Mike Pompeo

Mike Pompeo Discusses the Chinese Spy Balloon (Chris Stigall)

Published by Papa Giorgio

UPDATED PICS AFTER AUDIO!

This is an excerpt of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo discussing China with Chris Stigall on Chris’ podcast (found here on SALEM), but the entire shows topics include:

  • Ukraine, the Chinese spy balloon, classified documents, who’s running the Biden White House, the State of the Union, and more.

Chris Stigall’s site is HERE — and there is a wonderful archive section as well.

THESE ARE REAL

The Department of Defense has released of a photo of the Chinese spy balloon that was shot down earlier this month off the coast of South Carolina after it had traversed the country. 

The photo, obtained by Fox News Digital, was taken Feb. 3 by one of the U-2 pilots. It shows a U.S. Air Force pilot looking down at the suspect Chinese surveillance balloon as it hovered over the central continental U.S. …

(FOX | DAILY MAIL)

A “Domain Awareness Gap” Failure? (U.S. Northern Command)

Published by Papa Giorgio

General Keith Kellogg, who was the Executive Secretary and Chief of Staff of the United States National Security Council in the Trump administration, says he was never notified! And he went to every daily briefing.

NO BRIEFING DURING TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY

GATEWAY PUNDIT notes:

….Former Trump advisor John Bolton, former DNI Ric Grenell, Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Former Secretary of State and CIA Direcor Mike Pompeo, President Trump , Defense Secretary Mattis, and former DNI John Ratcliffe, spoke out that that this was a lie.

This never happened during the Trump years. And if it did happen, the top officials in Trump administration were not notified – which is just as bad.

The military is changing their story.  Now they want you to believe that the intelligence community discovered the balloons during the Trump years — BUT NEVER NOTIFIED THEIR INTEL LEADERS!….

DOMAIN AWARENESS GAP

PJ-MEDIA discusses why this may well be the case:

….The American military had a “domain awareness gap,” according to Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command.

“Every day as a NORAD commander, it’s my responsibility to detect threats to North America. I will tell you that we did not detect those threats,” VanHerck said. “And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out, but I don’t want to go into further detail.”

What’s a “domain awareness gap”? General VanHerck didn’t define the term, but Breaking Defense offered a partial explanation.

When VanHerck speaks of a “domain gap,” he’s referring to the U.S. Northern Command not having “the correct mix of sensor capabilities.”

The four-star general, a staunch proponent of beefing up US sensing capabilities to include over-the-horizon radars, did not disclose the number of past detection failures or where the balloons had flown. John Kirby, the White House National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications, said today that the Biden administration discovered three incidents during the Trump administration when “surveillance balloons, by the [Chinese government] transited US airspace” for “brief periods of time.” On Saturday a senior defense official told reporters there had been another incident earlier in Biden’s presidency. None were for the duration of last week’s saga.

That still doesn’t answer the question of how the balloon transits were detected after the fact. Here we get into the classified area of intelligence gathering,

“The intel community, after the fact … assessed those threats through additional means of collection and made us aware of those balloons that were previously approaching North America or transiting North America,” VanHerck said. He noted that USNORTHCOM does not have the authority to collect intelligence inside US borders but was able to track the movement of last week’s balloon because it was granted “specific authorities.”

So part of the problem was jurisdictional. But what those “additional means of collection” are is classified. It still doesn’t answer the question of why no one was informed if the intel was somewhere in some database. That would appear to be a big gap in our intelligence gathering that General VanHerck and Northern Command might want to address with all speed.

Likewise JUST THE NEWS has this:

The Air Force general charged with protecting America’s air space from hostile threats acknowledged Monday that the U.S. military failed to detect some previous incursions by Chinese spy balloons, calling it a troubling “awareness gap” that needed fixing.

“We had gaps on prior balloons,” Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck told reporters.

The comment by the North American Aerospace Defense Command commander both raised concern about NORAD’s vaunted ability to detect airspace threats and also undercut a bungled weekend effort by the Biden administration to try to suggest former President Donald Trump failed to react to three incursions on his watch.

In fact, VanHerck told reporters during a Pentagon briefing, the Trump administration wasn’t told about the incursions because NORAD missed them and that they only recently were detected after the fact by U.S. intelligence agencies.

“I will tell you that we did not detect those threats. And that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out,” he said, declining to be more specific about how earlier flyovers of Chinese spy balloons were missed……

Which makes KJP’s comments seem coherent (POWERLINE):

….Q How is it possible that this administration discovered at least three previous balloons that flew over the U.S. under the previous administration, but Trump officials didn’t know it was happening?

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: Yeah, so, look, I think that — and we have talked about this before, about how the — when it — when the PRC government surveillance balloons trans- — trans- — trans- — transited the continental U.S. briefly at least three times, as you just mentioned, during the President’s — the prior administration and once that we know of the beginning of this administration’s. But never for this duration of time, as we know.

This information was discovered prior to the admin- — administration left, but the intelligence community, as I said, is prepared to give — give briefings to key officials. But this is something —

Q Prior or post?

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: — this is something — sorry, post. So this is something that we — they did not — they were not aware of, as we’ve just laid out. But again, we are ready to brief key officials to let them know what — you know, what the intelligence community was able to figure out…..

MSM Telegraphs It’s Bias (Larry Elder vs. The World)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Larry Elder’s Show from Wednesday the 26th (2021) was good. The upload is mainly from the first hour, however, I add a lot of video to compliment his excellent points. Very long but worth the watch and listen.

Pam Keith’s “Hit Card” (Democrat’s Violent Past)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(This is with a hat-tip to Santa Clarita Community Watchdog Group — a Facebook group) In a post on Facebook I came across this linked article to LAW ENFORCEMENT TODAY discussing a Democrat politician from Florida’s 18th Congressional district apparently putting out a “hit list” against Republicans. Here is a portion of that article:

Politics is hardly ever pretty when it comes for folks racing toward an election, and thus that means the election for Florida’s 18th congressional district is not immune from the likes of nasty rhetoric from people trying to get a seat at the table.

But when you have people calling for an “open season” for killing your political opponents, then that is where a line has been crossed.

The person who crafted a hypothetical call for murdering the likes of President Trump, Roger Stone and AG Bill Barr is Pam Keith. This Democrat is vying to land Florida’s congressional seat for the 18th district, but a Twitter post dating back to June 10th  of this year puts her disturbing mindset on full display:

“GOP: Yeah he’s dead. But it’s not a big deal because he was a “bad guy.” Is that REALLY the new rule they want? Killing is OK if it’s a “bad guy?” Is it now open season on: Flynn, Manafort, Stone, Gates, Cohen, Trump, Barr, Kavanaugh, Lewandowski, Bolton, Pompeo, Papadopolous, Parscale.”

NATIONAL REVIEW is the original source for the LET article and notes the political struggle in that district, writing that “The race between Mast and Pam Keith for Florida’s 18th district is now considered a toss up by the Niskanen Center.” Continuing they note:

…The district has swung Republican since 2016, however Keith represents a first major challenge to Mast’s tenure.

Mast is a veteran of the Afghanistan War, where he lost both legs after a bomb exploded under him. Keith is herself a former judge in the Navy, and is an African American who has voiced support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairwoman Cheri Bustos has said of Keith, “Pam has never backed down from fighting for what’s right. She’s running for Congress to put an end to the petty partisanship that gets in the way of delivering results for Floridians.” However, Keith is not one of the candidates listed as part of the organization’s “Red to Blue” campaign to flip Republican-held districts.

With a competitive election on the horizon, focus has shifted to both candidates’ social media history. Keith was the subject of a profile in the Washington Post on Friday which did not mention her more controversial posts…..

Of course if this were a Republican, WaPo would have included those “controversial” posts. All this led to a humorous aside:

HOWEVER…

This made me think of a connection to the Democrat Party’s historical past. Here is my comment on that part of the group on Facebook:

You know, this reminds me of something from the Democrats past. What this is is a “hit card” that the violent arm [the KKK] of the Democrat Party use to carry around with them. They would use it as an identifier to kill or harass members of the “radical group” (Republicans who thought color did not matter) in order to affect voting outcomes. While we hear of the lynchings of black persons (who did make up a larger percentage of lynchings), there were quite a few white “radicals” lynched for supporting the black vote and arming ex-slaves. It is also ironic that the current Democrat melee is focused on racial differences.

I could go on, but I won’t.

Here is a short video discussing the matter:

  • “…virtually every significant racist in American political history was a Democrat.” — Bruce Bartlett, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), ix;
  • “…not every Democrat was a KKK’er, but every KKK’er was a Democrat.” — Ann Coulter, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (New York, NY: Sentinel [Penguin], 2012), 19.

“Unseemly And Unprecedented” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on former Secretary John Kerry: “What Secretary Kerry has done is unseemly and unprecedented.” He also says: “Secretary Kerry ought not to engage in that kind of behavior.”

POWERLINE: “What Secretary Kerry Has Done Is Unseemly And Unprecedented”

Yesterday morning I revisited former Obama administration Secretary of State John Kerry’s coaching of the powers that be in Iran on the fine art of resistance to the Trump administration. Yesterday afternoon Trump administration Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was asked at a press conference (transcript here) about Kerry’s freelance diplomacy, as Michael Rubin calls it in this excellent New York Post column. Pompeo responded: “What Secretary Kerry has done is unseemly and unprecedented. This is a former Secretary of State engaged with the world’s largest state sponsor of terror…” Going further, Pompeo condemned Kerry’s conduct as “beyond inappropriate.”

Pompeo spoke firmly but diplomatically, as befits the office he holds, but how sweet the sound of Kerry being called out by a Secretary of State seeking to squeeze the Iranians into civilized norms of behavior….

(Watch Ari Fleischer’s reaction)

LEGAL INSURRECTION lays down the law:

“did not deny the suggestion he’s telling the Iranians to wait out Trump until there is a Democratic president again”

[….]

This is serious. Michael Rubin writes at the Washington Examiner:

John Kerry deserves jail for secret Iran diplomacy

Kerry has always been an arrogant and aloof man. During his long career on Capitol Hill, Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle described him as the least-liked senator, an opinion repeatedly affirmed by his own office staff during his long career. He is disdainful of democracy. Simply put, he sees himself as above the law, deserving of privilege and special dispensation not only when he is in government, but also as a private citizen.

Perhaps Kerry believes he is not violating the Logan Act of 1799 which states that: “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

Trump responded Thursday night. Brooke Singman reports at FOX News:

President Trump and John Kerry entered into a war of words on Twitter Friday, with the president suggesting the former secretary of state had “illegal meetings” with the Iranian regime, and Kerry suggesting the commander-in-chief should be more concerned with the Russia investigation.

“John Kerry had illegal meetings with the very hostile Iranian Regime, which can only serve to undercut our great work to the detriment of the American people. He told them to wait out the Trump Administration! Was he registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act? BAD!” Trump tweeted Thursday night.

Democrat Senator Corey Booker Exemplifies Totalitarianism

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In the grilling of Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo, Corey Booker displays classic “thought control.” Dennis Prager rightly warns his listeners not just of Corey (although he does this), but of the tendency of all Leftism to degenerate into this form of fascism.