Commentary

Durham Links Russian Hoax to Clinton

In the continuing saga of the Democrats’ 2016 attempt to tie candidate Donald Trump and later President Trump to Russia over a four-year period, which has been subsequently debunked, Special Counsel John Durham now introduced evidence that ties payment for the effort to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Lawyers for the Clinton campaign paid a technology company to “infiltrate” servers belonging to Trump Towers and later the White House, in order to establish an “inference” and “narrative” to bring to government agencies linking Trump to Russia, according to Durham.

Using the identifier “Tech Executive -1” in his account of how the individual exploited access to non-public and/or proprietary internet data, Durham states that this individual enlisted assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university that was receiving and analyzing large amounts of internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.

“Tech Executive 1 tasked these researchers to mine internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” Durham stated, and “in doing so Tech Executive 1 indicated that he was seeking to please ‘certain VIPs’ referring to individuals at Law Firm 1 and the Clinton campaign.”

Interestingly, Durham indicated that the internet firm Tech Executive-1 worked for “had come to access and maintain dedicated servers for the Executive Office of the President,” and exploited this arrangement for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Trump.

You may recall that former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith admitted that he altered an e-mail stating that Trump campaign advisor Carter Page was not a source of the CIA, and pleaded guilty in a plea deal with Durham, and received a sentence of 12 months’ probation and 400 hours of community service.

However, considering the level of activities undertaken by Tech Executive-1 and Law Firm-1 and those associated with each, I would hope more appropriate punishment would be administered.

Not only was President Trump forced to carry out his duties as president during his entire tenure with this hoax hanging over his office, Trump supporters were subject to hateful criticism.  Taxpayers had to pick up the $30 million plus cost of Robert Mueller’s investigation, in which he found no evidence of illegal or criminal coordination with the Russians, and another $3 to $4 million for Durham to bring about justice to those who chose to derail the Trump presidency.

Don’t expect it will reach Clinton herself, unless there are documents that reveal her knowledge of the dirty tricks, but there are several bad actors who need to accept accountability.  Certainly, this should nix any plan by Hillary to make another run.

Trump is correct in his statement that the scandal is “far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about the spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution.”

The Army’s Report on the Afghanistan Withdrawal

While I don’t have access to the 2,000-page Army report on the findings of the investigation formed to learn how the withdrawal from Afghanistan was so poorly devised that 13 U.S. service members and roughly 170 Afghan civilians were killed, I know where the blame lies.

I don’t need the report to tell me that the withdrawal was screwed up at the top levels, not only of the Department of Defense, but the State Department and the White House.

The report tells the story of a frustration among senior military officials with civilians at State, President Biden and his advisors, with the Navy Rear Admiral Peter Vasely stating that the military would have been much better prepared to conduct a more orderly evacuation if policymakers had paid attention to what was happening on the ground.

To this day, President Biden continues to repeat that the withdrawal could not have been conducted in a more orderly manner, and repeatedly says that no military leaders advised him to leave a small military presence behind.

“I fear the president is delusional,” said Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, calling the withdrawal an “extraordinary disaster,” one that “will go down in history as one of the greatest failures of American leadership.”

Americans know what civilian control of the military entails – the president is the one in charge.  

A Marine corporal could have told him that you evacuate embassy personnel and other civilians first, and you do it from the fortified Bagram Air Base.

Months before the withdrawal decision was made, lists of those Afghan translators and their families should have been developed so that they, too, could be withdrawn.

You follow with the removal of weapons, ammunition, other supplies and equipment.  The billions of dollars’ worth of supplies and equipment could have been flown to a base as close as Qatar or as far as away as Germany.

Lastly, you complete the withdrawal by evacuating the troops.

Now, as we are responding to the saber rattling of Russia’s Putin, we must sadly depend on those same Defense officials – General Austin and Milley – Secretary of State Tony Blinken, President Biden and his National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, to set aside their concerns for masks, climate change and racial equity to keep us out of another shooting war.

Now, more than ever … may God continue to bless the United States of America.