COMMENTARY / OPINION
Who is REALLY behind it all? Peggy Tierney
SEP 22, 2025 TIERNEY’S REAL NEWS
Many people have asked me to explain who on earth I think are ultimately AT THE TOP of the financial pyramid – and the human puppet masters behind all the chaos in the world. Who the heck are really behind the satanic cabal called the New World Order (NWO) and who do they give direction to? Who ULTIMATELY ordered the hit on President Trump and took out Charlie?
In the span of just a few years in the 1960s, who ultimately decided that JFK needed to be assassinated on live TV by a Communist patsy and replaced with LBJ? Who decided that his brother Bobby Kennedy (RFK) needed to be murdered by a Palestinian-Jordanian patsy so he could never run against Nixon for President? Who decided that Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. should be slaughtered for supporting RFK and rejecting LBJ?
King‘s assassination in April 1968 and Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in June 1968 changed the 1968 election. Had Kennedy lived, he might have been a candidate King supported due to their shared interest in social justice. Kennedy’s assassination effectively eliminated that possibility.
Then, after Nixon went on to win – who decided that Nixon needed to be driven out of office in the most humiliating way and replaced with someone they could control? Who decided that Dementia Biden should steal the White House from Trump TWICE and who decided that Charlie needed to be gunned down in front of his supporters on a Utah college campus – in a state run by a RINO Governor that Obama loves – at just 31 years old.
I could go on and on…but you get the drift. These are questions that keep me up at night. What I do know is that these things don’t just happen. Someone ordered them to happen. Who makes the decisions? Who orders the hits? Who pays for all this chaos? Who organizes and brainwashes the foot soldiers and pays the professionals for the murders?
Many call it a spiritual war but can’t explain what that means. Many think they know the answer but can’t really articulate it for their friends. Many point their fingers to one group or another – but I believe it’s much much more complicated than that and I’m going to try to prove it to you.
UK, France, & Others GANG Up On Israel to recognize Imaginary Palestinian State [52:01]
September 21, 2025 JNS TV
The West’s Betrayal of Israel: Rewarding Hamas with a State [8:01] Avi Abelow
Sep 21, 2025
The West has shown its true face. By recognizing a so-called Palestinian state less than two years after the October 7th massacre, with our hostages still being held by Hamas in Gaza, the UK, Canada, and Australia have chosen to reward genocidal terror and betray the very values they claim to defend.
And then they recognized Islamist supremacy. JOSHUA HOFFMAN
The Red-Green Alliance is increasingly influencing leftist politics across the West — and Israel pays the price. No self-respecting diaspora Jew can trust the Left anymore.
SEP 21, 2025
At the very moment Jews are still reeling from the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, three of the West’s leading democracies have decided to hand Hamas a political victory on a silver platter.
Today, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced the United Kingdom’s recognition of a “Palestinian state” — minutes after similar declarations from Canada and Australia. If this weren’t reality, one would assume it was satire.
It is pure lunacy.
Defenders of the move will say “domestic political considerations” explain this rogue recognition, but that excuse doesn’t hold. According to two separate polls — one by France’s Representative Council of Jewish Institutions and another by JL Partners in Britain — over two-thirds of French citizens and nearly 90 percent of Britons oppose their governments’ recognition of a Palestinian state without preconditions. Ordinary citizens, unlike their political elites, understand that rewarding terror without demanding even the most basic concessions (such as the release of Israeli hostages or Hamas’ surrender) defies both common sense and common decency.
Starmer tried to reassure the public by declaring that “Hamas will have no future, no role in the Palestinian government or a role in security.”
But what if Palestinians want Hamas to have a role in their state?
You see, if the Palestinians are said to deserve their own state, and if democracy is universally praised as the best form of governance, then what happens if Hamas once again wins at the ballot box — just as it did in Gaza in 2006 — only to abolish future elections, entrench its rule by brutal force, and transform that “state” into a jihadist fortress? That is exactly what happened in Gaza, yielding years of bloodshed, multiple wars against Israel, and culminating in the atrocities of October 7th.
For decades, Palestinian society has elected, supported, or tolerated Hamas and its Islamist allies. Western “leaders” cannot pretend Palestinians are children who don’t know what they are doing. They are adults, perfectly capable of making decisions, and their decisions have overwhelmingly focused not on coexistence with Israel, but on rejecting the Jewish state’s existence and prioritizing destruction over statehood.
To see how misguided this approach is, one must recall the Oslo Accords. Signed in 1993 on the White House lawn, Oslo was presented as a historic breakthrough. It was born out of the First Intifada and years of secret negotiations in Norway.
Then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Palestinian leader (and mega-terrorist) Yasser Arafat, and U.S. President Bill Clinton shared a famous handshake that seemed to symbolize the dawn of peace. The agreement created the Palestinian Authority, which was granted limited self-rule in Gaza and parts of the West Bank. In return, the Palestine Liberation Organization recognized Israel’s right to exist, renounced terrorism — at least on paper — and pledged to resolve disputes peacefully. The world applauded, Nobel Prizes were awarded, and the narrative was set: Peace was finally within reach.
But the reality turned out very differently. Within months, suicide bombings began to tear through Israel’s buses and cafés, killing scores of civilians. The Palestinian Authority did not dismantle terror groups as promised. Instead, it quietly tolerated and even coordinated with them.
Arafat himself spoke one language in English to the West and another in Arabic to his people, where he compared Oslo to the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah: a temporary truce Muhammad signed with the Quraysh before breaking it when circumstances were more favorable. To Palestinians, this meant Oslo was never about peace; it was a tactical pause.
Palestinian textbooks continued to glorify violence, erase Israel from maps, and raise a generation taught that martyrdom was nobler than coexistence. Corruption within the Palestinian Authority grew rampant, with billions in international aid diverted into the pockets of Arafat’s cronies.
Terror groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad flourished in the permissive environment Oslo created, gaining strength and legitimacy. When Bill Clinton presented Palestinians with an unprecedented offer of statehood in 2000, Arafat rejected it outright and launched the Second Intifada: a campaign of suicide bombings, lynchings, and shootings that left more than a thousand Israelis dead.
Out of that rubble, Hamas rose to power in Gaza. In 2006, Palestinians freely elected them in legislative elections. By 2007, Hamas had violently seized control of Gaza, throwing political rivals off rooftops and establishing a permanent base for terror.
Instead of turning Gaza into the “Singapore of the Middle East,” as optimists once predicted, Hamas turned it into a missile launch pad, its economy strangled not by Israel, but by the obsessive choice to prioritize tunnels and rockets over schools and jobs. Oslo had not delivered peace; it had delivered chaos, jihad, and the entrenchment of rejectionism.
It is worth remembering how Hamas came to power in the first place. In 2006, they won Palestinian legislative elections not by openly campaigning on jihad, but by promising “reforms” — an end to the rampant corruption and mismanagement of the Palestinian Authority. That appeal to accountability and change resonated with Palestinians who were tired of Arafat’s cronies siphoning off aid while their lives remained stagnant.
Hamas sold itself as the clean alternative. And now, nearly two decades later, Hamas can once again turn to the Palestinian electorate with an even more powerful argument: Look, we got you a state. Recognition by London, Ottawa, and Canberra hands them a political trophy to brandish as proof of their effectiveness. It will not weaken Hamas; it will strengthen them. What they once achieved by the promise of reform, they will now claim through the promise of results.
Hence why Western “leaders” today sound eerily like Neville Chamberlain in the 1930s, mistaking declarations and handshakes for guarantees of peace while underestimating the fanaticism of their adversaries. Chamberlain believed Hitler could be appeased with words on paper; he waved the Munich Agreement as proof of “peace for our time,” only to discover that Hitler never intended peace at all.
In the same way, Starmer, Carney, and Albanese speak as if Hamas can be willed away with diplomatic pronouncements, as though Palestinian society’s repeated embrace of rejectionist movements is some minor obstacle rather than the central problem. Just as Chamberlain underrated Hitler’s intentions, today’s leaders are underrating Hamas and the ideology it represents: an uncompromising dedication to Israel’s destruction. The result, if history is any guide, will not be peace, but catastrophe.
The only logical conclusion is that these Left-wing politicians are not acting out of strategic foresight or principled diplomacy, but out of domestic political cowardice. They are trying to appease their own radical base.
Many of today’s liberals and leftists often insist that the Far-Left does not truly represent their side of the political aisle. Yet when the moment comes, many of their leaders consistently make Far-Left choices to satisfy the very radicals they claim to keep at arm’s length. Starmer, Carney, and Albanese are not statesmen thinking about long-term peace or stability; they are politicians desperate to pacify vocal segments of their electorate.
And, so, we must be honest: The Far-Left is becoming today’s Left. The loudest, most uncompromising elements of their coalition are the ones setting the agenda.
Even worse, the Red-Green Alliance is hijacking today’s Left. By this, we mean the unholy pact between the radical Left (the “red” heirs of Marxist class struggle) and the Islamist movements symbolized by “green” (the color of political Islam).
At first glance, they seem like ideological opposites: one secular and revolutionary, the other religious and theocratic. Yet they share a common enemy: the West, liberal democracy, and above all, Israel and the Jewish People. Their marriage of convenience thrives on grievance politics, the exploitation of victimhood, and the weaponization of human rights language to advance illiberal, often totalitarian ends. What was once a fringe alliance on the margins of Western campuses and anti-war marches is now shaping the policy choices of entire Western countries.
No diaspora Jew in the West can look at a leftist party today and find safety in it. The mask has slipped. For all their rhetoric about tolerance and justice, these movements have chosen to side with those who glorify the murder of Jews. Once, Jews could at least hope that liberal parties would defend them against reactionary forces on the Right. Today, the imminent danger comes from the Left, where the obsession with “Palestine” has become a litmus test of ideological purity, and Jewish safety is dismissed as an inconvenient distraction.
In fact, what we are seeing today is Oslo Accords 2.0. The First Intifada delivered Oslo; the October 7th massacre has somehow delivered premature recognition of “Palestinian statehood.”
Once again, violence has preceded diplomatic reward. Once again, Western “leaders” are mistaking gestures for substance, projecting their own fantasies of compromise onto a society that has never demonstrated the willingness or ability to build a peaceful state alongside Israel. Once again, recognition is being offered without responsibility, sovereignty without accountability, and legitimacy without reform.
The consequences are not theoretical. By recognizing a “Palestinian state” now, Western governments are teaching Palestinians the worst possible lesson. Instead of incentivizing reform — dismantling terror networks, fighting corruption, and preparing their people for coexistence — this move sends the opposite message: Rejection is rewarded, violence pays, and sovereignty requires nothing in return.
That lesson will not remain confined to Ramallah and Gaza. Iran will celebrate this as vindication of its “axis of resistance.” Hezbollah will interpret it as proof that terrorism bends the will of the West. Jihadist groups elsewhere will be emboldened to escalate, convinced that mass violence followed by victimhood narratives remains the fastest road to legitimacy.
Even more obscene is the timing. Dozens of Israeli hostages remain in Hamas captivity, enduring unimaginable horrors. To recognize a Palestinian state in this moment is to tell their captors: Your crimes are irrelevant, your brutality carries no consequence. It erases the hostages, turning them into forgotten props in a Western morality play. This is not diplomacy; it is complicity.
Worse still, it represents a grotesque moral inversion. Israel is punished for defending itself against the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, while Hamas is implicitly rewarded despite committing that slaughter. The democracies of the West are treating Israeli self-defense as provocation, while treating terror as entitlement. It is the UN’s twisted logic imported wholesale into Western foreign policy.
The truth is uncomfortable but undeniable: Palestinian society has not yet produced leadership willing — or even capable — of governing in peace with Israel. To recognize a state now, in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, is not just premature. It is reckless, delusional, and morally bankrupt.
If Oslo taught us anything, it is that wishful thinking in the West cannot substitute for reality in the Middle East. Recognition without responsibility leads not to peace, but to more bloodshed. And this time, with Hamas emboldened and the West rewarding rejectionism yet again, the costs will be even higher.
Ed.: I would think that if we decimated them, and eliminated them completely as we were instructed over and over in our Torah, these same shickse Western nations would have no ‘Balastinian State’ to recognize, or reward. …Just a thought.
The Tide is Turning [3:10] JEROME R. CORSI, PH.D.
Drug Shipments Are Being Destroyed, Dems Illegal Campaign Contributions Uncovered
SEP 21, 2025 Corsi Nation
Trump sent National Guard to Memphis Tennessee to restore law and order, prepares to send troops to battlezone Chicago.
National emergency declaration regarding our Democrat stolen elections coming soon?
France In Total COLLAPSE! [9:06] Jeff Taylor
Sep 19, 2025 Politics Latest
The French people have had enough of their politicians and are slowly shutting their country down! How long before we see this in the UK?!
🚨 LIVE: Chaos In Paris As Communists RIOT And ATTACK Police [27:30] Mahyar Tousi
September 19, 2025 Tousi TV
An Actual Demon?! Candace Owens’ Obsession With the Jews Has Gone Too Far [5:41] Mansur Ashkar
War numbers, the most powerful weapon against Israel Giulio Meotti
Those Zionist magicians have allegedly killed more children than there were in the Gaza Strip before the war. Just read the numbers we are being fed Opinion.
Sep 19, 2025, 12:43 PM (GMT+3) Israel National News
“65,000 is the number of Palestinian Arabs killed with certainty, 75 percent of whom were women and children. But we should start thinking about 680,000, because this is the number some scholars and scientists claim is the true death toll in Gaza”.
We are in Geneva, at the UN Palace of Nations, and the speaker is Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories. Any doubts have been dispelled about the 65,000 deaths in Gaza, “of whom 75 percent were women and children,” a figure that has been repeated since October 8, 2023, when Israel’s military response to the Hamas pogrom began. According to Albanese, a leading figure among Palestinian Arab activists, the number is on the order of ten times that number, before adding that the figures – any ot them – cannot be verified.
War numbers are the most powerful weapon against Israel, more than rockets and bullets: if Hamas is losing in Gaza, it is winning in the West.
The latest anti-Israeli truth spreading like wildfire is the claim that 680,000 people were killed in Gaza during the nearly two-year war between Israel and Hamas, “including 380,000 children under the age of five.” The claim stems from an article titled “Skewering History: The Odious Politics of Counting Gaza’s Dead,” published in Arena, a far-left Australian magazine. The claim that 380,000 children under the age of five died during the war isn’t just absurd; it’s ridiculous, since the latest estimate of Gaza’s population under the age of five before the war was 341,790. Therefore, this “study” would claim that Israel has killed more children under the age of five than there are in the Gaza Strip.
The macabre magic of Zionism.
These numbers are certainly more genocidal, certified by the UN commission headed by Navi Pillay, already discredited for calling Israel “apartheid.” All major media outlets have promoted the genocide accusations contained in a report by three completely discredited commissioners—Pillay, Miloon Kothari, and Chris Sidoti—members of the UN Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry on the Palestinian Territories. The Council’s member countries, let’s remember, are the great democracies and human rights advocates Cuba, Qatar, China, Sudan, Algeria, Bolivia, Kuwait, Burundi, Vietnam, Kyrgyzstan, and Bangladesh. According to this commission, 83 percent of the deaths in Gaza are civilians, citing an article in the Guardian as proof.
In May, one of the most grotesque and easily refutable claims during the war between Israel and Hamas emerged: the claim that 14,000 children in Gaza would die within 48 hours. Tom Fletcher, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, blurted out: “There are 14,000 children who will die in the next 48 hours if we don’t reach them. I want to save as many as possible in the next 48 hours.”
A bit like the “journalists” killed in Gaza. Suffice it to say that of the 192 journalists allegedly killed in Gaza and listed by Reporters Without Borders, 26 were employed by al-Aqsa TV (a Hamas channel), 19 by al-Quds al-Youm (Islamic Jihad), seven by Palestine Today (pro-Islamic Jihad), six by al-Mayadeen or al-Manar (the former affiliated with Hezbollah and the latter owned by Hezbollah), and another 23 by outlets linked to terrorist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Houthis. Nearly half of the journalists identified so far worked for terrorist organizations.
Today we read that Israel has already killed a third of Gaza’s total population (math must not have been taught at the UN – who are all those people streaming southward from Gaza City?).
Tomorrow we will read that Gaza is worse than Pol Pot’s Cambodia, but with the Green Khmers playing the roles of victims and resisters.
[Ed.:
The Significance of the Recently Released Russia Hoax Documents by Mollie Hemingway | Editor-in-Chief, The Federalist
SEPTEMBER 2025 | IMPRIMIS VOLUME 54, ISSUE 9
Within hours of her 2016 presidential campaign loss, a devastated Hillary Clinton attributed her defeat not to the American voters who rejected her, but to Russia, echoing a campaign theme she had been developing for months. “Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss” and “kept pointing her finger” at Russia, according to Shattered, a 2017 book about her campaign—“Her team coalesced around the idea that Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign.”
The corporate media were also devastated, as they had spent the entire campaign mocking the idea that Trump and his anti-establishment positions on foreign policy, trade, and wokeness could appeal to voters. To the extent possible, they would help promote Clinton’s blame game.
In early January 2017, the Clinton campaign’s “Steele dossier”—a secretly funded collection of made-up stories and gossip alleging that Russia had dirt on Trump and that Trump was colluding with Russia against the United States—was published. Washington would be consumed by the Russia collusion hoax for the next two-and-a-half years. The investigations it spurred would bankrupt Trump associates, destroy lives, and hamstring Trump’s ability to govern. It led to draconian censorship campaigns against conservatives. It hurt Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 general election. But no evidence was found that a single American, much less Trump himself, conspired with Russia.
Fast forward to today. Six months into Trump’s second term, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard have declassified and released long-suppressed documents detailing how President Obama and his spy chiefs laundered the Steele dossier and other falsehoods in an attempt to destroy Trump’s first presidency. The response from Democrats, the media, and many establishment Republicans has been to say that these suppressed documents contain nothing new or significant. Not true.
The Russia collusion hoax was anchored to two central claims: first, that Trump was a compromised agent of Russia, and second, that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump. The first claim was completely debunked after years of investigation. It is on the second and far more plausible claim—which was just as key to the hoax—that the newly released documents shed new light. And the revelations are shocking.
The documents show that in early December 2016, the intelligence community planned to publish a top secret presidential daily brief holding that “Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent US election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure.” Once published, this brief would have been read by Obama and his top officials, as well as President-Elect Trump and his designated National Security Advisor, Lt. General Michael Flynn. But the day before publication, the FBI—which had co-authored the brief—announced that it was pulling its support for the brief and would be drafting a dissent. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced that the brief would be held for the following week.
In the end, the brief was never published. Instead, Obama ordered his top spy chiefs to put together an Intelligence Community Assessment—known as an ICA—on “Russia election meddling.” The chiefs were directed to look at how Moscow sought to influence the 2016 election—including with hacking, leaks, cyber activity against voting systems, and “fake news”—and to answer the questions, “Why did Moscow direct these activities?” and “What have the Russians hoped to accomplish?”
Prior to this order from Obama, the spy agencies had assessed that Russia’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 election were consistent with Russia’s previous and long-standing election-year meddling and cyber-hacking efforts. They found that Russia’s goal was to mess with and decrease confidence in U.S. elections, rather than help elect particular candidates. But on the evening of December 9, 2016, The Washington Post published a story sourced to unnamed senior Obama officials claiming that the CIA had “concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump.” That was a lie. The process by which such assessments are made by the CIA hadn’t taken place, much less concluded anything. The same false information was leaked to The New York Times: “American intelligence agencies,” it reported, “have concluded with ‘high confidence’ that Russia acted covertly . . . to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior administration officials.” Both papers were awarded Pulitzers the next year for their willingness to participate, without a bit of skepticism, in this disinformation operation.
A few days later, Obama poured gasoline on the fire by publicly expressing concern that “potential hacking . . . could hamper vote counting and affect the actual election process itself.” Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, and FBI Director James Comey were working furiously to throw together the ICA Obama had ordered. Typically, such an assessment would take a minimum of several months and include a wide variety of perspectives. This ICA was prepared in two weeks using only five CIA staffers to draft it. Comey, Brennan, and Clapper overruled strenuous objections from senior intelligence officials who were aghast at the inclusion of unsubstantiated claims and unverified gossip. Some who complained had their promotions threatened. Others were told they were not privy to secret intelligence reviewed only by top leadership.
The finished ICA was reported on to Obama on January 5, 2017, and to Trump the next day. In addition to findings that were credible and substantiated, the report said Putin had developed “a clear preference” for Trump and “aspired to help his chances of victory.” It also included, contrary to the public testimony of Obama’s spy chiefs, a two-page summary of the Clinton campaign’s Steele dossier in the most classified version of the report. Comey met privately with Trump at the end of his briefing to tell him about unverified allegations that Russia held proof of salacious sexual and financial impropriety on the part of Trump. Four days later, CNN reported extensively on the meeting and what Trump was told. At this point, the Russia hoax was fully operational and would do severe damage to our country for years to come.
***
One document Ratcliffe released is a “tradecraft review” of the January 2017 ICA. Conducted by career officials at the CIA, the review found that the dishonest leaks by the Obama administration in December 2016 created an “anchoring bias” that polluted the entire document. The review also expressed concern about the ICA’s frantic production timeline; the refusal to allow analysts reviewing the document to see the intelligence its conclusions were based on; and the over-involvement of Comey, Brennan, and Clapper. It found that the assessment gave a “higher confidence level than was justified” to the claim that Russia preferred Trump and that it was tainted by a “potential political motive.”
Gabbard released an even more explosive report. Authored in 2017 and 2018 by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes, it had been hidden in a top secret vault for seven years. It conclusively debunked the ICA’s “key judgement” about Putin’s preference for Trump, excoriated the ICA for using the preposterous Steele dossier as a basis for its claims, and detailed how the views of career intelligence officials were overruled and dismissed.
Brennan had long publicly claimed that he had secret knowledge—separate and apart from the Steele dossier—to support his view that Russia interfered to help Trump. In August and September 2016, he had individually briefed the “Gang of Eight,” the top Senate and House officials who oversee the CIA, and it turned out that Brennan’s so-called secret knowledge was laughable. It was based mostly on three reports that “contained flawed information” and “became foundational sources” for the claim that Putin aspired to help Trump. Veteran CIA officers had said the reports “contained substandard information that was unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased, implausible,” and “odd.”
Brennan hadn’t allowed some of the information to go through normal vetting procedures when it was collected. And he “personally directed that two of the most important reports not be formally disseminated when he first learned of them,” supposedly because they were so sensitive—a questionable explanation given that the CIA has a special reporting channel for sensitive reports that are restricted to the president and other named individuals.
The only classified information cited in the ICA for the claim that Putin “aspired to help Trump’s chances of victory” was a fragment of a sentence that came from someone who did not personally know Putin. The fragment, consisting of the words, “whose victory Putin was counting on,” had been collected prior to the July 2016 Republican National Convention. So who could even know to which victory it referred? Furthermore, it is not known whether the fragment reflected the sub-source’s opinion of Putin’s thinking, Putin’s actual statements to his sub-source, or the views of someone else reflecting on Putin’s thinking to the sub-source. Its meaning was so unclear that “five people read it five ways,” according to the report.
For these reasons, experienced CIA officers initially omitted the fragment from the ICA. But Brennan ordered that it be included. One senior CIA officer, alarmed that it was the only evidence offered for the ICA’s main conclusion, noted the lack of “direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected.” The ICA also failed to address the strong anti-Trump bias on the part of the source of the fragment.
The ICA claimed that “a Russian political expert possessed a plan that recommended engagement with [Trump’s] team because of the prospects for improved US-Russian relations.” This claim was viewed as “lacking authoritativeness” and the CIA decided not to publish the intelligence even internally when they received it in February 2016. That’s probably because the so-called “plan” was in fact only an anonymous email with “no date, no identified sender, no clear recipient, and no classification”—not to mention that it was passed along by a foreign country with a noted anti-Trump bias.
The ICA then claimed that Putin’s inner circle “strongly preferred Republican over Democratic candidates because they judged that Republicans had historically been less focused on democracy and human rights.” The phrase “strongly preferred Republican” never appeared in the raw intelligence report and the ultimate source for the claim is unknown. What’s more, the claim that Republicans cared less about democracy and human rights in Russia was implausible. The Select Committee report noted that President Reagan was famous for his “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech, but a myriad of other examples could be cited.
The ICA claimed that the “clear preference” report was corroborated by liaison, diplomatic, and press reporting, when in fact none of that was true. The liaison reporting was from 2014 and “didn’t mention Trump at all.” The diplomatic report was a post-election overview from the U.S. ambassador noting that a Russian pundit said Trump and Putin should “work together like businessmen,” hardly corroboration for the claim that Putin’s inner circle preferred Republicans. Indeed, that same ambassador’s note quoted a Russian foreign minister saying that “we do not feel any euphoria” about Trump’s win.
The ICA also omitted intelligence that Putin was telling people he “did not care who won the election,” that he had “outlined the weaknesses of both major candidates,” and that Russia was “strategically placed to outmaneuver either [candidate].” If anything, Russia was preparing for Clinton’s victory and felt she was more predictable. The Kremlin worried that Trump officials would “likely adhere to conservative anti-Russian positions.” Putin “took exception” to a “favorable view” of Trump and said there was “no basis for enthusiasm” for Trump.
The original New York Times report on the CIA’s assessment said that although Russia had allegedly hacked both Republicans and Democrats, it had only released Democrats’ embarrassing emails. In fact, the CIA had no evidence that Russia held embarrassing emails or information on Republicans. It did have evidence that Russia had embarrassing information on Clinton that was never released. This included the fact that Obama and other party leaders thought Clinton’s health to be “extraordinarily alarming,” that Clinton was suffering from “intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness,” and perhaps that she had been placed on “heavy tranquilizers.” If Putin favored Trump, it would be odd not to have released this information in the closing days of the campaign.
The use of weak, disputed, and contradicted intelligence to make the claim about Russia preferring Trump wasn’t the only problem with the ICA. Its use of the Steele dossier was another. Brennan lied publicly when he testified to Congress on May 23, 2017, that the dossier “was not in any way used as a basis for the [ICA] that was done.” Not only was it cited as the fourth bullet point of “evidence” that “Putin aspired to help Trump,” it was falsely described as “Russian plans and intentions” and having come from “an FBI source.” The dossier was presented in a two-page summary that implied some of its findings had been corroborated, misrepresenting “both the significance and credibility” of the dossier, according to the Select Committee report. Further, by hiding the dossier summary in the highest classified version, the Obama spy chiefs were “better able to shield the assessment from scrutiny.”
The documents released by Ratcliffe and Gabbard show that career officers were pleading with their bosses not to assert, falsely, that Russia preferred Trump and not to include the Steele dossier in any way, shape, or form. One wrote: “Based solely on what we DO know now, my bottom line is this—unless FBI is prepared to provide much better sourcing—I believe this should NOT be included in the paper.” Noting that the document had not been formally issued as an FBI product, this same official characterized it as suffering from “POOR SOURCE TRADECRAFT,” as having “extremely sketchy” sourcing, and as failing to “meet normal [intelligence community] standards.”
Career senior intelligence officials worried about the dossier’s author being funded by an anti-Trump entity, even though they didn’t yet know that the funding came from the Clinton campaign. They also worried about the lack of transparency regarding the dossier’s sub-sources—a concern validated weeks later when the FBI finally got around to interviewing primary sub-source Igor Danchenko, a Russian national the FBI had suspected of being a spy, and determined that the salacious allegations in the dossier lacked any credibility. Despite this, the FBI defended the use of the dossier for years and hid Danchenko’s identity from Congress by hiring him as a confidential informant—a ruse allowing them to claim that revealing his identity would endanger ongoing investigations.
When Comey insisted that the information in the document was good, one intelligence official wondered why, if so, it hadn’t been used against Trump during the campaign. Including the Steele dossier in the ICA, this official added, would be like taking supermarket tabloids seriously. Pointing to a December 12, 2016, National Enquirer story headlined, “Muslim Spies in Obama’s CIA,” he asked rhetorically if that report should be included in an ICA as well.
Confronted by a reviewer who wrote that there was “no intelligence to directly support” the claim that Russia aspired to help Trump, and that making the claim would “open the [intelligence community] to a line of very politicized inquiry that is sure to come up when this paper is shared with the Hill,” Brennan called him and another dissenting official into his office and told them he knew better. Confronted with demands from senior officials that the Steele dossier not be included, Brennan insisted it stay in. “[D]oesn’t it ring true?” he asked.
***
In the wake of these recent document releases, the Department of Justice announced in July that it had formed a strike force—a means of allowing federal investigators across multiple agencies to pursue criminals engaged in conspiracies. An unnamed federal prosecutor began securing additional documents from the spy agencies. After collecting the necessary documents, the federal prosecutor will begin speaking with whistleblowers and others with knowledge about how the Russia hoax operation was run. Once his team has a clear picture, they will bring in some of the targets of the investigation for interviews. With the statute of limitations at five years for most of these potential crimes, the Department of Justice may have to show that the conspiracy against Trump is ongoing, a task made easier by the fact that some of Obama’s spy chiefs continue to defend their actions.
Back in January 2017, three days before he was briefed on the Steele dossier, Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer warned President-Elect Trump against criticizing the FBI and the CIA. “Let me tell you,” he said, “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. So, even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”
Thanks to Trump’s victory last November, it may be Obama’s spy chiefs who will regret taking on Trump.
The truth about why the US had to overthrow the ‘autocratic’ Assad regime and replace it with a group of Christophobic Islamic butchers
SEP 18, 2025
NOTE FROM LEO: Dear friends, the below article gives important history on the destruction of ancient Christian communities in Syria that I hope you will share with your friends and family. Meanwhile, if you appreciate these updates, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. This lets me know you value my independent reporting and analysis on issues that matter — war and peace, the surveillance state, globalism, etc. Some in my audience have canceled their subscriptions because they cannot handle any criticism of President Trump. I need those who appreciate honest and factual reporting, regardless of who it offends, to make up the difference. If you can afford $7 a month or $80 a year, please stand in the gap for me. Thank you and God bless.
The Associated Press reports that Syria’s foreign minister was in Washington on Thursday, September 18, “kicking off the first official visit to the United States by a top Syrian official in 25 years as the new government in Damascus struggles to recover from the civil war and boost relations with the West following the fall of autocrat Bashar Assad.”
The new Syrian government is filled with bloodthirsty Sunni jihadists, but the sick implication of the AP’s article is that they’re pro-Western, so it doesn’t matter.
Assad was backed by Russia and thus, in the eyes of the AP, he must be described as “autocratic.” While it’s true Assad was autocratic, all Arab leaders are autocratic and using this word to describe him doesn’t give the complete picture or context. Assad was in fact a protector of the Christian and Alawite religious minorities in Syria. He held off the dogs — the bloodthirsty Sunnis — and when he was overthrown with the help of Israeli and Western intelligence agencies, it became open season on Alawites and Christians. This is a fact the American neocons don’t want you to know.
Richard Ghazal lays out the sad story of Syria’s Christians in a July 7 op-ed for The Hill titled “The vanishing Christians of Syria: A crisis the world cannot ignore.”
But the AP can’t help itself. It can’t report the truth about Syria because it’s so tightly connected to the false narratives perpetrated by the U.S. military-industrial-intelligence complex, which is part of the neoconservative/neoliberal warmongering establishment in Washington. This establishment is inherently pro-Israel, but it’s also stridently pro-Sunni jihadist and anti-Russian. That’s why neocon Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham traveled to Syria in February 2012 and communicated to the Sunni tribes there that they had the backing of the West in their desires to overthrow Assad. From that point on, Syria disintegrated further and further into bloody civil war.
According to Ghazal’s article in The Hill, prior to the start of the Syrian Civil War, “Christians made up approximately 10 percent of Syria’s population and played key roles in academia, medicine, commerce and in public life. They coexisted with their Muslim neighbors to preserve a fragile but buoyant multiethnic, multiconfessional social fabric.”
The civil war, however, shattered this pluralistic order. Today, fewer than 300,000 Christians remain in Syria, down from roughly 2 million prior to the war.
To this day, I shudder whenever I hear a conservative pundit portray Putin as just another oldline KGB communist. The hatred of Russia has nothing to do with communism and everything to do with the struggle to maintain U.S./U.K./E.U. hegemonic control over the Middle East and the world. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, until it is, and that’s when U.S./Western adventurism triggers the slaughter of ancient Christian communities in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere.
Putin is no doubt an authoritarian leader, a nationalist and a pragmatist who gravitates to policies that magnify his grip on power.
In other words, one could make the argument that Putin is very nearly a Russian version of Donald Trump. He likes power. He wields it unapolagetically, austensibly for the betterment of his country’s standing in the world. But he’s no communist. Get over it all you gals and guys working in the well-funded think tanks with your heads still firmly entrenched in the 1980s. If Putin was a communist he would not be vilified day in and day out by the liberal Western media in the U.S., U.K., Germany and France. He would not have been protecting Syria’s Christians.
Interestingly, when Russia was communist, the AP, The New York Times, The Guardian and other liberal Western news agencies treated them much better and gave them much less hostile coverage.
Thursday’s jubilent AP report reflected its giddiness that “Washington has steadily been easing sanctions imposed on Syria under Assad since after U.S. President Donald Trump met interim Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa in Saudi Arabia in May — a key event that set Syria’s new authorities on the path to end decades of international isolation.”
Trump signed an executive order in June ending most of the U.S. economic sanctions on Syria, following through on a promise he made to the new Syrian president during their meeting. John McCain would be proud. Lindsey Graham is toasting the president and offering to pay for their next round of golf.
So the picture is clear. For all willing to see it. Align with Russia and you get branded a vicious dictator and are economically isolated by the West. Align with the U.S. and no matter how brutal you are to your own people, particularly Christians, you get an invite to the White House with offers of lucrative trade deals.
The new Syrian foreign minister, Asaad al-Shibani, earlier this year attended meetings with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, two of the major tools of Western hegemony used to shower friendly regimes with loans and financial goodies. He was also invited to New York where he held talks at the United Nations. Syria is now a member in good standing of the “international community,” aka modern Babylon. The Christian blood on the Syrian regime’s hands matters not. All that matters is they’ve agreed not to do business with Russia and to kiss the ring of Washington’s neocons while inviting in Western corporations to rebuild their war-torn nation. The Western corporations will be paid largely with loans that Syria’s new government gets from the IMF and World Bank. See how the scam works?
