What is the bet that Mr. Comey goes to Washington?

2007

2009

2020?

Comey’s firing is a gift to the FBI

By Michael Walsh

Let’s cut right to the chase: James Comey should have been fired immediately following his disastrous press briefing last July, in which he candidly laid out the case against Hillary Clinton over her mishandling of classified information and then refused to recommend charges. Overstepping his authority while radiating sanctimony, arrogating power while clumsily intervening in the election, Comey deserved to be sacked on the spot.

Everything since has been one long slow twist in the wind for Comey, a former US attorney in Manhattan, where his most notable accomplishment was sending Martha Stewart to jail.

Ignore for the moment Comey’s series of missteps resulting from the Clinton investigation and his increasingly erratic and unconvincing public fan dance as he sent the nation into electoral paroxysms over the past 10 months.

On his watch, the FBI continued its politically correct, see-no-evil attitude toward radical Islam and thus failed to prevent the atrocity in San Bernardino; it also investigated the Orlando nightclub shooter for 10 months before closing its case, allowing him to kill or wound 102 people. Meanwhile, the federal office of personnel management was hacked by the Chinese, resulting in a serious data breach. That’s failure on an unacceptable level.

Now the bureau’s tied up and bogged down in the almost certainly chimerical “Russian hacking” fantasy, which bubbled up out of the leftist fever swamp in the wake of Clinton’s loss in November, and for which there is exactly zero evidence.

So when President Trump finally put Comey out of his — and our — misery last week, it was the best merited cashiering since Truman fired a showboating MacArthur.

Ignore the political firestorm that’s followed. Trump could cure cancer, solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis and appoint Oprah as his special envoy to Mars and the Beltway press corps would still howl for his head. The fires fueling this politically motivated hatefest will abate only when the Democrats accept that they lost an election they fully expected to win.

As the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, the FBI director shouldn’t be a political figure.

And that’s the key word — political. As the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, the FBI director shouldn’t be a political figure.

The bureau began as a financial-crimes investigatory arm of the justice department in 1908, and grew to maturity under J. Edgar Hoover, monitoring domestic Bolshevik radicalism in the early 1920s, then tackling interstate violent crime during the wild and woolly ’30s: the birth of the “G-Men.”

Yet the temptation to be a Washington player is always present. Hoover, who served under eight presidents and whose reign lasted until his death in 1972, amassed a storehouse of inside dirt on politicians, which made him essentially unfireable and which led to congressional insistence on Senate confirmation of future directors and 10-year term limits.

What’s needed now is a restoration of what should be the FBI’s primary mission, as it was in the early Hoover days: counterterrorism. Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it’s far less important for the bureau to be chasing bank robbers in Burlington and Butte than it is for it to function as the nation’s first line of homeland security defense.

The country doesn’t need another politician, jurist or prosecutor at the bureau. It needs someone dogged, determined, experienced, impartial and fearless. 

Although the parallels are not exact, historical circumstances have demanded that the FBI now function in relation to the CIA and NSA similar to the way Britain’s MI5 (domestic) and MI6 (foreign) intelligence services work together. Nearly 16 years on, the Washington establishment still hasn’t accepted that 9/11 really did fundamentally change our notions of crime, prevention and punishment.

But the American people have, which is one of the many reasons Trump won the election. Further, far from damaging the president in the eyes of his supporters, Trump’s decisiveness in canning Comey will only endear him to them even more.

So who should replace Comey? The rumor mills are already churning out names of the usual suspects: a judge (Michael J. Garcia), a prosecutor (Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher), a politician (Sen. John Cornyn of Texas) and a veteran fed (Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe)

But the country doesn’t need another politician, jurist or prosecutor at the bureau. It needs someone dogged, determined, experienced, impartial and fearless. Someone sworn to protect and serve, who will follow the evidence wherever it leads and make the appropriate recommendations in the name of justice. Incorruptible and impartial.

In other words, a cop — the best one we have.

Michael Walsh is an author, screenwriter and contributing editor at PJ Media. His most recent book is “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace.”

Internet Pirates Commandeer US Spy Agency Software and Hack The Planet

Russian-linked cyber gang blamed for NHS computer hack using bug stolen from US spy agency

Ransom message found on NHS computers

A cyber gang with possible links to Russia is being blamed for the extraordinary worldwide computer security breach - possibly in retaliation for US airstrikes on Syria.

The mysterious organisation - called Shadow Brokers - claimed in April it had stolen a ‘cyber weapon’ from an American spying agency that gives unprecedented access to all computers using Microsoft Windows, the world’s most popular computer operating system.

The hacking tool had been developed by the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s powerful military intelligence unit. The NSA had developed its ‘Eternal Blue’ hacking weapon to gain access to computers used by terrorists and enemy states.

But in an astonishing twist, the NSA’s tool was stolen by Shadow Brokers. 

How the computer hack spread

The gang in turn ‘dumped’ the computer bug on an obscure website on April 14, just a week after President Donald Trump ordered the US bombing of Syria.

Some experts believe that timing is significant and indicates that Shadow Brokers has links to the Russian government.

In an internet posting, six days earlier on April 8 - and a day after the first airstrikes - Shadow Brokers appeared to issue a warning to President Trump.

In a statement, the group said in broken English: “Respectfully, what the f*** are you doing? The Shadow Brokers voted for you. The Shadow Brokers supports you. The Shadow Brokers is losing faith in you. Mr Trump helping the Shadow Brokers, helping you. Is appearing you are abandoning ‘your base’, ‘the movement’, and the peoples who getting you elected.”

Shadow Brokers

It is believed ‘Eternal Blue’, having been dumped by Shadow Brokers, was then picked up by a separate crime gang which used it to gain remote access to computers, including systems that brought parts of the NHS to a standstill. 

The gang, having gained access to computers, then deployed a second software programme - using ransomware called WanaCrypt or WannaCry - which hijacks a computing system and encrypts all the files contained on it. 

The only way to unlock the files is to pay a ransom. 

In this case, the gang is demanding $300 for each computer it unlocks - paid in ‘bitcoins’, a virtual currency used on the internet.

One computer security expert said ‘Eternal Blue’ was used as the ‘crowbar’ that effectively opened the doors to computers, making them vulnerable to attack. The results have been devastating.

Sean Sullivan, security adviser to F-Secure, a cyber security company, said: “Shadow Brokers obtained the NSA tools that exposed a vulnerability in Microsoft’s operating systems. They dumped the instructions detailing how to get in. The exploit is the ‘crowbar’ to open the door and the ransomware is the ‘hand grenade’ you lob in once the door is open.”

It is thought the NSA warned Microsoft its hacking tool had been stolen earlier this year, prompting Microsoft to develop a ‘patch’ - or fix - in March allowing computer users to update their systems and protect them from cyber attack. But operating systems older than 2009 are not though to have been protected. This may have made the NHS more vulnerable because of outdated systems in some hospitals and GP surgeries due to lack of IT investment.

Graham Cluley, a computer security expert, said: “Microsoft developed the patch after an exploit was taken from US intelligence. The US intelligence agency found a security hole in Microsoft software and rather than doing the decent thing and contacting Microsoft they kept it to themselves and exploited it for the purposes of spying. Then they themselves got hacked. And it was at that point Microsoft thought, ‘Jesus we need to patch against this thing’” 

“It’s likely that regular online criminals simply used the information that the Shadow Brokers put on the internet and thought ‘how can we monetise this’.”

Nobody knows who is behind Shadow Brokers but in a statement issued to  a specialist technology website in December, the gang said: “The Shadow Brokers is not being irresponsible criminals. The Shadow Brokers is opportunists. The Shadow Brokers is giving ‘responsible parties’ opportunity to making things right.”

Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower now living in exile in Russia, claimed last year that Shadow Brokers was backed by the Kremlin following another leak. Snowden tweeted that “circumstantial evidence and conventional wisdom indicates Russian responsibility”.

Official advice from Spain’s emergency computer response service yesterday appeared to confirm that the ransomware attacks stemmed from the Eternal Blue tool, when it urged organisations to download a Microsoft update that protects against it.

Cyber security experts told The Telegraph the ransomware was being quickly spread by a wave of “phishing” emails carrying bogus attachments that infected computers when unsuspecting users clicked on them.

The scam emails lured victims into opening infected files posing as invoices, job offers, or even clinical test results.

By Friday night, the ruse appeared to be paying off handsomely. 

Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence at the cyber firm CrowdStrike, said thousands of dollars had been tracked rolling into internet accounts set to up to receive the ransom payments.

However official government advice on both sides of the Atlantic is not to pay criminals behind such attacks.

Mr Meyers said: “We advise people not to pay, because if people do pay, it emboldens these criminal actors.”

He instead urged organisations to make sure they had backed up their data and installed the latest software updates and security. Employees in the NHS also had to be warned how to spot the suspect emails.

Trump and His Generals

What is U.S. goal in the world? Does anyone know?

Pat Buchanan on multiple failed interventions: 'We have lost control of our destiny'

Patrick J. Buchanan  

Published: 15 hours ago

THE WAR PARTY

For the World War II generation, there was clarity. 

The attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941, united the nation as it had never been before – in the conviction that Japan must be smashed, no matter how long it took or how many lives it cost.

After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, however, Americans divided. 

Only with the Berlin Blockade of 1948, the fall of China to Mao and Russia’s explosion of an atom bomb in 1949, and North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950, did we unite around the proposition that, for our own security, we had to go back to Europe and Asia. 

What was called the Cold War consensus – that only America could “contain” Stalin’s empire – led to NATO and new U.S. alliances from the Elbe to the East China Sea.

Vietnam, however, shattered that Cold War consensus. 

The far left of the Democratic Party that had taken us into Vietnam had repudiated the war by 1968 and switched sides to sympathize with such Third World communists as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and the Sandinistas.

Center-right presidents – JFK, Nixon, Reagan – accepted the need to cooperate with dictators who would side with us in fighting Communism. 

And we did. Park Chung-Hee in Korea. The shah in Iran. President Diem in Saigon. Gen. Franco in Spain. Somoza in Nicaragua. Gen. Mobuto in the Congo. Gen. Pinochet in Chile. Ferdinand Marcos in Manila. The list goes on.

Under Reagan, the Soviet Empire finally fell apart, and the USSR then disintegrated in one of the epochal events of history.

The American Century had ended in America’s triumph. 

Yet, after 1989, no new national consensus emerged over what ought to be our role in the World. What should we stand for? What should we fight for?

What Dean Acheson had said of our cousins in 1962: “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role,” was true of us.

What was our role in the world, now that the Cold War was history?

George H.W. Bush took us to war to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Soaring to 90 percent approval, he declared America’s new role was to construct a New World Order.

Those who opposed him, Bush acidly dismissed in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1991, the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor: 

“We stand here today on the site of a tragedy spawned by isolationism. … And it is here we must learn – and this time avoid – the dangers of today’s isolationism and its … accomplice, protectionism.”

Neither Bush nor his New World Order survived the next November.

Then came payback for our sanctions that had brought death to thousands of Iraqis, and for the U.S. bases we had foolishly planted on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia – Sept. 11, 2001. 

George W. Bush reacted by launching the two longest wars in our history, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and announced that our new role was to “end tyranny in our world.”

The Bush II crusade for global democracy also fizzled out.

Barack Obama tried to extricate us from Afghanistan and Iraq. But he, too, failed and got us into wars in Yemen and Syria, and then started his own war in Libya, producing yet another failed state.

What does the balance sheet of post-Cold War interventions look like? 

Since 1991, we have lost our global pre-eminence, quadrupled our national debt and gotten ourselves mired in five Mideast wars, with the neocons clamoring for a sixth, with Iran.

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With the New World Order and global democracy having been abandoned as America’s great goals, what is the new goal of U.S. foreign policy? What is the strategy to achieve it? Does anyone know? 

Globalists say we should stand for a “rules-based world order.” Not exactly “Remember the Alamo!” or “Remember Pearl Harbor!”

A quarter century after the Cold War, we remain committed to 60-year-old Cold War alliances to defend scores of nations on the other side of the world. Consider some of the places where America collides today with nuclear powers: the DMZ, the Senkakus, Scarborough Shoal, Crimea the Donbass.

What is vital to us in any of these venues to justify sending an American army to fight, or risking a nuclear war?

We have lost control of our destiny. We have lost the freedom our Founding Fathers implored us to maintain – the freedom to stay out of wars of foreign counties on faraway continents.

Like the British and French empires, the American imperium is not sustainable. We have issued so many war guarantees it is almost assured that we will be dragged into every future great crisis and conflict on the planet. 

If we do not review and discard some of these war guarantees, we shall never know peace. Donald Trump once seemed to understand this. Does he still?

"Increasingly difficult to wake up overseas to news from home, knowing I will spend today explaining our democracy and institutions. "

US Ambassador to Qatar Dana Shell Smith


Dana Shell Smith  ✔@AmbDana 

Obama appointee, US Ambassador to Qatar Dana Shell Smith has created a diplomatic incident after she tweeted her frustrations with the Trump administration.

Smith, who has been based in Qatar since 2014, took to Twitter early Wednesday to voice her feelings following the decision to fire FBI Director James Comey. The US ambassador to Qatar has expressed her dissatisfaction with political events back home in a decidedly undiplomatic message posted on social media.

Dana Shell Smith, who has been the American envoy to the Gulf emirate since 2014, took to Twitter in the hours after the dramatic sacking of FBI director James Comey by President Donald Trump.

"Increasingly difficult to wake up overseas to news from home, knowing I will spend today explaining our democracy and institutions," Shell Smith tweeted, in apparent disapproval of the move.

It was a rare public show of exasperation with political events -- either in the US or Qatar -- by the envoy, who was appointed by Barack Obama.

The message was posted on May 9 and has been retweeted more than 2,000 times.
Qatar is a key US ally and home to Al-Udeid, the largest US airbase in the region, which houses around 10,000 troops.

Last month, US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis visited Doha and met Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani.

Trade between the two countries is also growing.

Last year, after Trump's election, it was announced that gas-rich Qatar's sovereign wealth fund wanted to invest $10 billion in US infrastructure projects.

There was some angry reaction to Shell Smith's tweet online, with calls for her to be sacked for her apparent criticism of the president.

In a new post on Thursday morning, Shell Smith appeared to try to take the sting out of her earlier message.

"Diplomats explain & defend our political system. Can be tough when partisan acrimony so high, but there is still no greater country. #USA," she tweeted.

Trump Fires Comey

President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said.

"The president has accepted the recommendation of the Attorney General and the deputy Attorney General regarding the dismissal of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation," Sean Spicer told reporters in the briefing room.

NOW TIMES CHANGE:

Sanctimonious Comeynius the Nauseous

The FBI has a long and dishonorable record of political interference and malfeasance, often associated with its first director, J. Edgar Hoover. He placed his agents on the staffs of the most powerful committees of Congress. He turned the FBI into a political police, infiltrating and disrupting the nation’s “enemies” as he defined them—the USA Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, anti-Vietnam War protest organizations, the civil rights movement, the New Left, and even white hate groups like the KKK. 

All became targets of FBI dirty tricks, infiltration, and disruption. And what’s more, Hoover did it on his own authority—ignoring Justice Department guidelines and the recommendations of his superiors—not unlike Comey.

Some say Hoover’s power was rooted in the infamous secret files on members of Congress—known as the director’s “confidential files” that he kept in his inner office. But after Hoover’s death, Congress came to its senses. 

In 1975, it empowered the Church Committee to investigate and rein in the illegal domestic spying activities of the Intelligence Community, specifically including the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And it legislated term limits.

Today the FBI director is nominated by the president and appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate for a 10-year term—10 years, that is, during good behavior and at the pleasure of the president. Following the Church Committee investigations, it was widely believed that the FBI had been brought to heel by superior power emanating from the U.S. Congress.

But that was before 9/11 and the explosive growth of the intelligence agencies and assets over the past 15 year. New powers of surveillance, internal security, and counterterrorism were added across the Intelligence Community, and especially to the FBI’s portfolio and budgets, which mushroomed.

Now comes Director Comey, who was a registered Republican until July, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2013. In a spectacular arrogance of power, Comey put his office in jeopardy, as well as the FBI, wading into the political arena, intervening not once but twice, in the closing days of the presidential election of 2016. But make no mistake about the gravity of his misconduct.

It was a direct assault on the electoral process, even if he says it was not; no matter his intentions, it was an attempt to subvert democracy as it has been practiced in the United States for 240 years.

Bampumim Teixeira - Career Criminal Immigrant - Murdering Cockroach

Killer is from Guinea-Bissau in West Africa and is Sunni Muslim. Both Doctors were tied up throats slashed. This was another terrorists attack in the name of Islam.

Bampumim Teixeira. (Twitter)

A man with a criminal history of robbing banks is accused of slitting the throats of two well-liked doctors who were found in their blood-spattered $1.9 million South Boston condo.

Bampumim Teixeira, an immigrant from West Africa who had worked as a security guard, was shot by police who arrived at the scene and discovered him inside the 11th floor luxury penthouse, Boston police say. Authorities then discovered the bodies of Lina Bolanos, 38, and Richard Field, 49, who were engaged anesthesiologists who had traveled the world together and were known for their warmth and compassion with patients.

Prosecutors indicated robbery may be the motive, according to WBZ. However, prosecutors did not specifically use that word during a bizarre court hearing May 8, in which the suspect was arraigned in a hospital bed and kept his eyes closed. They did say, though, that he was dressed in black clothes and gloves, and they found a bag of jewelry in the condo that contained what they believe was Bolanos’ jewelry. Police found a knife at the scene, CBS Boston reported.

In a news conference on May 9, the District Attorney disputed earlier accounts that the suspect knew the victims, and also said that Texeira had not shot at 

Heavy asked Jake Wark, spokesman for the Suffolk County District Attorney, about Teixeira’s immigration status, and he said, “From what I gather, Teixeira is a lawful permanent resident. Questions about immigration law and sanctions are best posed to federal authorities such as ICE, since state prosecutors have no jurisdiction or standing in those matters.” Shawn Neudauer, Public Affairs Officer for ICE, told Heavy in response to a series of questions about Teixeira’s immigration status: “ICE has no legal interest in this individual, though we will continue to monitor the matter in case his criminal charges change his legal disposition.” 

Teixeira had a criminal history before the murders in the United States.

A legal permanent resident, according to Cornell University, “is a non-citizen who has been granted authorization to live and work in the United States on a permanent basis. As proof of that status, a person is granted a permanent resident card, commonly called a ‘green card.'”

Emmanuel Barack Macron

Mommy's Boy:




The Outsider:

The Scumbags: the Real Deplorables and Despicables