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Was Elliott Abrams Deceived on Newt? January 27, 2012 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: I mentioned his name yesterday --Jeffrey Lord was in the political office of the White House during the first term of Reagan, maybe both terms. Jeffrey Lord now writes at the American Spectator.Jeffrey Lord, like me, didn't understand all this stuff at Newt yesterday. AP has a story referring to me now as "conservative radio titan."And they describe me as trying to defend Newt on this yesterday, and in the process, nevertheless, recounting all of the things that Newt had said. I wasn't trying to defend Newt,...

As Ronald Reagan used to say: Well. Yesterday we took note of former Reagan State Department official Elliott Abrams' piece over at NRO that went after Newt Gingrich on his relationship with Reagan. While voting regularly with Reagan as a young congressman from Georgia, Gingrich, claimed Abrams, "often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides and his policies to defeat Communism." Abrams then goes on to cite " a famous floor statement Gingrich made on March 21, 1986." Or sort of cites it.  In fact, I'm sorry to say, what appears to be going on here is that Elliott...

As Ronald Reagan used to say: Well. Yesterday we took note of former Reagan State Department official Elliott Abrams' piece over at NRO that went after Newt Gingrich on his relationship with Reagan. While voting regularly with Reagan as a young congressman from Georgia, Gingrich, claimed Abrams, "often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides and his policies to defeat Communism." Abrams then goes on to cite " a famous floor statement Gingrich made on March 21, 1986." Or sort of cites it. In fact, I'm sorry to say, what appears to be going on here is that Elliott...

I like Elliott Abrams. Big time. But…gee. Elliott…Elliott…Elliott. Mr. Abrams is in the news for this piece over at National Review Online Sounds saleable, yes? Ex-Reagan State Department aide cites Newt criticism on Reagan. There's a problem with this story. [Snip] Never… not once… did Elliott Abrams ever say to me something along the lines of "that SOB Newt said X." Never. I never heard it from Elliott, and perhaps even more to the point I never heard it from a colleague in our office. One would hear things about, say, then Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter or some such. The...

A key Bush administration official is disputing the Obama administration's contention that there were no understandings between President George W. Bush and then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on the issue of continued West Bank settlement construction. In an op-ed piece which appeared in Thursday's editions of The Wall Street Journal, Elliott Abrams, who served under Bush in the National Security Council and who held a series of discussions with the Israeli leadership, said that Bush and Sharon did strike a deal which constituted U.S. acquiescence to continued construction in Israeli settlement blocs that Jerusalem intended to keep under any final status...

Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen Are PhDs and Middle East Experts Who Did Some Lobbying. They Thought They Were Doing What Washington Insiders Always Do. Thomas O’Donnell didn’t reveal his job when he phoned Keith Weissman in 2004 and got the policy analyst’s wife. He says he didn’t want to scare her. When Weissman returned the call and found out O’Donnell was an FBI agent, his first reaction was to attempt a joke: “What did I do?” “I’m sure you didn’t do anything,” O’Donnell told him. He wanted to meet that day, for five or ten minutes, and get Weissman’s...

Covert US group plots to isolate 'rising' Iran Farah Stockman, Washington January 3, 2007 A SELECT group of US officials has been quietly co-ordinating actions for nearly a year to counter the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, including increasing the military capabilities of Arab allies such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The group, known as the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group, is also giving covert help to Iranian dissidents and building international outrage towards Iran by publicising its alleged role in a 1994 terrorist attack in Argentina. Pentagon officials involved with the group intend to...

Top White House posts go to Jews Nathan Guttman, THE JERUSALEM POST Apr. 25, 2006 After appointing Joshua Bolten to be the White House chief of staff, US President George W. Bush nominated another Jewish staffer, Joel Kaplan, to serve as Bolten's deputy, putting him in charge of the daily policy planning. The fact that White House policy is now in the hands of two Jews is not seen as significant by activists in the American Jewish community. "He is simply appointing the best people for the job," said Nathan Diament, who heads the Washington office of the Orthodox Union....

In a step toward resuming U.S. peacemaking efforts in the Mideast, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will send two senior envoys to the region on Tuesday even amid uncertainty about stricken Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Assistant Secretary of State David Welch and Elliott Abrams of President Bush's national security council staff, will look into arrangements for a Palestinian election Jan. 25 among other issues on the Mideast agenda. They were to have met last week with Sharon's top advisers, but Welch and Abrams postponed their trip after the prime minister suffered a second, and devastating, stroke. Rice notified Mahmoud...

WASHINGTON - Elliott Abrams, a special assistant to the president and an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, has been appointed deputy national security adviser with a focus on promoting global democracy and human rights. President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, also announced Wednesday that Faryar Shirzad will continue to serve in an expanded role as deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs. Abrams, who becomes national security adviser for global democracy strategy, will continue work on Israeli-Palestinian affairs in concert with Hadley and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Abrams has served as special assistant...

Michael Hirsh Jan. 25 - Natan Sharansky can bestow no higher praise than to call George W. Bush an honorary “dissident.” And the Israeli cabinet minister says he is elated that the U.S. president, in his second inaugural speech last week, appeared to fully embrace Sharansky’s vision of foreign policy. “It’s clear to me that he read my book,” Sharansky, a squat cannonball of a man with a heavy Russian accent, told NEWSWEEK. “I only wish that my mentor, Andrei Sakharov, were alive to see this,” Sharansky added, referring to the Soviet nuclear scientist who risked his life and career...

New York ON A THURSDAY they had the book party. It was a simple affair: just family, friends, coworkers, and journalists. They came to Ambassador Joseph Wilson's house, nestled in the ritzy Palisades neighborhood of Northwest Washington, to celebrate the release of his first book, The Politics of Truth. One thing Joe Wilson keeps track of is his "Notoriety Quotient," or the amount of attention he receives from the media. And that Thursday it seemed to be on the rise. For the past week The Politics of Truth was mentioned in the same breath as Ron Suskind's The Price of...

It was an e-mail we weren't meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that "the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level"—this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we're not supposed to know the...

WASHINGTON - Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, has been pegged as a possible leaker of the name of CIA (news - web sites) operative Valerie Plame to a syndicated columnist, according to a new book by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, Plame's husband. In "The Politics of Truth," to be published Friday, Wilson says Libby is "quite possibly the person who exposed my wife's identity," according to The Washington Post, which obtained an early copy. Wilson writes that a "workup" of his background was done by the White House in March 2003, after his public...

Every Tuesday morning during the Iraq war Washington's opinion-makers and journalists knew there was only one place to be: at the "black-coffee briefings" held at the American Enterprise Institute, a fortress-like building on M and 17th streets, opposite the main offices of the National Geographic magazine. Technically, AEI is a thinktank. More than that, though, it is the headquarters of the intellectual movement known as neoconservatism. Its staff includes famous names such as Richard Perle, Irving Kristol and Newt Gingrich. The magazine Weekly Standard, the neocon bible, is published at the same address. Black coffee was not strictly compulsory at...

<p>NEW YORK--The timing couldn't have been better. The U.S. is soon likely to go to war in Iraq in no small part because of the arguments of thinkers who have graced the pages of Commentary magazine over the years, opposing appeasement and urging a strong U.S. military presence in the world--to face down tyrants and spread democracy. And here was the City University of New York hosting a conference this week to discuss the 57-year-old magazine and its legacy.</p>

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2002/12/02/national2032EST0775.DTL (12-02) 17:32 PST WASHINGTON (AP) -- Iran-Contra figure Elliott Abrams, who received a pardon from the first President Bush for his role in the scandal and has served in the White House for over a year, has been promoted to a key post among the current President Bush's national security aides. Abrams was appointed to lead the National Security Council's office for Near East and North African affairs. The senior director job oversees Arab-Israeli relations and U.S. efforts to promote peace in the troubled region. His appointment, which does not require Senate confirmation, was announced Monday by Bush's...

The Republic Is Not Ungrateful: That phrase was the caption of a Thomas Nast cartoon that defended President Ulysses S. Grant from calumny. I couldn't find an image online, but you get the idea. I thought of it this morning when I read this short item in the Washington Post about the promotion of Elliott Abrams to the position of Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs at the National Security Council. Abrams, as you may recall, served as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America in the Reagan Administration. In that position he led the fight for...

Familiar figure is Bush’s new man for the Middle East: Elliott Abrams By Matthew E. Berger WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 (JTA) — When Jewish leaders plan their first meeting with the National Security Council’s new director for the Middle East, there will be little need for introduction: The American Jewish world knows Elliott Abrams and — possibly more importantly — Abrams knows them. Named last week as the NSC’s senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs, Abrams is a familiar face in the Jewish world for his work on Soviet Jewry and issues of international religious freedom. Abrams,...