Information sharing? Ask Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Leon Panetta!

Daniel John Sobieski informs us at American Thinker,

As National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster pointed out Tuesday, nothing President Trump told Lazrov was classified or endangered sources and methods. Of course, this matters not to those who thinks it wrong to share information with the Russians but okay to share that same information to the Washington Post.

It was the kind of general information and concerns that the Russians tried to share with President Obama about the Tsarnaev brothers before the Boston Marathon bombings. If President Obama had “colluded” with the Russians the way Trump is said to have done, the Boston Marathon bombing would never have happened. As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized:

It boggles the mind that we didn't listen to the Russians when they warned about the Tsarnaev brothers in part because, well, they're the Russians. But we want to preserve the records of every housewife in Des Moines because data mining that arguably invades the privacy rights of innocent Americans might reveal something.

One person whose privacy was not invaded by U.S. intelligence was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as he repeatedly visited the al-Qaida online magazine Inspire for its recipe "Build a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom."

The NSA's blanket surveillance did not detect Tsarnaev's interest in building the pressure cooker bombs he would use to devastating effect at the Boston Marathon. The massive databases that we are building a massive facility in Utah to store also failed to uncover the online communications that Tsarnaev had with a known Muslim extremist in Dagestan.

Collusion with the Russians in this case would have saved American lives, but Obama refused Russian assistance in fighting these terrorists. Is Trump “colluding” with the Russians to save lives from ISIS terrorists a bad thing? Did we forget that the Russians had a plane blown out of the sky over the Sinai by terrorists?

Panetta himself, it would seem, is the one who needs to be surrounded by adults to keep his loose lips in check, having put the lives of those who took out Osama bin Laden at risk. As Breitbart reported:

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta, for example, told CNN on Tuesday that Trump “cannot just say whatever the hell he wants and expect it doesn’t carry consequences.”

Panetta should know, because it was his loose talk after the Osama bin Laden raid that exposed a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, who helped locate the Al Qaeda leader. As a result, Afridi was imprisoned on fabricated charges and will live under fear of assassination for the rest of his life.

As Breitbart News noted in 2013, a Pakistani report on Dr. Afridi reportedly concluded “Dr. Afridi was implicated by a ‘statement by the U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who was the CIA Director when May 2 happened, confirming the role of Dr. Afridi in making the U.S. assassination mission a success.'”

Panetta did not reveal that critical intelligence in a private meeting with a foreign emissary, but to the entire world, on CBS News’ 60 Minutes.

Then there is Joe Biden, whose loose lips got members of Seal Team 6 targeted for revenge in an Afghan mission known as Extortion 17. As Investor’s Business Daily recounted on May 28, 2013:

Extortion 17 was the call sign of a special operations mission in Afghanistan on Aug. 6, 2011, that responded to an Army Ranger unit engaged in a firefight with the Taliban and in need of backup.

The Chinook helicopter carrying the rescue team was shot down by a Taliban-owned rocket-propelled grenade over the Wardak Province on Aug. 6, 2011, killing 38, including 30 Americans and 15 members of Navy SEAL Team 6, the unit that killed Osama bin Laden just three months prior.

The shoot-down was described at the time as a "lucky shot," but the families of the dead SEALs believe that, like Benghazi, it was a pre-planned operation of revenge facilitated by a government that put them in harm's way without adequate support and with a bull's-eye painted on their backs.

At a Pentagon briefing on Monday, May 2, 2011, a senior defense official was asked if it was a Navy SEAL team that found and killed the world's most wanted man. The terse and proper response was: "Not going to comment on units or numbers."

Then on May 3, Vice President Joe Biden got up to speak at a dinner at Washington's Ritz Carlton Hotel marking the 50th anniversary of the Atlantic Council to spill the beans about Adm. James Stavridis and "the incredible, the phenomenal, the just almost unbelievable capacity of his Navy SEALs and what they did last Sunday."

From that moment, the families believe, the Taliban looked for an opportunity for revenge, and a government more concerned with politically correct rules of engagement than victory helped them get it.

Biden skated on the leak that got SEAL Team 6 targeted for revenge. Those who now condemn Trump for trying to save American and, yes, Russia lives, were silent, especially Leon “loose lips” Panetta. Panetta and Biden, like Hillary Clinton at Benghazi, put lives in jeopardy and got men killed.

Read more here.

My big brother made me do it!

Denise Lavoie of the Associated Press reports:

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev went on trial for his life Wednesday in the Boston Marathon bombing with his own lawyer bluntly telling the jury he committed the crime. But she argued that he had fallen under the influence of his older brother.

“It WAS him,” Judy Clarke, one of the nation’s foremost death-penalty defense attorneys, said of Tsarnaev in a startling opening statement in the most closely watched terrorism trial in the U.S. since the Oklahoma City bombing nearly 20 years ago.

Laying out an argument aimed at saving Tsarnaev not from a guilty verdict but from the death penalty, Clarke said that the defense will not try to “sidestep” his involvement in the “senseless, horribly misguided acts carried out by two brothers.”

But prosecutor William Weinreb pointed out that

After the bombings, Tsarnaev “acted like he didn’t have a care in the world,” the prosecutor said. Weinreb said Tsarnaev went back to the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and hung out with his friends.

“While victims of the bombing lay in the hospital and learned that they would have to have their limbs chopped off to save their lives, the defendant pretended that nothing had happened,” Weinreb said.

Tsarnaev’s lawyers have made it clear they will try to show that at the time of the attack, Tsarnaev, then 19, looked up to his older brother, Tamerlan, 26, and was heavily influenced by him. They plan to portray Tamerlan as the mastermind of the attack. He died in a shootout with police days after the bombings.

But prosecutors say Dzhokhar was an equal participant who acted of his own free will. They contend the brothers — ethnic Chechens who arrived from Russia more than a decade ago — were driven by anger over U.S. wars in Muslim lands.

The trial will be split into two phases — one to decide guilt or innocence, the other to determine punishment. If Tsarnaev is convicted, the jury will decide whether he gets life in prison or death.

Clarke, Tsarnaev’s lawyer, has saved a string of high-profile clients from the death penalty, including Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph; Unabomber Ted Kaczynski; and Jared Loughner, the man who killed six people and gravely wounded then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in a 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona.

How did this punk get such a high-powered attorney?