State Department

If Fred Fleitz, a distinguished author, former CIA analyst, State Department and House intel Committee staffer with decades of public service can be trashed as a bigot for stating the facts of the government’s case in the successful prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation then no patriot or conservative policy analyst or author is safe from false charges of bigotry.

Leaderless and without navigators to direct it, the ship of American diplomacy is adrift in the fog. But while the Senate deserves criticism for not yet approving CIA Director Mike Pompeo to replace former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson as America's chief diplomat, that's far from the only malady afflicting the Department of State. The Trump administration bears blame itself for its continuing failure to appoint talented officials to crucial roles at the department's Foggy Bottom headquarters.

The Taliban in Afghanistan and ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and its offshoots elsewhere around the world, do not desire any kind of “peace” except the peace of the Ummah – the peace of the worldwide reign of Islam.

Russia's hypersonic missile program was born at Skolkovo a vast Russian industrial espionage program with its genesis at the nexus of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s foundation, Hillary Clinton’s State Department, Bill Clinton, and Russian oligarch Vekselberg. It is driven by donors to the Clinton Foundation and was championed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Tillerson's job is to find some sort of unity. With a big part of the permanent bureaucracy opposed to him, and especially opposed to the president who appointed him, that might be impossible. So Tillerson might want to choose the proposed mission statement that brought the closest thing to a consensus: "Protecting Americans and the interests of America throughout the world."

National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster's guidance to President Trump that he should falsely certify that Iran is in compliance with the Obama nuclear deal amounts to looking the other way on Iran’s violations and is little different than what Hillary Clinton would have done if she had won the 2016 election.

“For 16 years we’ve been at war. When service members are not deployed overseas, they are preparing for war,” says retired Army Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin. “Not one minute of preparation time should be squandered on social experiments.”

If President Trump and Secretary Tillerson don’t expose the truth about Obama’s secret side deals with Iran, Americans will remain in the dark, not only about what commitments to Iran Obama bound us to, but whether the Trump administration has been honest when they said Iran is complying with the deal and that there would be a break with Obama’s dangerous policy of appeasing the Islamist terrorist state.

As tempting as it must seem to President Trump, caution flags should be raised if he decides to make the White House his de facto State Department. While Trump believes he can close deals with foreign leaders like no one else can, someone has to pave the way for those deals, and a State Department led by Trump appointees is the best bet to fill the role.

Montenegro is a quaint, but geopolitically irrelevant. Balkan state. If Montenegro's admission to NATO is approved by the full Senate, Americans will have yet another essentially useless defense dependent, this one a corrupt, long-time gangster state.

Over the weekend media reports surfaced that Christopher Ashcraft, a U.S. State Department “consular officer” posted to Guadalajara, Mexico had been shot and wounded by Zafar Zia. What is more interesting, and has not been widely reported is that Zafar Zia, although of Indian heritage, is a Muslim.

History tells us that the idea of bringing your political enemies into your inner councils is the pathway to failure. Donald Trump must make a clean break with the Republican Quislings, like Mitt Romney and Bob Corker, who enabled Obama to advance his agenda.

The public needs to ponder why an entire government agency dedicated itself to riding shotgun for the presidential candidate most likely to win. Perhaps Clinton's habitual secrecy, paranoia and dishonesty infected the State Department under her tenure there. Either way, it certainly shares those characteristics with her.

Welcome to modern Washington, just two months away from a presidential election. It’s possible, of course, that the people who believe the system is rigged and that their government has taken sides against them are wrong. But the most disquieting possibility is that it isn’t crazy to think they might be right.

The American public may have learned much earlier than it eventually did that Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email account. But two of her State Department aides intervened in late 2012 and early 2013 to block a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records for Clinton’s email accounts.

Conservatives responding to FedUp PAC’s poll see the failure to protect the Benghazi compound as a disqualifying event for Clinton, with 96% saying it shows her to be unfit to serve as commander in chief. But they are equally critical of Capitol Hill Republican leaders, with 96% are concerned, and 90% of those are “very concerned”, that eyewitness testimony regarding the “stand down” order was not included in the report of the House committee investigating the attack.

Our friends at Judicial Watch have pried loose a new trove of emails from the State Department that prove, despite Obama's remark that her email did not endanger national security, she was warned in stark terms about how vulnerable her communications were to exploitation. But even after the official warning she continued to use her now infamous personal server and other unsecure electronic communication devices.

A security clearance and access to the highest levels of American military and diplomatic intelligence are not constitutional rights. It is time for Ms. Abedin to be put under oath to answer questions about her associations with the Muslim Brotherhood, whether or not she lied during her security clearance process and her role in moving classified material from the secure State Department system to the unsecure Hillary Clinton email server.

Obama & State Dept. under Hillary Clinton “changed sides in the war on terror” in '11 by implementing a policy of facilitating weapon delivery to al-Qaida-dominated rebel militias in Libya attempting to oust Moammar Gadhafi, the Citizens Commission on Benghazi concluded in its report.