Refugee Admissions Into U.S. Plunge 83% In First Two Months Of FY18

As monthly refugee admissions into the United States lap the last few months of Obama"s administration, the stark changes enacted by the Trump White House are more apparent than ever with admissions down a staggering 83% in the first two months of fiscal 2018 (October and November) compared to the first two months of fiscal 2017.

As CNS News points out, a total of only 3,108 refugees were admitted in October and November down from the 18,300 refugees who were admitted in October and November of last year.

The most striking change between the refugee admissions in the initial two-month period of this fiscal year and last fiscal year was the relative differences in size of the contingents from Syria, Somalia and Iraq.

In Oct.-Nov. 2016, 2,259 Syrians (97.6 percent Muslim, 1.7 percent Christian), 2,463 Somalis (99.9 percent Muslim) and 2,262 Iraqis (75 percent Muslim, 17.3 percent Christian, 7.4 percent Yazidi) were resettled.

 

In Oct.-Nov. 2017 the numbers had dropped to 33 Syrians (66.6 percent Muslim, 33.3 percent Christian), 126 Somalis (100 percent Muslim) and 76 Iraqis (84.2 percent Muslim, 10.5 percent Christian, 3.9 percent Yazidi).

 

Among the 3,108 refugees admitted since FY 2018 began, the five largest contingents came from Bhutan (805), the Democratic Republic of Congo (627), Burma (347), Ukraine (290) and Eritrea (281).

 

The religious breakdown of those 3,108 refugees was: 59.6 percent Christian, 15.4 percent Muslim, 9.6 percent Buddhist, 7.6 percent Hindu, 4.7 percent Kirat and 0.9 percent Jewish.

 

By contrast, the five countries represented most strongly among the 18,300 refugees resettled by the Obama administration in the U.S. during the first two months of FY 2017 were the DRC (4,236), Somalia (2,463), Iraq (2,262), Syria (2,259) and Burma (1,509).

 

The religious breakdown of those 18,300 refugees was: 48.1 percent Christian, 43.6 percent Muslim, 2.4 percent Buddhist, 1.7 percent Hindu, 0.9 percent Kirat and 0.3 percent Jewish.

Meanwhile, fourteen months after the Obama administration backed a push at the U.N. for global responsibility-sharing for refugees and migrants, the Trump Administration has pulled out of the initiative with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley saying it “is simply not compatible with U.S. sovereignty.”

Now the administration is also withdrawing from a U.N. initiative called the Global Compact on Migration.

 

In a statement Sunday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. would continue to engage at the U.N. but in this case it “simply cannot in good faith support a process that could undermine the sovereign right of the United States to enforce our immigration laws and secure our borders.”

 

“The United States supports international cooperation on migration issues, but it is the primary responsibility of sovereign states to help ensure that migration is safe, orderly, and legal.”

 

Haley said Sunday the New York declaration “contains numerous provisions that are inconsistent with U.S. immigration and refugee policies and the Trump administration’s immigration principles.”

 

She said no country has done more that the U.S. in providing support for migrant and refugee populations across the globe, “and our generosity will continue.”

 

“But our decisions on immigration policies must always be made by Americans and Americans alone,” she said. “We will decide how best to control our borders and who will be allowed to enter our country.”

Of course, it"s just a matter of time until Chuck Schumer and/or Nancy Pelosi tell us that Trump"s efforts to not outsource decisions regarding American sovereignty to the U.N. is just more evidence of the inherent racism plaguing the current administration.

House Intel. Chair Accuses Obama Staffers of "Hundreds Of Unmasking Requests"

After being forced to recuse himself from his committee"s investigation of the "Russian meddling" controversy earlier this year (see: House Intel Committee Chair Nunes Recuses Himself From Russia Probe), Devin Nunes has thrust himself back into the national spotlight by drafting a letter to the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, saying he has evidence that several of Obama"s top political aides made hundreds of unmasking requests in the waning days of Obama"s administration even though they offered no legitimate reason to do so and some of them didn"t even serve in an intelligence position.

In Thursday’s letter, Nunes said the total requests for Americans’ names by Obama political aides numbered in the hundreds during Obama’s last year in office and often lacked a specific intelligence community justification. He called the lack of proper justifications a “serious deficiency.”

His letter noted requests from senior government officials, unlike career intelligence analysts, “made remarkably few individualized justifications for access” to the U.S. names.

“The committee has learned that one official, whose position had no apparent intelligence related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama administration,” Nunes wrote. “Of those requests, only one offered a justification that was not boilerplate.”

“We have found evidence that current and former government officials had easy access to U.S. person information and that it is possible that they used this information to achieve partisan political purposes, including the selective, anonymous leaking of such information."

Of course, we pointed out last week (see: New Scapegoat Emerges In Unmasking Scandal: Meet Obama"s Former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power) that the official "whose position had no apparent intelligence related function" was likely Obama"s U.N. ambassador, Samantha Power.

Power appears to be central to efforts by top Obama administration officials to identify individuals named in classified intelligence community reports related to Trump and his presidential transition team.  If true, Power"s role in the unmasking efforts would be particularly questionable since it"s nearly inconceivable that her position as the U.N. ambassador would require such sensitive unmasking activities.

"Unmasking is not a regular occurrence—absolutely not a weekly habit. It is rare, even at the National Security Council, and ought to be rarer still for a U.N. ambassador," according to one former senior U.S. official who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.

"It might be defended when the communication in question relates directly to U.N. business, for example an important Security Council vote," explained the former official, who would only discuss the matter on background. "Sometimes it might be done out of other motives than national security, such as sheer curiosity or to defend a bureaucratic position. Or just plain politics."

The Intelligence Committee"s focus of Power and other key Obama officials is a prime example of the Obama administration"s efforts to spy on those close to Trump, according to sources familiar with the ongoing investigation.

"The subpoena for Power suggests just how pervasive the Obama administration"s spying on Americans actually was," said one veteran GOP political operative who has been briefed on the matter by senior Congressional intelligence officials. "The U.N. ambassador has absolutely no business calling for the quantity and quality of the intelligence that Power seems to have been asking for."

"That"s just not the sort of thing that she should have been concerned about, unless she was playing the role of political operative with the help of the intelligence community," the source said. "It gives away what was actually going on: the Obama administration was operating in a pervasive culture of impunity and using the intelligence community against their political opponents."

So, you"re saying that while Americans were being distracted with a barrage of "Russian meddling" stories, that Obama was working behind the scenes to transform our various intelligence agencies in this country into his very own political weapons of mass destruction? 

That sounds like a very serious 4th Amendment issue...we"re starting to see what the FISA courts were getting at:

"Since 2011, NSA"s minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collection under Section 702.  The October 26, 2016 Notice informed the Court that NSA analysts had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the Court."

"At the October 26, 2016 hearing, the Court ascribed the government"s failure to disclose those IG and OCO reviews at the October 4, 2016 hearing to an institutional "lack of candor" on NSA"s part and emphasized that "this is a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.""

Three Leakers Of Classified White House Information Said To Be Identified, Expected To Be Fired

As reported over the weekend, having returned from his first foreign trip president Trump is preparing a "war room" in response to the barrage of Russian news blanketing the media, and plans to restructure the White House communications strategy and possibly staffing.

There have been rumors around Washington that press secretary Sean Spicer"s job is in danger (and that Jared Kushner, the focus of much of the latest newsflow, may be forced to take a "step back") but the White House has denied these rumors. In an interview with Fox News" Jeanine Pirro earlier this month, Trump said Spicer has been "doing a good job but he gets beat up."

But the biggest issue plaguing the White House at this moment is the seemingly relentless leakage of confidential information surrounding Trump"s activities, with Trump administration officials saying last week the recent high-profile leaks of classified information are "coordinated and timed."

And in a new development, CBS News has confirmed that three leakers of classified information at the White House have been identified and are expected to be fired. 

According to CBS, "officials within the Trump White House believe leaks of Mr. Trump"s conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are a "deliberate attempt" by officials who are holdovers from President Obama"s administration and are trying to damage the Trump presidency."

Last week, the Trump campaign released an email to supporters entitled "SABOTAGE," in which the campaign said, "There are people within our own unelected bureaucracy that want to sabotage President Trump and our entire America First movement."

The White House has yet to announce any terminations or staff reallignment. Instead, overnight Trump took another swipe at reports that his Twitter privileges may be removed, saying that "the Fake News Media works hard at disparaging & demeaning my use of social media because they don"t want America to hear the real story!"

The Fake News Media works hard at disparaging & demeaning my use of social media because they don"t want America to hear the real story!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2017

Camille Paglia: Democrats Are Colluding With The Media To Create Chaos

By Emily Jashinky, originally in the Washingtonm Examiner,

Camille Paglia is much more worried about the media than about the steady string of Trump-related scandals they claim to be uncovering.

In a Tuesday interview with the Washington Examiner, Paglia excoriated the press for its coverage of Trump"s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey and his alleged sharing of classified information with Russian officials.

Fresh off a spirited panel with Christina Hoff Sommers hosted by the Independent Women"s Forum, the iconic feminist dissident, who serves as a professor of media studies at the University of the Arts, accused journalists of colluding with the Democratic Party in an effort to damage the Trump administration.

"Democrats are doing this in collusion with the media obviously, because they just want to create chaos," she said when asked to comment on the aforementioned stories.

"They want to completely obliterate any sense that the Trump administration is making any progress on anything."

The popular author, whose latest book was released in March, pointed to early struggles experienced by previous presidential administrations to illustrate the media"s bias against Trump. "Obama"s administration for the first six months was chaos," Paglia recalled. "Bill Clinton"s was chaos for six months. Nobody holds that against a new person."

"Those two guys had actually been politicians!" she continued, noting Trump"s relative inexperience with government operations.

Paglia"s assessment of media bias in the Trump era leaves little room for optimism.

"I am appalled at the behavior of the media," she declared. "It"s the collapse of journalism."

As the Examiner reported in April, Paglia, who cast her ballot for Jill Stein last November, is predicting Trump will win re-election in 2020.

"I feel like the Democrats have overplayed their hand," she said at the time.

Though the news cycle has moved through plenty of additional scandals in the past month, it appears as though Paglia"s assessment of the president"s prospects has not changed.

"I"m looking forward to voting Democrat again," the acclaimed philosopher explained. "But the point is I feel that the media has so utterly lost its credibility that I think people are going to vote against the media again."

Obama: "This Whole Notion Of 'Voter Fraud' Is 'Fake News'"

Speaking at his final press conference from the White House, Obama decided to tackle the prickly topic of "voter fraud" saying that the notion that "there are a whole bunch of people out there who are not eligible to vote and want to vote" is just "fake news".

"This whole notion of voting fraud, this is something that has constantly been disproved.  This is "fake news"." 

"The notion that there are a whole bunch of people out there who are not eligible to vote and want to vote.  We have the opposite problem.  We have a bunch of people who are eligible to vote, who don"t vote."

Which would be true, if not for the inconvenient fact that numerous Democratic operatives, including Bob Creamer, a "consultant" who visted the White House 200 times during Obama"s administration, are on film admitting to mass voter fraud. 

“It’s a very easy thing for Republicans to say, “Well, they’re bussing people in.” Well, you know what? We’ve been bussing people in to deal with you fucking assholes for fifty years and we’re not going to stop now, we’re just going to find a different way to do it."

“When I do this I think as an investigator first – I used to do the investigations. I think backwards from how they would prosecute, if they could, and then try to build out the method to avoid that.”