Archives for September 2016

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Jim Jordan is furious that yet another bloated bill to keep the government running was approved on Capitol Hill this week and he fears it will only set the stage for an even greater spending binge come December.

Rep. Jordan, R-Ohio, says this move was designed by party leaders to avoid a government shutdown that would surely be blamed on Republicans, even though he says it’s really the Democrats that gummed up the appropriations process.

“It’s not good for the country and not good for the taxpayer,” said Jordan.

The legislation, known as a continuing resolution, easily passed the U.S. Senate 72-26 on Wednesday, followed by a similarly lopsided 342-85 margin in the House.  It keeps federal funding at existing levels but also includes special funding for Zika response, aid for flood victims in Louisiana and other projects.

Jordan says he voted against the bill for multiple reasons, including Congress failing to follow regular order and approve 13 individual spending bills rather than one giant bill that only the leadership of both parties in the House and Senate got to craft.

He also says it ignores our nation’s balance sheet once again.

“I think when you’ve got a $20 trillion debt, you’ve got to try to get a handle on the spending.  Here we are increasing it at a time when the deficit went up this year.  Really?  We’re just going to go ahead and spend at that level.  [The House Freedom Caucus] felt that didn’t make sense and that’s why we were against the earlier budget proposal in the Spring of this year as well,” said Jordan.

While Jordan is frustrated that spending levels negotiated by President Obama and former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, are still in place, he says Democrats are very effective at forcing the GOP’s hand.

“Primarily, it’s not happening because in the Senate, Harry Reid won’t let the individual bills come up for a vote.  That’s the way it’s supposed to work,” said Jordan.  “He’s been able to win every fight by saying, ‘Look, I’m going to hold up defense spending until you give me the spending I want on domestic issues.”

“What that means is taxpayers get the short end.  I think, frankly, our military gets the short end of that deal too and it’s just not good for the country,” said Jordan.

Jordan says Republicans would be in a position to cut spending without Reid’s parliamentary games.

“If we could get our troops funded and our military funded at the right level and get that bill taken care of early, then I think we could go after some of the ridiculous spending and some of the ridiculous regulations within the federal government,” said Jordan.

He says Republicans always end up giving in as government shutdowns loom because the party refuses to frame the debate in a way that would be a winner for them in the court of public opinion.  Jordan says the party needs to fight.

Last year, he says the battle should have been waged over Planned Parenthood funding in the wake of videos explaining how the nation’s largest abortion provider alters their methods of killing unborn babies in order to preserve organs for which researchers pay the most money.  This year, Jordan thinks the battle should have been pitched over tightening up the vetting of Middle East refugees.

Incidentally, Planned Parenthood funding may soon be increasing due to the provisions associated with the Zika funding.

So why did 70 percent of House Republicans vote for the continuing resolution?  Jordan says there are multiple reasons, but the political calendar is the most likely explanation.

“Some are okay with the spending levels and everything else, but for some I think it was also a concern about a shutdown scenario here five weeks before a presidential election,” said Jordan.

The government is now funded until December 9.  Jordan says that debate will look even uglier as a lame duck session cobbles together funding through September 2017.

“We’re kicking a big spending measure into a lame duck session; a lame duck session when a number of members will no longer be accountable to the voters.  The voters will just have spoken, just picked a Congress for the upcoming year.  Yet, they’re going to be going back and dealing with billions of dollars of spending,” said Jordan.

Jordan says that never turns out well for taxpayers.

“In the last five years, we have seen what happens in lame duck sessions.  We’ve seen what happens right before the holidays.  You get tax increases.  You get omnibus, cromnibus, big spending measures.  It never works out good for the taxpayers and families of this country in my judgment,” said Jordan.

The congressman says this is yet another aspect of the system that drives voters crazy, as Washington operates under a different set of rules than most hardworking Americans.

“There are two standards.  One for ‘We the People’  and a different one for the politically connected.  One for us regular folks and another if your name is Lois Lerner, John Koskinen or Hillary Clinton,” said Jordan referring to IRS officials neck-deep in the scandal of the government harassing conservative groups and individuals.

And just this week, lawmakers, including Jordan, grilled FBI Director Jim Comey over multiple immunity offers and no prosecutions in the investigation of Clinton’s handling of classified information and her use of a private server.

Jordan says the public is incensed, even if the Justice Department is not.

“That’s why you see such strong appeal for Donald Trump, particularly in our state of Ohio.  It’s because they know he’s going to come in and shake up the system, which needs to happen,” said Jordan.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton is warning Hillary Clinton would be nothing more than President Obama’s third term in the fight against radical Islamic terrorism, applauding Donald Trump’s aggressive stand on ISIS and fearing there could be many negative repercussions to Congress allowing 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia.

Bolton, who publicly supports Trump, served as UN ambassador from 2005-2007.  Before that, he served in the State Department under President George W. Bush.

Monday night’s first presidential debate was touted as having a substantial focus on national security.  It didn’t live up to that billing, but Clinton and Trump did cover their approaches to ISIS and cyber security.  Clinton offered more specifics than Trump on how to defeat ISIS, but Bolton says her prescription sounds familiar.

“Hillary Clinton is going to be Barack Obama’s third term.  I think that’s true not just on national security matters but on domestic policy as well,” said Bolton.  “While she likes to say, and did several times on Monday say I’ve got a plan for this or I’ve got a plan for that, her plan for ISIS sounds suspiciously like Barack Obama’s, except she’s going to do it better.”

Bolton says he likes Trump’s emphasis on defeating ISIS swiftly.

“Trump has been very clear.  As long as ISIS has a privileged sanctuary from which it can recruit new members and train and direct them to terrorist activity in Europe of the United States, that’s a real threat to us.  So the slow rolling Obama offensive against ISIS in Iraq and Syria has really cost us and could cost us and could cost us further in very human terms,” said Bolton.

“Trump has been about as emphatic as one can imagine that he believes that rapidly defeating ISIS in Iraq and Syria ought to be the top priority,” said Bolton.

Clinton attacked Trump for not being more public about his approach to defeating ISIS and suggesting he doesn’t have one.  Trump responded by saying that Clinton is showing our enemy exactly what she would do.

Bolton says he’s not worried by Trump’s lack of specifics.

“Even if he laid out a plan today, in six months, when – assuming he wins – he takes office, the lay of the land could be different,” said Bolton.

Adding to the complexities surrounding ISIS is the dire warning from FBI Director James Comey in congressional testimony this week that removing a physical sanctuary for ISIS does not entirely solve the problem and actually a new concern.

“The so-called caliphate will be crushed. The challenge will be: through the fingers of that crush are going to come hundreds of very, very dangerous people,” Comey said at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on the global terror threat. “There will be a terrorist diaspora sometime in the next two to five years like we’ve never seen before.”

“We must prepare ourselves and our allies particularly in western Europe to confront that threat because when ISIL is reduced to an insurgency and those killers flow out they will try to come to western Europe and try to come here to kill innocent people,” added Comey.

Bolton agrees with Comey, first about how long it will take to defeat ISIS on our current course.

“I think what he’s implicitly saying is that if Hillary’s elected, carrying out Obama’s policies will take several years to defeat ISIS,” said Bolton.

He says ISIS is rather effective at slowing the advance of the U.S. and our allies.

“They have not been in the kind of chaotic retreat that would signal a breakdown of their command and control or their discipline.  If they are able to hold with that level of professionalism, I think they’ll fight a slow retreat, hold off as long as they can, wait for the United States to get tired or get diverted by something else,” said Bolton.

But Bolton says Comey is also right about what happens to those ISIS fighters once their territory is taken away form them.

“If it looks like they’re going down to defeat, I think they will do precisely what FBI Director Comey said.  They’ll simply leave the region and go and carry on their war against the West in Europe or in the United States itself,” said Bolton.

Overall, Bolton says the first debate did not spend nearly enough time focused on national security.

“I don’t think there was enough time and the topics in the debate were very broad,” said Bolton.  “I just think, given the threat of international terrorism around the world, the threat of nuclear proliferation, the threats of Russia and China, that people need to size up the candidates on how they’re going to do dealing with these foreign challenges,” said Bolton.

The former ambassador is also speaking out of the first congressional veto override of the Obama administration.  Lawmakers overwhelmingly enacted legislation allowing the families of 9/11 victims to seek damages in court from the government of Saudi Arabia.

Bolton believes the bill is a bad idea.

“By lifting Saudi or any other nation’s sovereign immunity, if they are alleged to have engaged in terrorist acts, we’re exposing military personnel, intelligence agents, diplomats and even private citizens to being arrested overseas, to being pursued by lawsuits, to having frivolous lawsuits filed against the U.S. government that endanger our operations all around the world,” said Bolton.

He says if Saudi Arabia were proven to be behind the 9/11 attacks it would be grounds for war, not civil lawsuits.  He also believes it gives false hope to families still hurting from their losses on 9/11.

“The bill is a cruel hoax on the families of the victims.  They’re not going to find out anything more than what the general public already knows.  The Saudis are not going to allow them to wander through their files or interview their top officials.  At the end of the day, the victims’ families are going to be right where they are today,” said Bolton.

Bolton blames the Obama administration for doing very little to explain to lawmakers why this bill might be well-intentioned but harmful to U.S. interests.

The revelation that at least 500 million user accounts were hacked at Yahoo is spawning more concern over cyber security failures by the U.S. government and corporate America, and a leading cyber expert says we’re still not serious about a problem that is much worse than most people realize.

The stunning admission that more than half a billion user account credentials were stolen by the breach at Yahoo, including users’ email addresses, birth dates, passwords and some security questions.  Even more troubling to some experts is how long the hack played out.

“Whoever it was was lurking around in their system since 2014, which is an inordinately long period of time.  Usually someone is in about 201 days and there start to be indications that they’re in there.  In this case, Yahoo didn’t even find out until they were notified by somebody else,” said IDT911 Founder and Chairman Adam Levin.

“That is distressing, but it also shows that regardless of how big companies are and how technologically sophisticated they are, we’re living where breaches are the third certainty in life, that cyber war has replaced the Cold War and that you’ve got very sophisticated, creative and persistent people that are getting into systems all over the world and are becoming more and more difficult to ferret out,” said Levin.

Levin says the scope of hacking right now is far beyond what most people realize.

“Business and government are being breached at an insane pace.  Up to about a year ago, over a billion files had been improperly accessed by people that had no right to be there.  They projected that in 2016, before they were thinking about Yahoo, we could have as many as one billion files that were improperly accessed through breaches,” said Levin.

He also says Americans must scrap the mentality that hackers want nothing to do with normal, everyday people.

“A lot of people say, ‘Why does anybody want to breach me.  I’m nobody.  What they have to understand is – both our companies and government and each and every one of us – we are all Kim Kardashian.  We are all celebrities,” said Levin.

“They want to get what we’ve got because there’s money at the end of the rainbow based on the information they can get from us, that they can exploit, that they can use to create a mosaic of our lives.  They can commit identity theft or steal intellectual property and trade secrets,” said Levin.

The nature of identity theft is also evolving and getting more elaborate.

“When you talk about identity theft, we’re way beyond people opening accounts in people’s names.  We’re talking about medical identity theft, where you could die on a stretcher because of a wrong blood type.  You could end up on a no fly list.  You could be arrested because you’re pulled over for a busted tail light and there are warrants for your arrest.  There could be tax fraud, child identity theft.  We’re living in serious times,” said Levin.

However, he says the government is still not taking the threat as seriously as it should be.

“When you have a Congress that can’t agree on the day of the week, when you have administrations that have to fight for every penny in order to harden cyber defenses, where you have a two million person projected gap in cyber security professionals.  We’ve got a lot of work to do.  This should be a front burner issue,” said Levin.

The issue was raised in Monday’s presidential debate.  Levin says we’re going to need a lot more from our next president on this issue than what we saw on that stage.

“It’s more than just making strong statements or talking about expertise by one’s child.  We’ve got to get deadly serious about this,” said Levin.

After noting that breaches are inevitable, Levin advises individuals to minimize their risk, monitor their situation and manage the damage.

When it comes to reducing your digital exposure, Levin says consumers need to be much better about protecting their information.

“If someone contacts you online, or in person or telephonically, and asks you to authenticate yourself, you hang up, you delete, you walk away.  It’s one thing if you’re in control of the interaction and they need information to confirm you’re you.  It’s another if they’re in control of the conversation, because they should know your credit card number or your security code or your Social Security number,” said Levin.

He also recommends never carrying your Social Security card on you, choosing strong passwords and never sharing your passwords with anyone over email or social media.  Levin also encourages people to monitor their credit scores, since major drops indicate a breach.  And he suggests taking advantage of free services that banks, insurance companies and corporations often have to clean up the damage.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is drafting legislation to block a new Obama administration rule that would allow the government to hack into the devices of any American on the permission of a single judge without the need for any evidence of wrongdoing.

At issue is Rule 41 (b)(6)(B) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which spells out the protocol the federal government must follow to obtain information from American citizens.  Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, says the proposed language is a major departure from the current policy.

“Right now, as it stands without this change, the government has a requirement that it must apply for a single warrant and that it has to be in the same judicial district where this search will take place,” said Lee.

“But under the amended version of Rule 41 (b)(6)(B), if that takes effect, this deliberate and focused process would be scrapped and it would be scrapped in favor of a nationwide warrant to search millions of devices anywhere across the country,” said Lee.

The senator says under the proposed rule change the Obama administration just needs one judge in the U.S. to hack your phone or computer.

“The impact of Rule 41 (b)(6)(B) would be to allow a single judge to issue a nationwide warrant empowering the federal government to hack into any computer that people in the government believe may be part of a botnet,” said Lee.

A botnet is a group of private computers infected with malicious software.  Once infected, that network of devices is used without the knowledge of those computers’ owners to send spam and engage in other nefarious activities.

Lee says the desire to crack down on botnets is understandable, but not at the expense of constitutional rights.  In April, the Supreme Court quietly approved the proposed rule change, but Lee says there’s a reason why we have three branches of government.

“Regardless of whether the Supreme Court is likely to strike down this or that law, what do we think about it?  Is this consistent with our own standards of what we think the federal government ought to be authorized to do.  We ought to undertake an examination of each of these policy decisions with our own view of the fourth amendment in mind,” said Lee.

The fourth amendment to the Constitution says, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Lee believes the Constitution is very clear on this proposed rule change.

“Yes, this offends my own view of privacy as protected by the fourth amendment,” said Lee.

In fact, he thinks this effort to skirt the fourth amendment ought to remind us of why we have it in the first place.

“When there’s blanket permission, it starts to look like the kind of thing that happened under the reign of King George III (prior to the American Revolution) on both sides of the Atlantic.  The government would use what they call general warrants, a warrant basically saying, ‘Go get the bad guys.  You can search anything you want,'” said Lee.

Lee expects a strong bipartisan effort in Congress to push back against the Obama administration.  Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, is taking a major role in this effort, as is the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont.  Even the ACLU is opposed to the rule change.

But the clock is ticking for Lee and his allies.

“The House and Senate must pass resolutions of disapproval prior to Dec. 1 to prevent this from going into effect.  We’ve got Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and Democrats and Republicans in the House who support that.  Now, not every Democrat and not every Republican shares that view but many of us do.  That’s why we’re getting the word out now,” said Lee.

They must not only get the resolutions passed but also be ready for an Obama veto.  Overriding that veto would require two-thirds majorities in both chambers.  Lee has not begun any sort of formal head count, calling it “unnecessary” and “counter-productive” when the effort to educate the public is just beginning.He says public pressure on members of Congress could be the difference between winning and losing.

“We need everyone who hears about this proposed rule change to Rule 41 (b)(6)(B) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to reach out to their senators and their congressmen and tell them how they feel about this,” said Lee.

A more urgent deadline looms on Friday, September 30.  That’s when the U.S. is scheduled to cede control of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.

“Normally, as a constitutional conservative, I’d be elated to have the government relinquishing control of something.  The only problem here is  in this case we’re not relinquishing it to the American people.  We’d be relinquishing it, potentially, to despotic governments throughout the world, government’s run by people who might have very different ideas about the internet and censorship,” said Lee.

He says the lack of specifics on what comes next with ICANN is the most unnerving part.

“We need to wait and make sure that ICANN remains under government control until we know who’s going to be running it and how it’s going to be organized, what kinds of things foreign governments would and would not be able to do to censor and impose artificial restrictions on the internet,” said Lee.

He says internet domain control falling into the wrong hands would not only chill the free flow of information but also endanger other key liberties.

“You could also end up seeing a lot of intellectual property rights diminished or even eliminated by the wholesale assignment of a domain name belonging to one person or one company over to another,” said Lee.

With just three days left top fight this issue, Lee and his allies are hoping to jam a provision into must-pass legislation.

“We need something attached to the spending bill that needs to be passed between now and Friday to contain some type of limitation, some type of language limiting the Obama administration’s ability to relinquish control of ICANN,” said Lee.

Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America break down the performances of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Lester Holt – pointing out their strengths and weaknesses, but mostly their weaknesses.

Former Justice Department official Victoria Toensing says more and more evidence shows FBI Director James Comey made basic errors in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information and many FBI personnel believe his conduct has embarrassed the bureau.

In July, Comey offered a long list of poor decisions and “extremely careless” behavior by Clinton because she ran all of her email through a private email server before saying there was no intent by Clinton to break the law and no precedent existed for prosecuting the case.  Therefore, Clinton would not be charged.

Since then, the FBI has released more and more evidence from the case, leaving Toensing and others with deep reservations about Comey’s competence.  The latest revelations include the extension of immunity to Clinton’s State Department Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, that President Obama communicated with Clinton via her server under a pseudonym and that Comey allowed one prominent Democratic attorney to represent four different witnesses in the case.

“I think Jim Comey has to go,” said Toensing.  “I can’t tell you the number of present federal prosecutors and FBI people who have been talking to my husband (former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova) and me about how upset they are with Jim Comey and his performance and how it’s embarrassed the FBI,” said Toensing.

While admitting any punishment for Comey is unlikely, Toensing is calling on Congress to rebuke him.

“Congress should at least pass some kind of a resolution condemning him for his inability, it seems, to conduct an investigation in a way that a first-year federal prosecutor would know how to do,” said Toensing.

Mills is one of multiple people who received limited or full immunity during the investigation.  Toensing says that should have been unnecessary but Comey failed to take one of the most basic steps in law to further the investigation.

“You have to open a grand jury,” she said.  “Why didn’t the director open a grand jury?  In his report, he complains that he didn’t get certain documents.  He tried to get these documents but couldn’t get them.  Well, do you know what you do in an investigation?  You open a grand jury.  Then you issue a subpoena and you get those documents.”

She says would have been particularly important with Mills.

“If he had a grand jury open, he would have been able to subpoena the computer of Cheryl Mills.  So he wouldn’t have had to give her immunity.  He could have just subpoenaed it and he would have gotten that computer,” said Toensing.

Even more bizarre, despite Mills being given immunity – which is protection from criminal prosecution – Mills was allowed to sit in on the FBI’s interview of Clinton in July.  is this common practice?

“I’ve never heard of it,” said Toensing.

She’s also never heard of an investigation where a single attorney has been allowed to represent so many critical witnesses.

“He allows Beth Wilkinson, a known Democrat, to represent two attorneys (including Mills) and two other people.  He allowed one lawyer to represent four people.  That’s unheard of,” said Toensing.  “Just think how she got to coordinate their testimony.”

Toensing says the new revelation that Obama emailed Clinton on the private server raises another red flag.

“It seems that he also thinks the president was involved, because now we know from the weekend dump, that the president was using an alias.  Therefore, the president had to know about this use of the private server.  Now, he’s got the White House involved.  He’s got the Democrat nominee involved.  He just didn’t want to deal with it,” said Toensing.

She believes Comey, who has long had a reputation for seeing the law in black and white, wanted to avoid injecting the FBI into the middle of a contentious campaign season.

In addition, Toensing is flabbergasted that no one is facing charges for destroying evidence through the tens of thousands of emails that Clinton admits her legal team deleted.  Clinton claims they were all personal matters but previous FBI document released dispel that argument.

Toensing says that shows clear intent, regardless of Comey’s insistence he could find none.

“Destroying evidence is just the most wicked evidence one could have against a person.  I have never heard of lawyers purposely destroying evidence and not being the target of an investigation themselves,” said Toensing.

“I would be shaking in my boots if I had a subpoena from the Justice Department for a client and I went in and said, ‘Oh, we went through the files and we thought three file cabinets weren’t important so we just threw those away,'” said Toensing.