Steven Sotloff spokesman blasts White House handling

◼ A spokesman for Steven Sotloff’s family contends the slain American journalist was sold to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant by Syrian rebels and says the Obama administration “could have done more” to save him. - Jonathan Topaz/Politico

Appearing on CNN Monday evening, Barak Barfi said that his sources in the region have told him one or more of the Syrian rebels sold Sotloff to ISIL for $25,000-$50,000. He referred to them as “so-called moderate rebels, that people want our administration to support,” a jab at lawmakers and political figures — including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and many others — that have suggested arming the Syrian rebels.

Barfi, a research fellow at the New America Foundation, reserved stronger criticism for the Obama administration, whom he accused of spreading inaccuracies and failing to do enough to secure Sotloff’s release. The White House has confirmed two separate videos released in the last month showing an ISIL militant beheading Sotloff and fellow captured U.S. journalist James Foley.

“We know that the intelligence community and the White House are enmeshed in a larger game of bureaucratic infighting and Jim and Steve are pawns in that game and that’s not fair,” he said, in a reference to Foley.

Barfi also said that “the administration has made a number of inaccurate statements,” including that the Sotloff family was kept “regularly informed” regarding Steven and that the hostages were often moved to different locations.

Greta Reveals Shocking Story Of White House Trying To Silence Her For Reporting On Benghazi

◼ Speaking on her On the Record program on Friday, September 5, Van Susteren claimed that “the Obama administration’s behavior post-Benghazi has been weird, like they are hiding something.” - Jeffrey Meyer/Newsbusters



The Fox News host continued by insisting that the White House was deliberately targeting her network for daring to ask questions about Benghazi:

Since day one of Benghazi, Fox News has aggressively investigated. It hasn’t been easy. It's more like pulling teeth trying to get answers from the Obama administration...Remember the days right after the attack, the State Department had a conference call to brief all in the media and excluded Fox News? When confronted, State Department apologized and said it was oversight. Really? An oversight? Well, it happened again a short time later. This time the CIA giving a media briefing and guess who was specifically excluded? You got it. Fox News.

Van Susteren went one step further and maintained that “Fox News is being punished for aggressively asking questions, doing our jobs” and argued that the Obama administration pressured Fox to back down from its Benghazi coverage:

When reporter Jennifer Griffin said she was told that there was a stand down order at Benghazi, I got a weird call from the Obama administration trying to pressure me to get Jennifer to back down on her report. I thought the call from the Obama administration was dirty.

The Fox host concluded her “Off the Record” commentary by hitting the White House one final time for its repeated refusal to turn over all pertinent information on Benghazi:

As recently as April after the administration said it turned over all the information an email surfaces that had been withheld in the face of repeated requests. Are you suspicious? I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t born yesterday.

BOOM! POLITIFACT CATCHES OBAMA IN A LIE IN YESTERDAY’S MEET THE PRESS INTERVIEW

WASHINGTON POST GIVES IT FOUR PINOCCHIOS



◼ Spinning Obama’s reference to Islamic State as a ‘JV’ team - Glenn Kessler/Washington Post

Question: “Did the president underestimate ISIS [the terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] when he referred to them in an interview only a couple months ago as a JV squad and making a reference to National Basketball Association basketball teams like the Lakers?”

◼ Yesterday on Meet the Press, Obama told Chuck Todd that he was not specifically referring to ISIL in his infamous JV quote from the New Yorker in January - The Right Scoop

TODD: “Long way, long way from when you described them as a JV team. Was that bad intelligence or your misjudgment?”

OBAMA: “Keep in mind I wasn’t specifically referring to ISIL. I’ve said that, regionally, there were a whole series of organizations that were focused primarily locally, weren’t focused on homeland, because I think a lot of us, when we think about terrorism, the model is Osama bin Laden and 9/11.”

But Politifact disagreed and gave the above statement by Obama a big fat LIE after contacting the author of the New Yorker piece in which the quote was originally published...

And there it is. A big fat lie.

◼ We rate the statement False. - POLITIFACT

◼ WashPost Awards Obama Press Secy ‘Four Pinocchios’ For His Defense of Obama’s ‘JV’ Comments - Newsbusters

Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler took aim at White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on Wednesday, September 3 and the result wasn’t pretty. At issue was Earnest’s attempt to clarify remarks made by President Obama during an interview in January where he labeled the terrorist group ISIS as a “JV” team.

Despite the press secretary’s best efforts to argue that Obama was “not singling out ISIS” when he called them “JV”, Kessler made clear that nothing could be further from the truth and gave Earnest four Pinocchios for his efforts.

◼ Obama said in 2008, “I mean, words mean something. You can’t just make stuff up.” - Washington Free Beacon

Why Obama Can’t Claim He Never Called ISIL ‘JV’

Commentary‘s Pete Wehner recently ◼ eviscerated that claim, calling it “demonstrably untrue.” Wehner quoted Obama’s original remarks, which were in response to David Remnick pointing out that “the flag of Al Qaeda is now flying in Falluja”–and that flag was an ISIL flag.

The Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler has also given the White House’s defense of the “JV” comment four pinnochios.

Wehner writes:

The problem is in this whole process the president of the United States is distorting the truth. He’s doing so willfully. But this deception will not only fail; it will further undermine his credibility, which is already at a low ebb. As Mr. Obama said in 2008, “I mean, words mean something. You can’t just make stuff up.”

Mr. Obama is at war with reality, and reality is winning.

DOJ Investigation of Ferguson Police: Fair and Impartial?

◼ It’s not enough that the Justice Department is investigating the shooting of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, MO police officer. Now it’s opening up a “pattern and practice” investigation of the entire Ferguson police force. The big question: Is this Justice Department capable of conducting a fair and impartial investigation? - Hans A. von Spakovsky/PJMedia

...Our review of the backgrounds and experience of the lawyers working in the Special Litigation Section, combined with my own experience working in the Civil Rights Division, convinced me that almost all the lawyers in the Section harbor an active hostility towards law enforcement. That makes it difficult to have confidence in the impartiality and objectiveness of any investigation the Special Litigation Section conducts in Ferguson.
__________________
Hans A. von Spakovsky is a Senior Legal Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and a former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department. He is the coauthor of the book “Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk”.

He is also John Fund's co-author for "OBAMA'S ENFORCER: Eric Holder's Justice Department." Learn more about Eric Holder's Justive Department, meet John Fund, get a copy of the book, and get it signed October 12th at Humboldt GOP's "MEET THE AUTHOR' end of summer fundraiser.

Barbara Boxer re-election run looking unlikely

◼ It's not just that she has less than $200,000 in her campaign account, compared with $3.5 million at this stage before her last election fight. Some comments from those who know the 73-year-old senator are also telling. - SF Chronicle

"She is not running for re-election," said one longtime Democratic fundraiser with deep ties to Boxer, who spoke only on background.

State Democratic Party Chairman John Burton, Boxer's longtime friend and mentor, says she has not informed him of her intentions. But at a Democratic Party fundraiser in San Francisco on Thursday night, co-hosted by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Kamala Harris, Burton told the crowd, "When we meet here four years from tonight, we could be looking at one California governor and one U.S. senator."

◼ BOXER MAY DROP 'SENATOR' FOR 'MA'AM' - William Bigelow/Breitbart

...Prospective candidates on the GOP side include two candidates capable of self-funding: Rep. Darrell Issa and business executive Carly Fiorina. Fiorina lost to Boxer in 2010.

HOW BREITBART NEWS STOPPED THE PRESIDENT'S AMNESTY POWER GRAB

◼ In an interview with Chuck Todd of NBC News' Meet the Press, President Barack Obama blamed the crisis of unaccompanied minor children at the border for prompting his decision to break his promise to use executive action to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants by the summer's end. - Joel Pollak/Breitbart

... “The truth of the matter is that the politics did shift midsummer because of that problem,” Obama said, in an interview to air Sunday.

Obama's reversal has infuriated amnesty activists, who feel betrayed and are vowing to use protest and civil disobedience to press their case. It has also outraged conservatives, who regard Obama's planned appropriation of executive powers as unconstitutional, and who regard his decision as a nakedly political calculation designed to save troubled Democrats. Yet Obama is correct: "the politics did shift" because of the illegal alien children.

And Breitbart News did more than any outlet to draw attention to the problem--not just that children and teens were crossing the border in unprecedented numbers, but that they were being warehoused in extremely tough conditions at Border Patrol facilities, where agents were struggling to manage a humanitarian crisis brought on, many felt, by the Obama administration's own policies and loose talk about amnesty for illegal immigrants.

On June 5, Breitbart News' Brandon Darby, editor of Breitbart Texas, broke the story--with exclusive images...

The photographs soon became a national sensation. The story was picked up by rival outlets--not conservative news sites alone, but liberal sites like the Huffington Post and mainstream media outlets as well. The images of gaunt, exhausted, desperate children and mothers crowded into cells shocked the nation--and brought hordes of reporters from network and cable television news to the Texas border to document more of the story.

The reporters of Breitbart Texas did not stop there. They continued to lead the way in exploring and describing the arduous journey that the children had made, and the deadly hazards that awaited them even after crossing the porous U.S.-Mexico border.

Those stories--amplified by the Drudge Report and echoing in other outlets across the country--made the lack of border security impossible to ignore, changing the immigration debate.

The most telling sign that the border crisis had political consequences was Dave Brat's stunning upset victory over House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the 7th congressional district primary in Virginia. From then on, Republicans began making their opposition to amnesty clear--and Democrats began to panic.

That is what led to Obama's reversal--and the original reporting from Breitbart, arguably the scoop of the year, deserves credit.