American special operations forces captured a militant Sunday who was allegedly involved in the attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, two US officials confirmed to Fox News.
US official identified the suspect as Mustafa al-Imam.
The attack resulted in the death of the American ambassador and three other Americans.
The White House is expected to release more details shortly.
The officials say U.S. commandos captured the unidentified man in Libya and are transporting him back to the U.S. The officials say the mission was approved by PresidentTrump and carried out in coordination with Libya’s internationally recognized government.
Remember, the Obama Administration lied about Benghazi. For about three weeks Obama’s minions insisted it wasn’t a planned attack. A crowd of demonstrators was “triggered” — probably by an on-line anti-Muslim video.
Washington is gigantic, corrupt, and unaccountable. Can it be fixed? Yes, but not by Congress. Only by we the people. It's called a Convention of States, and it's right there, in Article V of the Constitution. Jim DeMint, former Senator from South Carolina, explains.
Y’all remember that song by The Police called “Message in a Bottle”, the closing refrain was sending out an SOS. I travel quite a bit and am often asked a recurring question, “if you could say anything to President Trump what would you say?”. That same question occurred again last week Friday evening in Hoffman Estates Illinois during the question and answer session of my presentation to the Illinois Family Institute. Now, one must be very aware of what you write or say when it comes to President Trump lest you find yourself being attacked, assailed, and denigrated by those who appear to just want blind cheerleading, or do not even read what you write.
I have previously written here at Townhall.com about President Trump lacking an ideological core. Some may deem that as being acceptable, not yours truly. A leader must have a fundamental, foundation, in order to provide guidance and leadership on critical issues. You cannot just abdicate your role, and vision, to the legislative branch. Now, in all fairness, I do see President Trump seeking to be more engaged in the tax reform issue, but we need to stop using the language of the left. My concern is that we do not need President Trump to resemble the biblical verse of James 1:8, “being a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways”.
But, as I stated last week in the Chicago suburbs, here are the points of order that I would share with President Trump.
First, Mr. President, if Barack Obama had the chutzpah to commute the sentence of one Bradley Manning, a traitor that released over 700K pieces of classified information, you should take a like action. You need to pardon US Army 1LT Clint Lorance who is serving a twenty-year sentence for doing what Americans want a combat leader to do, kill the enemy. We have previously deployed our troops into these modern day combat zones and given them nebulous rules of engagement that lend the advantage to the enemy. We who have been in these current combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan recognize the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of this non-state, non-uniformed enemy. The fact LT Lorance did as well, and took an action, for which the Army withheld exculpatory evidence of gun residue on the unarmed, but killed enemy, is disturbing. So Mr. President, you lost an incredible opportunity, the day Manning was released, Clint Lorance should have also gained freedom. And there are several other victims of the previous delusional rules of engagement who should also be released. Mr. President, if you can pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio, certainly you can do the same here.
Second, Mr. President, why have you not signed an Executive Order designating the Muslim Brotherhood as an Islamic terrorist organization? There are member nations in the Gulf Cooperation Council that have indeed taken that action. Sir, I implore you to read the Muslim Brotherhood Explanatory Memorandum written in 1991 by Mohammed Akram and uncovered during a 2004 FBI raid on a home in Northern Virginia. The document lays out the strategic goals and objectives for a “civilizational jihad” in America, and lists the organizations to enable such. If there was EVER a real-world Trojan Horse that we are allowing full operating capability in our Nation, it is the Muslim Brotherhood. Who is preventing this executive order from happening? More importantly, why? We cannot defeat the global Islamic jihad if we are allowing it to thrive within our borders and have influence in our government, on our campuses, and in our society. This is not just about reducing the territorial integrity of the Islamic State, it is about denying the Islamic jihad any sanctuary…especially in America.
Third, Mr. President, you cannot be the one that allows Iranian regional hegemony in the Middle East. If you take credit for defeating the Islamic State and forcing them out of Mosul and Raqqa, you must also admit that it was made possible by our Kurdish allies. However, now the Iraqi Army, aided by Shiite militias, have turned on the Kurds and are attacking them with US military equipment, like M1 Abrams tanks. The Kurds have been staunch US supporters and now they are facing an onslaught from a Baghdad government controlled from Tehran. Matter of fact, it is Commander General Suelimani of the Iranian Quds Force, a designated terrorist organization who is leading the military assault against the Kurds. General Suleimani is supposed to be under UN sanction to not deploy outside of Iran, yet there he is in the vicinity of Kirkuk directing combat operations against the Kurds. Mr. President, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) just had a referendum vote on independence, where do you stand on that? Where does your National Security Adviser stand on that is the real question? If you want a legacy in the Middle East, support the Kurds, go there to Irbil, and let the region know who America stands with. Turkey is led by an Islamist. Iran is led by crazed clerics. Iraq is a client state of Iran. Syria is a client state of Iran. Hezbollah is the Islamic terrorist proxy army of Iran. There is one chess move you can make to “trump”, pardon the pun, the Russian-Iranian axis that is forming. That window of opportunity is closing, you must take action.
Lastly, Mr. President, recently your Attorney General Jeff Sessions came out and told us about some lame apology from the IRS reference the targeting of conservative groups. We now know this did happen, as admitted by the IRS. An apology is not enough, there have to be consequences for leveraging the power of financial intimidation by a government agency against the American people. You said you were a law and order President, that you would drain the swamp. Lois Lerner is a swamp creature that is being paid a pension by the American taxpayer. Four Americans were killed in Benghazi, where they were abandoned to die. US Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed as a result of Operation Fast and Furious…who is responsible, accountable? Constitutional Conservatives want a champion that will let the progressive socialist left know there are not two levels of justice. We want the Obama holdovers in your administration sent packing.
So now, I will put this message into the bottle and set it adrift, hoping it will reach you, Mr. President.
Today might be one of the biggest days of my life, and it will be impossible to explain why that is so unless you know at least a little bit about blockchain, dAPPS, cryptocurrencies, Ethereum, and the legal distinction between a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT) and an ICO.
If those words look unfamiliar, one of the biggest technical revolutions the world has ever known is sneaking up on you. The folks in Silicon Valley – who live about three years in the future compared to the rest of the country – can’t stop talking about this topic. The smartest people in the Valley tell me blockchain will change nearly everything, and already is. It’s like “the Internet” before anyone had heard of the Internet. That’s how big it is.
One small example is that startups are raising funds by creating and selling their own digital “tokens” or “coins,” using blockchain technology, that serve as the payment mechanisms within their products. The tokens have an advantage over regular money in part because you can program simple rules for them using distributed apps, or dAPPS, to add function to your product. And blockchain brings its own set of advantages I’ll mention below.
In the case of WhenHub, a dAPP will trigger an automatic payment when certain conditions are met. The effect is to eliminate billing and invoicing efforts for micro-contracts while creating a distributed record of each transaction that is impervious to manipulation.
My example doesn’t get at the full power of blockchain. It’s just one of the many things it can do.
The reason people buy these digital tokens from startups is that they hope the value will rise as the startup adds customers. The tokens are artificially limited in quantity, so the value of each token increases with demand. Customers of the startup won’t notice the rise in token value because prices within the product are pegged to nominal “real money” value. In other words, if one token is worth a dollar today, but worth ten dollars tomorrow, the startup auto-adjusts the price within the product to ten-percent of a token. The customer always pays the same “real money” price even as token values rise.
Tokens can easily be exchanged for Bitcoins or cash on websites that do that sort of thing. See Bitcoin Exchanges.
The process of creating digital tokens to raise funds is called an ICO (initial coin offering) when you do it the wild-west unregulated way. If you lawyer-up in advance, jumping through lots of (expensive) hoops to minimize future regulatory risks, your lawyers will tell you to call it a Simple Agreement for Future Tokens (SAFT). A SAFT is a contract with the startup to issue you tokens if and when it is able to launch a network in which the token has utility value. That’s what WhenHub is announcing today.
To be clear, ICOs and SAFTs are not investments, nor do they give the buyer equity in the startup. But they do provide an easy way – compared to angel investing – to share in whatever success the startup experiences. With SAFTs and ICOs the startup describes its plans in a white paper so any potential token buyers can evaluate the risks. WhenHub already has several products on the market, with more coming soon, but we describe in our white paper a proposed new product that is based on our existing scheduling platform and takes advantage of blockchain. The proposed product (WhenHub Interface) is the one that will use digital tokens.
If you are new to this field, I hope I just gave you a toe-hold for understanding it. And I would be delighted if you share this post with friends.
Our tokens are only available in Australia, Canada, European Economic Area, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Japan, Russian Federation, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States (excluding New York State). If you are in the United States, you need to be an Accredited Investor (meaning kinda rich) to participate. Outside the United States, regulatory restrictions are lower.
Our Pre-sale is now in progress and our Public Sale starts on Nov. 10, 2017. During the Pre-sale, the minimum purchase amount is $50,000 and participants get an Early Bird bonus of 30%. For the Public Sale the minimum amount is $250, and the the Early Bird discount starts at 20% and decreases to none in two weeks.
Here’s the executive summary from our white paper. A link to the full paper is at the end.
— Executive Summary —
WhenHub proposes to build a mobile app for connecting consumers to experts of all kinds via two-way video streams, text, audio, or in person. The app will be part of a larger service ecosystem called the WhenHub Interface Network (WIN) (Patent Pending).
The service will use dAPPS (distributed apps) running on the Ethereum blockchain to create secure micro-contracts – that can be as short as 15 minutes – as well as to provide frictionless billing and payment service. At the end of each micro-contract, payment in the form of WHEN Tokens will be automatically transferred to the expert. No paperwork or billing is involved.
Users buy WHEN Tokens using a credit card or with Bitcoins at an online exchange via the WhenHub Interface app. The tokens are used within the app to pay experts for their time.
For privacy, your phone number and address are not shared with experts.
Our partners will provide verification services on participating experts to give consumers confidence.
No international billing and currency issues when WHEN Tokens are involved.
Pricing for experts can be fixed or auction-based.
In the gig economy, think of this product as a “long tail” market for expert advice. Experts of all kinds can display their availability whenever they like, for as short a window as 15 minutes.
The WhenHub Interface app will use the existing commercial WhenHub API for scheduling and geofencing features.
WhenSense is our proposed technology for allowing third-party sites to host ads about our participating experts’ availability and share in the income from completed contracts. Site owners paste our HTML code into their site to participate.
WHEN Tokens are not an investment vehicle, but because they will be artificially limited in quantity, their value is expected to fluctuate based on customer demand for the WhenHub Interface app.
Lately, Gillespie has eased off talking about MS-13 and focused more on the economy, but by bringing illegal immigration into the race he’s managed to capitalize on what Trump exposed last year: Democrats, even centrist ones like Northam, don’t really believe in immigration enforcement anymore. To the extent that’s a message even a decidedly non-Trumpian Republican like Gillespie can leverage, it’s not just an immediate problem for Northam but a national problem for the Democratic Party.
Democrats might denounce it as racist, but the importance of the immigration question can’t be emphasized enough. Last week, Andrew Sullivan wrote, “The most powerful thing Trump said in the campaign, I’d argue, was: ‘If you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country.’ And the Democrats had no answer, something that millions of Americans immediately saw. They still formally favor enforcement of immigration laws, but rhetorically, they keep signaling the opposite.”
That immigration would feature so prominently in a race between two relative centrists underscores the extent to which America’s two major political parties are cracking up. This week’s announcement by Sen. Jeff Flake that he won’t seek reelection confirmed that the GOP is increasingly the party of Trump, with all that implies about immigration. On the Democratic side, Northam’s candidacy seems thoroughly out of step with the Sanders wing of his party. Sanders made headlines recently with his unrealistic “Medicare for all” bill, which a growing number of Democratic senators have felt obliged to endorse because it’s really a litmus test of their progressive bona fides. Like health care and abortion, immigration is one of the issues increasingly defining the parties.
It also helps explain why a race that shouldn’t be close is tightening.
Maggie Haberman is shocked — shocked — to find that Hillary Clinton's people are dishonest. Some of you may remember Hillary Clinton. This is the woman who liedabout her husband's infidelity, her trip to Bosnia, the cause of the Benghazi massacre, her illegal emails and just about everything else she's ever talked about. But when the Clinton people told Haberman that they had nothing to do with the now-infamous Steele dossier filled with dubious Russian dirt on Donald Trump, Maggie apparently bought it hook, line and sinker. "Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year," she complained on Twitter. Shocked.
It now turns out that Clinton and the Democrats paid for the dossier, thus colluding with the Russians to help skew the outcome of an American presidential election. Reports that the Republicans also had something to do with the dossier are a smokescreen: they didn't. And drawing a moral equivalence between this and Donald Trump Jr.'s meaningless meeting with a Russian lawyer is nonsense. Clinton and the Democrats did what they have been accusing Donald Trump of doing all this time. That's the story.
So how'd the Democrats get away with peddling the phony version of the Russia scandal for so long? Let's take a closer look at Haberman and her gullibility in context.
Haberman is a White House correspondent for the New York Times, a former newspaper. Haberman's father was a long-time Times journalist and Maggie herself got to know Donald Trump while covering him for the New York Post, giving her a useful relationship with the president.
The job she holds now was once held by Jeff Zeleny, who famously used his first chance to ask Barack Obama some tough questions by asking him what "enchanted" him most about being president. In doing so, Dreamy Jeff kicked off eight years of embarrassing non-coverage of one of the most corrupt administrations in American history. At the end of Obama's IRS scandal, the Fast and Furious scandal, the Benghazi scandal, the Lynch-Clinton scandal and — as we're now finding out — a possible spying on Donald Trump scandal, the American press corps almost universally declared Obama "scandal free." Like Admiral Nelsonputting his telescope to his blind eye, they really did not see the corruption! They thus sacrificed their credibility on the altar of their politics, leaving themselves open to Trump's Godzilla-like destruction of whatever moral authority they had left.
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And what was Maggie Haberman, then a reporter for Politico, doing during that time? Let's turn for answers to actual journalist Sharyl Attkisson. Attkisson had to leave CBS News because they repeatedly quashed her exposes about Obama administration corruption. During her reporting on Fast and Furious, she claims Obama's corrupt Justice Department broke into her computer, planted classified documents and riffled through her files. She says the DOJ not only tried to smear her but also her whistle-blowing source as well.
In her excellent new book Smear, Attkisson describes how political operatives use friendly journalists to skew coverage.
"In a January 2015 strategic memo about 'Shaping a Public Narrative,'Clinton officials describe Politico reporter Maggie Haberman as an ideal, friendly journalist willing to generate positive press for the campaign. Under the title 'Placing a Story,' the memo states, 'We feel that it's important to go with what is safe and what has worked in the past. We've had a very good relationship with Maggie Haberman of Politico over the last year. We have had her tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed. While we should have a larger conversation in the near future about a broader strategy for re-engaging the beat press that covers HRC, for this we think we can achieve our objective and do the most shaping by going to Maggie.' It almost makes it sound as if Haberman is on the payroll of the Clinton campaign."
It does, doesn't it?
Since we now know that Robert Mueller's FBI covered up Russian malfeasance during Vladimir Putin's successful attempts to acquire some of our uranium supplies — malfeasance that seems to have included millions of dollars in payoffs to the Clintons — Haberman's friendliness with the Clinton people brings much of her other reporting into question. For instance, who are Haberman's sources and what are they using her for when they anonymously feed her stories about Muller's current investigation into Trump's dealing with Russia?
“In the spring of 1932 desperate officials, anxious for their jobs and even their lives, aware that a new famine might be on its way, began to collect grain wherever and however they could. Mass confiscations occurred all across the U.S.S.R. In Ukraine they took on an almost fanatical intensity.”
I am quoting a few lines from “Red Famine,” Anne Applebaum’s brilliant new history of the deliberate policy of mass starvation inflicted on Ukraine by Joseph Stalin in the early 1930s. An estimated five million or more people perished in just a few years. Walter Duranty, The Times’s correspondent in the Soviet Union, insisted the stories of famine were false. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for reportage the paper later called “completely misleading.”
How many readers, I wonder, are familiar with this history of atrocity and denial, except in a vague way? How many know the name of Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s principal henchmen in the famine? What about other chapters large and small in the history of Communist horror, from the deportation of the Crimean Tatars to the depredations of Peru’s Shining Path to the Brezhnev-era psychiatric wards that were used to torture and imprison political dissidents?
Why is it that people who know all about the infamous prison on Robben Island in South Africa have never heard of the prison on Cuba’s Isle of Pines? Why is Marxism still taken seriously on college campuses and in the progressive press? Do the same people who rightly demand the removal of Confederate statues ever feel even a shiver of inner revulsion at hipsters in Lenin or Mao T-shirts?
These aren’t original questions. But they’re worth asking because so many of today’s progressives remain in a permanent and dangerous state of semi-denial about the legacy of Communism a century after its birth in Russia.
Yes, and there are many, many more of them than there are neo-nazis.
Since April of 2016, Obama's campaign organization has paid nearly a million dollars to the law firm that funneled money to Fusion GPS to compile a dossier of unverified allegations against Donald Trump.
Former president Barack Obama’s official campaign organization has directed nearly a million dollars to the same law firm that funneled money to Fusion GPS, the firm behind the infamous Steele dossier. Since April of 2016, Obama For America (OFA) has paid over $972,000 to Perkins Coie, records filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) show.
The Washington Post reported last week that Perkins Coie, an international law firm, was directed by both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to retain Fusion GPS in April of 2016 to dig up dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump. Fusion GPS then hired Christopher Steele, a former British spy, to compile a dossier of allegations that Trump and his campaign actively colluded with the Russian government during the 2016 election. Though many of the claims in the dossier have been directly refuted, none of the dossier’s allegations of collusion have been independently verified. Lawyers for Steele admitted in court filings last April that his work was not verified and was never meant to be made public.
OFA, Obama’s official campaign arm in 2016, paid nearly $800,000 to Perkins Coie in 2016 alone, according to FEC records. The first 2016 payments to Perkins Coie, classified only as “Legal Services,” were made April 25-26, 2016, and totaled $98,047. A second batch of payments, also classified as “Legal Services,” were disbursed to the law firm on September 29, 2016, and totaled exactly $700,000. Payments from OFA to Perkins Coie in 2017 totaled $174,725 through August 22, 2017.
FEC records as well as federal court records show that Marc Elias, the Perkins Coie lawyer whom the Washington Post reported was responsible for the payments to Fusion GPS on behalf of Clinton’s campaign and the DNC, also previously served as a counsel for OFA. In Shamblin v. Obama for America, a 2013 case in federal court in Florida, federal court records list Elias as simultaneously serving as lead attorney for both OFA and the DNC.
Federal records show that Hillary Clinton’s official campaign organization, Hillary For America, paid just under $5.1 million to Perkins Coie in 2016. The DNC paid nearly $5.4 million to the law firm in 2016.
The timing and nature of the payments to Perkins Coie by Obama’s official campaign arm raise significant questions about whether OFA was funding Fusion GPS, how much Obama and his team knew about the contents and provenance of the dossier long before its contents were made public, and whether the president or his government lieutenants knowingly used a partisan political document to justify official government actions targeting the president’s political opponents named in the dossier. According to the Washington Post, Fusion GPS was first retained by Perkins Coie on behalf of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in April of 2016.
At the same time that Hillary’s campaign, Obama’s campaign organization, and the DNC were simultaneously paying Perkins Coie, the spouse of one of Fusion GPS’s key employees was working directly for Obama in the West Wing. Shailagh Murray, a former Washington Post reporter-turned-political operative, was serving as a top communications adviser to Obama while the Obama administration was reportedly using information from the dossier to justify secret surveillance of Trump campaign staff. Murray is married to Neil King, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who was hired by Fusion GPS in December of 2016. While at the Wall Street Journal, Kingworked alongside Fusion GPS’s core team, even sharing bylines with Glenn Simpson, the Fusion GPS executive who personally hired Steele to probe Trump’s alleged Russia connections.
The importance of the dossier funded by Democrats, commissioned by Fusion GPS, and compiled by Steele, is difficult to overstate given that its contents were reportedly briefed to both President Obama and then-President-Elect Trump. The dossier was eventually published in full by BuzzFeed on January 10. On January 6, then-FBI Director James Comey had briefed Trump on the allegations in Steele’s dossier. Steele admitted in court filings that he had shopped much of the information in his dossier to numerous media outlets beginning in September of 2016.
Fusion GPS, which has been accused of illegally operating as an undisclosed agent of foreign governments, is currently facing multiple congressional inquiries into its activities and its clients. Bill Browder, whose attorney was allegedly murdered by Russian authorities after publicizing explosive allegations of Russian fraud and money laundering, alleged in congressional testimony last July that Fusion GPS was paid by Russians to undermine U.S. sanctions against the country. Late last week, Fusion GPS reportedly struck a deal with U.S. House investigators regarding a federal subpoena of the firm’s bank records. And in September, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who serves as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, reportedly requested that the U.S. Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit provide his committee with all suspicious activity reports related to Fusion GPS’s bank transactions.
Following reports of Perkins Coie’s role in funneling money to Fusion GPS, the Campaign Legal Center, a non-partisan campaign finance watchdog, filed a complaint with the FEC alleging that the secret funding schemes violated federal campaign disclosure laws.
Fusion GPS is also facing a separate defamation suit in federal court related to claims in the dossier. That case, which was brought by three Russian businessmen who claim to have been libeled in the Steele dossier, was filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., in early October. Fusion GPS is yet to respond to those allegations in court.
