Trump thanked by Mueller's parents

Julie Kelly wrote in American Greatness,

...“I still say Kayla should be here, and if Obama had been as decisive as President Trump, maybe she would have been,” Marsha Mueller, Kayla’s mother, told the Arizona Republic on Sunday. The former president, who famously referred to the al-Qaeda offshoot as a “JV team” in 2014 shortly before ISIS declared a caliphate, fumbled his response to its growing threat in the final years of his presidency. Obama admitted during the G7 meeting in June 2015 that his administration did not have a “complete strategy” to fight ISIS and that the details, including cooperation with our allies, were “not worked out.”

But in 2016, rather than successfully hunting down terrorists including Mueller’s captors, Obama and his top national security officials hunted down Trump campaign aides. Baghdadi’s death should be a reminder—an infuriating one at that—of how the Obama administration, particularly the CIA and FBI, squandered vital resources in service to a politically motivated investigation into Trump and his presidential campaign rather than focusing their efforts on the legitimate threats facing the country.

Trump alluded to that malfeasance in his press conference on Sunday. “When we use our intelligence correctly, what we can do is incredible,” Trump said while commending intelligence operatives who helped locate the ISIS madman. “When we waste our time with intelligence that hurts our country because we had poor leadership at the top, that’s not good.”

Trump, of course, was referring to former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former FBI Director James Comey, the “Praetorian Guard” that laid the trap for Team Trump in 2016. As ISIS continued its murderous rampage in the Middle East and parts of Europe that year—including the Bastille Day truck attack in France that killed 86 people and wounded hundreds more—the most powerful intelligence professionals in the United States were surveilling Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.

...“To guard against leaks, subsequent meetings in the Situation Room followed the same protocols as planning sessions for the Osama bin Laden raid,” the Post reported.

Most notable are the people who attended those briefings: Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco and Vice President Joe Biden. In other words, most of Barack Obama’s inner circle.

The objective of the meetings, according to the Post, was to gin up enough proof to support Brennan’s narrative—which he quickly cobbled together using sketchy evidence after the election—that Putin was scheming to make sure Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.

“Despite the intelligence the CIA had produced, other agencies were slower to endorse a conclusion that Putin was personally directing the operation and wanted to help Trump,” the Post revealed. Brennan later told Congress that his team collected intelligence about “U.S. persons” associated with the Trump campaign and passed that information to the FBI; Comey, the story goes, then opened a counterintelligence probe into four Trump campaign aides in July 2016.

...For more than a year, the leaders entrusted to protect the country and administer justice on behalf of Americans victimized by terrorists instead used their awesome reach and influence against a domestic political rival. They illegally leaked classified information; spied on American citizens solely based on their political activity; deceived a secret court; circulated political dirt disguised as official intelligence; withheld information from Congress; ambushed Trump advisors; and repeatedly misled the American people about an imaginary threat posed by “Russian collusion.”

This is why the multiple inquiries underway at the Justice Department into the activities of Obama’s team in 2016 and early 2017 are so vital. The very people who have warned for nearly three years that Donald Trump poses a risk to national security are the people who actually have jeopardized our safety. Baghdadi’s delayed demise is just the latest example.

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