The RPI Challenge

The debate over what actually occurred on 9/11 and, more to the point, who might have been behind it, continues to preoccupy many observers worldwide. There is considerable legitimate concern that the commission that reviewed the incident engaged in a cover-up designed either to excuse a catastrophic failure on the part of the United States’ national security apparatus, or even connivance of federal agencies in the attack itself. And then there is the issue of possible foreign government...

The controversy swirling around the phone conversation between the US President Donald Trump and Ukraine President Vladimir Zelensky regarding the business interests of former vice-president Joe Biden’s son is having a salutary effect on the conflict in Ukraine. The US Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker has resigned from his official position once it transpired that his name appeared in the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s dealings with Zelensky. (Meanwhile, Trump’s personal...

I confess that I still don’t get what exactly is going to be the particular offense for which President Trump is going to be impeached. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of impeaching Trump and removing him from office, but only for grave crimes, such as waging war illegally (i.e., without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war), wreaking death, suffering, and destruction in those wars, committing countless assassinations, and violating provisions in the Bill of...

When you’re several decades older than Greta Thunberg, her impassioned warning of impending doom hits you differently than it may college students or early twentysomethings just a few years older than she. In a word, it sounded “familiar.” I’m not just talking about the climate change movement, nor exclusively about the left side of the political spectrum. I’ve been hearing about impending doom that can only be averted by massive increases in the size and scope of government my whole life,...

Photo: White HouseThe news is dominated by “the whistleblower,” the CIA officer who reported to the CIA Inspector General (IG) that President Donald Trump may have committed a crime during a conversation with the president of Ukraine. I’ve been fascinated by the story for a couple of reasons. First, as a whistleblower and a former CIA officer, I know what must have been going through the guy’s mind as he was coming to the decision to make a report on the president of the United States. That...

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” — James Madison Eventually, all military empires fall and fail by spreading themselves too thin and spending themselves to death. It happened in Rome. It’s happening again. At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a...

Notice something important about the hoopla regarding President’s Trump withholding of US foreign aid to Ukraine while he was requesting Ukrainian officials to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden for possible corruption: Nobody in Washington, D.C., or within the establishment press is questioning the concept of foreign aid itself. Foreign aid has become such an established and accepted way of inducing foreign regimes to comply with the dictates of US officials that the thought of...

You don’t need to be a supporter of President Trump to be concerned about the efforts to remove him from office. Last week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced impeachment proceedings against the President over a phone call made to the President of Ukraine. According to the White House record of the call, the President asked his Ukrainian counterpart to look into whether there is any evidence of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election and then mentioned that a lot of people were talking about...

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Your Twitter account has just been closed. Why? Daniel McAdams: In August I was watching a segment of the Sean Hannity program while at a friend’s house and noticed that despite an hour of Hannity ranting against the “deep state” in the US, he was wearing a lapel pin bearing the seal of the US Central Intelligence agency, which most would agree is either the center or at least an important hub of the US “deep state” itself. I tweeted about this strange anomaly and as a...

US President Donald Trump has one thing in common with his critics: both double or even triple down rather than admit failure, as shown by impeachment hearings in Washington and a continued campaign for regime change in Venezuela. At the UN General Assembly this week, the US relentlessly promoted Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela, while issuing sanctions against the actual government in Caracas. Guaido declared himself “interim president” in January with the support of the...

In the months leading up to a CIA whistleblower's hearsay complaint about President Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the US intelligence community quietly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers must provide first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings, according to The Federalist's Sean Davis. Then, on September 24 - days before the anti-Trump complaint was declassified and released to the public - a new version of the whistleblower complaint form...

Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson showed his true colors this week when he led the collapse of European support for the nuclear deal with Iran. What’s more, it was pathetically evident that Johnson was pandering to US President Donald Trump. Since the clownish figure of “Boris” took over Downing Street in July, it was predictable that the hapless Johnson and his wobbly Brexit ambitions would make him ever-more reliant on the American president in order to negotiate a post-Brexit trade...

The misguided 'impeachment inquiry" develops with the declassification and publication of the whistleblower complaint (pdf) that underlies the case. It alleges what was publicly known even before the phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian President Zelensky was published. During the then still ongoing Mueller investigation Rudi Giuliani, as a private lawyer for President Trump, tried to find exculpating information which he hoped would debunk the allegations of collusion between Trump and...

Now that we have seen the whistleblower complaint filed by a CIA officer against President Trump, there should be little doubt that it is a fraud and represents an abuse of the whistleblower process. I know genuine whistleblowers (e.g., Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, Ed Loomis, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, etc.) and have been one myself. I am familiar with the kind of information one must possess (or should possess) in order to initiate a complaint. This complaint does not even meet the stupid...