If you are following the events in Iran, you already know that there is an effort underway by a resistance movement  to replace the theocratic government of the Islamic State of Iran with a more representative government.

To get more complete and timely news coverage than any of the US skews media are likely to provide, you may want to look at some of the news agencies in Iran.

The state-controlled news agency is the Fars News Agency.  Obviously, Fars is decidedly anti-American.

The news of the resistance movement is provided by the National Council of Resistance of Iran.  The NCRI bills itself as the viable democratic alternative which “…embodies the unshakable resolve of the Iranian people to overthrow the mullahs’ inhuman regime.”  Similarly, the website of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), often referred to as the Mujahedin-e Kahiq (MEK), frequently contains information about the freedom movement growing in Iran.

The Iran News Wire strives to be “…the voice of the Iranian people and their protests for freedom and democracy at a time when the Iranian government wants to silence dissent and suppress their voices for democracy.”

This list will be updated as new English-language sources are identified.

01-21-2020:  See also the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA).

For those who are trying to keep up with who’s who in the Iranian (government) zoo, here’s an informal org chart from Radio Farda:

Now that four Hellfire missiles have reduced IRGC General Qassem Soleimani to particulate matter, General Esmail Ghaani has replaced him as the commander of the Qods Force.

Please read Elizabeth Vaughn’s report headlined DiGenova Calls Admiral Mike Rogers’ Cooperation With Durham Team to Be the ‘Biggest Single Development’ in Case, Here’s Why.  It appeared in the RedState Afternoon Briefing online which was posted at 1:30 pm on December 26, 2019.

Many of us who have been following the FISA abuse allegations case very closely agree with Joe DiGenova’s assessment of the importance of Admiral Rogers’ courageous and timely revelations of the Obama Administration’s completely illegal abuse of FISA electronic interceptions targeting the Trump presidential campaign.  At great personal risk to himself, Admiral Rogers revealed the violations to the FISA Court and to then President-elect Donald J. Trump.

To get a more organized understanding of the importance of Admiral Rogers’ revelation and its truly remarkable contribution to our national security, read the timeline story published online in themarketswork.com on April 5, 2018.  It was written by Jeff Carlson  His story is headlined The Uncovering – Mike Rogers’ Investigation, Section 702 FISA Abuse & the FBI.

Readers may reasonably wonder if this is such a big deal, why hasn’t it been covered by such esteemed pieces of trash skews media including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major broadcast and cable electronic skews media networks including ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, and the Associated Press.

There are two reasons in my opinion.

First, Hillary Clinton was supposed to win the 2016 Presidential and become the first woman to be President of the United States.  Fortuitously in their view, her presidency was going to immediately succeed the presidency of the first Negro President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.  The skews media were hyperventilating with excitement at the prospect of being the reporters who covered two successive historic presidencies.  They had become so emotionally invested (and in some instances, financially invested) in a Hillary Clinton presidency the possibility of objective news reporting reflecting the woman’s true level of corruption was gleefully discarded.  The skews media’s institutional arrogance and condescension and their hatred for Donald Trump made it even easier to scrutinize his every defect no matter how large or small and to simply ignore the threat Clinton posed to the national security.

Second, after Attorney General William Barr replaced Jeff Sessions, Barr found evidence suggesting that some in the US Intelligence Community had engaged some  Five Eyes (FVEY) partners to conduct some of the otherwise illegal overseas surveillances on US citizens involved in the Trump campaign.   As Department of Justice Inspector General Mike Horowitz revealed in his FISA Abuse Report earlier this month, the FISA surveillances used against the Trump campaign had the very thinnest counterintelligence predication, but they soon morphed into purely political surveillances of the Trump campaign and ultimately the Trump White House at the direction of FBI Director James Comey and with complicity from Obama Swampwellers and holdovers in the US Department of Justice.

There is absolutely no doubt in my feeble little mind that President Obama would have been made aware of the FVEY involvement even if he was cleverly cloaked with the filmy distortion of plausible deniability.  If Brennan or Clapper or Comey engaged a FVEY counterpart to shepherd the surveillances, the last thing the three of them would want would be for an oveerseas intel counterpart to disclose it to his or her head of state or head of government.  They would have feared that the prime minister of whatever country would pick up the phone and call Obama and ask for the underlying reasons for the interceptions.  Good Swampdwellers such as Brennan or Clapper or Comey don’t want “The Boss” to hear about their illegal activity from another head of state or head of government before hearing it from their own people.  For good Swampdwellers it’s often more of a CYA thing rather than a genuine desire to protect the United States.

If Hillary Clinton had won the presidential election in 2016 as was the foregone expectation, all of this would have been covered up.  Everything.  That means the US intelligence agencies including the FBI would have continued with her blessing to violate the rights of US citizens when it was politically expedient.  And the US skews media would have been intrumental in the ongoing criminal and civil rights violations.  To the extent they are involved in the ongoing effort to  remove President Donald J. Trump from office, the skews media are aiding and abetting the subversion of the US Constitution and attempting to nullify the votes of those who voted to elect President Trump.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Admiral Rogers exposed himself to great personal risk to be one of the very few voices of loyalty, integrity, duty, morality, and character in the administration of Barack Hussein Obama.  We can only hope and pray that  those who sought to cover up this grave insider attack by Obama and members of his administration and a few intelligence community employees disloyal to the Constitution and our nation will never be in a position of public trust again.  For some of them, incarceration should be their life’s last chapter.

Bravo Zulu, Admiral, and thank you for your service.

Under the constipated leadership of its Speaker, Nancy d’Alesandro Pelosi, the US House of Representatives has declared that the duly-elected and installed President Donald J. Trump’s remaining in office for another nanosecond, let alone until the general election on November 3, 2020, constitutes an imminent threat to our national security.

In an effort to stave off this grave national emergency of historic proportion, the Dear Leader and her followers in the House heroically prepared and urgently passed two articles of impeachment.  This after multiple focus groups told the House Democrats what words (forget evidentiary facts) they hoped would deceive Republican Representatives and the rest of us riffraff sharing space in the Clinton basket of deplorables into turning against President Trump and supporting a Democrat lynch mob.

The ink on the resolution for articles of impeachment was barely dry before the House selected its speediest courier to dash through the Capitol to the Senate side and deliver the articles of impeachment to the Senate so the Senators could conduct the trial, find the President guilty as charged, and order him removed from office forthwith.  That’s what happened, right?

Well, no.  Not exactly.

It’s true that Nancy and nearly all of the sock puppet Democrat lynch mob in the House couldn’t wait to line up and speak ad nauseum into skews cameras and microphones about the gravity of the emergency necessitating immediate impeachment and removal of the President of the United States, but then a funny thing happened on the way to the Senate.  Nancy and her fellow Baltimoron Stooge Steny told the House Rules Committee to hang onto them.

D’Alesandro Pelosi’s instructions for constipative obstruction were clear:  Don’t deliver the final and approved articles of impeachment to the Senate until we can figure out a way to thwart the Republican-controlled Senate from voting to acquit President Trump.  As long as we in the House don’t deliver them to the Senate and identify our designated stooges to prosecute the case there, we can say Trump has been impeached.  Most of the ignorant deplorables outside New York, California, and Illinois will believe we’ve actually removed him from office.

But now,  Nancy has decided dealing with President Trump’s allegedly cataclysmic misconduct can wait until after the Fools on the Hill loyal to her if not our country have sobered up and returned from the Hanukkah/Christmas/Kwanzaa/New Years Day holidays around January 7, 2020.

As a result of her questionable call,  the House-approved articles of impeachment are sitting in a tightly sealed Mt. Olive kosher baby dills jar in the closet of the House Rules Committee.  It won’t be unsealed and delivered to the Senate until Senate Majority Leader Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr. (AKA:  The Turtle) allows San Fran gran Nan and her stable of Maocrat House members to dictate to the US Senate how The Turtle must interpret the Procedure and Guidelines for Impeachment Trials in the United States Senate.

You see, Nanny Wrinkle has decreed that until her House formally sends a message to the Senate containing the information that the House has voted impeachment, adopted articles, and appointed managers, the Senate cannot lawfully fulfill its constitutional duties and proceed with the trial.  In other words, the House and its international propaganda agents in the skews media can declare in stentorian tones that they have impeached President Donald J. Trump, thereby subverting his presidential authority.

Here’s my suggested solution for The Turtle:  If you believe there may be some validity to Nan and the Maocrat’s theory of the Constitution, why not ask Johnny and the Supremes for a declaratory judgment on her “I can hold ’em ’til you fold” theory of the constitutional authority of the Senate trial?  If the Supreme Court rules that the Senate has the authority to proceed with the trial based on the articles passed but not forwarded to the Senate by the House, then The Turtle should immediately ask the Court for a writ of mandamus to order the required message be prepared and delivered by the House to the Senate by the close of that business day.  Thereafter as prescribed by Senate Rules pursuant to the Constitution of the United States, the trial to remove or acquit President Donald J. Trump must proceed.

Because as the Maocrats like to preach in their Church of Political Expediency, “No man is above the law.”

My December 2, 2019, post entitled Please Check Unreasonable Expectations at the Door stated the FISA abuse report prepared by the US Department of Justice Office of Inspector General would be released on December 9th.  It was.

Here is a link to the redacted FISA abuse report released today and formally entitled Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation.   It is further cited as Report 20-012 of the Oversight and Review Division.

Reading the report’s Executive Summary may suffice for a general overview of the IG’s methodology, findings, and recommendations.  The entire report is 476 pages long.   I’d urge readers to at least read the Executive Summary for yourself rather than relying on any of the skews media reports and talk show commentaries.  I listened to a few radio skews broadcasts today and read a few of the online articles posted by seemingly credible skews media.  My opinion is that you will be better informed after reading some or all the report yourself. (more…)

On December 7, 2019, the Majority Staff of the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives released a report entitled Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment.  Here is a link to that report.

I presume that this report is supposed to guide the majority party members of the House Judiciary Committee when the Committee drafts the articles of impeachment to be presented to the entire House of Representatives for its consideration.

Note this particular report is provided to inform only House members and their staffs.    While the US Senate may adopt some or all of the House majority party’s report, the Senate is by no means bound by its information or recommendations.

The report is an indicator of what the articles of impeachment the House sends to the Senate will generally contain.  Because it is an accusatory document, it is necessarily biased in its content.

It will be helpful for us citizens if the Senate would produce a companion report which goes into some detail about the exact procedures, rules, and laws that guide the Senate in adjudicating each of the articles of impeachment.

In addition to the Congressional reports that help explain presidential impeachment, readers might find it helpful to read Attorney General William Barr’s Address to the 19th Annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture at the Federalist Society’s 2019 National Lawyer’s Convention Washington, DC presented on November 15, 2019.  Since separation of powers is going to be a key issue in the expected impeachment trial of President Trump, the AG’s explanation of presidential executive authority and limits was as informative as it was easily readable and entertaining.

On December 9, 2019, US Department of Justice (DoJ) Inspector General (IG), Michael Horowitz, is planning to release the long-awaited Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) report to the public.  The report is expected to be approximately 500 pages long.

In very broad terms, IG Horowitz was instructed to investigate alleged abuses of the FISA and its judicial component, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, by US DoJ employees.  It had been alleged that the FBI and other employees of the DoJ (including attorneys) had abused the FISA during their investigation into alleged irregularities associated with the 2016 presidential election.

The FISA report was not intended to be an all-encompassing investigation into all of the allegations of crimes and abuses of authority associated with the 2016 election.  However, because of the potential factual overlap between allegations, the FISA report may need to include information about some other unrelated matters in order to avoid leaving obvious factual gaps in the FISA fact reporting.

The point of the preceding blather is to encourage people to read the entire 500-page FISA report when it is made public to better understand that the alleged FISA abuses were part of a much larger investigation beyond the scope of the FISA report.  Relying on any of our skews media, whether print or electronic, to accurately and completely summarize the FISA report will be deceptively disappointing.  As seen in some of the reporting by Sulzberger’s Slimes at the New York Times, the skews media’s manipulative spin has apparently already begun.

The purpose of any DoJ IG investigtion is to provide the US Attorney General (AG) with accurate, timely investigative facts so the AG can identify and correct intentional and unintentional instances of fraud, waste, and abuse committed by employees of the DoJ.  Its purpose is to improve DoJ administration, not prosecute alleged crimes.   The FISA report will be an administrative report of information, not a prosecutorial brief in support of criminal complaints or grand jury indictments.

The DoJ IG is not a prosecutor.  If he believes a prosecutable crime has been committed, he can refer his beliefs to an appropriate US Attorney.  The decision to convene a grand jury or charge a crime (or not charge) will be made by a US Attorney or other DoJ attorney so empowered.  It will not be made by the DoJ IG.  However, the DoJ IG’s reports are prepared with considereation of evidentiary admissibility.

If readers of the DoJ IG’s FISA report are expected it to open the floodgates of federal criminal prosecutions, they’re likely to be disappointed.  Nevertheless, the FISA report has likely already been submitted without redactions to Connecticut US Attorney John Durham whom AG William Barr selected to investigate the origins of the special counsel’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and whether it was properly predicated.   The FISA report is likely to be rich in investigative leads that has and will save USA Durham’s team a great deal of time.

My hope is that the DoJ IG’s FISA report will be used as it was intended:  To identify the dismal failures of duty in the US DoJ, especially those failures or omissions that have for years been eroding the performance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Main Justice employees.  I also hope that it will be of immense assistance to USA Durham in preparing criminal prosecutions where and if warranted in DoJ and the FBI.

Once again, the great political cartoonist AF Branco has captured the essence of a political issue with graphic brevity and precision.

In this instance, he has caricatured the House Bullet Twins, Representative Adam “Hollow Point” Schiff and Speaker Nancy “Dum-Dum” d’Alesandro Pelosi, displaying their faux outrage at President Trump’s authorization to provide Turkey, Russia, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with a military deconfliction notice of the air traffic associated with the hit on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

“Military Deconfliction” notices have been used regularly to help militarily adversarial forces avoid misinterpreting the intent of a military action.   In this instance, the deconfliction notice would likely have been limited to the expected flight paths of the US helicopters flying low, dark, and fast in and out of Barisha, Syria.

It is almost certain that whoever made the call on behalf of the US disclosed only enough information to reassure the Turks, the Russians, and the SDF that they were not the intended target of a US military action.  It may have included any potential alternate flight paths if they were forced by operational necessity.

As for Hollow-Point’s and Dum-Dum’s faux outrage that the President didn’t inform them before the recipients of the deconfliction notice, they did not as Congresscritters have a “need to know.”  They had no beneficial part to play in the operation.  Their being informed ahead of time could only result in the operation being compromised, not improved.

If information about the operation had leaked out, it would have compromised operational security and jeopardized the lives of all our military troops involved.   It could easily have escalated the conflict rather than prevent it.   “Friendly fire” by uninformed adversaries would have adversely affected the mission’s success.  By giving the notice, President Trump was giving US military counterparts from Russia, Turkey, and the SDF time to prevent friendly fire.

It seems likely that the Russians, Turks, and SDF probably figured out what the US’s mission was.  They would quickly have deduced that al-Baghdadi’s demise helps them by removing a major impediment to stabilizing the region while at the same time not appearing to be in cahoots with the US.

We’re still waiting to see and read the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report “… on potential surveillance abuses by intelligence officials during the 2016 Russia investigation.”  And waiting.  And waiting.  Fox News Network is reporting that the final report is still being declassified.

The report’s boundaries have shown some elasticity insofar as what material will and will not be investigated and included in the report.

One of the more intriguing questions that has been posed (though not necessarily addressed in the report) will be whether the United States Eye solicited one or more of the remaining four of the Five Eyes (FVEY)  countries (US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) to conduct signals intelligence (SIGINT) surveillances on US citizens involved in the presidential campaign of 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump.  The US cannot lawfully conduct or solicit surrogates to conduct such politically-motivated surveillances against US citizens.

If another Five Eye country was solicited by a US Intelligence Community member to collect and illegally pass the information to the Obama administration or campaign, the logical followup question would be, “Was President Obama aware of the illegal surveillances and did he in fact authorize them?”

I contend the answer to the followup question would have to be a resounding, “Yes!”

How can I be so sure?  Because there would be a good chance that a SIGINT agency head with a FVEY country receiving an obviously unlawful request from Brennan or Clapper would go running to his own head of government and say, “Mr. (or Madam) Prime Minister, a US intelligence community head just asked us to begin an electronic surveillance on the Trump presidential campaign and pass the information to him directly.  What do you want me to do?”  At that point, the PM would pick up the phone and call President Obama with a lot of very touchy questions about the request.  That would be an inquiry even President Obama would not want to receive unless he was not only aware of the DNI’s request but had also either explicitly or implicity approved it and already had some story fabricated to keep his own butt safe and sound in the Oval Office instead of federal prison.

Of course, Hillary Clinton was already measuring for drapes in the Oval Office.  It was a foregone conclusion that she would be the inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States in January 2017.  Had that happened, all of the corruption in the US Department of Justice, the FBI, the federal judiciary, and the State Department would have been swept under the rug stored in some obscure National Archives and Records Administration warehouse and sealed for 100 years.

President Trump’s victory and his determination to drain the swamp caught Obama, the Clinton Crime Family, and their numerous conspiring cronies off guard.  With a new President, an honest Attorney General, and a very competent US Attorney looking at the IG’s forthcoming report carefully, maybe the operative instruction to Obama et al should be, “Lawyer up!”

We can only hope…

Washington Examiner online opinion headline:

ABC News ‘slaughter in Syria’ footage appears to come from a Kentucky gun range

The print and electronic “news” media challenge how we, the great unwashed, can question their credibility when we read stories like this.

Don’t stop with the reporters.  Keep looking up the media food chain to editors, publishers, media owners, and above all, at the alleged journalism schools that teach and train tomorrow’s skewers of the news.