Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America react to Senate Republicans nuking the filibuster rule on Supreme Court nominations. They also cheer Nikki Haley for staring down the Russians over Syria’s use of chemical weapons against its own people. And they discuss the removal of Steve Bannon from a key National Security Council position.
A former federal prosecutor says it is highly unusual for anyone in a political position to request the “unmasking” of U.S. citizens and he says it is vital for congressional investigators to determine the full scope of the federal government’s incidental surveillance of Donald Trump and his associates during the campaign and the presidential transition.
On Tuesday, Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice admitted to requesting the intelligence community unmask Americans captured in communications with foreigners under legal surveillance. However, she insists there was nothing unusual about it and that she did not leak any of the classified information.
Andrew C. McCarthy was a federal prosecutor, most famous for leading the prosecution of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and his associates for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and their plots to attack other New York City landmarks. He’s written about the Rice revelations this week at National Review Online.
He says Rice’s actions were very unusual.
“We’re talking about what’s supposed to be incidental collection. It starts to look a whole lot less incidental if you’re doing the same thing again and again with respect to the same people or group of people,” said McCarthy.
“By the time someone like Susan Rice gets a finished intelligence product or report in her hands, the unmasking question has already been answered by the people who know it best, which is the collecting agency. It’s highly, highly unusual for consumers of intelligence to go to the collecting agencies and ask them to unmask the identities,” said McCarthy.
With Rice admitting to requesting the unmasking, the question now becomes what President Obama knew. McCarthy says every administration has safeguards in place to protect the president and give him plausible deniability in situations like this. But he says it was clear to the intelligence-gathering agencies (CIA, NSA, and FBI) who they were responding to.
“If you were the NSA and you got a call from Susan Rice, who says, ‘You know, I’d really like to see the identity of this American that you haven’t identified in your report,” when you hear that question, you’re not talking to just any government official. You’re talking to the president’s right hand,” said McCarthy, who says the NSA still should have denied the request.
He also believes it’s highly unlikely that Rice personally did any leaking. But he is beginning to connect the dots on how all of this played out.
“I think what happened here is you had very high people at the top who did the unmasking. You had this executive order by Obama which pushed this information out across the intelligence community. And then you have people like Evelyn Farkas, who tell us that the administration was putting pressure on members of Congress to ask the intelligence community for as much disclosure as possible,” said McCarthy.
“So what you did is you set up a situation where leaking of classified information, probably about Trump people, became inevitable. And what ended up happening over the last five months? There was lots of leaking,” said McCarthy.
McCarthy says his experience leads him to some simple conclusions.
“Where I come from, the best evidence of conspiracy is success. If what they were trying to do was create a situation where there would be a lot of leaking of classified information, there’s been a lot of success over the last five months,” said McCarthy.
While finding the actual leakers of the classified information is important, McCarthy says there ought to be higher priorities.
“It’s much less important that you figure out where people committed crimes here than to get to the bottom of whether there was a grotesque abuse of power,” he said.
He says answering that question definitively could determine the future security of the nation.
“The important thing here is that at the end of this year, all of these surveillance powers are up for reauthorization by Congress. If the American people are led to believe, because it’s true, that there’s been massive abuse of these powers, those powers are going to be curtailed. There’s going to be a scandal and there’ll be a lot of pressure on Congress to remove some of these surveillance authorities,” said McCarthy.
“If that happens, that will make our country much less safe, because all power can be used roguishly. But these powers are there because we actually need them to protect the country. I’m worried that this scandal puts the government in such disrepute, once we get to the bottom of it, that the public will not trust the government to use these powers responsibly,” said McCarthy.
McCarthy is not worried about the bickering in the House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee, suggesting it’s just like lawyers arguing vigorously on different sides of a case.
However, he does say it is up to Congress to find out what happened.
“Congress is the only game in town because this is all classified information. The intelligence committees are cleared to do this kind of investigation. So if we don’t have Congress do it, it’s probably not going to get done anytime soon,” said McCarthy.
Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America discuss yet another North Korean missile test, which appears to have been a major flop. They also try to read between the lines of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson 23-word statement in response to the North Korean missile. And they shred Pepsi’s horrible new web ad, apparently designed to appeal to social justice warriors, that ends up as a “Dagwood sandwich of bad” and actually infuriates the Black Lives Matter crowd.
Increased American air power is inflicting heavy damage on ISIS in Mosul and will do the same in the stronghold of Raqqa, but retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen Tom McInerney says the intensity needs to increase and we cannot be distracted over controversies about civilian casualties.
McInerney was a frequent critic of what he considered a much too soft air campaign against ISIS from the Obama administration. He is pleased to see Defense Secretary James Mattis and other military leaders embrace their overwhelming advantage from above.
“We’re seeing a significant increase in the number of sorties and we are seeing increased success. Mosul will fall, I think, in the next two weeks or so,” said McInerney, while noting that full control of Mosul will take time because of the large population and the house-to-house fighting that will be needed to prevail in full.
As the air campaign begins to reap results, the international community is raising questions about the rate of civilian casualties in Mosul. Some estimates concluded a recent bombing campaign resulted in 200 civilian deaths and many outlets told stories of children searching in vain for their parents.
McInerney says there are two things to keep in mind. First, he says people should not assume the U.S. is to blame, because ISIS may well have targeted civilians to build criticism of the U.S. campaign.
“The weapons they used – they probably used 100-pound bombs – were not the kind that could have taken a building down like that. So there is a great deal of concern that ISIS deliberately triggered it to kill civilians so we would terminate out bombing there,” said McInerney.
If verified, McInerney says such tactics would prove just how effective the ramped-up air bombardment really is.
“My intuition is that’s what they did because the air power has been so effective and they can’t do anything to counter it. So they’re trying to increase the casualties. Our humanity to man increases the inhumanity to mankind that ISIS is doing. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t,” said McInerney.
Secretary Mattis defended U.S. actions vs. ISIS.
“There is no military force in the world that has proven more sensitive to civilian casualties,” said Mattis, according to Reuters. “We go out of our way to always do everything humanly possible to reduce the loss of life or injury among innocent people. The same cannot be said for our adversaries.”
McInerney says Mattis is exactly right.
“We work very hard at not having casualties, but you’re not going to go to zero. You’ve got to expect some. The quicker we do it and defeat ISIS militarily, the sooner this is going to be over. The caliphate will have been defeated,” said McInerney.
However, McInerney insists the U.S. needs to limit direct U.S. involvement to the air campaign and perhaps some helicopter support. He says local ground troops must be the ones to defeat ISIS in Mosul and beyond. He also says the Muslim leaders in the region are deafening in their reluctance to challenge the ideology espoused by ISIS.
“Where are the fatwas out of Mecca and Medina that decry this evil ideology?” said McInerney.
Beyond Mosul, the focal point of defeating ISIS will soon manifest itself in a siege against the self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa. McInerney says air power will be key to success there as well.
“It must go. I would have taken down a lot more buildings and important places (before launching a siege), but I’m not running it. I think we need to be very aggressive,” said McInerney.
And that means ratcheting up the intensity of the bombings ever further.
“Oh, it’s going to be intensified. It’s got to be intensified in Raqqa,” said McInerney.
Insurance companies are more frequently refusing to cover the cost of prescription drugs, even when their plans promise that they will. This leaves patients less healthy and pharmaceutical companies stripped of incentive to innovate. American Society for Preventive Cardiology President Dr. Seth Baum explains why this problem is getting a lot worse, why it could stifle the advancement of new medicines and how individual patients can be a vital part of the solution.
Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America applaud Veterans Affairs Sec. David Shulkin for demanding broader authority to fire personnel, such as the one recently discovered to be viewing pornography while with a patient. They also discuss the latest round of sexual harassment allegations aimed at Fox News. And they get a kick out of powerless Senate Democrats trying to make demands in exchange for allowing Neil Gorsuch to get confirmed.
A prominent conservative, female attorney in Washington is ruffling feathers in the modern women’s movement by suggesting victory has been achieved on the issues that drove activism in the first place, but she says abortion activists have since hijacked the movement and any dissent is considered treasonous.
In a recent column for the the New York Times, Cleta Mitchell says the original women’s movement was not about abortion but about giving men and women a level playing field.
“[Abortion] wasn’t the genesis of the women’s movement. It was really to identify laws that treated women and men differently,” said Mitchell, who is a partner in the Washington firm of Foley & Lardner. She has been prominent in many politically-charged cases. Her clients include individuals and groups targeted by the IRS while seeking tax-exempt status.
Mitchell points out that U.S. law evolved from English common law, which inflicted inequities such as not allowing women to inherit property. For many years, the law excluded women from certain professions or precluded them from serving on juries. In the 19th century, women were often not allowed to speak in public. More recent issues focused on equal opportunity and pay.
Mitchell says women should be eager to point out they won all those debates.
“Fortunately, we were successful. Those laws were eradicated. There is no disparate treatment of women under the law in the United States today. Period,” said Mitchell.
Mitchell was active in the women’s movement in the 1970’s, but within a few years, she could see the emphasis changing to embrace abortion.
“I began to see that happening towards the end of the time I was active in the women’s movement, where I began to see that it was morphing at that time into the abortion issue. We were also being confronted with things like gay rights. I didn’t have any interest in those things because I thought that wasn’t what represented most American women and the challenges women faced,” said Mitchell.
Mitchell says that morphing continued until abortion rights became the foundation for the movement.
“The women’s movement refuses to declare victory mainly because it has morphed into a giant lobby for abortion. It’s not within the construct of Roe v. Wade. It is abortion on demand with no restrictions,” said Mitchell.
In addition to the rhetoric, Mitchell says the proof is in who are considered leaders of the women’s movement today.
“Today, that is really Cecille Richards, the head of Planned Parenthood. That’s who they look to as a key leader as well as (avowed communist) Angela Davis. And they bring Gloria Steinem out of mothballs,” said Mitchell, who also denounced the women’s march in January as well as the aggressive speeches from Davis, Madonna and Ashley Judd.
She says the past 45 years have proven a conservative icon 100 percent correct.
“The truth of the matter is Phyllis Schlafly was right. In the final analysis, Phyllis was absolutely right. I’m glad I was able to tell her that many, many times before she died last year. She said that it wasn’t possible to have an Equal Rights Amendment and the women’s movement without it morphing into something we didn’t want to have happen,” said Mitchell.
“Phyllis was right that it was the natural progression that it would be taken over by the left wing, which it was,” said Mitchell.
So instead of empowering all women, Mitchell says abortion quickly became a wedge issue by which liberal women would shun their conservative counterparts.
“I think that conservative, professional women are virtually invisible within the ranks of what would be the women’s movement. If you are a pro-life, conservative professional woman, you’re really a pariah,” said Mitchell, who recounted how women at a conference sponsored in part by her firm turned on her after learning of her legal work on behalf of conservative clients.
“When they found out who my clients were, one of them looked at me and said, ‘Does that mean that you know Tom DeLay?'”
“I said, ‘Yes, I know Tom Delay.’ He was House Majority Leader at the time.”
“They said, ‘Well, you can’t be friends with him.'”
“I said, ‘As a matter of fact I am friends with him and I think he’s a fine legislator and I help him every chance I can.'”
These women just looked at me and instantly turned away. One of them said, ‘What are your views on abortion?'”
“I said, ‘I’m pro-life,’ and they said, ‘How can you be pro-life and pro-woman?’ These women just pounced on me,” said Mitchell.
In some cruel irony, Mitchell says it’s often liberal, pro-choice women who stunt the career growth of women who don’t agree with them politically.
“There is no daylight if you are a pro-life, conservative professional woman. You are not welcome in the ranks of the women who put together networks and events to promote themselves,” said Mitchell.
Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America point out that even the liberal editorial board at USA Today is telling Democrats that filibustering Neil Gorsuch is a bad idea against an obviously qualified jurist. They also shudder as apparent terrorist attacks kill and injure metro passengers in St. Petersburg, Russia. And they react to former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice reportedly being the one to request the “unmasking” of Trump officials incidentally caught up in government surveillance.
