Back to Basics

Once again, it appears that President Barack Obama is positioning key Benghazi players in such a manner as to keep them from testifying before Congress by exerting “executive privilege.”

CIA Deputy Director Steps Down ‘To Spend More Time With His Family’

CIA deputy director Michael Morell, who played a key role in editing the administration’s controversial talking points on last September’s terror attack in Benghazi, announced his retirement on Wednesday after 33 years of service.

The White House immediately announced that President Obama had appointed Morell to serve on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, an independent advisory body.

Obama also nominated as the next CIA deputy director Avril Haines, currently deputy assistant to the president and legal advisor to the National Security Council. She will be the first woman to hold the CIA post.

“As much as I would selfishly like to keep Michael right where he is for as long as possible, he has decided to retire to spend more time with his family and to pursue other professional opportunities,” CIA Director John Brennan said in a statement.

“Michael’s devotion to the men and women of the Agency, our intelligence mission, and to a job well done has been exemplary.” During his time at the CIA, Morell held positions included those of presidential briefer, director for intelligence, deputy director and acting director.

Morell made unwelcome headlines last month when documents released by the White House – after some had been leaked to media – showed he had proposed extensive edits to notes being prepared by the administration about the Benghazi attack, for public release.

In a document dated Sept. 14 – two days before ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice would go onto Sunday television talk shows to talk about the incident – Morell advised the removal from the draft talking points of all references to al-Qaeda and previous terror activity in Libya.

His proposed edits included the striking of an entire portion reading: “The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qaeda in Benghazi and eastern Libya. Since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out that individuals had previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”

On the other hand, he did not suggest in that instance any amendments to a part of the draft that linked the Benghazi attack to a demonstration at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo hours earlier (by Muslims purportedly angry about an online video clip denigrating Mohammed.)

The bottom line in Rice’s various talk show appearances that Sunday was that the violence in Benghazi was, according to the best information available at the time, not a premeditated terror attack but linked to protests over the video.

She told ABC’s This Week, for instance, that “our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous – not a premeditated – response to what had transpired in Cairo.

The mainstream media have embraced President Obama’s recent national security team picks either by omitting key information about the nominee or, in the case of Susan Rice, by miscasting the controversy as one of Republican outrage, rather than lies about Benghazi. Republican partisans aren’t the only ones outraged about Benghazi and the lies told thereafter: lots of average Americans are too.

Following the September 11 attack on our diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, last year, United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice went on five Sunday morning talk shows to forward the Administration’s narrative about the attacks, saying that they were spontaneous, fomented by a small group of extremists, and that they were in response to an anti-Islamic video. Here, for example, is what she said on Meet the Press: “But putting together the best information that we have available to us today—our current assessment is that what happened in Benghazi was, in fact, initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo—almost a copycat of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, which were prompted, of course, by the video.”

These statements were later proven to be false, hurting both the Administration’s and Rice’s credibility.

Rice has been rewarded for her behavior by replacing Tom Donilon as national security advisor to the President, a position that is not confirmed by Congress. The New York Times called it Obama’s “defiant selection.” Former Harvard professor Samantha Power has been nominated to replace Rice as United Nations Ambassador. (Power is the wife of former regulatory czar Cass Sunstein.)

Alexis Simendinger of RealClearPolitics said that “President Obama has again practically baited congressional Republicans to wail about his appointees, betting that congressional overreach might put his administration on higher ground after weeks of scandal distractions and legislative fallbacks.”

Rice is being rewarded for her loyalty to the President at the expense of integrity and loyalty to the truth. “Either she knew what really happened and deliberately lied to the American people or she was a mere actress who read the script she was given and didn’t know enough to question whether the words she spoke were accurate,” asserted K.T. McFarland, a former national security staffer for three Republican presidents, writing for FoxNews.com.

The New York Times tells a different story. “Ms. Rice, using talking points drafted by the C.I.A., said the assault appeared to be a protest gone awry rather than a premeditated terrorist attack,” writes Mark Landler for the Times (emphasis added). “That proved incorrect, and though Ms. Rice cautioned that the account could change with further intelligence, Republicans accused her of sanitizing the truth for political reasons.” The Times should at least broaden their criticism criteria to include conservatives, and not just Republicans. But this furthers The New York Times’—and the mainstream media’s—rhetoric that the current controversies are just Republican-manufactured and, thus, the American people should look the other way at these politically-manufactured firestorms.

CBS News has also emphasized that this is a “Republican” objection to Rice’s new post and prior actions. “Members of the GOP seized on her remarks to suggest the administration was misleading the public about the nature of the attack,” wrote Stephanie Condon.

Is it possible that Barack Obama is throwing National Security Advisor Tom Donilon under the bus prior to any discovery of wrongdoing in connection with Benghazi? And, forever sealing the lips of lying liberal United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice who openly told and repeated lies relating to Benghazi?

The have been numerous suspicions that National Security Advisor Tom Donilon may have run a rogue operation out of the White House in connection with Hillary Clinton and the Department of State. One that resulted in military-grade weaponry being given to Muslim Terrorists. And, that Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi to negotiate the purchase of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and other weaponry from terrorists lest it be used to down a civilian airliner and the terrorist attack be traced to American weaponry and its actual source.

Tom Donilon resigns …

Tom Donilon resigning as national security adviser; Susan Rice to replace him

President Obama announced Wednesday that national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon is resigning his post and will be replaced by U.N. Ambassador Susan E. Rice, a close confidant who has been strongly criticized by Republicans but is widely expected to move into the job. Obama said Donilon “has decided to step aside at the beginning of July.” Rice, one of Obama’s most trusted foreign policy advisers, does not need Senate confirmation to take Donilon’s place.  Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice will take Tom Donilon’s place as national security adviser, and Samantha Power will replace Rice at the U.N.

This year, she withdrew her name from consideration to become secretary of state — a position that does require Senate confirmation — in the face of extensive criticism of her role in the aftermath of the Sept. 11-12, 2012, attacks on two U.S. compounds in Benghazi, Libya. The attacks killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. <Source>

Donilon’s role in Benghazi affair questioned …

Gingrich Claims Emails May Prove White House Could Have Ordered Benghazi Stand Down

“There is a rumor — I want to be clear, it’s a rumor — that at least two networks have emails from the National Security Adviser’s office telling a counterterrorism group to stand down,” Gingrich told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News . “They were a group in real-time trying to mobilize Marines and C-130s and the fighter aircraft, and they were told explicitly by the White House ‘stand down and do nothing. This is not a terrorist action.’”

Gingrich continued, “If that’s true, and I’ve been told this by a fairly reliable U.S. senator, if that’s true and that comes out in the next day or two, I think it raises enormous questions about the president’s role, Tom Donilon, the National Security Adviser’s role, the Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who has taken it on his own shoulders, that he said don’t go. And I think that’s very dubious, given that the president said he had instructions they are supposed to do everything they could to secure American personnel.”

According to Gingrich if this information is accurate, there is only two possible conclusions:” that the the secretary of defense usurped the commander in chief or that President Obama never gave the order.”

According to liberal Fox pundit Bob Beckel, speaking on the O’Reilly Factor, thought that Donilon was the most likely source of the false and misleading taking points given to Susan Rice and others.

This is an update of a March commentary on the subject of Susan Rice who has just been appointed the new National Security Advisor to the President.

By Alan Caruba

The obvious question is “What does Susan Rice know about national security?” though she did serve on President Clinton’s National Security Council. As the Assistant Secretary of State on the Africa desk when the Rwanda genocide occurred in 1994, both Clinton and she were missing in action. He later would say it was one of the biggest mistakes of his time in office.

The lesson: Stick to publicizing the issued talking points without deviation and with utter disregard for the facts, get a promotion:

Susan Rice, the U.N. ambassador caught up in political controversy over the Benghazi terrorist attack, will replace Tom Donilon as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

Donilon had been widely expected to step down in Obama’s second term, and the official said he was resigning.

Obama will announce the change Wednesday afternoon at the White House, according to administration officials.

An example of why Rice is qualified to spot and advise the president about legitimate security threats? Here you go:

Five days after the [Benghazi] assault on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorists attacks, Rice appeared on U.S. Sunday news shows to say it was a spontaneous development during a protest, rather than a terrorist strike.

If being that far off base isn’t a qualification I don’t know what is.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air examines Rice’s curious promotion:

Even if Rice had no input into the process of generating the false and damaging talking points for her full Ginsburg on September 16th, her only defense is that someone handed her a sheet and told her to tell that story without having checked it out for herself. Does a national-security adviser normally just act as someone else’s mouthpiece? The very nature of that position requires an independent mind to test and, when necessary, oppose the conclusions coming from the intelligence community, and to dig into the intel herself to provide critical advice to the President.

By parroting the bogus talking points days after the attack, Rice demonstrated that she will without question follow orders. Any actual qualifications she may or may not have to be national security adviser run a distant second to her apparent unwavering loyalty. Additionally, Rice’s promotion is a great big “in your face” to Republicans trying to get to the bottom of Benghazi. It’s a win-win promotion for the Obama administration, though I can’t see how America comes out ahead because of this.

Update: Did Obama offer up the worst buddy cop movie idea ever?

As my readers know, I am no fan of unions, especially public employee unions who have nearly bankrupted many cities, counties, and states. Who in their right mind would accept their coercive and thuggish tactics to achieve their socialist agenda? How can you support any entity that rewards seniority over merit, the status quo over innovation, onerous work rules that drive up costs without an increase in productivity. Purchasing politicians with campaign funding and voter support – but only those politicians willing to throw citizens and consumers out of the bargaining process – in essence, bargaining for raises,  benefits, and work rules beneficial to themselves against their paid “yes man” politician.

Now we find the unions trying to influence Obama’s nomination for Commerce Secretary by pursuing the politics of personal destruction,  examining every utterance, association and record in order to demonize her nomination. Not because she is not qualified for the position, but because some of her ownership properties are not unionized.

The progressives spin a “negative picture” because Hyatt Hotels are not unionized …

Obama’s Commerce Secretary Pick Failed to Disclose $80 Million in Earnings

The Secretary of Commerce overseas virtually all of the business and industry that takes place in the US and with other countries.  He/she is responsible for trillions of dollars of business and sales.  That requires someone who not only has an extensive business background, but also someone who is trustworthy and beyond reproach. Recently, President Barack Obama appointed Penny Pritzker to be the next Secretary of Commerce.   The Secretary of Commerce oversees an annual budget of $7.5 billion and 47,000 employees located in the US and abroad.  Does Pritzker meet the qualifications needed to head the Commerce Department?

Where were these progressive dickwads and asswipes when it came to the election of President Obama, clearly the most unqualified politician of our time, a man with dubious associations with socialist and communist ideologues, terrorists, and criminals? Oh I forgot, Obama stands with the unions – particularly the most corrupt and socialist ones like the SEIU (Service Employees International Union).

Pritzker is the founder, chairman and CEO of PSP Capital Partners along with the Pritzker Realty Group.  She is known as an entrepreneur and business executive.  In 2011, she was listed by Forbes 400 to be the 263^rd wealthiest person in the United States with a net worth of $1.7 billion.  Pritzker also served as finance chairman for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

From that, it would seem that she is a successful and highly qualified business person who may just be a decent Secretary of Commerce.  However, there are other factors that need to weighed before she receives an approval.

The national hotel and workers union has expressed opposition to Pritzker’s nomination citing her dealing with the Hyatt Hotel chain.  In a phone interview, Donald Taylor, president of UNITE HERE, the hotel and restaurant workers’ union with 270,000 members said:

“We are opposed to the nomination of Penny Pritzker based on what has taken place at Hyatt.”

Taylor said he has not yet been in contact with AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka concerning their support or opposition to the Pritzker appointment.  The AFL-CIO, one of the largest and most powerful unions in the country has been boycotting the Hyatt Hotel chain ever since the Pritzker assisted restructuring.

Source: Obama’s Commerce Secretary Pick Failed to Disclose $80 Million in Earnings

Here is the AFL-CIO’s take from their website …

UNITE HERE: Hyatt’s Pritzker Wrong for Top Commerce Job

Penny Pritzker is President Obama’s nominee to become the next secretary of commerce.

The White House vetting process is to blame for all the senior-level vacancies around the State Department, but nominations for some of those positions should be coming soon, Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday.

At a Wednesday hearing, Kerry’s first since taking up his new post, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA) pressed the secretary to explain why the State Department hasn’t had a full-time inspector general (IG) for more than five years. Kerry said that the logjam wasn’t on his end of the equation but rather at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where his selections for multiple positions have not be able to get through the bureaucracy.

“We’re trying to fill a number of positions right now, the IG among them. The greatest difficulty I’m finding — now that I’m on the other side of the fence — is, frankly, the vetting process,” Kerry testified. “And I’ve got some folks that I selected way back in February, when I first came in, and we’re now April, and I’m still waiting for the vetting to move.”

Kerry didn’t mention any of the other major open positions at the State Department, which include deputy secretary for management, special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, special envoy for Sudan, assistant secretary for Africa, assistant secretary for Europe, assistant secretary for Asia, assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor, assistant secretary for legislative affairs, assistant secretary for diplomatic security, and as of next week, assistant secretary for political military affairs.

Kerry indicated that nominations could be forthcoming soon from the president.

“I’ve talked to the White House. They’re totally on board. They’re trying to get it moved. So I hope that within a very short span of time, you’re going to see these slots filled,” Kerry said. “They need to be, and that’s just the bottom line. It’s important, and I commit to you we will.”

Royce was skeptical and asked Kerry to talk to the president about the vacancies.

“I don’t need to talk to the president. We’re going to get this done. We know it, and we’re trying to get the right people,” Kerry said. “Matching person to task and also clearing all the other hurdles is, I’m finding, not as easy as one always thinks, but we’ll get it done.”

In the past week, criticism of the vacancies in Foggy Bottom, as well as Kerry’s absence from the State Department during his multiple and extended trips abroad, has come from both the right and the left.

“Selecting, nominating, and confirming his own people should be a top priority for Secretary Kerry — more important than some of the trips he is taking,” former NSC and State Department official Elliott Abrams wrote on the Council on Foreign Relations’ website. “The task of managing the department cannot be left to anyone else and is not a minor aspect of his role. It’s time to adjust priorities and get a nominee announced for every one of these policy-level vacancies.”

“The mordant joke I’ve heard from within the State Department during the past couple of months has been ‘John Kerry phone home,’” wrote FP CEO David Rothkopf. “What it means is that there’s no place for one-man diplomacy in this increasingly complex world.

The path to rule by executive order by the Obama Administration runs directly through the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. “There are few things more vital on the president’s second-term agenda,” Constitutional Accountability Center president Doug Kendall told The Washington Post last week. “With legislative priorities gridlocked in Congress, the president’s best hope for advancing his agenda is through executive action, and that runs through the D.C. Circuit.”

Currently, the D.C. Circuit, which is considered one notch below the U.S. Supreme Court and deals with many challenges to executive branch actions, has four openings. It currently has four Republican appointees and three Democrats. This is the same court that ruled in January that President Obama lacked the authority to make the three recess appointments he made to the National Labor Relations Board.

As the White House looks to pack the court with those favorable to its causes, so too the media swallow whole the Administration’s agenda. “What’s different now, says Mark Jurkowitz of the Pew Research Project for Excellence in Journalism, is new technology that allows the White House to distribute its own content far more widely and effectively than past presidents could,” reported the Associated Press. “At the same time, it’s getting harder for cash-strapped news outlets to resist using photos, video and other content supplied by the White House” (emphasis added). It’s also easier to just take statistics from the White House rather than to do additional research. And the media have never been more willing accomplices than with Obama.

One statistic provided by the White House that has been bandied about by several news outlets, including The Washington Post and Mother Jones, is that “Overall, President Obama’s judicial nominees wait an average of 116 days on the Senate floor for a vote […] more than three times longer than President George W. Bush’s judicial nominee average wait time of 34 days.” And, according to the Post’s Juliet Eilperin, “At this moment 15 such nominations are awaiting a Senate floor vote, 13 of which made it out of committee unanimously.”

“The White House has begun to make a public case for moving faster, though it has not engaged in the sort of horse trading that usually helps ease legislative logjam.” In other words, getting judges confirmed is important to the President, but not important enough to compromise on his legislative agenda.

“A reader might imagine that the reporter is making an intelligent apples-to-apples comparison,” when citing this statistic, noted Ed Whelan for National Review. “But in 2005—the first year of President Bush’s second term—the Senate hadn’t confirmed any of Bush’s nominees by this date. (It of course had confirmed nominees in previous years.)”

The average number of days from nomination to confirmation was 171 days for Bush’s district court nominees and 366 days for the circuit-court nominees from 2001 to 2006, according to the Congressional Research Service (pdf). As for Bush’s nominees confirmed in 2005, as Whelan outlines, they each took between seven months and four years, when measured from nomination to confirmation—and none were confirmed by the beginning of April 2005. He describes the Obama Administration as 0 for 1 so far, since Caitlin Halligan is “the first D.C.

Seriously?  I have a book coming out at the beginning of June that explains that this isn’t true.  In the meantime I will simply mark the claim here.  From the NY Times:

There is no historical precedent for the number of cabinet-level nominees that Republicans have blocked or delayed in the Obama administration. Chuck Hagel became the first defense secretary nominee ever filibustered. John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, was the subject of an epic filibuster by Senator Rand Paul. Kathleen Sebelius and John Bryson, the secretaries of health and human services and commerce, were subjected to 60-vote confirmation margins instead of simple majorities. Susan Rice surely would have been filibustered and thus was not nominated to be secretary of state. . . .

Penny Pritzker: A Chicago Fat Cat for Commerce Secretary?
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2013

Will President Obama really nominate billionaire Chicago gal pal Penny Pritzker to head his Commerce Department? “It’s a done deal,” according to a White House source close to the Chicago Sun Times. As further confirmation, Pritzker resigned abruptly from the Windy City’s school board late last week. The crony fix seems to be in.

Taxpayers, beware. Pritzker is a deep-pocketed doyenne with a family history of dodging taxes — or siphoning them away from the public for her own family’s gargantuan private gain. If you want to see how she’ll oversee a $10 billion government agency, look at her own wealth redistribution record.

Most notoriously, Pritzker headed up subprime lender Superior Bank. Even after it went under in 2001 and left 1,400 mostly poor and minority customers destitute, Pritzker was pushing to expand its toxic subprime loan business. As I’ve reported previously, Pritzker and her family escaped accountability by forking over a discounted $460 million settlement over 15 years after the bank collapsed.

One of the Obamas’ oldest Chicago friends and an intimate confidante of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Pritzker served as a top national finance chairwoman and bundler for the 2008 presidential campaign. She is an heir to the Hyatt Hotel and Pritzker family fortunes. According to Forbes, her grandfather and his sons also created the industrial conglomerate Marmon Holdings, which the family sold to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway for $4.5 billion.

To protect her family’s multibillion-dollar fortune, Pritzker’s enterprises park their money in the very same kind of offshore trusts Obama attacked GOP rival Mitt Romney over. But Obama lapped up nearly $800 million in campaign and inaugural funding raised by Pritzker. A former Pritzker tax lawyer pioneered tax-avoidance strategies for the family, which allowed them to pay $9 million in taxes instead of $150 million in estate taxes after patriarch A.N. Pritzker died. As Forbes notes: “There are now 11 Pritzkers on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans.” Nice lawyering if you can get it.

Exempted from Obama’s poisonous class-warfare demagoguery, Pritzker also chaired Chicago’s failed Olympic Village Subcommittee while serving as president of Pritzker Realty Group, a top Illinois mega-developer that would have reaped untold millions in project work if then Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and the White House had secured the 2016 Olympic bid.

Former Pritzker executive and Obama campaign treasurer Martin Nesbitt also served on the Olympic committee, while holding the chairmanship of the Chicago Housing Authority under Daley — brother of former Obama Chief of Staff William Daley. Cronies of a feather.

One of the most lucrative schemes milked by these developers and perfected in Chicago is a mechanism called tax increment financing. When I worked in Seattle covering corporate welfare and city government, I became strange bedfellows with a diverse alliance of libertarians and Ralph Naderites who rightly oppose “public-private partnership” deals between developers, statist Democrats and corporate welfare Republican politicians. These “public-private partnership” scams inevitably involve tax increment financing gimmickry to siphon off tax dollars to subsidize developers/builders/contractors, who then reward politicians with big campaign donations.

TIF schemes totaling hundreds of millions of tax dollars were at the heart of the Obama/Daley/Pritzker Chicago Olympics bid. And a huge franchise of Pritzker’s Hyatt Hotels Corp.