware of threats,” says Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Adrian Fontes. The real “bad actors,” he says, are the people who “want the election denialists and the rumor-mongers to run amok and just spread out whatever lies they want.”

If Republican officials begin disengaging from CISA, their states will lose critical security protections and resources. CISA sponsors the EI-ISAC, which shares information about threats and best practices for thwarting them; provides free services like scanning election offices’ networks for vulnerabilities, monitoring those networks for intrusions and reviewing local governments’ contingency plans; and convenes exercises to test election officials’ responses to crises.

“For GOP election officials to back away from [CISA] would be like a medical patient refusing to accept free wellness assessments, check-ups, and optional prescriptions from one of the world’s greatest medical centers,” says Eddie Perez, a former director for civic integrity at Twitter and a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonprofit group advocating for improved election technology.

Worse, some CISA projects will become less effective as they lose participants. The EI-ISAC’s information-sharing initiative is only as valuable as the information that state and federal agencies submit to it.

Even if most states stick with CISA, it would only take a few holdouts to create systemic risk. “America's election security posture is only as strong as its weakest jurisdiction,” says David Levine, the senior elections integrity fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy.

Cautious Optimism Despite ‘Strain’

Election security experts and Democratic officials express cautious optimism that there won’t be a GOP exodus from CISA this year.

“I have faith Republican secretaries of state will continue to prioritize their voters and collaborate with CISA to ensure a secure 2024 election,” says Mississippi representative Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee.

Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Elections and Government Program, notes that some of CISA’s new regional election security advisers “have worked in recent years as or for Republican officeholders,” giving them credibility with GOP leaders.

According to Minnesota’s Simon, “the vast majority of secretaries find these partnerships valuable.”

Still, Warner says some secretaries quietly support his pushback against CISA and other aspects of the Biden administration’s election security strategy. “There [is a] meeting of the minds by some of the secretaries, especially on the right, with some of these similar concerns,” he says, even if “they’re not as outspoken as I am.”

That shared skepticism of CISA means that, even after Warner leaves office next year, the agency will remain on precarious footing with some of its Republican partners. For now, CISA’s allies are left hoping that the agency’s time-tested bonds will prove stronger than pressures from conservative activists.

“You can have strain in some areas of a relationship and still have a strong relationship,” says Arizona’s Fontes. “That’s what being a grown-up is about. And I think most of us are doing that pretty well.”

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ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly · 7 days ago

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The NY Times

Adam Goldman and Devlin Barrett

Wray told F.B.I. employees he wanted to keep the focus on the bureau’s work.

The F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, said on Wednesday that he intended to resign before the Trump administration took office, bowing to the reality that President-elect Donald J. Trump had publicly declared his desire to replace him.

Mr. Wray announced the move while addressing employees on Wednesday afternoon in remarks that tacitly acknowledged the politically charged position the F.B.I. now faces with an incoming president who openly scorns the agency.

“I’ve decided the right thing for the bureau is for me to serve until the end of the current administration in January and then step down,” Mr. Wray said, adding, “This is the best way to avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work.”

The director spoke wistfully about his time at the F.B.I. “This is not easy for me,” he said, addressing a packed conference room at F.B.I. headquarters, as many more watched on video feeds at F.B.I. offices around the country. “I love this place, I love our mission and I love our people.” He left the room to a standing ovation, and some shed tears as Mr. Wray shook employees’ hands on the way out, according to an F.B.I. official.

The announcement comes after Mr. Trump said in late November that he intended to nominate Kash Patel, a longtime loyalist, to run the F.B.I., and more than two years before Mr. Wray’s 10-year term would have expired.

Paul Abbate, the deputy F.B.I. director, is set to retire in late April but would typically serve as acting director until Mr. Patel is confirmed. It is not clear who would replace Mr. Abbate, the most senior agent in the bureau, or whether he would actually stay past the change of the administration.

Over more than seven years, Mr. Wray oversaw one of the most consequential and tumultuous periods in the bureau’s history, juggling high-profile criminal investigations of political figures, heated congressional inquiries and two attempted assassinations of Mr. Trump.

Even as he fended off Mr. Trump’s relentless criticisms of the F.B.I., Mr. Wray supervised a wide array of national security issues that included terrorism, escalating cyberattacks and threats from geopolitical rivals like China, Iran and Russia. He also had to grapple with a spate of mass shootings and the rise of right-wing extremism while managing an agency with 35,000 employees and a budget of more than $10 billion.

But it was the bureau’s scrutiny of Mr. Trump that almost certainly cut short Mr. Wray’s tenure.

His F.B.I. repeatedly investigated Mr. Trump, including by conducting a court-approved search of the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 for classified documents, examining his widespread efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and delving into the possible links between his 2016 campaign and Russian intelligence operatives engaged in election interference.

Under Mr. Wray’s watch, agents also investigated the current president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., over his handling of sensitive records after he left the vice presidency. They undertook several other politically charged cases that made the agency the subject of sharp partisan scrutiny, including its inquiry into Hunter Biden.

In the face of intense political cajoling, second-guessing and condemnation, Mr. Wray frequently urged his agents to “keep calm and tackle hard,” and preached a strict adherence to the investigative process that has been the agency’s calling card for decades.

His apparent successor could not be more different. Mr. Patel, a former federal prosecutor and public defender, is a fierce critic of the F.B.I. and has vowed to fire its leadership, empty its headquarters and root out the president-elect’s perceived enemies in what he calls the “deep state.”

Mr. Wray’s resignation was not unexpected, but former and current F.B.I. agents said the news still hit hard. They voiced wariness at what could ensue if Mr. Patel was confirmed and said they were bracing themselves for upheaval.

Mr. Trump on Wednesday welcomed the news of the move, praising it on social media as “a great day for America.”

Under Mr. Wray’s leadership, he added, the bureau had “raided my home, without cause, worked diligently on illegally impeaching and indicting me, and has done everything else to interfere with the success and future of America.”

Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill, Mr. Patel said that “we look forward to a very smooth transition at the F.B.I., and I’ll be ready to go on Day 1.”

Mr. Wray became the bureau’s eighth director in August 2017, after Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey from the job in 2017 in the middle of the Russia investigation.

At the start, Mr. Trump called Mr. Wray “a man of impeccable credentials.” But the president quickly soured on him.

Mr. Wray withstood extraordinary pressure from Mr. Trump to leverage the powers of law enforcement to damage his perceived enemies and later to play down the threats of right-wing violent extremism and Russian election interference.

The rift between the men grew as Mr. Wray waved off false claims the president peddled about voter fraud and left-wing extremists. His tenure became increasingly tenuous after William P. Barr resigned as attorney general in December 2020, in part because he had fallen out of favor with the president. Mr. Barr was said to have argued against firing the F.B.I. director, shielding Mr. Wray from Mr. Trump’s fury.

Mr. Trump’s allies also took aim at Mr. Wray, faulting him for not speaking out vociferously against the Russia investigation or the botched wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser.

During the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump publicly declared that Mr. Wray should resign, and it was clear his antipathy had only intensified, partly because of the 2022 search of his Florida home.

After an assassination attempt in July at a rally in Butler, Pa., Mr. Trump lashed out at the F.B.I. because the bureau did not definitively say he had been shot in the ear.

“No wonder the once storied F.B.I. has lost the confidence of America!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.

In leaving before Mr. Trump is sworn in, Mr. Wray may avoid the kind of public standoff that marked some firings during the first Trump administration. But the turbulence at the F.B.I. is all but certain to continue if Mr. Patel is confirmed and Mr. Trump tries to make sweeping changes at the agency.

Mr. Trump has vowed to investigate and possibly prosecute his perceived enemies, whom he accuses of unfairly prosecuting him. He has also called for investigations of prosecutors, judges and politicians.

Though separated by years, the investigations into Mr. Trump led to the firing and resignation of two F.B.I. directors, highlighting the political perils of scrutinizing the incoming president.

Only a few months into his first term, Mr. Trump abruptly fired Mr. Comey, prompting bureau officials to open an inquiry into whether the president dismissed him to obstruct the Russia investigation. The firing helped spur the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III as a special counsel to take over the broader inquiry, intensifying Mr. Trump’s ire toward it.

Just as Mr. Comey’s downfall was in part his refusal to pledge his loyalty to the president to protect him from investigation, Mr. Wray remained quiet when the president promoted politicized narratives about law enforcement, particularly the Russia investigation, and increasingly sought the bureau’s intervention in matters that could help him politically.

Though the president has the authority to fire the F.B.I. director anytime, only one director had been fired in the bureau’s 108-year history before Mr. Trump began his first term. President Bill Clinton fired William S. Sessions in 1993.

Mr. Wray was considered a safe choice to lead the F.B.I. and bring stability to an agency rattled by Mr. Comey’s firing. A former federal prosecutor who defended Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey in the so-called Bridgegate scandal, Mr. Wray also served in the upper ranks of the Justice Department under President George W. Bush and helped guide the department through the response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Former and current F.B.I. officials said he was a cross between the laconic and hard-charging Mr. Mueller, who ran the bureau for more than a decade after Sept. 11, and Mr. Comey, whom they viewed as too focused on his public persona.

Mr. Wray, known for his quiet demeanor, kept a lower profile than Mr. Comey, a move calculated in part to avoid the president’s wrath, and his decision to stay out of politics won him the support of current and former F.B.I. agents. But Mr. Trump quickly directed his salvos at Mr. Wray.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/11/us/trump-news#wray-trump-fbi-director

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veale2006-blog · 3 months ago

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World Events Unveiled: The CABAL's Defeat and the Looming Storm

The once-secretive ambitions of the CABAL deep state, particularly their grand design to use Ukraine as a pawn in a war against Russia and seize Moscow, have crumbled. Their objective, which aimed to capture Russia's vast resources, GDP, and a staggering 17.5 million tons of lithium reserves (a treasure trove coveted by the likes of BLACKROCK, CIA, MI6, MOSSAD, and the Deep State), has unraveled into failure.

What's more, their nefarious operations to orchestrate a world war, all while mainstream media sounds the alarm for World War III, are teetering on the edge of disaster. This scheme, driven by a staggering 1.2 trillion-dollar heist from taxpayers in the name of supporting Israel, is beginning to unravel.

The truth is that the U.S. finds itself in an economic quagmire, edging closer to financial collapse, with the capability to wage not one but three wars - against Russia, China, and the Middle East - practically non-existent.

The Ukraine war, contrary to Biden's public statements of Russian failure in capturing Kiev, is reaching its conclusion. Military assessments, war games, and the testimony of top-ranking Generals all point to the impending end of this conflict. Russia has secured the second-largest city in Ukraine, Kharkiv, and is steadily advancing westward, with Odessa on the horizon. European support for the U.S. and Ukraine war is waning rapidly.

This is why the deep state has hurriedly ignited another conflict in the Middle East - a desperate ploy for funding and money laundering, all in a frenzied bid to evade an impending storm of arrests by the U.S. Military.

In the Middle East, Turkey has made a seismic pivot away from U.S. NATO allies, engaging in troop movements and naval exercises. Notably, Turkey is demonstrating its ability to mobilize two million soldiers in emergency combat scenarios, sending shockwaves through the corridors of the CIA, MOSSAD, MI6, and the Davos elite.

Pakistan has aligned with Turkey, while China supports both nations, and Russia backs several Middle Eastern countries, including Syria and Palestine. Putin's declaration of support for Palestine further underscores the changing geopolitical landscape.

As it stands, the U.S. military is ill-equipped for ground warfare in Russia, China, or the Middle East, with a glaring absence of missiles and weapons. In contrast, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey, bolstered by China and Russia, boast a formidable arsenal. Iran's missile capability, in particular, poses a colossal threat, with odds of 16 to 1 in favor of Iran in naval confrontations.

The outcome is clear: the U.S. military finds itself at its weakest point in a century, a fact echoed in all military assessments, war games, and projections.

Behind this tumultuous backdrop, the real World War III event looms on the horizon, set for late 2024. President Trump has unequivocally stated that only he can prevent this catastrophe, and the impending mega scare event, complete with a full-scale nuclear standoff, will be the crucible of exposure for the U.S. Military Industrial Complex (including the CIA, Obama, Bush, the Clintons, the Rockefellers, and more).

Everything is hurtling toward a colossal reckoning: from Biden and the Hunter laptop revelations (just the tip of the iceberg) to the stolen 2020 elections, the Epstein saga, the CIA-Pentagon-Fauci trifecta behind the pandemic and lethal vaccines, all the way to the Deep State's orchestration of world wars. This was all foreseen, a narrative unspooling since the very beginning.

In these chaotic times, while the world appears on the precipice of World War III, it's crucial to remain calm. Yes, there will be skirmishes, nations picking sides, but as my previous communications have suggested, eventually, a sense of calm will prevail. Then, brace for a colossal, world-altering event, where nuclear bombs will remain dormant. The sole exception may be North Korea detonating a nuke over the ocean during the 2024 mega-massive scare event.

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