ET Williams

The Doctor of Common Sense

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Extreme Vetting Looks Good: Trump’s Proposals

No, you’re not welcome. Stay home and tear your own shit up.

Trump Administration Considers Far-Reaching Steps for ‘Extreme Vetting’

Foreigners entering U.S. could be forced to hand over phones, answer questions on ideology; changes could apply to allies like France and Germany

Foreigners who want to visit the U.S., even for a short trip, could be forced to disclose contacts on their mobile phones, social-media passwords and financial records, and to answer probing questions about their ideology, according to Trump administration officials conducting a review of vetting procedures.

The administration also wants to subject more visa applicants to intense security reviews and have embassies spend more time interviewing each applicant. The changes could apply to people from all over the world, including allies like France and Germany.

The measures—whose full scope haven’t yet been publicly discussed—would together represent the “extreme vetting” President Donald Trump has promised. The changes would be sure to generate significant controversy, both at home, from civil libertarians and others who see the questions as overly intrusive, and abroad, with experts warning that other nations could impose similar requirements on Americans seeking visas.

“If there is any doubt about a person’s intentions coming to the United States, they should have to overcome—really and truly prove to our satisfaction—that they are coming for legitimate reasons,” said Gene Hamilton, senior counselor to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly.

Administration officials say fighting terrorism is an urgent task that justifies tough rules. The review under way aims to replace what the Trump administration sees as a presumption toward letting people into the country toward a more skeptical outlook.

The review was called for in an executive order Mr. Trump signed last month banning travel from six-majority Muslim countries, which he said was needed to guard against terrorism. The order also directed security officials to implement a vetting program that allows for a “rigorous evaluation” of whether applicants support terrorism or present a risk of causing harm.

While much of the order was put on hold by a federal judge in Hawaii, the work to enhance vetting procedures was allowed to proceed.

Homeland Security officials say the agency is planning to significantly increase demands for information from all visa applicants, including visitors, refugees and others seeking to immigrate.

The changes might even apply to visitors from the 38 countries that participate in the Visa Waiver Program, which requires adherence to strict U.S. standards in data sharing, passport control and other factors, one senior official said. That includes some of the U.S.’s closest allies, such as the U.K., Japan and Australia.

The biggest change to U.S. policy would be asking applicants to hand over their telephones so officials could examine their stored contacts and perhaps other information. Visitors have had their phones examined at ports of entry, but that isn’t routinely requested during the application stage.

The goal is to “figure out who you are communicating with,” the senior DHS official said. “What you can get on the average person’s phone can be invaluable.”

A second change would ask applicants for their social-media handles and passwords so that officials could see information posted privately in addition to public posts. DHS has experimented with asking for people’s handles so they can read public posts, but not those restricted to friends.

“We want to say for instance, ‘What sites do you visit? And give us your passwords,’ so that we can see what they do on the internet,” Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said at a congressional hearing in February. “If they don’t want to give us that information then they don’t come.”

In response to Mr. Kelly’s hearing, a coalition of about 50 civil liberties and other groups issued a statement that month saying requiring passwords is “a direct assault on fundamental rights,” including freedom of expression. They also complained that the policy could be mirrored by foreign governments demanding passwords from Americans.

In addition, a DHS inspector general’s report this year found that the agency didn’t properly measure the effectiveness of pilot programs that used social media in visa-application reviews, making it hard to determine if they should be expanded.

Former DHS officials who worked on these issues during the Obama administration said that the information gleaned from telephones and social media could be helpful in assessing threats posed by applicants, but they said there are downsides, too. The effort—particularly the social-media hunt—would be time-consuming, they said, and it could drive people with bad intentions to change their practices.

“The real bad guys will get rid of their phones. They’ll show up with a clean phone,” said Leon Rodriguez, who headed the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services until January and was deeply involved in refugee screening. “Over time, the utility of the exercise will diminish.”

Still, one Obama official said, telephone contacts could be particularly helpful in identifying terrorist ties, as their phone numbers could be run against various U.S. databases.

Already, the State Department has taken small steps toward tighter vetting, according to cables sent from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to embassies and consulates. In them, he orders officials to identify “applicant populations” that warrant additional scrutiny, according to documents posted by Reuters in March. The department hasn’t disputed their contents. He also directs offices to limit the number of interviews scheduled each day to ensure each application is properly scrutinized.

Mr. Tillerson instructed officials to ask visa applicants additional questions, such as listing all email addresses and social-media handles used in the past five years, as well as the applicant’s travel history, employers and addresses over the past 15 years. But after the federal court put the travel ban on hold, Mr. Tillerson said in another message that to be cautious, those instructions should be put on hold as well.

The administration is also working to implement an idea first raised by Mr. Trump as a presidential candidate last August for an “ideological test” for people coming to the U.S. Such tests have been used before—for instance, to screen out anarchists, or members of the Communist Party.

“Those who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted for immigration into the country,” Mr. Trump said in an August speech.

The DHS official working on the review said the types of questions under consideration now include whether visa applicants believe in so-called honor killings, how they view the treatment of women in society, whether they value the “sanctity of human life” and who they view as a legitimate target in a military operation.

The goal, he said, isn’t to filter out people with contrary thoughts but people who might act on them.

That notion draws criticism from civil libertarians.

“It could deprive American citizens with the ability to interact and gain knowledge from the full spectrum of individuals and people who hold diverse beliefs world-wide,” said Hugh Handeyside, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security project.

“Our views and beliefs and opinions are protected,” he said. “Those same principles should drive our decisions about whether people would be permitted to visit the United States.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-considers-far-reaching-steps-for-extreme-vetting-1491303602

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Federal Reserve President Lacker Admits to Leaking Economic Secrets. NO Charges Filed. WTF

Lock his sorry ass up damit!

Richmond Fed President Lacker says he was involved with Medley leak, announces immediate resignation

Richmond Federal Reserve President Jeffrey Lacker announced his immediate resignation Tuesday, admitting that he discussed sensitive information with an analyst regarding the Fed’s plans for economic stimulus.

Lacker, 61, became president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond on Aug. 1, 2004. He is a member of the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee. CNBC has learned that the resignation was negotiated with law enforcement officials. Lacker’s attorney told CNBC no charges will be filed.

Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker

Richmond Fed’s Lacker departure result of negotiations with law enforcement officials  

Richmond Federal Reserve President Jeffrey Lacker announced his immediate resignation Tuesday, admitting that he discussed sensitive information with an analyst regarding the Fed’s plans for economic stimulus.

Lacker, 61, became president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond on Aug. 1, 2004. He is a member of the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee. CNBC has learned that the resignation was negotiated with law enforcement officials. Lacker’s attorney told CNBC no charges will be filed.

Lacker, who was not a voting member of the FOMC this year, previously said he planned to retire in October.

In his letter of resignation, Lacker admitted to speaking to an analyst at Medley Global Advisors regarding the September 2012 Fed meeting. Medley publishes analysis for hedge funds and asset managers and is owned by the Financial Times. Lacker said his actions violated Fed communications policies that prohibit “providing any profit-making person or organization with a prestige advantage over its competitors.”

Lacker said he was asked by an analyst about an “important nonpublic detail” regarding the Federal Open Market Committee’s policy options.

“Due to the highly confidential and sensitive nature of this information, I should have declined to comment and perhaps have ended the phone call,” Lacker said. “Instead, I did not refuse or express my inability to comment and the interview continued.”

In addition, Lacker said he was obligated to disclose that the analyst had confidential information, which he did not do.

The Fed was criticized for not referring the leak to the Securities and Exchange Commission or the FBI. Instead, Fed General Counsel Scott Alvarez lead a Fed probe into the matter from October 2012 until March of 2013.

Lacker said he further did not disclose during an internal review into the matter that the analyst had confidential information. He never revealed the information until an April 15 interview with multiple federal authorities including the FBI.

“I deeply regret the role I may have played in confirming this confidential information and in its dissemination to Medley’s subscribers,” Lacker added. “In this episode, as in all of my communications with analysts, journalists and the public, it was never my intention to reveal confidential information.”

The Richmond Fed said it was immediately looking for a replacement. In the interim, Mark Mullinix, who was first vice president, will serve as acting president.

“We are focused on moving forward within our organization — and were already underway with our presidential search, following Jeffrey Lacker’s announcement in January to retire in 2017,” it said in a statement. “This search process will continue as scheduled.”

The Medley investigation involves allegations that confidential information from the Federal Reserve Board committee, which sets monetary policy, was leaked to a private newsletter. Such a leak could have given an unfair advantage to some investors.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/04/richmond-fed-president-lacker-says-he-was-source-of-medley-leak-announces-immediate-resignation.html

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CNN Meltdown: Tells Viewers to Ignore Susan Rice Leaks

Here’s one of the leaders of the official propaganda department for the Obama Administration

Since news broke Monday that the Obama Administration’s National Security Adviser, Susan Rice, directed the “unmasking” of NSA intercepts of Trump associates, CNN has raced to shoot down the blockbuster report.

CNN Tonight’s Don Lemon went so far as to announce he would ignore the news at all costs.

While interviewing a Democratic congressman, CNN’s Chris Cuomo claimed it was “demonstrably untrue” Rice sought surveillance of the Trump team, even as that’s exactly what yesterday’s reports prove.

Over the last 24 hours, the network has also repeatedly called on its chief national security correspondent — who was also a political appointee in the Obama White House — Jim Sciutto, to dismiss the reports as a non-story; Sciutto has even excused Rice claiming ignorance of the unmasking scandal two weeks ago, arguing Rice “wasn’t aware” what unmasking Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) was referring to.

And on Tuesday’s “New Day,” anchor Alisyn Camerota openly pleaded with Sen. John McCain to write-off the news as unimportant.

Last night, Lemon began “CNN Tonight” with an announcement that the Rice report a “fake scandal ginned up by right-wing media and Trump” that he would not be baited into justifying with coverage.

“On this program tonight, we will not insult your intelligence by pretending,” it’s legitimate, he said. “Nor will we aid and abet the people trying to misinform you, the American people, by creating a diversion. Not going to do it.”

Sciutto also claimed the story was “ginned up” to distract from Trump tweeting that the Trump Tower was “wiretapped,” when it was in fact communications were picked up through ordinary NSA surveillance.

“Again, to note by senior intelligence officials who work for both Democrats and Republicans, this appears to be a story, largely ginned up, partly as a distraction from this larger investigation,” Sciutto told Anderson Cooper, explaining that “someone close to Ambassador Rice” told him this type of unmasking is “not unusual.”

In another appearance, Sciutto even attempted to excuse Rice from claiming to have no knowledge of the unmasking she’s been caught orchestrating.

“From her perspective she didn’t know what specific unmasking Devin Nunes and others are talking about, in part because that is something she asks — or asked during the regular course of her work as national security adviser,” he said. “I do know from speaking to people yesterday close to her that she doesn’t know specifically what Devin Nunes and others are accusing her of when it comes to unmasking because that was something sets in the regular course of her job.”

And in yet another appearance, Sciutto also setup something of a strawman, arguing that the unmasking story is not important because “unmasking is not leaking.”

During an interview with Sen. John McCain, CNN’s Camerota plainly tried nudging the Arizona senator into dismissing the Rice bombshell:

CAMEROTA: “Okay, senator, I want to move on to other news of the day and that is, as you know, the Trump White House has talked about what they see or they say they see as a controversy of the former national security adviser Susan Rice unmasking a name, someone on team Trump, that was somehow caught up in some incidental collection of surveillance. They say that this is a controversy, it shows that she has done something wildly out of the bounds of normalcy. Is this business as usual for a national security adviser to ask for a name to be revealed, an American name, if she wants to know more or is this some sort of a controversy?”
McCAIN: “I think the circumstances indicate that there’s a possibility that that request could have been politically motivated. But we need to get to the bottom of it. As I’ve said, and I’ll probably say many more times because I’m kind of boring, this is a centipede. A shoe will drop every few days, the latest the meeting in Seychelles. This is a requirement, in my view, why we need a select committee in order to get through all this because there’s lots more shoes that will drop. I can’t make a judgment on what I just heard. She did have the authority to do it. What was the motivation for doing it, I think is the question.”
CAMEROTA: “What we’ve heard from the reporting, is that if she saw a masked name that said American number one had these conversations with Russians at the same time that President Obama had imposed sanctions, wouldn’t that arouse some curiosity on her part?”
McCAIN: “All I can say, Alisyn, is that I don’t know enough to reach a conclusion except to say this is another aspect of this multi-dimensional scandal.”

UPDATE: In an interview on MSNBC addressing this story, Susan Rice has now confirmed she unmasked Trump campaign officials, but is denying doing so for political reasons.

Other highlights from the interview:

— Rice on Whether She Unmasked More Trump Officials than Usual: ‘I Don’t Have Any Particular Recollection’

— Susan Rice Admits Pace of Surveilling Trump Team Increased After Election

— Susan Rice on Leaking Flynn’s Call: ‘I Can’t Get into Any Specific Reports’ 

— Susan Rice Won’t Commit to Testifying About Her Role in Unmasking Trump Team

https://news.grabien.com/story-cnn-goes-rampage-against-susan-rice-bombshell-instructs-view

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Evidence Mounts that Trump’s “Russia Connection” is FAKE News

Ask yourself why the leftists do not want a good relationship with Russia.

Fresh evidence the Russia ‘scandal’ is a Team Obama operation

Do you suspect that the noise over Trump campaign contacts with the Russians is just a political hit arranged by Obama insiders before they left? You got fresh evidence of that Monday, with news that then-national security adviser Susan Rice was behind the “unmasking” of Trumpites in transcripts of calls with Russian officials.

Again, nothing on the public record so far shows that anyone on Team Trump said anything improper on those calls.

It’s no surprise that US spooks intercept foreign officials’ calls. But intelligence community reports don’t disclose the names of US citizens on the other end. To get that info, a high official must (but rarely does) push to “unmask” the Americans’ names.

Bloomberg’s Eli Lake now reports that Rice started doing just that last year.

That was perfectly legal. But we also know that the Obama administration later changed the classification of the “unmasked” transcripts, and other similar material, in order to spread the information as widely as possible within the government.

The motive for that was (supposedly) to prevent Team Trump from burying it all once it took over. But the result was that it made it relatively safe for someone (or someones) to leak the info to the press.

Which made it likely somebody would leak. So Team Obama’s “spread the info” initiative certainly broke the spirit of the laws.

Those leaks have produced a nagging political sore for the new administration — leading to the ouster of national security adviser Michael Flynn, helping to drive down President Trump’s approval ratings and making it harder for him to push his program through.

Rice certainly wasn’t politically naive about the political uses of intelligence information. She was, after all, the Obama official who famously made the rounds spouting the false “Our intel says it was about the video” line on the Benghazi attack back during the 2012 campaign.

All of this puts the actions of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes in clearer perspective. After viewing the Rice requests at the White House, he disclosed that Trump officials had been caught up in incidental surveillance.

All of which is a reminder that two issues are in play here: Russian meddling in the election, about which the nation already knows plenty — and the Obama team’s efforts to sabotage Team Trump.

http://nypost.com/2017/04/03/fresh-evidence-the-russia-scandal-is-a-team-obama-operation/

 

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Somali Migrant Killed Woman and Raped 2 Elderly Disabled Men

Children, goats and old men. Mooslims are sick bastards.

Somali Asylum Seeker Accused of Killing Woman and Raping Disabled Elderly Men

A Somali asylum seeker has been charged with raping two disabled men and murdering the wife of one of the victims in Germany last year.

The unnamed 18-year-old is accused of breaking into a care home in the town of Neuenhaus in October and raping a paralysed 59-year-old man.

He is then alleged to have entered an adjoining room and raped a second man before killing his 87-year-old wife when she confronted him.

Police say the migrant, who is currently being held in a psychiatric unit, killed the woman with “great force” to avoid being caught.

He was then confronted by a janitor at around 3.30am but forced his way past him before jumping out a window and fleeing the home.

The janitor told the court he was “puzzled and thought it might be a resident”, but upon asking the asylum seeker who he was he ran towards the main entrance before changing direction and using a chair to leap from a window.

Police arrived at the care home soon after and went door-to-door before finding the victims lying in a pool of blood. The suspect was later arrested at his home, with police finding damp trainers and clothes in his closet.

Grafschafter Nachrichten reports the migrant was in an “alcoholic state” at the time of the attack and may have had a history of mental illness.

Germany has witnessed a series of concerning incidents involving migrants since the start of the migrant crisis.

In December, police arrested a 17-year-old asylum seeker on suspicion of raping and murdering a student after his DNA was found at the crime scene.

The victim was found dead two months previously after having been drowned, with news of the arrest leading to many people saying an ironic “thank you” to Chancellor Angela Merkel for her open-door immigration policy.

Police union chief Rainer Wendt said the killing could have been prevented. “We wouldn’t have this victim, and so many others, if our country had been better prepared for the dangers that always go along with massive immigration,” he said.

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/04/03/somali-asylum-seeker-accused-killing-woman-raping-disabled-elderly-men/

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Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice Behind Leaks and Unmasking

Susan Rice belongs in prison. Arrest the bitch damit!

Susan Rice Requested Unmasking of People Connected to Trump Transition

Susan Rice, who was former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, did not respond to a report from Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake that on multiple occasions, she made requests to unmask United States citizens connected to President Donald Trump’s transition team.

According to Lake, Rice did not respond to an email seeking comment on the story.

The breaking news helps confirm some of President Trump’s accusations that senior Obama officials were involved in disseminating classified information about his transition team to the media, fueling new details about the congressional investigations into Russia’s meddling in the election.

On Monday, Fox News senior correspondent Adam Housley said that the “unprecedented” unmasking took place at the direction of “very high-up” officials.

“A lot of these men and women in the intelligence communities did not want to speak about what’s going on because they were concerned about those methods being known,” Housley reported. “But now, they figure they might as well at least clarify things since Nunes has been leaked to by someone they don’t know or at least they tell me they don’t know.”

Susan Rice has not denied the allegations, saying only, “I know nothing about this” when asked about the reports last month on PBS.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/04/03/eli-lake-susan-rice-requested-unmasking-people-connected-trump-transition/