Daily Archives: July 17, 2017

Modern Women’s Rights, Atheism, and Ideological Warfare – The Good Men Project (blog)

Posted: July 17, 2017 at 3:56 am

Marie Alena Castle is the communications director for Atheists for Human Rights. Raised Roman Catholic she became an atheist later in life. She has since been an important figure in the atheistmovement through her involvement with Minnesota Atheists, The Moral Atheist,National Organization for Women, andwrote Culture Wars: The Threat to Your Family and Your Freedom (2013). She has a lifetime of knowledge and activist experience, explored and crystallized in an educational series. The first part of this series can be found here Session 1and Session 2.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Even with groups such as NARAL, NOW, and Planned Parenthood, the onslaught against womens rights, reproductive rights and so on, continue to take place. The most vulnerable poor and minority women tend to be the main victims, and so their children and the associated families and so communities. In a sequence, I see attacks on womens reproductive rights as attacks on women, children, so families, and so communities, and therefore ordinary American citizens. What can be some buffers, or defenses, against these direct attacks on the new media and communications technologies, e.g. to educate and inoculate new generations?

Marie Alena Castle:

Jacobsen: Who are the unknown womens rights heroes, men and women, that people should more into to self-educate?

Castle:They are the people who work at abortion clinics. They all have stories to tell. One of my friends managed a clinic and she was constantly threatened with violence and pickets at her house. I went there a few times to help in case the picketers got violent. One August I suggested she hook up her garden hose to a bottle of sugar water and set it to spray on the picketers and attract hordes of hornets. She wouldnt do it but I would have. The leader of the picketers was the local fire department chief (with expert knowledge of how to set her house on fire). She wanted to move but dared not for fear the fire chief would send a potential buyer to case the house for fire-setting purposes. She needed some carpentry done but feared getting someone she didnt know who would have a violent anti-abortion agenda. I got an atheist carpenter friend for her who was reliably safe.

Jacobsen: Once the shoe bites, people then become active, politically and socially, typically. These people can rise and protest in an organized and constructive way. Do you think this era of yes, alternative facts, but at the same time mass accessibility of information can hasten people realizing their shoe is being bitten, even when they werent aware before?

Castle:Lotsa luck on this. Most people really do assume that, as child bearers, women really are something of a public utility and in need of regulation. Why else would there be any discussion about how Roe v. Wade should be interpreted? What we need are new court challenges to Roe v. Wade that say it should be repealed and replaced with a ruling that says abortion is a medical matter to be handled by a woman and her doctor and is not the governments business. Lets have a major public discussion about womens bodily autonomy and why their bodies need government oversight.

(While Im at it, let me note that I am also opposed to men being drafted into the military. The government does not own their bodies any more than it owns womens bodies. You get men to voluntarily agree to kill people and you get women to voluntarily agree to give birth or you do without.)

Jacobsen: For centuries, and now with mild pushback over decades, the religiously-based, often, bigotry and chauvinism against women, and ethnic and sexual minorities is more in the open, and so more possible to change. Because people know about it, and cant deny it. And when and if they do, the reasons seem paper thin and comical, at times. What expedites this process of everyone, finally, earning that coveted equality?

Castle:The mild pushback has come because more people are losing interest in religion, and religion has always been the driver of bigotry and prejudice. The loss of interest has come from Internet sources that expose the absurdities and failings of religion.

To expedite the process you change the laws. You change the laws by organizing for and electing legislators who support civil rights. Then you elect a President who will appoint judges who support those rights. Nothing changes if the laws dont change. The laws helped bring civil rights to the South because it gave pro-civil rights citizens the protection they needed to treat people with respect. We started getting civil rights by public agitation that led to legislation that led to court review and rulings that did or did not affirm those rights. One exception: We got women covered by the Civil Rights Act when sex was introduced into the language in the expectation that it would be seen as such a joke that the Act would be voted down, but it passed.

To get women out of the public utility category, we need to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. That failed the first time precisely because opponents said it would give women the right to have abortions. What isabout abortion that sets some people off so violently? None of them show any real practical interest in born babies. Why this obsession with controlling women? Something about species survival? So many men with so many zillions of sperm and frustrated by womens limited ability to accommodate all that paternal potential? Who knows?

The only thing holding up equal rights for all is the Catholic and Protestant fundamentalist religions (and maybe also misogynistic Islam but we have to see how that immigrant population votes after being exposed to the relatively civilizing effect of living here). Its always those religions that protest against womens rights, gay rights, and that so ferociously supported slavery.

Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Marie.

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Scott Douglas Jacobsen founded In-Sight Publishing and In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. He works as an Associate Editor and Contributor for Conatus News, Editor and Contributor to The Good Men Project, a Board Member, Executive International Committee (International Research and Project Management) Member, and as the Chair of Social Media for the Almas Jiwani Foundation, Executive Administrator and Writer for Trusted Clothes, and Councillor in the Athabasca University Students Union. He contributes to the Basic Income Earth Network, The Beam, Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Check Your Head, Conatus News, Humanist Voices, The Voice Magazine, and Trusted Clothes. If you want to contact Scott: [emailprotected]; website: http://www.in-sightjournal.com; Twitter: https://twitter.com/InSight_Journal.

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Denver’s Secular Hub unites non-believers in what one calls an atheist church – The Denver Post

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By 10:30 a.m., the assembly room has filled with people. Theyre four dozen strong, swirling about the long rectangular hall like in a hive, standing and laughing in small clusters, shaking hands and hugging latecomers, finishing coffee and doughnuts in the kitchen, leaning in close to hear a weeks worth of gossip whispered too low for lurking passers-by.

The congregations Sunday morning gathering is a cherished communal ritual that brings together newly joined 20-somethings, still groggy from a night on the town, with chatty retirees who have been members since the institutions founding. They come from across metro Denver to hang out and talk about whatevers on their mind: Donald Trump, National Public Radio, last nights Rockies game, the hiking trail du jour.

Inevitably, though, their conversation returns to the supernatural power that unites them: God.

This isnt church, though.

Its atheist church, jokes Ruth McLeod, who moved to Denver from Louisiana in 2012.Church doesnt have a monopoly on community.

Like most members of the Secular Hub, a nontheistic community center in Denvers Whittier neighborhood, McLeod doesnt believe in God. After abandoning her strict Christian upbringing in college, she turned to atheism, a solution to the silence of the cosmos that allowed her to jettison what she considers the contradictions of the Bible and the conservative social program of the church.

Her conversion has increasing resonance in the United States, where one in 13 adults identify as atheist or agnostic. American secularists, though, are not an organized tribe. Nontheists lack the elaborate institutional wherewithal enjoyed by the 160 million Americans who regularly attend religious services. In a country where faith is worth $1.2 trillion equivalent to the entire economy of Mexico God disbelievers have no colleagues in Congress, face pervasivecontemptand control few institutions of their own.

The Secular Hub aims to curb those realities by providing a central meeting space where the theologically marooned can stake out a home.

We think were the first secular community center in the United States, says Barb Sannwald, a professional computer programmer and founding member. Its much easier to be an atheist in Colorado than elsewhere.

The secular center hosts an assortment of compatible yet distinct deity doubters atheists, agnostics, humanists and freethinkers held together by skepticism, faith in science and a commitment to free-ranging dialogue. Numerous affiliate groups also rent out the building for weekly meetings, including the local chapters of Freedom from Religion Foundation,United Coalition of Reasonand Freethinkers in AA, a nonreligious arm of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Two hundred twenty-five core members pledge $5 a month each for official status. Hundreds more float among groups, dropping in and out of meetings and get-togethers as wanted. Leaders strive to bring together the entire congregation through regular programming, which includes book clubs, movie screenings, meet-and-greets, meal discussions, and public lectures by renowned scientists and skeptics. On Sundays, everyone comes together for Secular Hubs flagship affair, Coffee & Community, which simulates the dependability of weekly church service without ceremony or sermons.

For a few years, Sannwald and other founders attended First Universalist Church of Denver, a liberal Christian group that embraces a wide array of beliefs from Eastern and Western religious traditions. Around 2007, a community newsletter alerted Sannwald to Humanists of Colorado, which held monthly meetings at the church. She began frequenting meetings, where she met a number of like-minded locals who valued the camaraderie of First Universalist Church but demurred on its doctrine, namely the emphasis on God.

There was a small group of us looking for the type of community that a church provides, Sannwald said. Churches are great places to find friends, to find comfort during difficult times and to meet others. But none of us were religious, so we didnt want to go to a church.

So in late 2012, she and a cohort of 20 Coloradans began raising money to open a space for agnostics, atheists, secularists and humanists in metro Denver. They initially considered asking a deep-pocketed donor to underwrite the startup.

Daniel Brenner, Special to the Denver Post

But we decided we wanted this to be a group effort, Sannwald said. So we had 23 founders put up the founding money to ensure broad-based support from the secular community.

In October 2012, representatives from Denver Atheist Meetup and Humanists of Colorado officially formed a nonprofit, which they called Secular Hub. A month later, the founders signed a lease at East 31st Avenue and Downing Street, where the organization still exists today.

The Hubs origin story speaks to a spate of nontheistic organizations popping up across the country. More than a dozen similar secular ventures have opened over the past decade, estimates Nick Fish, national program director of American Atheists.

Its certainly a growing feature of the humanist and atheist community, he said. The great thing about being an atheist is that no one tells you how to do it. But that can also be a struggle, as theres not always community support groups out there. Groups like the Secular Hub provide that for people who want and need that. What theyre doing is really important and worthwhile.

In the 4 1/2 years since the grand opening of Denvers first outpost for nonbelief on Feb. 12, which isDarwin Day,of 2013 the organization has grown from a core of committed nontheists to an emerging community of engineers, artists, immigrants, families, lifelong nonbelievers and recent religious defectors.

Andrew Forlines is one such religious turncoat. The 32-year-old grew up outside Cincinnati, home-schooled by archconservative parents who instilled Christian fundamentalism in their children. Forlines rebelled early. Despite never receiving formal education, he possessed an innate curiosity and habit for self-teaching that gradually led him astray from his anti-science parents and their faith founded inbiblical inerrancy.

When he moved to Denver two years ago, he wanted a community where he could make sense of his unorthodox upbringing. Through a Google search last July, he found Recovering from Religion, an affiliated group that offers guidance for spiritual renegades who have walked away from what Forlines calls indoctrination.

I was looking for a support group for people like me who struggle with a dogmatic religious upbringing, he said. I felt welcomed and embraced. Everyone was very nice. I felt a tremendous amount of relief to have found like-minded people.

Forlines immediately took to the community, where his values and background werent isolated or isolating but shared. In March, he launched two regular events of his own: a book club on social issues, and Dinner & Documentary, which hosts monthly film screenings and open discussions over food.

The Hub is what anyone makes of it, he said, emphasizing the organizations differences from a church. Its in between a stand-alone organization in your traditional sense and a physical meeting space for subgroups to utilize. Ive found that it often brings together people who make decisions based on science and empirical evidence.

As with secularism itself, the Hubs ideological flexibility and lack of firm hierarchy allow members such as Forlines to engage as frequently, widely and deeply as desired. Leaders want to meet nonbelievers where they are, welcoming potential members who might be skeptical about joining an institution devoted to skepticism.New members must pledge to follow only three rules for admission: honoring the separation of church and state; maintaining goodwill among members and avoiding hostility; and not promoting any beliefs in gods or other supernatural entities.

Sannwald and other leaders have been encouraged by a gust of interest, particularly among parents with young children. Yet the current facility with only 1,500 square feet of meeting space has little capacity for kids and no property outside.

Were growing to a point where we might want to move, Sannwald said. Its one of our goals. But we have no concrete plans yet.

A move, though, will require sufficient funds. The Hub currently subsists on membership dues, which help pay rent, utilities and little more. The all-volunteer board and staff take no commission for their work.

Growth will also test the bonds that hold together a piecemeal community with many peripheral groups and members. Religions have core texts that serve as a central spoke around which the community can coalesce. The Secular Hub, which lacks such a common code, lets the burden of communion fall on members themselves. Its a tall task that both challenges and liberates.

In a church, theres this feeling of needing to conform to dogma thats a lie, said Kimberly Saviano, a Hub founder who lives in Denver. Secularism and atheism do not have any particular ethical code. We are responsible to come up with our own.

To secularists such as Saviano, that responsibility poses a uniquely human task, one that reflects the problem and offers hope for all social networks.

Most of us have a deep need for community, somewhere we belong and have people who understand you, she said. Were trying to be there for each other if someones in the hospital or moving or going through a tough time. Thats the organizing force of community, making sure were taking care of each other. And theres nothing religious about that. You dont need God for that.

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NATO urges Turkey, Germany to settle air base row – Reuters

Posted: at 3:55 am

BRUSSELS/BERLIN (Reuters) - NATO's Secretary General has urged the Turkish and German foreign ministers to resolve their differences over visits to Turkish air bases, part of a wider row between the two allies.

Germany has refused to extradite asylum seekers Turkey says were involved in a coup attempt last year, Berlin is demanding the release of a Turkish-German journalist, and Ankara has refused to let German lawmakers visit soldiers at two air bases.

German soldiers contribute to a NATO air surveillance mission at Konya, 250 km (150 miles) south of the Turkish capital Ankara, and its troops stationed at another air base, in Incirlik, have already been moved to Jordan.

NATO said Jens Stoltenberg had called Sigmar Gabriel and Mevlut Cavusoglu on Friday to ask them to settle the dispute.

"We hope that Germany and Turkey are able to find a mutually acceptable date for a visit," a NATO spokesman said.

Germany's armed forces are under parliamentary control and Berlin says the lawmakers must have access to its soldiers.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted in a television interview on Sunday that German lawmakers should be allowed to visit the Bundeswehr soldiers at the NATO air base in Konya.

"This whole issue is unfortunate, very unfortunate," Merkel told public broadcaster ARD, adding that more talks were needed to find a solution, also with the help of NATO.

On whether Ankara had asked Berlin to extradite asylum seekers in exchange for granting lawmakers access to the air base, Merkel said she was not aware of any such a request.

"If this was the case..., we would reject this entirely," Merkel said.

There could be no negotiations with Ankara about the extradition of Turkish asylum seekers and granting German lawmakers access to the soldiers at Konya air base because both issues were completely unrelated, she added.

Reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek in Brussels and Michael Nienaber in Berlin; Editing by Louise Ireland and Giles Elgood

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NATO Commander Confirms Killing of Abu Sayed – Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

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US Army General John Nicholson confirmed the killing of Abu Sayed - the head of the Islamic State group affiliate in Afghanistan. Nicholson said Sayed was killed in an airstrike in Kunar province. (July 15)

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Defence Eyes Breakthrough in Macedonia NATO Killing Case – Balkan Insight

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Defence lawyers for 11 residents of the north-eastern village of Sopot, who are being retried for allegedly planting a mine in 2003 that killed two Polish NATO soldiers and one Macedonian civilian, have expressed hope that the Special Prosecution, SJO will drop all charges at the next court session scheduled for September 18.

I think that the SJO would drop the charges in this case at the first session [as] it was already proven by the wiretapped conversations [between former senior Macedonian officials, on tapes released by their opponents] that it was a politically motivated set-up, said Naser Raufi, a lawyer for the defendants.

The SJO, which was set up in 2015 to investigate alleged high-level crimes which came to light in the wiretapped conversations which were released earlier that year, formally asked to take over the case on November 4, 2016.

After much deliberation, it finally got the case this month. The Prosecution for Organised Crime and Corruption handed over the Sopot case to the SJO on July 5. After reviewing the case, the SJO decided on July 10 that the case falls under its jurisdiction, the SJO said last Thursday.

The defence had hoped all along that the SJO would take over the case because it was mentioned by top officials in the wiretaps. Defence lawyers hoped the tapes would shed new light on the crime.

In one of the wiretapped conversations, what were alleged to be the voices of the then Interior Minister Gordana Jankuloska and then Secret Police chief, Saso Mijalkov, could be heard talking about the case.

In the conversation, Jankuloska allegedly suggests to Mijalkov that then Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski should be consulted about how to proceed with this sensitive case and both seem to acknowledge that the conviction of the villagers, who were originally found guilty in 2010, rests on very thin evidence.

It is not excluded that more wiretapped conversations which are now in the hands of the SJO may reveal even more details about the case because in 2015, the then opposition released only a small portion of them.

The mine explosion in Sopot happened in 2003 when Macedonia was still recovering from the 2001 armed conflict between ethnic Albanian insurgents and the security forces.

After a prolonged trial, the 12 defendants were originally sentenced in March 2010 to a total of 150 years in jail, but after Macedonias ethnic Albanian political parties complained, a parliamentary commission decided that there were some omissions during the trial.

The parliamentary commission's decision rested on a claim by one of the defendants, Ramadan Bajrami, that he confessed after being tortured by police.

This resulted in the court ordering a new trial, which was originally supposed to start in 2011.

By 2016, one of the original 12 defendants had died.

The countrys ethnic Albanian political parties have criticised the Sopot case and several others as examples of injustice against Albanians in Macedonia.

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US to create independent military cyber command – Minneapolis Star Tribune

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By LOLITA C. BALDOR , Associated Press July 17, 2017 - 2:20 AM

WASHINGTON After months of delay, the Trump administration is finalizing plans to revamp the nation's military command for defensive and offensive cyber operations in hopes of intensifying America's ability to wage cyberwar against the Islamic State group and other foes, according to U.S. officials.

Under the plans, U.S. Cyber Command would eventually be split off from the intelligence-focused National Security Agency.

Details are still being worked out, but officials say they expect a decision and announcement in the coming weeks. The officials weren't authorized to speak publicly on the matter so requested anonymity.

The goal, they said, is to give U.S. Cyber Command more autonomy, freeing it from any constraints that stem from working alongside the NSA, which is responsible for monitoring and collecting telephone, internet and other intelligence data from around the world a responsibility that can sometimes clash with military operations against enemy forces.

Making cyber an independent military command will put the fight in digital space on the same footing as more traditional realms of battle on land, in the air, at sea and in space. The move reflects the escalating threat of cyberattacks and intrusions from other nation states, terrorist groups and hackers, and comes as the U.S. faces ever-widening fears about Russian hacking following Moscow's efforts to meddle in the 2016 American election.

The U.S. has long operated quietly in cyberspace, using it to collect information, disrupt enemy networks and aid conventional military missions. But as other nations and foes expand their use of cyberspying and attacks, the U.S. is determined to improve its ability to incorporate cyber operations into its everyday warfighting.

Experts said the command will need time to find its footing.

"Right now I think it's inevitable, but it's on a very slow glide path," said Jim Lewis, a cybersecurity expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But, he added, "A new entity is not going to be able to duplicate NSA's capabilities."

The NSA, for examples, has 300 of the country's leading mathematicians "and a gigantic super computer," Lewis said. "Things like this are hard to duplicate."

He added, however, that over time, the U.S. has increasingly used cyber as a tactical weapon, bolstering the argument for separating it from the NSA.

The two highly secretive organizations, based at Fort Meade, Maryland, have been under the same four-star commander since Cyber Command's creation in 2009.

But the Defense Department has been agitating for a separation, perceiving the NSA and intelligence community as resistant to more aggressive cyberwarfare, particularly after the Islamic State's transformation in recent years from an obscure insurgent force into an organization holding significant territory across Iraq and Syria and with a worldwide recruiting network.

While the military wanted to attack IS networks, intelligence objectives prioritized gathering information from them, according to U.S. officials familiar with the debate. They weren't authorized to discuss internal deliberations publicly and requested anonymity.

Then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter sent a plan to President Barack Obama last year to make Cyber Command an independent military headquarters and break it away from the NSA, believing that the agency's desire to collect intelligence was at times preventing the military from eliminating IS' ability to raise money, inspire attacks and command its widely dispersed network of fighters.

Carter, at the time, also pushed for the ouster of Adm. Mike Rogers, who still heads both bodies. The Pentagon, he warned, was losing the war in the cyber domain, focusing on cyberthreats from nations such as Iran, Russia and China, rather than on countering the communications and propaganda campaigns of internet-savvy insurgents.

Officials also grew alarmed by the growing number of cyberattacks against the U.S. government, including several serious, high-level Defense Department breaches that occurred under Rogers' watch.

"NSA is truly an intelligence-collection organization," said Lauren Fish, a research associate with the Center for a New American Security. "It should be collecting information, writing reports on it. Cyber Command is meant to be an organization that uses tools to have military operational effect."

After President Donald Trump's inauguration, officials said Defense Secretary Jim Mattis endorsed much of the plan. But debate over details has dragged on for months.

It's unclear how fast the Cyber Command will break off on its own. Some officials believe the new command isn't battle-ready, given its current reliance on the NSA's expertise, staff and equipment. That effort will require the department to continue to attract and retain cyber experts.

Cyber Command was created in 2009 by the Obama administration to address threats of cyber espionage and other attacks. It was set up as a sub-unit under U.S. Strategic Command to coordinate the Pentagon's ability to conduct cyberwarfare and to defend its own networks, including those that are used by combat forces in battle.

Officials originally said the new cyber effort would likely involve hundreds, rather than thousands, of new employees.

Since then, the command has grown to more than 700 military and civilian employees. The military services also have their own cyber units, with a goal of having 133 fully operational teams with as many as 6,200 personnel.

Its proposed budget for next year is $647 million. Rogers told Congress in May that represents a 16 percent increase over this year's budget to cover costs associated with building the cyber force, fighting IS and becoming an independent command.

Under the new plan being forwarded by the Pentagon to the White House, officials said Army Lt. Gen. William Mayville would be nominated to lead Cyber Command. Leadership of the NSA could be turned over to a civilian.

Mayville is currently the director of the military's joint staff and has extensive experience as a combat-hardened commander. He deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan, leading the 173rd Airborne Brigade when it made its assault into Iraq in March 2003 and later heading coalition operations in eastern Afghanistan.

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Byron York: What campaign wouldn’t seek motherlode of Clinton emails? – Washington Examiner

Posted: at 3:54 am

The public learned on March 10, 2015 that Hillary Clinton had more than 60,000 emails on her private email system, and that she had turned over "about half" of them to the State Department and destroyed the rest, which she said were "personal" and "not in any way related" to her work as Secretary of State.

The public learned later the lengths to which Clinton went to make sure the "personal" emails were completely and permanently deleted. Her team used a commercial-strength program called BleachBit to erase all traces of the emails, and they used hammers to physically destroy mobile devices that might have had the emails on them. The person who did the actual deleting later cited legal privileges and the Fifth Amendment to avoid talking to the FBI and Congress.

Clinton's lawyer, David Kendall, told Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Benghazi Committee, that investigators could forget about finding any of those emails, whether on a device or a server or anywhere. Sorry, Trey, he said; they're all gone.

It was, as the New York Times' Mark Landler said in August 2016, the "original sin" of the Clinton email affair that Clinton herself, and no independent body, unilaterally decided which emails she would hand over to the State Department and which she would delete.

Still, there were people who did not believe that Clinton's deleted emails, all 30,000-plus of them, were truly gone. What is ever truly gone on the Internet? And what if Clinton were not telling the truth? What if she deleted emails covering more than just personal matters? In that event, recovering the emails would have rocked the 2016 presidential campaign.

So, if there were an enormous trove of information potentially harmful to a presidential candidate just sitting out there what opposing campaign wouldn't want to find it?

There have been recent reports that last summer a Republican named Peter W. Smith made some sort of effort to find the missing Clinton emails, apparently getting in touch with hackers, some of whom may have been Russian. But nothing came of it, and no evidence has emerged that Smith was connected to the Trump campaign. (The 81-year-old Smith later committed suicide, apparently distraught over failing health.)

In a phone conversation Friday, Corey Lewandowski, the Trump campaign manager who was fired on June 20, 2016, said he never heard of or communicated with Smith, and wasn't aware of any effort to find the missing Clinton emails. "I never solicited, or asked anybody to solicit or find a way to get these potential emails," Lewandowski said. "And to the best of my knowledge, nobody [in the campaign] did either."

Still, Lewandowski added that, "In the world of cybersecurity, it's fairly well known that when you delete emails, they're not gone."

Another former top Trump aide said that was a common view in the campaign. "The feeling was that they [the emails] must exist somewhere," the former aide said, "because once something is digital, it's never truly gone."

"Trump believes that," the aide added.

Still, the aide also said he had never heard of Peter W. Smith, and didn't know of any effort to find the emails. "There was never a thought of who might have them," the aide said. "Nobody at the campaign was trying to find them."

Both Lewandowski and the other former aide stressed the greatest political value of the missing emails, as far as Trump was concerned, was that they gave Trump a way to "poke" and "troll" his Democratic opponent. The Clinton team was BleachBitting and swinging hammers to smash devices and she says everything was on the up and up, that she has nothing to hide? Candidate Trump could riff on that all day. It was as if Clinton were trying her best to look guilty, to Trump's political benefit.

But at least one high-ranking Trump team member apparently did believe the missing Clinton emails still existed. In August 2016, Gen. Michael Flynn, then the Trump campaign's top national security adviser, discussed the emails with a conservative radio host named John B. Wells. "The big question is, does somebody have more emails?" Flynn began:

Does somebody have the 30,000? The likelihood of that ... the likelihood somebody has all of those emails, at a nation-state level, meaning Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, or even other countries, or some other large hacktivist group, like the WikiLeaks group that we know exists the likelihood is very high, and I'm talking like better than 95 percent. I would actually bet a paycheck on it, that somebody has it.

Flynn, of course, was a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, so he should know something about that. Flynn also had Trump's ear on national security and other matters. And he was saying the emails are out there, somewhere.

Which leads to a question. Would it have been appropriate for the Trump campaign to try to find the emails? After all, the emails were under congressional subpoena, under FBI investigation, of intense public interest, and a potentially explosive issue in the presidential campaign. What opposing campaign wouldn't want to know what was in them?

Look at a few possible scenarios. What if a member of the Clinton team defected and offered them to the Trump campaign? Would it have been appropriate for Trump to accept?

Or: What if a rogue hacker "a 400-pound person sitting in bed," as Trump once said got the emails and offered them to the campaign? Would accepting under those circumstances have been appropriate?

What if an intelligence operative from a friendly country got them and offered them? And what about an unfriendly country?

Would there be a scale, from standard oppo research on one end to treason on the other, depending on how the emails were acquired?

I posed those hypotheticals at least I think they are hypotheticals to three veteran Republican operatives: Tim Miller, who served as spokesman for Jeb Bush's 2016 campaign; David Carney, a New Hampshire-based strategist who's been involved in dozens of campaigns; and Barry Bennett, who ran Ben Carson's 2016 campaign and also served briefly as an adviser to the Trump effort.

Miller, a vocal critic of the president, stressed via email the question comes in the context of Russia's hacking of DNC and John Podesta emails. "So I would say that it would be unacceptable in opposition research to do that hack Podesta/DNC in any situation," Miller said.

"Where Hillary's deleted emails from her time as Secretary of State are concerned, many of those may have actually been public records," Miller continued. "So if they were acquired through a whistleblower or a lucky break scraping Internet archives, that would of course be fair game. That said, under no circumstance would enlisting a hostile government's help be acceptable for a myriad of reasons: legal, ethical, practical (how can you govern when you are in debt to a hostile government)."

For his part, Carney, writing via email, offered ways a campaign might have handled such a situation, had it arisen. "If the emails did show up, most serious campaigns would not touch them directly legalities and all. But friends of the campaign would strongly encourage the turncoat to dump them to reporters. Easier not to have fingerprints on questionable documents."

"Foreign governments would always use high-level U.S. third parties, not any direct campaign contacts, and most likely they would end up in the media," Carney continued. "So YES campaigns would seek the emails, but not directly if they were not legally available or the sources were questionable."

Bennett began by noting that the Trump campaign would have had "no ability to find [the missing Clinton emails] all by themselves. There was no tech operation until late summer, and even then it was basic."

"If someone I didn't know reached out and said, 'I have them,' I would have immediately called the committee and said this person says he has them," Bennett continued, via email. "I wouldn't want to touch them. But I would very much want them out there in the public.

"It is still hard for me to believe that copies of them aren't out there somewhere," Bennett added, going on to provide advice for a campaign facing a scandal-plagued opponent.

"Even during the Carson campaign I didn't meet with anyone I didn't know," Bennett said. "How do you know you're not being set up? I had people come to me and say they had dirt on [Ted] Cruz. I passed."

"Information can only be as trusted as the source that gives it to you. You can get easily burned with bad info or even looking like you want dirt. This is why everyone outsources research. No one in their right mind would want to touch documents under subpoena. No lawyer would ever let you."

"All of this being said, of course you want them to go public," Bennett concluded. "If the Russians had them, the last thing they would do is call a goofy record promoter in England and set up a meeting with a lawyer that can't even get a visa. Instead, DHL them from Asia to the New York Times."

Bennett alluded to the odd circumstances of Donald Trump Jr.'s June 9, 2016, meeting with Russians offering some sort of dirt on Hillary Clinton (not, as far as we know, the missing Clinton emails). In the days since the meeting was first reported, several political operatives of both parties have claimed they would never have taken part in such a meeting. While that might indeed be true, some would certainly have tried to find a hands-off way to get damaging material about their opponent into public view.

In the 2016 campaign, everyone knew Clinton had a huge secret those 30,000-plus "personal" emails and that she had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep that secret. Many people, and not just partisan warriors, suspected she had something to hide. And now, it should not be a surprise if there were some shenanigans as political operatives tried to learn the real Clinton email story.

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Byron York: What campaign wouldn't seek motherlode of Clinton emails? - Washington Examiner

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Not All Foreign-Influence Scandals Are Created Equal – National Review

Posted: at 3:54 am

This summer we mark the 20th anniversary of a major investigation by Congress of attempts by a hostile foreign power to influence an American presidential election.

Im glad the news media is pursuing the TrumpRussia scandal, but lets not forget the differences between how they are covering Russia compared with how they reported a similar story this one involving Communist China that developed during Bill Clintons 1996 reelection campaign. The Washington Post reported in 1998 that evidence gathered in federal surveillance intercepts has indicated that the Chinese government planned to increase Chinas influence in the U.S. political process in 1996.

Many people still believe that a major cover-up of that scandal worked in part because the media expressed skepticism and devoted only a fraction of resources they are spending on the TrumpRussia story. Network reporters expressed outright skepticism of the story, with many openly criticizing the late senator Fred Thompson, the chair of the Senate investigating committee, for wasting time and money. On June 17, 1997, Katie Couric, then the Today co-anchor, asked the Washington Posts Bob Woodward about the story: Are members of the media, do you think, Bob, too scandal-obsessed, looking for something at every corner?

According to an analysis by the Media Research Center, the news coverage of the congressional hearings on the China scandal in the summer of 1997 were dwarfed by reports on the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace and the death of Princess Diana.

The Chinese fundraising scandal involving DNC finance vice chairman John Huang first came to light in the final weeks of the 1996 presidential campaign. A former Commerce Department official, Huang was a top fundraiser who scooped up suspect foreign cash for Team Clinton.

A 1998 Senate Government Affairs Committee report on the scandal found strong circumstantial evidence that a great deal of foreign money had illegally entered the country in an attempt to influence the 1996 election. The DNC was forced to give back more than $2.8 million in illegal or improper donations from foreign nationals.

The most suspect funds were brought in by Johnny Chung, a bagman for the Asian billionaire Riady family. Chung confessed that at least $35,000 of his donations to the Clinton campaign and the DNC had come from a Chinese aerospace executive a lieutenant colonel in the Chinese military. Chung said the executive had helped him meet three times with General Ji Shengde, the head of Chinese military intelligence. According to Chungs testimony, General Shengde had told him: We really like your president. We hope he will be reelected. I will give you $300,000 U.S. dollars. You can give it to...your president and the Democratic party.

The sprawling fundraising scandal ultimately led to 22 guilty pleas on various violations of election laws. Among the Clinton fundraisers and friends who pleaded guilty were John Huang, Charlie Trie, James Riady, and Michael Brown, son of the late Clinton Commerce secretary Ron Brown. But many questions went unanswered, even after the revelations that Clinton had personally authorized offering donors Oval Office meetings and use of the Lincoln bedroom. A total of 120 participants in the fundraising scandal either fled the country, asserted their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, or otherwise avoided questioning. The stonewalling worked and probably encouraged Hillary Clinton in her own cover-up of her private e-mail server and her ties with the Clinton Foundation.

Indeed, much of the media basically gave the Clintons a pass on evidence that special-interest donors to the Clinton Foundation frequently managed to score favors from the State Department. Journalist Peter Schweitzer revealed in his book Clinton Cash that State had helped move along an infamous deal that granted the Russians control of more than 20 percent of the uranium production here in the United States. The company involved in acquiring the American uranium was a very large donor to you guessed it the Clinton Foundation.

None of this history should dissuade the media from questioning the White Houses often shifting and blatantly inaccurate accounts of what happened and who was involved and when. Either the presidents team is infected with a self-destructive gene or they really do have something to hide.

But a little humility and honesty on the part of the media would be appropriate. Much of the breathless and constant coverage of the Russia scandal is motivated by the medias hatred of Donald Trump, which is of course reciprocated.

When it came to the Clintons, the media tended to downplay or even trivialize many of their scandals. But, to be fair, a little bit of self-awareness is beginning to show up in the Russia coverage. Last Thursday, Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC noted that when it came to opening the door to lowering the standards of conduct by a modern president, Bill Clinton led the way with his lying and scandalous behavior. She was referring, of course, to the Lewinsky scandal, but her comments are equally appropriate to the many other Clinton scandals that didnt receive wall-to-wall coverage.

READ MORE: With Trump, the Benefit of the Doubt Is Gone 16 Things You Have to Believe to Buy the Witch Hunt Russia Narrative Anti-Trump Overreach Could Backfire

John Fund is NROs national-affairs correspondent.

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FISA reform is needed, and conservatives should lead the way – Washington Examiner

Posted: at 3:53 am

Congress is getting ready to debate reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, set to expire at the end of the year. Liberty-minded voters and lawmakers should support reform of this provision, to insure that the federal government's power is kept in check.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have abused warrantless surveillance authorities when in power, to sweep up communications of American citizens in a way that violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Section 702 passed in 2008, when Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate. The original bill was supported strongly by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. With Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, they now have the power to reform the same surveillance overreach they have previously criticized.

The fight has become an internal struggle between the old establishment guard of the Republican Party and newer, more liberty-minded members who are concerned about privacy and government overreach. The future of the Republican Party includes support for privacy and Fourth Amendment rights. Therefore, the leadership in the House, where this bill is expected to start, should be responsive to the members who are leaders of the privacy movement. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., has voiced support for Section 702 reform, and hopefully will lead the charge to bring together divergent elements of the Republican Party, to support a common sense compromise on the bill.

The Bush administration engaged in widespread warrantless wiretapping without any congressional authorization. Likewise, the Obama adminisration used Section 702 to engage in similarly unconstitutional practices.

The provision has been used in a way that violates the Constitution and does not enhance national security. A Washington Post analyzed documents released by Edward Snowden and reported on July 5, 2014 that, "Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency" under Section 702. The Washington Post reviewed 160,000 intercepted email and instant messaging conversations and reported on widespread monitoring of Americans' data that should have required a warrant based on probable cause for the government to collect. This massive data collection is a problem unto itself because the government amasses a giant database of information that they keep.

These abuses are evidence enough that Section 702 needs to be reformed or allowed to expire.

Congress must insist on closing the so-called backdoor search loophole. This loophole allows the government to target Americans under Section 702, under the pretense that they are really targeting foreign nationals. The FBI routinely performs these types of searches, even in cases where they lack the evidence necessary even to open a formal investigation.

There are currently no prohibitions on the use of this information in prosecutions against Americans for alleged offenses unrelated to terrorism. That Section 702 can be used to wiretap Americans without a warrant, and in investigations that have nothing to do with terrorism, demonstrates the amount of mission creep that this anti-terrorism provision has permitted.

Another critical reform that should be imposed on the program would be to limit the scope of Section 702 to only allow targets to be foreign powers or agents, and exclude individuals who are not associated with terrorism and may merely be businessmen or journalists. Furthermore, the upstream surveillance program that has been used to search emails and text messaging on a massive scale should be ended.

Real transparency and oversight of FISA programs needs to be part of any compromise, and any retained data needs to be purged on a regular basis. Finally, private citizens need to have a way to challenge unconstitutional surveillance in court if they believe their rights have been violated.

The law has been implemented in a way that violates the Bill of Rights. This should lead constitutional conservatives in the Senate to filibuster any reauthorization that does not include substantial reform.

Brian Darling is former Senior Communications Director and Counsel for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). He can be followed on Twitter: @BrianHDarling.

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FISA reform is needed, and conservatives should lead the way - Washington Examiner

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Knocking Down the Best Argument in Defense of Trump Jr. – NYMag – New York Magazine

Posted: at 3:53 am

Don Jr. Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

As shoe after shoe after shoe keeps dropping about the Trump Tower meeting Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort had with a Russian lawyer and other questionable intermediaries, there has been a quiet but significant effort by prominent legal minds to defend, or at least be skeptical of, the whole affair. The thrust of these counterarguments is that the main characters did nothing wrong because the law simply doesnt penalize anything that happened at the meeting.

The defenses run the gamut: The Trump team couldnt have broken campaign-finance laws because seeking and receiving damning materials on a political adversary is what campaigns do all the time, so federal law doesnt apply. Or, if the law does reach what transpired at the meeting, the promised dirt on Hillary Clinton isnt the type of in-kind contribution or thing of value that federal law forbids foreign nationals from making. Or, if the damaging information does count as an illegal campaign contribution from a foreign national, the penalties would only be civil in nature which means Robert Mueller, the Russia special counsel, cant just prosecute Trump Jr. or his associates over what happened at that fateful June 2016 gathering.

By far the most intriguing of all these defenses is the suggestion, advanced by First Amendment expert and UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, that Trump Jr. and crew were merely exercising their constitutional right to solicit and receive a campaign boost from Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Kremlin-linked attorney who requested the meeting. And that she may also have been acting within her rights to share the Clinton dirt with Trumps inner circle. As if theres somehow a free-standing, free-speech right to exchange opposition research, no matter the nationality of the source. And the Constitution would suffer if we criminalize these acts.

Volokhs arguments and hypotheticals are thoughtful, compelling even: If the Clinton campaign heard that Mar-a-Lago was employing illegal immigrants in Florida and staffers went down to interview the workers, that would be a crime, he writes as one of his examples. A Slovakian student temporarily in the U.S., he writes in another, would similarly be forbidden from sharing potentially explosive information about Trumps dealings in her home country. These and other scenarios are meant to illustrate how the federal ban on foreign nationals making election-related contributions including anything of value to a campaign, which would encompass the Clinton dirt would sweep far too broadly. And when a ban lends itself to such a substantially broad reading, Volokh explains, that means the ban itself is unconstitutional on its face.

But Adav Noti, an attorney with Campaign Legal Center, isnt convinced. His organization filed a complaint on Thursday with the Federal Election Commission and the Department of Justice alleging that the Trump campaign effectively solicited an illegal campaign contribution by procuring the incriminating Clinton evidence from Veselnitskaya. Noti told me in an interview that most of the hypos Volokh laid out in his article arent covered by the statute because the law already contains an exception for volunteer services to a campaign information that is offered voluntarily and that you otherwise cant ascribe value to.

But opposition research by a person flying in from Moscow at no cost to the campaign that the campaign actively sought can indeed be very valuable. And, if its part of a larger, coordinated effort by a foreign power to sway an American election, a scheme to obtain it would be largely distinguishable from, say, undocumented workers dishing to the Clinton camp for free on shoddy working conditions at a Trump property.

Bob Bauer, an election-law expert who has written extensively on the campaign-finance implications of Trumps flirtations with Russia, acknowledged in a Friday post on the blog Just Security how the federal ban on foreign-national contributions might run into First Amendment problems if the right facts come along. But were not dealing with those facts right now. In his view, everything that has come out from the Trump campaign vis--vis Russia is an entirely different animal. A court would likely go out of its way to uphold the law in a case where, as alleged against the Trump campaign, a candidate and his organization enters into a systematic understanding with a foreign government to assist its bid to win the presidency, Bauer wrote.

In other words, what weve seen so far in the recent onslaught of revelations about Trump Jr. and his wish to get an assist from Russia is analogous to the kind of conduct that courts have already said falls outside the scope of the First Amendment. In Bluman v. FEC, a case Noti litigated and won, a three-judge district court reaffirmed the principle that prohibiting foreign nationals from spending money in the electoral process is perfectly consistent with our constitutional ideals. The court said:

It is fundamental to the definition of our national political community that foreign citizens do not have a constitutional right to participate in, and thus may be excluded from, activities of democratic self-government. It follows, therefore, that the United States has a compelling interest for purposes of First Amendment analysis in limiting the participation of foreign citizens in activities of American democratic self-government, and in thereby preventing foreign influence over the U.S. political process.

That was written by U.S. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative the Trump administration has been eyeing for a promotion to the Supreme Court. The high court, for its part, didnt even bother hearing an appeal over the case; it just affirmed the ruling summarily with no dissenting opinions. All of which suggests that other judges would follow suit if presented with the Trump Tower scenario: a meeting where no actual money may have changed hands, but where something more nefarious, coordinated, and potentially criminal may have taken place. Theres yet more to come.

Courts have a way of salvaging perfectly constitutional laws if they have to, limiting their analysis to the specific fact patterns before them. Since the documented Russian connections to the Trump campaign is unlike anything this country has seen, its easy to see how the First Amendment wouldnt stand as an obstacle if it were shown that there was a coordinated attempt to strike at the core of American self-government.

Made in America week is already shifting the conversation to the Trump familys fondness for overseas manufacturing.

A scorecard on how Trump has advanced Russian interests (whether knowingly or unknowingly), from easing Russian sanctions to the Syrian cease-fire.

The rise and meaning of an ubiquitous term of abuse.

The Trump administration gets Orwellian in its efforts to repeal Obamacare.

The agency wasnt even protecting the presidents son at the time.

Its unusual for a new president to be this widely disliked.

The courts have already been pretty consistent on this issue of foreign citizens not being able to participate in Americas self-government.

McCain is expected to recover, but the same cant be said for the GOPs haphazard efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare.

And, yes, hes going to write about his experience dealing with Trump.

Looks like the Trump campaign thought there was something in that nothingburger.

And yet, it still might pass in the next few days.

The new plan would dramatically expand where and when the government could target immigrants for deportations which bypass immigration courts.

Voters are worried about his voter-fraud commissions attempt to gather information on them.

Shes totally open, the future president clearly says to the young pop singer in 2013. But what else?

Most of Trumps Christian right allies dont bother to take his own slight religious pretensions very seriously. A new book apparently will.

Trump may be pushed by a lawsuit to keep his 2016 promise to kill DACA and deport Dreamers or they could become a pawn for nativists in Congress.

One golfer said his attendance would be a debacle, but Trump doesnt care.

At this point it would take a strange coincidence for hacking not to have been discussed.

He ordered the government not to enforce the seemingly arbitrary restrictions on which relatives can enter the country.

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