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So what's Ben Rhodes been up to these days? His unmaskings and leaks are over, he doesn't have Seb Gorka to lie about, and his failures as a national security official have pretty well been exposed. I kid you not: he hasn't been idle. His latest scheme is launching a "shadow" National Security Council, called "National Security Action," co-chairing the operation with Jake Sullivan. Showing that he was always the one running things in the Obama White House, despite his creative writing major, his past career as a failed novelist, and his lack of national security experience, he's herded a...

Appalling as the Benghazi, AP, and IRS scandals are, this dwarfs them all. This puts US national survival, and hundreds of millions of lives at stake. The head of Russia’s National Security Council has arrived in the US on a two-day visit for top-level talks on key stumbling blocks in bilateral relations. He will also deliver President Putin’s response to a letter President Obama sent in April. Putin aide Yury Ushakov confirmed on Tuesday that Patrushev is carrying the presidential letter and is scheduled to meet Obama. Among the US officials Nikolay Patrushev will meet during his trip is National...

The Obama Administration held talks with Sheik Abdullah Bin Bayyah, the vice president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, in the White House. The Investigative Project reported: Radical Egyptian cleric Yusuf Qaradawi is considered so radical that the United States bans him from entering the country. Qaradawi, considered the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, has called for the killing of Jews and Americans. That history makes the June 13 White House meeting with Sheik Abdullah Bin Bayyah all the more inexplicable. Bin Bayyah is vice president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), a group founded...

President Obama delivered a soaring eulogy for the late Richard Holbrooke today, calling him a "leading light" of U.S. diplomacy. But ... the president's warm remarks belie a far more complex relationship between the President and Holbrooke...Attention also turned to his tumultuous final years, when Holbrooke was portrayed as a disruptive force within the Obama administration, whose relationship with top American and foreign officials had chilled, and whose professional tenure was nearly over... The authors mine interviews with people who knew Holbrooke in Kabul, Islamabad, New York, Brussels, and Washington—including his wife Katie Marton, Gen. David Petraeus, and Secretary of...

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Dennis Ross, who served as US President Barack Obama's Middle East adviser from 2009 to 2011, has revealed in a new book to be published next week that national security adviser Susan Rice is largely responsible for worsening ties with Israel amid the controversial Iran nuclear deal. In his new book "Doomed to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship From Truman to Obama,” excerpts of which were posted by Politico on Thursday, Ross writes that Rice's "combative mind-set" made relations between Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu even worse than they were. For one thing, the ex-Middle East adviser reveals that Rice...

If the Bergdahl uproar feels creepily reminiscent of the Benghazi uproar, or the Syrian "red line" uproar, or the choose-your-own- Obama -foreign-adventure uproar, it's because they all have a common denominator. This is what happens when political hacks formally take over foreign policy. It's the "formal" point that bears some meditation. Barack Obama isn't the first president to make foreign-policy decisions on the basis of domestic political calculations. He does, however, win the distinction of being the first president to utterly disregard—to treat with contempt—the institutions and procedures that were designed to help the commander in chief insulate the serious...

SCENE LAST NIGHT: Less than a mile or so from Chabad Lubavitch's HQ at 770 Eastern Parkway, around 80 Hillary for America supporters gathered at the home of former White House Jewish Liaison Jarrod Bernstein and Hildy Kuryk, currently communications director at Vogue, to hear from the Clinton campaign's senior advisors including manager Robby Mook, vice chairwoman Huma Abedin and finance director Dennis Chang. SPOTTED: Recent Chairman of the Conference of Presidents Bob Sugarman, Obama mega-bundler Sarah Kovner, Tusk Ventures' Seth London, Anya Hoerburger of Intermedia Partners, Samantha Maltzman, Jill Strauss, Samantha Vinograd of Goldman Sachs and formerly at office...

Full title: EXCLUSIVE: Deputy of banned suicide-bomb-endorsing cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi had White House meeting with National Security Council staff --------------------------------------- The UK and U.S. have banned Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who leads the anti-Israel International Union of Muslim Scholars. The Obama administration invited that group's VP, Abdallah bin Bayyah, to a private meeting on the day it announced support for Syria's rebelsThe organization ended its December 2012 board meeting by calling for the end of Israel and the return of its lands to the PalestiniansHours after MailOnline began inquiring with the National Security Council about its meeting with bin Bayyah, the cleric's...

A White House national security official was fired last week after being caught as the mystery Tweeter who has been tormenting the foreign policy community with insulting comments and revealing internal Obama administration information for over two years. Jofi Joseph, a director in the non-proliferation section of the National Security Staff at the White House, has been surreptitiously tweeting under the moniker @natsecwonk, a Twitter feed famous inside Washington policy circles since it began in February, 2011 until it was shut down last week. Two administration officials confirmed that the mystery tweeter was Joseph, who has also worked at the...

Fox News is claiming to have CONFIRMED that a seven-page email exchange occurred among top officials in the weeks just after the Benghazi attack. The email exchange was to come up with a media strategy regarding a Fox News report from September 27, 2012, that concluded the Obama administration knew within 24 hours that the Benghazi attack was indeed a terrorist attack. Those on the email exchange were Obama’s former Deputy National Security adviser Denis McDonough, current CIA chief John Brennan, and presidential adviser Ben Rhodes. The email exchange, characterized as ‘stunning’, is being withheld by the State Department citing...

(CNN) – Susan Rice, United States ambassador to the United Nations, will replace Tom Donilon as President Barack Obama's national security adviser, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

WASHINGTON — A White House official says Tom Donilon is resigning as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser and will be replaced by Susan Rice. Rice is currently the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She has been harshly criticized by Republicans for her initial accounting of the attacks on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, which later proved to be incorrect.

(CNN) – Susan Rice, United States ambassador to the United Nations, will replace Tom Donilon as President Barack Obama's national security adviser

In the last few days, Obama administration officials have frequently faced the question: Is the fighting in Libya a war? From military officers to White House spokesmen up to the president himself, the answer is no. But that leaves the question: What is it? In a briefing on board Air Force One Wednesday, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes took a crack at an answer. "I think what we are doing is enforcing a resolution that has a very clear set of goals, which is protecting the Libyan people, averting a humanitarian crisis, and setting up a no-fly zone," Rhodes...

Yesterday, we posted a photo of Abdul Rahman Ali Issa Al-Salimi Al-Harbi, a Saudi national who was a ‘person of interest’ in the Boston marathon bombings. In that photo, Al-Harbi doesn’t appear to be the least bit concerned about his fate. Now we have another photo (h/t Diana West) of Alharbi at the hospital, smiling while standing next to what appears to be a Saudi diplomat...

"My time in the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply disillusioning experience." It was close to midnight on Jan. 20, 2009, and I was about to go to sleep when my iPhone beeped. There was a new text message. It was from Richard Holbrooke. It said, "Are you up, can you talk?" When I called, he told me that Barack Obama had asked him to serve as envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He would work out of the State Department, and he wanted me to join his team. "No one knows this yet. Don't tell anyone. Well, maybe...

Obama Fires Top General Without Even a Phone Call Daniel Halper January 25, 2013 10:26 AM President Barack Obama fired General James Mattis, the head of Central Command, without even calling the general to let him know he was being replaced. "I am told that General Mattis was travelling and in a meeting when an aide passed him a note telling him that the Pentagon had announced his replacement as head of Central Command. It was news to him -- he hadn't received a phone call or a heads-up from anyone at the Pentagon or the White House," Thomas E....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama will name close aide Tom Donilon as his new national security adviser on Friday in a move that could have implications for the struggli

November 2, 2012 The Smoking Gun of the Benghazi Cover-up By Pat Buchanan 11/2/2012   On June 6 of this year, a bomb planted at the U.S. compound in Benghazi ripped a 12-foot-wide hole in the outer wall. On June 11, the British ambassador's motorcade was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, wounding a medic and doctor. The next day, the ambassador was gone and the British Benghazi post was closed. At the same time, the Red Cross, after a second attack, shut down and fled the city. "When that occurred," says Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, who headed the military...