- Andrew McCarthy wrote a good explanation of the latest NSA data collection scandal:
So, to summarize, we have the communications of Americans inside the United States being incidentally intercepted, stored, sifted through, and in some instances analyzed, even though those Americans are not targets of foreign-intelligence collection. The minimization procedures are supposed to prevent the worst potential abuses, particularly, the pretextual use of foreign-intelligence-collection authority in order to conduct domestic spying. But even when complied with, there is a colorable argument that the minimization procedures do not eliminate the Fourth Amendment problem — i.e., they permit seizure and search without adequate cause.
Now we know the minimization procedures have not been complied with. The new scandal involves their flouting.
Later:
This meant the NSA was not supposed to use an American’s phone number, e-mail address, or other “identifier” in running searches through its upstream database.
It is this prohibition that the NSA routinely and extensively violated. Evidently, there was widespread use of American identifiers throughout the years after the 2011 revision of the minimization procedures. The violation was so broad that, at the time the Obama administration ended, its scope had still not been determined.
- The latest Center for Medical Progress undercover video on Planned Parenthood includes a discussion of how to work around partial birth abortion bans by pulling off a leg or two. I’d embed the video but YouTube deleted it (a recurring pattern with conservative videos). There’s a copy on YouTube here, but it probably won’t be there for long.
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Conservative Daniel Rendleman attended a “reproductive rights seminar” at Yale Law School and came away with lessons that pro-life people can learn from pro-abortion people.
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The head of the Department of Education’s student aid office, James Runcie, quit after Betsy DeVos instructed him to testify before the House Oversight Committee on his department’s increasing rate of improper payments for federal student aid programs.
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One of the goons who beat up protesters outside the Turkish embassy was not one of Erdogan’s bodyguards, but an Erdogan supporter from New Jersey. He is one of the people who kicked a Kurdish woman to the point that she has a brain injury.
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The Middlebury College students who participated in a violent protest against Charles Murray received a slap on the wrist, and none of them were prosecuted for assaulting Allison Stanger.
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Alliance Defending Freedom sued Kellogg Community College for arresting two students who were distributing copies of the Constitution on campus.
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The Department of Defense acknowledged that a March air strike in Mosul killed 105 civilians. A plane dropped a 500 pound bomb on a building where ISIS snipers were operating, and the bomb detonated explosives that ISIS stored there.
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An Iraqi journalist delivered photos and video depicting elite Iraqi army units torturing and executing prisoners. From the linked article:
Arkady originally planned to produce a “positive story” about the Emergency Response Division (E.R.D.) of Iraq’s Ministry of Interior, documenting how soldiers from both the Shi’a and Sunni sects of Islam could work together in the fight against ISIS. But he says, as the soldiers began to trust him, they allowed him to record scenes in which they tortured their captives and later even sent him a video showing the shooting of a handcuffed prisoner.
In a remarkable phone interview last week, E.R.D. Capt. Omar Nazar did not dispute the authenticity of the footage Arkady documented but said the brutal tactics were justified because the men tortured and killed were linked to ISIS.
“We do not want war prisoners in our fight against ISIS,” said Capt. Nazar. “We don’t take prisoners.”
The journalist, Ali Arkady, is seeking asylum in Europe.
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British police stopped sharing information on the Manchester suicide bombing with American agencies after the American agencies leaked information to the media. The American agencies promised to do better and now the Brits are sharing information again.
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Iran claims it built a third underground ballistic missile factory.
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OPEC decided to extend its oil output cuts another nine months. One think tank believes oil consumption will peak in 2020–2021, and that oil prices will fall to $25/barrel after that.
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Former Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos was injured when he opened a booby-trapped package in his car.
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Reuters profiled the three people responsible for North Korea’s missile development program.
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Ami Horowitz on “white privilege”:
Tag: Charles Murray
Links for 5-22-2017
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Turkey’s government summoned the American ambassador, John Bass, and filed a formal protest over “aggressive” actions taken by American law enforcement while President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s goon bodyguards assaulted protesters outside the Turkish embassy in Washington, D.C. A Turkish state-owned news agency published a video making the case that Erdogan’s bodyguards were compelled to beat the protesters up; Belingcat studied the video and (not surprisingly) discovered creative editing.
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The Telegraph’s live blog on the Manchester bombing is here.
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The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that North Carolina’s legislators illegally gerrymandered two legislative districts. The decision effectively overturned a 2001 Supreme Court decision, Cromartie II, that approved one of the two districts covered by today’s decision — and the district’s borders changed little between 2001 and today. Dan McLaughlin writes that today’s decision basically translates to, “it’s OK when Democrats gerrymander districts, but it’s not OK when Republicans do it.”
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The U.S. Supreme Court limited the ability of patent litigants to shop for friendly federal district court venues (with the court for the Eastern District of Texas a popular choice). Previously someone could sue a company for patent infringement in any district where the company did business; now the company can be sued only in the state where it’s incorporated. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion for the entire court.
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Anonymous sources told The Washington Post that Donald Trump asked the Director of the NSA, Admiral Michael Rogers, and the Director of National Intelligence, Daniel Coats, to publicly state that there’s no evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia. Rogers and Coats both found the request “inappropriate” and refused.
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The Trump administration asked a federal court for another 90 day delay in a lawsuit dealing with ObamaCare’s insurance subsidies. This was the case brought by the House of Representatives during the Obama administration, where the House argued that the Obama administration was subsidizing insurance companies with money that Congress hadn’t appropriated.
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The Department of Homeland Security believes more than 700,000 foreign travelers to the U.S. overstayed their visas last year.
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The U.S. Senate confirmed Iowa Governor Terry Branstad as ambassador to China.
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The Congressional Joint Economic Committee held a hearing on “What We Do Together: The State of Social Capital in America,” and Democrats turned it into a hit job on one of the guests, Charles Murray.
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California’s legislature has a plan for universal health care coverage, and the price tag is double the state’s current annual budget — $400 billion.
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Hackers are targeting the U.N. experts who are investigating North Korea’s sanctions violations. North Korea denies involvement, but they’re the obvious suspect.
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China arrested six Japanese nationals, apparently on espionage charges.
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Another Tibetan monk, Jamyang Losel, self-immolated in Amdo province. He’s the 150 Tibetan to self-immolate since 2009.
Links for 5-11-2017
- Donald Trump signed an executive order creating the “Presidential Commission on Election Integrity.” The chair and vice-chair are Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, respectively. Election results in Dallas County, Texas are delayed thanks to credible allegations of mail-in ballot fraud; there are also allegations of vote harvesting.
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George Soros is funding a new campaign targeting companies that may benefit from Trump administration policies: “The campaign, known as ‘Corporate Backers of Hate,’ targets nine companies: JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Disney, IBM, BlackRock, Uber, and Blackstone.”
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Former Congresswoman Corrine Brown (D-FL) was convicted on 18 counts of wire fraud and tax evasion related to a charity she operated.
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Health insurance company Aetna plans to exit all ObamaCare exchanges in 2018.
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Someone at New York University accidentally leaked information about an advanced code-breaking supercomputer to the internet. The computer was a joint development between NYU, IBM, and the Department of Defense.
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So far 60 Middlebury College students have been punished for the fracas that erupted when Charles Murray delivered a speech on campus. Some students are under criminal investigation for assaulting professor Allison Stanger.
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Israeli Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked wants the U.S. to tell the Palestinian Authority to stop paying terrorists to attack Israelis and Americans. This would seem to be an obvious thing to do, and yet…
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The U.S. and Russia renewed their agreement dealing with military air traffic over Syria. The scheme started in 2015 but Russia canceled it last month after the Trump administration fired cruise missiles into a Syrian air base.
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The Lebanese parliament’s term ends on June 20, and Sunni Muslims, Shiite Muslims, and Maronite Christians are arguing over the election law that dictates the government’s structure:
Lebanon’s once-dominant Maronite Christians are at the heart of the dispute. Maronite leaders say the law used to hold the last election gives Muslims too much say over which Christian MPs get elected.
The main Christian party, the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) founded by President Michel Aoun, wants a law that redraws constituencies so that more of the Christian seats are decided exclusively by Christian voters.
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Ben Shapiro for PragerU: “Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings”:
Links for 3-27-2017
- Congressman Mo Brooks (R-AL) filed a one sentence bill that repeals ObamaCare.
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Congressman Devin Nunes said the source for his revelations about the inadvertent collection of intelligence involving Donald Trump’s transition team was an intelligence officer, whom Nunes met on the White House grounds. The relevant intelligence reports were circulated in the executive branch, and Nunes (like other members of Congress) doesn’t have access to that network.
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NATO plans to spend $3.24 billion over three years to upgrade its satellite and computer technology.
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The U.S. Senate voted for cloture on a treaty amendment that adds Montenegro to NATO. The vote was 97–2, with Rand Paul and Mike Lee opposed. Paul noted that Montenegro has all of 2,000 people in its military, so it’s not in a position to help itself, let alone contribute to NATO.
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Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Department of Justice grants to cities and states will be contingent on immigration cooperation, implying that sanctuary cities and states will be cut off. In the current fiscal year, those grants total $4.1 billion.
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Daniel Greenfield writes that civil war is upon us:
Our system of government was designed to allow different groups to negotiate their differences. But those differences were supposed to be based around finding shared interests. The most profound of these shared interests was that of a common country based around certain civilizational values. The left has replaced these Founding ideas with radically different notions and principles. It has rejected the primary importance of the country. As a result it shares little in the way of interests or values.
Instead it has retreated to cultural urban and suburban enclaves where it has centralized tremendous amounts of power while disregarding the interests and values of most of the country. If it considers them at all, it is convinced that they will shortly disappear to be replaced by compliant immigrants and college indoctrinated leftists who will form a permanent demographic majority for its agenda.
But it couldn’t wait that long because it is animated by the conviction that enforcing its ideas is urgent and inevitable. And so it turned what had been a hidden transition into an open break.
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Charles Murray (finally) responded to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has long asserted (inaccurately) that he’s a white nationalist.
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Today in prosecutorial misconduct, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Kansas possesses hundreds of phone and video recordings of conversations between lawyers and their clients at a privately run prison in Leavenworth. A former assistant district attorney in New York, Tara Lenich, was charged with forging the signatures of judges on orders approving cellular wiretaps.
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Royal Dutch Shell and Anadarko Petroleum may allow their ten year partnership in the Permian Basin to expire, hoping they can speed up development of the oil and gas fields after dividing them between the companies.
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A Russian court sentenced opposition leader Alexei Navalny to 15 days in jail for resisting police orders.
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The British government is pressuring technology companies for access to encrypted messaging applications that run on smartphones. The Westminster attacker used WhatsApp, which is difficult to penetrate.
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The American University of Afghanistan reopened after a Taliban attack last August. Security on the campus is now handled by a Canadian company.
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YPG officials believe Raqqa will join the federation of local governments that Kurds have established in northern Syria after ISIS is driven from the city. This sort of talk causes the Turkish government to become unhinged.
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Malaysian police officers visited North Korea’s embassy, fueling speculation that Malaysia will turn over Kim Jong Nam’s body.
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Why Isn’t There a Palestinian State? by PragerU:
Links for 3-7-2017
- Conservative and libertarian groups like Heritage Action, Americans for Prosperity, and FreedomWorks came out against the ObamaCare Lite bill released yesterday by House Republicans. They were joined by Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Thomas Massie. Mike Pence told Congressional Republicans that a vote against the bill is a vote for ObamaCare, illustrating how the past decade of two party rule has given us lots of crap choices.
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P.H. Guthrie believes Donald Trump declared war on the Obama administration:
President Trump labeled ex-President Obama a “bad or sick guy” in a tweet on Saturday, accusing Obama of tapping his phones during the presidential campaign. Through a spokesman, Obama denied any direct involvement in ordering surveillance on Trump, his associates, or his campaign.
By denouncing Obama in such an explosive and public manner, Trump has escalated the controversy over alleged Russian interference in the campaign into a political war between the current and former presidents. The move is Trump’s boldest play yet, the equivalent of poker’s all-in re-raise against Democrat allegations of Russian collusion. While almost all of official Washington is shocked by Trump’s gamble, there is strong reason to believe he holds the winning hand.
- A group of academics re-staged part of the presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but swapped the genders of the two candidates. They expected the male version of Hillary Clinton to win, but they were wrong. At least some people in the audience were bewildered by the outcome.
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American troops are stationed in Manbij, Syria to act as peacekeepers between the Kurdish YPG, Turkish troops, and rebels backed by Turkey. A Pentagon spokesman said, “This is obviously a really complicated situation.” It would be a much clearer situation if the U.S. had a realistic policy toward Turkey.
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Peter W. Wood wrote an interesting analysis of how Middlebury College enabled the protesters who attacked Charles Murray:
The Middlebury fracas would have been plenty bad enough if it ended there. But what made headlines came later. When Murray was being escorted to his car, the group he was with was assaulted by students, and Professor Allison Stanger was injured after someone pulled her hair and twisted her neck. She had to go to an emergency room and was fitted with a neck brace.
Later:
But there are deeper layers of irony here. If you examine the video carefully, Stanger makes several appearances before she goes on stage. At one point (29:08), Stanger is to be found grinning at the chant, “Hey hey, ho, ho, Charles Murray has got to go.” At another (30:05) Stanger is broadly smiling as the crowd chants, “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray go away.” Still later, as the crowd chants, “Black Lives Matter,” Stanger raises her hands above her head (33:20) and claps along. Soon after, the camera pans across her again (33:34) and she is chanting the slogan as well as clapping.
- The events at Middlebury College resemble what happened on Indian college campuses in the 1990s:
The outbreaks of violence in India during mid–90s, represented the last days of dying socialist control at Indian universities. The ideas of the free market had become unstoppable, and a violent resistance to these ideas was instigated and inflamed by a handful of professors with an ultra-left background. Correlation is of course not causation, but correlation leads to recognizable patterns. There is a method in this campus madness in the West as well.
Most of this campus violence and intolerance wouldn’t occur, for example, without the vocal and tacit support of a sub-section of faculty within today’s academic community. This is therefore much more cynical than a random, spontaneous outburst of student activism which accidentally turns violent. This section of academia, the majority of them postmodernists and ultra-leftists, explicitly endorse the suppression of their ideological opponents as well as free speech and debate. And they explicitly promote an ideological movement which involved hijacking Western academia and using students as their personal army.
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The largest manufacturer of credit card terminals used in the U.S., Verifone, is investigating a breech of its internal computer networks.
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Chinese telecom company ZTE pleaded guilty to illegally selling electronic equipment and software to Iran and North Korea. ZTE will pay a $892 million fine.
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The first pieces of the THAAD anti-missile defense system started appearing in South Korea, prompting whining by China.
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A group called the Anti-Corruption Foundation published a report and a movie on Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, claiming he, like Vladimir Putin, has become extraordinarily wealthy while holding public office. The person behind the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Alexey Navalny, is well connected at the Kremlin, indicating there’s a faction that wants Medvedev gone.
Links for 3-6-2017
- House Republicans released their ObamaCare replacement bill, and it’s full of ugly compromises that could make it difficult for anyone to support it.
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Donald Trump signed a new executive order on immigration that’s intended to be more defensible than the previous executive order. People with valid visas are exempt from the order, Iraqis are no longer part of the temporary ban on entry to the U.S., and Syrian refugees are not blocked from entering the U.S. indefinitely as they were before.
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Charles Murray wrote an account of his experience at Middlebury College:
That’s why the penalties imposed on the protesters need to be many and severe if last Thursday is not to become an inflection point. But let’s be realistic: The pressure to refrain from suspending and expelling large numbers of students will be intense. Parents will bombard the administration with explanations of why their little darlings are special people whose hearts were in the right place. Faculty and media on the left will urge that no one inside the lecture hall be penalized because shouting down awful people like me is morally appropriate. The administration has to recognize that severe sanctions will make the college less attractive to many prospective applicants.
My best guess is that Middlebury’s response will fall short of what I think is needed: A forceful statement to students that breaking the code of conduct is too costly to repeat. But even the response I prefer won’t generalize. A tough response will be met with widespread criticism. Students in other colleges will have no good reason to think their administration will follow Middlebury’s example.
And so I’m pessimistic. I say that realizing that I am probably the most unqualified person to analyze the larger meanings of last week’s events at Middlebury. It will take some time for me to be dispassionate. If you promise to bear that in mind, I will say what I’m thinking and rely on you to discount it appropriately: What happened last Thursday has the potential to be a disaster for American liberal education.
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Russian hackers are reportedly extorting money from American liberal groups like the Center for American Progress.
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Alexandria, Virginia’s public school district canceled classes on Wednesday so teachers can protest Donald Trump.
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An American airstrike in Yemen killed a person Barack Obama released from Club Gitmo in 2009, Yasir al-Silmi.
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The Philippine Senate ended its investigation into claims that President Rodrigo Duterte ran death squads while he was mayor of Davao City, citing a lack of proof.
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A South Korean special prosecutor formally charged President Park Geun-hye with accepting bribes from Samsung Group via her friend Choi Soon-sil. Lee goes on trial on Thursday.
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North Korea fired four ballistic missiles that traveled 620 miles. Three of the four missiles landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone, which extends 200 miles from its coast.
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Iran test fired two short range ballistic missiles, one of which struck a target barge. Iranian fast attack boats also approached the USNS Invincible in the Hormuz Strait.
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A Taliban faction attacked a Pakistani border outpost, killing five soldiers. Pakistan says dozens of fighters crossed the border from Afghanistan, and ten of them were killed.
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Christina Hoff Sommers on the non-existent gender wage gap:
Links for 3-5-2017
- There’s heated debate over Donald Trump’s accusation that the Obama administration wiretapped him during the run-up to the November 2016 election. First, Andrew McCarthy explains that the Department of Justice has both law enforcement and national security roles. The DOJ pursues its national security role at the direction of the President; the President is not (normally) involved in the law enforcement role, which is pursued at the direction of the DOJ’s bureaucracy. According to published reports, the Obama DOJ pursued a criminal investigation (part of its law enforcement role) of Donald Trump’s associates in June 2016, which went nowhere. Then the investigation switched to a national security approach, and DOJ filed a request with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (the “FISA Court”) to surveil Trump’s associates; it’s not clear if that request named Trump himself, and, if it did, in what context. Regardless, Barack Obama should have known about that FISA Court request, since it was filed under his authority as Commander in Chief. The FISA Court rejected that request, which is very unusual. In October 2016 the DOJ went back to the FISA Court with a narrower request, which was approved. It’s not clear who was surveiled under that authorization, or if the surveillance continues today. Obama administration representatives are choosing their words carefully when characterizing what happened, and Andrew McCarthy explains why:
Nevertheless, whether done inside or outside the FISA process, it would be a scandal of Watergate dimension if a presidential administration sought to conduct, or did conduct, national-security surveillance against the presidential candidate of the opposition party. Unless there was some powerful evidence that the candidate was actually acting as an agent of a foreign power, such activity would amount to a pretextual use of national security power for political purposes. That is the kind of abuse that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in lieu of impeachment.
Robert Barnes explains how the Obama administration could have abused the FISA process for political ends, and it is potentially troubling.
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The federal government has an agency that’s intended to protect privacy and other civil liberties called (appropriately enough) the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Unfortunately it’s all but dead, and no one in the federal government seems to care.
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Donald Trump supporters held a demonstration about a mile away from the University of California at Berkeley campus, with predictable results: brawls accompanied by flag and sign burning. Ten people were arrested.
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Jenna Lifhits explains what happened in the weeks up to the assault on Charles Murray and others at Middlebury College.
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A Syrian government MiG–23 was shot down on its way to Idlib, Syria. The plane crashed in Turkey. The pilot ejected and also landed in Turkey, where he’s being treated for spinal injuries.
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A great NRA ad targeting the selective pursuit of the truth by The New York Times:
