Americans have been beaten in Afghanistan, a U.S. military official said Saturday.

A day after he said the military was aware of reports that Americans were beaten by Taliban terrorists, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said that “we know of a small number of cases where some Americans … have been harassed, and in some cases, beaten.”

“We don’t believe it’s a very large number, and most Americans who have their credentials with them are being allowed through the Taliban checkpoints,” he added.

The stunning admission came as the U.S. Embassy warned Americans against traveling to the U.S.-held airport in Kabul, where thousands of people are trying to enter to escape the country before American troops leave.

The United States is openly working with the Taliban to facilitate the evacuation, and Taliban militants control all of the ground around the exterior of the airport.

President Joe Biden said Friday that the United States was in “constant communication” with the Taliban, which is designated as a terrorist group by a number of countries.

The U.S. military has largely chosen not to conduct operations outside the airport, leaving Americans and Afghans to fend for themselves until they reach the facility.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told members of Congress in a call Friday that violence against Americans “is unacceptable,” Kirby said Saturday.

And U.S. commanders have conveyed the same message to Taliban commanders, he said.

“We’ve been in touch with the Taliban for quite some time, I think, over the course of the last week. And we’ve certainly made our concerns known,” Kirby said.

According to the military spokesman, word had not filtered down from Taliban leadership to every individual militant.

“What appears to be happening is that not every Taliban fighter either got the word or decided to obey the word,” he said.

The revelation came as a growing number of Republicans called for more decisive action from the Biden administration, which both parties have said has botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“Instead of going out there and making the Taliban our hostages, right now America is on day seven, day eight of the Afghanistan hostage crisis for us,” Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), a military veteran, said on Fox News on Friday. “And until we flip that scenario back to where it was prior to this, we can’t safely get our people out.”

“Biden’s failed Afghanistan withdrawal has put thousands of American lives in danger behind enemy lines,” added Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who is trying to impeach Biden, on Twitter on Saturday. “The Taliban is beating Americans but Biden is still relying on & trusting them. He is incompetent, unhinged, incoherent & unfit.”

Military officials said the focus remains on keeping the airport secure and evacuating people who can make it there.

“The military mission that we are executing now is a noncombatant evacuation operation,” Kirby said. “We’re fighting against both time and space. That’s the race that we’re in right now,” he added later.

Pentagon Confirms Americans Have Been Beaten in Afghanistan (theepochtimes.com)

As the storming of the Capitol building on January 6th was still unfolding a despicable gremlin of a woman at The New York Times, Sheera Frenkel, was already crafting a totally baseless lie along with her demonic friends at the ADL and Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg about the event being “planned” on both Gab and Parler.

“We need to ascertain right here, right now, whether this specific platform was knowingly facilitating an attack on our nation’s capital, literally a terror act against the seat of our government,” said the ADL’s Greenblatt, who noted that other platforms should also be investigated over the insurrection attempt but he says special attention needs to be trained on Gab.

Source

The ADL also went as far as demanding the DOJ investigate both myself individually and Gab as a whole for “intentionally aided or abetted individuals who carried out the January 6 attack on the nation’s Capitol.”

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of the largest social network on the internet that happens to have a specific feature for organizing and planning events, also deflected the blame on Gab and Parler. “Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has sought to deflect blame, noting the role of smaller, right-leaning services such as Parler and Gab.”

It has been widely reported, even by mainstream media outlets, that if the event was planned and organized anywhere it was most certainly done on her platform, Facebook.

Today the FBI is exposing the mountain of lies built up by Frenkel, Greenblatt, and Sandberg (I can’t help noticing a trend here!)

The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.

“Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases,” said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. “Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages.”

Source

The defamatory lies of the New York Times, the ADL, and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg had dire consequences for Parler, which was immediately removed from App Stores and hosting providers and has never fully recovered despite caving to Apple’s demands for censorship.

These defamatory lies also impacted Gab’s public image. The lie is still featured prominently on Gab’s Wikipedia page and is falsely cited by other reporters in stories about Gab to this day.

We demand a full and immediate retraction of this story by the New York Times and thank God for shining the light of truth on this fake news story.

Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab.com
Jesus is King

NYT Editorial Team,

Gab AI Inc. hereby demands retraction of the false and defamatory reporting published by the New York Times’ Sheera Frenkel on January 6th, 2021 claiming without providing any evidence whatsoever that the storming of the Capitol was organized on our platform.

Today it has been reported that the FBI found scant evidence that the event was organized at all, let alone on Gab.

Gab is not a lawless platform and proactively cultivates good working relationships with U.S. and international law enforcement. If we were made aware of an illegal plot taking place on our hardware, we would have removed it. This stands in sharp contrast to platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which for years have harbored international terrorist organizations like the Taliban – something your paper has never reported on or taken to task to the extent you took us to task for content which appeared on our platform in the aftermath of Jan. 6th and other offensive but legal content that has appeared on our platform from time to time.

We quote from Reuters: “The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.”

In light of this reporting vindicating Gab’s innocence in this matter, we are demanding a full retraction of the defamatory reporting published by The New York Times. Ms. Frenkel’s piece, which alleged that “[t]he storming of Capitol Hill was organized on social media” and made extensive reference to posts on Gab that discussed the event (as indeed most of the Internet did on that day) without providing any evidence that the event was in fact organized by those same commenters, was presented as fact, not opinion.

This statement of fact was not only false, it was recklessly and maliciously false. FBI officials’ own statements on the matter, reported today, prove it was false.

Our rights in this matter are fully and expressly reserved. Please be guided accordingly.

Gab Legal

The New York Times and ADL Lies Exposed By The FBI – Gab News

Former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick – who played a critical role in shaping the Vatican’s controversial relationship with the Chinese Communist Party – has repeatedly headlined events sponsored by CEFC China Energy, a Chinese government-led influence group that has counted Hunter Biden as its Managing Director, The National Pulse can reveal.

The former Cardinal, who was defrocked due to sexual abuse, spoke at several events hosted by the group, with excerpts of his remarks earning publication in CEFC China Energy’s journal, “China Eye.” McCarrick has asserted commonalities exist between Communist and Catholic doctrine along with drawing positive parallels between Xi Jinping and the Pope.

McCarrick also served as an envoy for negotiations between the Chinese Communist Party and the Vatican over establishing formal ties, with many criticizing the final deal as a “slap in the face” to China’s Catholics. The establishment of formal relations between the two entities follow McCarrick’s robust involvement with CEFC China Energy.

CEFC’s Deputy Chairman and Secretary-General is Dr. Patrick Ho, dubbed “the f**king spy chief of China” in exclusive audio released by The National Pulse from Hunter Biden’s “Hard Drive from Hell.”

Ho appears multiple times in the e-mails as the pair inked million-dollar contracts, earning Hunter Biden the position of “Managing Director” at CEFC by 2018. The Chinese Communist Party operative was later indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for “schemes to bribe top officials for business advantages,” and used the committee “to conceal his criminal schemes, according to the Department of Justice.

McCarrick spoke at several CEFC events including the New York Forum on World Civilizations in 2012 and Sino-US Colloquium on Core Values and World Order in 2013.

A 2014 edition of CEFC’s “China Eye” Journal contains an excerpt from McCarrick’s speech from 2013. “It is a special pleasure to be back with the China Energy Fund,” he began his speech before praising the “brilliant” Patrick Ho. “I do not have the brilliance or the learning to match Patrick, but I’m just going to take out a couple of things that I think would be important and perhaps stimulating as we begin our discussion today,” he added.

EXC: Ex-Cardinal Negotiating Vatican-China Deals Attended Hunter Biden-Led Communist Party Influence Events, Deleted Webpages Reveal. (thenationalpulse.com)

Americans in Afghanistan were told Saturday not to go to the airport in Kabul to evacuate unless they receive a specific message to do so.

“Because of potential security threats outside the gates at the Kabul airport, we are advising U.S. citizens to avoid traveling to the airport and to avoid airport gates at this time unless you receive individual instructions from a U.S. government representative to do so,” the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan said in an alert.

The Pentagon declined to comment, referring The Epoch Times to the State Department. That agency did not respond to a request for comment.

Video footage from the exterior of the airport on Saturday showed crowds remaining outside the concrete, razor wire-topped walls being guarded by U.S. troops.

President Joe Biden told Americans in Washington on Friday that his administration had “no indication” that Americans weren’t able to get to the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul.

“We’ve made an agreement with the Taliban. Thus far, they’ve allowed them to go through,” he said.

He later said he misunderstood the question and that Americans may be getting into trouble after being let through Taliban checkpoints.

But the Department of Defense, about an hour later, acknowledged being aware of reports that Taliban terrorists had been beating Americans in Afghanistan.

Thousands of Americans are estimated to remain in the country after the United States withdrew most troops and the Taliban pummeled Afghan forces.

The Taliban took over Kabul on Aug. 15.

Members of Congress from both parties have been critical of how the United States conducted the withdrawal, with many wondering why civilians weren’t evacuated before the military largely pulled out.

Now, Americans, Afghans, and others seeking to flee the country must brave the Taliban-held streets to reach the airport, with little to no help from troops from the United States or other nations, though some special forces have reportedly conducted targeted rescue missions by helicopter and U.S. troops went outside the airport to rescue 169 people.

Americans were encouraged to leave Afghanistan earlier this year and urged to do so as the Taliban rapidly gained ground this month.

Those who chose to stay have been receiving changing advice from U.S. officials regarding travel to the airport.

The U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan told Americans on Aug. 15 to shelter in place because of the unstable security situation there.

That directive remained active until Aug. 18, when Americans were told that U.S. government flights were departing from the airport but also informed that the government could not “ensure safe passage” to the facility.

A similar message was promoted on Thursday, with another warning.

“We are processing people at multiple gates. Due to large crowds and security concerns, gates may open or close without notice. Please use your best judgment and attempt to enter the airport at any gate that is open,” U.S. citizens were told.

US Tells Americans to Avoid Traveling to Kabul Airport Because of ‘Potential Security Threats’ (theepochtimes.com)

Illegal immigrants are crossing into the United States from Mexico in record-shattering numbers, but the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is ignoring a congressional request for information regarding where the government is relocating them, lawmakers say.

“On April 15, 2021, 34 Members of the House of Representatives sent a letter requesting important information regarding the destinations within the interior of our nation of the heavy illegal migration over our nation’s border,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) told DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in an Aug. 5 letter.

The letter was also addressed to Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra. The two departments are responsible for implementing President Joe Biden’s open border policies on immigration.

“As of the date of this letter, the response from [HHS] deferred to [DHS], and regrettably, DHS has not responded to the Congress’ letter,” Braun and Gohmert told Mayorkas and Becerra.

The lawmakers said the repeated requests for relocation information were made because “border crossings remain unsustainably high. In July, it was reported that attempted crossings at the U.S.–Mexico border remain at a historically high level not experienced in at least 21 years.

“In June, more than 188,829 individuals were taken into custody by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), including 15,018 unaccompanied children. This former figure represents an alarming 141 percent increase from January 2021. Like so many in our nation, we remain deeply concerned about this unlawful, manmade humanitarian and national crisis that is being facilitated on our southern border.”

In addition to Braun and Gohmert, the April and August letters were signed by Sens. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.).

Members of the House of Representatives who signed the letters include Reps. Diana Harshbarger (R-Tenn.), Matthew Rosendale (R-Mont.), Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), Greg Steube (R-Fla.), Randy Weber (R-Texas), Ben Cline (R-Va.), Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), Bob Good (R-Va.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Chip Roy (R-Texas), Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), Michael Cloud (R-Texas), Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Ted Budd (R-N.C.), Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Bill Posey (R-Fla.), Vicki Hartzler (R-Mo.), and Pete Sessions (R-Texas).

Representatives from DHS didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.

The information sought by the lawmakers includes the following:

“The locations where illegal immigrants have been sent, transported, or provided ability or funding to travel to, or allowed to travel to by other funding including their own or private funding for all individuals who entered the U.S. without visas.

“For each named location, the total number of immigrants who have been sent, transported, or provided ability or funding to travel to, or allowed to travel to by other funding, including their own or private funding to such city.

“The number of immigrants tested for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), the number of immigrants that tested positive for COVID-19, and [DHS’s] course of action to respond to immigrants that test positive for COVID-19.”

The signers noted that “this requested information is critical to understanding how the unabetted flow of illegal aliens over the Southern border affects all Americans in each of the 50 states.”

“It must be reiterated that members of the executive branch have a duty, and many have sworn an oath that would include the requirement to carry out the lawfully enacted legislation under the Constitution,” the letter reads.

“With an open border facilitating illegal entry into our nation and the manifold resulting criminalities, the executive branch is failing miserably in its duty.

“Your failure to provide this requested information over the past three months, an eminently reasonable amount of time, raises further concerns about the lack of transparency and your unwillingness to provide this important information to elected representatives of the people of this nation.”

Homeland Security Ignoring Congressional Requests for Info on Where Illegal Immigrants Are Being Sent (theepochtimes.com)

‘Highly unlikely’ Taliban will overrun Afghanistan, Biden said in July

When President Joe Biden defended his decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by a September 11 deadline, the president told reporters in July that it remained “highly unlikely” the Taliban would take control of the country. 

“The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” Biden said. “The Afghan government and leadership has to come together. They clearly have the capacity to sustain the government in place … there’s not a conclusion that, in fact, they cannot defeat the Taliban.”

Biden’s forecast for the future of Afghanistan, however, has proven completely false. The Taliban has captured several of Afghanistan’s largest cities, and experts now believe the terrorist group will target the Afghan capital of Kabul in the coming weeks. The Biden administration scrambled to call in another 8,000 troops to the region in an effort to rescue both U.S. troops and civilians remaining in the country.

Biden’s Afghanistan Predictions Were All Wrong (freebeacon.com)

Fellow American:

Did you see the news? 

Joe Biden released 50,000 illegal immigrants into the United States without even giving them a court date. 

We don’t know how many are violent criminals, how many work for the drug cartels, or how many are infected with Covid-19. All we know is that the Left’s plan is working.

They don’t see the lawless humanitarian crisis on the border as the problem. To Democrats, the crisis is the solution. 

ONLY A CONSERVATIVE HOUSE CAN SEAL THE BORDER. CLICK HERE TO GIVE TO HOUSE FREEDOM FUND TODAY!

Democrats want chaos at the border so that they can sneak in as many illegals as possible, right under your nose. So far, more than 1 MILLION illegals have crossed the border since Joe Biden took office! 

Biden isn’t turning them back to Mexico. He’s letting them into our towns, without Covid tests or court dates, while telling American citizens we have to start wearing masks again!

What happened to our country? America belongs to the people who love her, and it’s time to take her back.

Support the House Freedom Fund today, and join the fight to win America back.

HFF is the only organization in the country exclusively committed to electing TRUE CONSERVATIVES to the U.S. House.
      
HFF only supports fighters – men and women like Jim Jordan, Scott Perry, and Lauren Boebert. These are leaders ready to take on the socialist Left, the establishment GOP, the Big Tech billionaires, and the mainstream media.

I know because HFF supports me, and that’s no small thing. I’ve learned that when conservatives truly fight the liberals, even many of the leaders in our own party will abandon them.

Electing more Republicans won’t change anything. Only electing conservatives can make the House great again. HFF is the Right’s secret weapon against the woke socialist Left.

As you know, under our Constitution, the House holds the power of the purse over the federal budget. If we nominate and elect enough conservatives next year, we can cut off Biden’s allowance:

❌ No more money to relocate illegal immigrants into our hometowns;
❌ No more money to poison our children with Critical Race Theory;
❌ No more money to get Big Tech to spy on American citizens;
❌ No more money for new mask mandates or school closures; and
❌ No more money to finance coronavirus experiments by Communist scientists in Chinese labs.

If Democrats won’t turn away illegal immigrants, then the American people have to turn away the Democrats.

Please join me in supporting HFF today!

Thank you for considering this urgent request and doing so much to help fight for America’s future.

Sincerely,

Marjorie Taylor Greene
U.S. Congresswoman (R-GA)

‘It was pretty obvious to me what was going to happen’ if Biden bucked military advice, Senate minority leader says

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said President Biden directly ignored the advice of military leaders during briefings on the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

“I was in a number of these briefings over the last couple months, it was pretty obvious to me what was going to happen,” McConnell said Monday. “I know for a fact that the president’s military leaders argued against this decision. I think the president himself felt strongly about this and overruled his own military leaders to do it, and he owns it.”

McConnell slammed the Biden administration for its incompetent withdrawal of thousands of Americans and Afghans. Footage emerged Monday of havoc at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, that caused civilian casualties.

“Honestly, this administration looks to me like it couldn’t organize a two-car funeral,” McConnell said. “It is a sad day for the United States of America.”

President Biden responded Monday to critics of his withdrawal, saying he stands by his decision.

“We will continue to support the Afghan people,” Biden said. “The way to do it is not through endless military deployments, but diplomacy.”

McConnell: Biden Ignored Military’s Advice on Afghanistan (freebeacon.com)

The restraint crowd delivers America’s humiliation in Afghanistan

When the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft was founded in 2019, the mainstream media celebrated its emergence as a beacon of hope for a more restrained American foreign policy. Two years later, the humiliating failure wrought by the toxic mix of isolationism and anti-Americanism at the heart of the Quincy Institute is on full display.

Charles Koch, once pilloried for his conservative politics, was celebrated for a collaboration with George Soros that aimed to “bring an end to America’s age of endless wars and to reduce the nation’s military footprint around the world.”

While the left and right alike remain allergic to bipartisanship, the so-called transpartisanship of the Quincy Institute’s retrenchment remains very much in fashion in Washington. It can now claim full credit for the foreign policy debacle in Afghanistan.

The institution itself—and the White House—agrees. The Quincy Institute trumpeted its “success” in a Monday night email. “We knew that if we could bring the forces against endless war on the Left and the Right together, we could achieve the impossible,” the Quincy Institute wrote to supporters. White House chief of staff Ron Klain, for his part, retweeted the top Koch aide William Ruger’s wet kiss to Biden: In Ruger’s view, the president is “showing the requisite realist spine America needs at the moment.” Congratulations!

Quincy cheered President Joe Biden’s announcement in April that the United States would leave Afghanistan, sneering that that “the military high command’s never-ending urge to stick with a failed war was complemented by the inside-the-Beltway Blob’s doomsday scenarios and tired nostrums.”

The Soros network may have been pushing on an open door with Democrats, but Charles Koch gets the credit for doing the heavy lifting to provide intellectual cover for isolationists on the right.

That’s in part why President Donald Trump nominated Ruger, to serve as ambassador to Afghanistan in the last days of that administration. We opposed that nomination, but we now regret he wasn’t there this week to see the fruits of his labor.

This precipitous and calamitous withdrawal had “transpartisan” advocates. But the slogans, the white papers, the research and reports, and the veneer of professionalism and academic rigor used to justify the reckless policy came largely from Koch, Soros, and their army of “restrainers.”

A recent article from the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft blog posed a question that gets to the core of its naïve worldview:

What would our world actually be like if you simply declared peace and came home?

Now they know the answer. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft has brought us the single most irresponsible bit of American statecraft in 50 years. This travesty—and all the death and destruction that will flow from it—is their first great achievement. Let’s hope it is also their last.

Responsible Statecraft Gets Its Moment (freebeacon.com)

The Forrest Gump of American decline?

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan is at the center of yet another U.S. foreign policy disaster. During the Obama administration, in his role as a top aide to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and then-vice president Joe Biden, the highly credentialed wunderkind presided over some of the most humiliating failures in the history of American foreign policy.

Sullivan’s extensive experience as an architect of American failure in Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Iran, and Myanmar, plus the fact that White House press secretary Jen Psaki is mysteriously out of the office, made him a natural choice to defend the Biden administration’s handling of the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan.

“It is certainly the case [that] the speed with which cities fell was much greater than anyone anticipated,” Sullivan said Monday during an interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, who also asked about President Joe Biden’s assessment that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was “highly unlikely” and “there’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States,” as there was in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.

Fact check: False. Kimberley Motley, an international human-rights attorney who has worked in Afghanistan for more than a decade, described the situation in the country as a “nightmare” that was “like Saigon on steroids.”

Sullivan was unable to muster a compelling response. “To be fair, the helicopter has been the mode of transport from our embassy to the airport for the last 20 years,” he said as the network rolled footage of Taliban militants streaming into Kabul.

Perhaps the 44-year-old Sullivan has grown weary of presiding over epic failures. Despite being considered one of the most brilliant foreign policy experts of his generation, Sullivan’s résumé is littered with embarrassing debacles, including both of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaigns. Afghanistan is merely the most recent example.

In 2011, as a top adviser to then-secretary Clinton, Sullivan helped orchestrate the “kinetic military action” in Libya. Even though the intervention resulted in the death of dictator Muammar Qaddafi, it is widely viewed as a failure. The U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was assassinated during the Benghazi terrorist attacks in 2012, and the country would eventually become a haven for Islamic State militants.

Less than a month before Stevens was killed, Sullivan was among the team of experts advising then-president Barack Obama on the escalating civil war in Syria. Obama warned Bashar al-Assad, the Russian-backed dictator, that the use of chemical weapons was a “red line” that would “change my calculus” regarding U.S. military action against the regime.

Assad crossed the red line on multiple occasions, and the United States responded by taking negligible action to deter the slaughter of civilians. Assad remained in power, Russia flexed its military muscle, and the Islamic State established a caliphate in northeast Syria, wreaking havoc in Iraq as well.

During an interview with the New Yorker in 2019, Sullivan said he considered it “a great regret of mine” that “we were not able to more effectively play a role in stopping hundreds of thousands of people from dying in Syria and millions and millions more losing their homes.”

By 2014, Obama’s failure to enforce his “red line” on chemical weapons in Syria had changed Vladimir Putin’s calculus regarding Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Once again, the United States took no significant action to deter Russian forces from destabilizing the country and annexing Crimea. The conflict would claim thousands of lives, including the 298 people aboard Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down with a Russian-made missile over eastern Ukraine.

Less than a month after Biden was sworn in as president, the government of Myanmar was ousted in a military coup conducted by individuals responsible for the genocidal atrocities perpetrated against the country’s Rohingya population. Foreign Policy magazine called it “a failure of U.S. diplomacy orchestrated by some of [the Biden administration’s] own players nearly a decade ago.”

In other words, people like Jake Sullivan. In 2011, he was advising Clinton when she described meeting Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi as an “inspiration” and touted the Obama administration’s efforts in the country as a diplomatic victory. The celebration was short-lived. Aung San Suu Kyi would go on to assume a senior role in the country’s government but would be widely condemned for her refusal to denounce the military’s campaign of violence against the Rohingya.

Sullivan, who played a key role in negotiating the failed Iran nuclear deal in 2015, is currently leading the Biden administration’s efforts to revive the controversial agreement. He will almost certainly have a major role in crafting the pathetic U.S. response to China’s inevitable invasion of Taiwan. He is the Forrest Gump of American decline, and one of the best rebuttals to the American system of meritocracy.

None of these policy failures will hurt Sullivan’s glowing reputation among members of the Liberal Élite. After all, his credentials are impeccable: Yale University (Phi Beta Kappa), Rhodes scholar, Yale Law School, Brookings Institution. He was a debate team champion and president of the student council in high school, where he was voted “most likely to succeed.” He clerked for Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer and worked as chief counsel for Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), where he was presumably traumatized by the abuse he suffered.

In any event, these colossal blunders will likely pale in comparison to what he will be able to accomplish as U.S. secretary of state in the Kamala Harris administration.

Jake Sullivan Presides Over Yet Another Foreign Policy Disaster (freebeacon.com)

Fellow Conservative:

We were right all along. It is becoming more and more apparent that Communist China directly caused COVID and that liberals – from the World Health Organization to the United Nations, to Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer – aren’t going to do anything about it.

Joe Biden is terrified of angering Communist China.

Millions are dead, the American economy in shambles and all of it can be tied back to Communist China. Joe Biden’s only response is capitulation and shaming anyone who dares to tell the truth.

Remember all the times Republicans – President Trump especially – were mocked for saying that China caused COVID-19? Remember all the times last year when we fought to close our borders to Chinese travelers, but Joe Biden and his friends on the left mocked us and called this common-sense move racist?

If they won’t do anything, then it is up to us. I am working overtime to expose the truth, save lives, do my part to take back the U.S. Senate for the Republican Party, and I need you to help me in this fight.

The outcome could decide the direction of our nation for generations and our ability to hold China accountable for harming the world.

I have been saying this for months, here is a clip of me on Fox News– if you aren’t angry after watching this, then you aren’t paying attention.

Multiple issues are being covered up:
• The “gain of function” research being conducted on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology;
• Big Tech’s censoring of the evidence for the lab-leak theory during last year’s election campaign;
• The three Wuhan scientists who got seriously ill in late 2019;
• The APPALING conditions at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
• China no longer holding its Military Games in Wuhan.
• The bid for new repairs at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that are going unquestioned…until now.

It is disgusting to see such weakness in the Oval Office. But, if we don’t take back the Senate to add some balance and strength to our government, I don’t know what will happen.

Please, your donation of $1,000, $500, $250, $100, even just $50 to do your part to take back the Senate could make a HUGE difference.

Republicans are fighting to hold China accountable for the lives it has destroyed. Every day, every hour, we cannot stop working to protect our families and the nation I love and served in the U.S. Navy to protect.

China must be held accountable. With your help, I will continue the fight to protect our great country. Please stand with me today.

For our children,

Rick Scott
U.S. Senator, Florida

The Space Force officer who was removed from his command post for condemning Marxism and critical race theory is leaving the military.

Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier told The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” that his last day in the service will be Sept. 1.

“I wrote a letter to then-Acting Secretary of the Air Force explaining certain circumstances, which I don’t plan to make public, but also requesting an early retirement, and a separation honorably from the service,” he said. “And they’ve denied me an early retirement, but agreed that they would separate me. And so my family and I have decided that that’s the best course of action for us right now, given the circumstances.”

“I believe I’m able to continue serving my country outside of the service and out of uniform, perhaps in a better way than I was able to, given the circumstances, in uniform at the moment.”

Lohmeier plans to accept public speaking engagements and offer consulting services.

He’s received a slew of invitations to various events and conferences in recent months.

Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, Space Operations Command commander, relieved Lohmeier of his command of a squadron in May “due to loss of trust and confidence in his ability to lead,” the Space Force said at the time.

Whiting made the move because of remarks Lohmeier made on a podcast. He also ordered an investigation into whether the comments constituted prohibited partisan political activity.

Lohmeier published a book warning about the spread of Marxism and critical race theory in the military and was on the podcast promoting the book.

During the appearance, Lohmeier claimed that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was promoting “diversity, inclusion, and equity,” which he and others have said are “rooted in critical race theory, which is rooted in Marxism.”

The Air Force Inspector General’s Office later took over the investigation.

Multiple members of Congress spoke out against what happened, including Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“Based on the information the committee has received so far and what’s been reported in the press, I am concerned,” Inhofe said at the time. “Members of our military should not only be able to speak out against Marxism, but they should be encouraged to do so—as long as they follow the rules and laws already in place. Marxism is an ideology that goes against everything this country stands for, and it belongs, as Ronald Reagan said famously, ‘on the ash-heap of history.’”

Lohmeier told The Epoch Times that neither his book nor the remarks were politically partisan.

“It’s not politically partisan to expose Marxist ideology where it exists and to talk about critical race theory; that should be something we’re unitedly standing against,” he said.

He also said he attempted before writing the book to utilize internal mechanisms that let service members lodge complaints, but to no avail.

The Space Force and the Air Force didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Exclusive: Space Force Officer, Punished After Denouncing Marxism, to Leave Military (theepochtimes.com)

My Fellow American:

Dr. Anthony Fauci has been wrong time and time again during this COVID-19 Pandemic, and we need to stop allowing him to set public policy.

He was wrong about closing the schools.

He was wrong about mask mandates.

He was wrong about the origin of this disease.

He is wrong to support eviction moratoriums.

I am working to ensure our rights are never taken away like this again, and I need your help.

In the coming months, you will hear politicians explain away their unconstitutional lockdowns and mandates as “following the science.” Don’t let them get away with it.

They are scaredy-cats who abdicated their responsibility to lead our nation because they were afraid of being made fun of on Saturday Night Live or at the DC Cocktail parties.

I am sick of these cowards taking away our liberties and then throwing their hands up when we prove them wrong AGAIN.

I won’t forget, and we need to make sure that the rest of the nation doesn’t either. I am working with the Republican Liberty Caucus – and that’s why I am asking you to stand with me in support of their organization.

Put simply, the RLC is the conscience of the Republican Party – something we need now, more than ever. A group of freedom-loving individuals focused on ensuring no elected or appointed member of our government can trample on our Constitutional Rights.

Just as we need to rebuild our nation’s economy, we need to rebuild the Republican Party and those who represent us in government. That hard work begins right now, and with your support, it will be led by the Republican Liberty Caucus.

We seem to have forgotten the principles that make us great during the Pandemic. You, me, and the Republican Liberty Caucus are going to remind them.

Please, your donation of $45 or more could make all the difference as we seek to Take Back America.

If you believe in America, if you believe in the Republican Party, and if you believe in finding out the truth about COVID-19 and putting our economy back on track, then please donate today.

Thank you for your time. God Bless America.

Rand Paul
U.S. Senator, Kentucky

The pending report from special counsel John Durham, who was tasked with investigating the origins of the FBI’s Trump–Russia probe, should be released to the public, Senate Republicans argued in a letter this week.

More than 40 Republican senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), signed a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking that Durham, a former U.S. attorney, be allowed to continue his investigation and that his report is released to the public.

There have been questions about whether Durham’s investigation will lack funding past the end of the federal government’s fiscal year on Sept. 30. He was tapped by then-Attorney General William Barr to investigate the FBI’s operations when it surveilled former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Barr elevated Durham to become special counsel in October 2020.

“The Special Counsel’s ongoing work is important to many Americans who were disturbed that government agents subverted lawful process to conduct inappropriate surveillance for political purposes,” the Republican senators’ letter reads. “The truth pursued by this investigation is necessary to ensure transparency in our intelligence agencies and restore faith in our civil liberties. Thus, it is essential that the Special Counsel’s ongoing review should be allowed to continue unimpeded and without undue limitations.”

The Republicans called on Garland to make a pledge to release the full report and allow Durham to investigate past September.

“We are over two years into the investigation of how the Obama–Biden FBI spied on an incoming president, and we still do not have answers. America’s national security apparatus was weaponized to take down President Trump, and the American people deserve to know how this occurred,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who is leading the effort, said in a statement.

In recent months, however, there have been scant reports about the progress of Durham’s investigation. According to an Aug. 13 report from The Wall Street Journal, Durham’s investigation is still active and is presenting evidence to a grand jury. The WSJ report cited anonymous sources.

If Durham presents evidence before a grand jury, it suggests that he’s considering more criminal charges beyond the case against former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty to altering an email about former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. During the 2016 campaign, Page was placed under FBI surveillance in an operation that was later flagged in a December 2019 report (pdf) conducted by the Department of Justice’s inspector general, who found errors and omissions in how the agency operated.

The Department of Justice didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.

44 Senate Republicans Demand John Durham Report Be Made Public (theepochtimes.com)

The thousands of prisoners freed by the Taliban in Afghanistan after the terrorist group took over the country pose a “serious concern to the security of the United States,” top Republicans in the House of Representatives warned national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Wednesday.

Prisoners freed from Pul-e-Charkhi prison and Bagram Air Base, among other lockups, are reported to include Taliban terrorists, senior Al-Qaeda operatives, and former Guantanamo Bay detainees.

“This development is found to be more troubling considering recent reports of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General [Mark] Milley’s observation that terror groups like Al-Qaeda could build up in Afghanistan much sooner than earlier intelligence estimates suggested. With the very real prospect that seasoned terrorist operatives now roam freely in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, we write to urgently request information on how the U.S. Government plans to mitigate threats to U.S. interests and the homeland,” the Republicans wrote to Sullivan.

They’re asking for detailed information on the prisoners, including whether the U.S. government is aware of any who were previously involved in plotting terror attacks against the United States.

“As the American people prepare to mark the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, we are soberly reminded of the dangers posed to the homeland by threats borne out of terror safe havens, like Afghanistan,” Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.) and two other top Republicans said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Sullivan told reporters on Tuesday that the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan was presenting broad challenges.

“We will remain persistently vigilant against the terrorism threat in Afghanistan,” Sullivan said, asserting that the United States “has proven in other places that we can suppress terrorism without a permanent military presence on the ground.”

“We are going to have to deal with the potential threat of terrorism from Afghanistan going forward, just as we have to deal with potential threat of terrorism in dozens of countries, in multiple continents around the world,” he added.

Katko, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) also linked the threat to the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, where thousands of people are crossing illegally every day.

Border agents have encountered known or suspected terrorists from far-flung countries. The outgoing Border Patrol Chief said recently that “Unprecedented numbers of known or suspected terrorists have crossed the southern border in recent months.”

As part of their inquiry, the lawmakers want to know whether the intelligence community and U.S. immigration enforcement officials are sharing information related to known or suspected terrorists “seeking to exploit vulnerabilities along the southwest border.”

Katko is the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee. McCaul is the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Rogers is the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee.

Prisoners Released by Taliban in Afghanistan Pose ‘Serious Concern’ to US Security, Republicans Warn (theepochtimes.com)