"Seventeen different instances of government agency involvement."

Via the Right Scoop, a video companion to Jillian Kay Melchior’s must-read today at NRO about the Kafkaesque government gauntlet run by “True the Vote,” a nonprofit devoted to training people to be election monitors. Why might an org like that attract federal scrutiny? Catherine Engelbrecht, the group’s founder, thinks it’s because she’s an active [...]

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The fallback defense.

Sharyl Attkisson hinted last night on Twitter that she would have something “interesting” on Benghazi today.  The CBS reporter didn’t disappoint.  Although it’s not exactly a blockbuster revelation, the change in tone in White House trial balloons in its defense of the Benghazi debacle is stunning: Obama administration officials who were in key positions on Sept. [...]

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"I have to go back 40 years to Watergate when Nixon put out his edited transcripts to the conversations, and he personally went through them and said, 'Oh, let's not tell this, let's not show this.'"

We heard from one half of the Watergate-exposing journalistic duo this week on the AP scandal, and now the other half weighs in on the supposedly waning Benghazi debate.  The White House released 100 pages of e-mails that went around the administration on 9/14 — but oddly not on 9/12 or 9/13 — less than [...]

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"FBI says AQ (not AQIM) was involved and they are pursuing that theory.”

The White House finally released the e-mail string that led to the creation of the talking points for the Benghazi terrorist attack that somehow completely missed the fact that it was a terrorist attack.  Did that succeed in having the Obama administration’s argument that it reflected the best intelligence at the time?  Not if you read [...]

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Throwing elbows?

Coming as it does amid tensions sparked between the US and Russian security services by the Boston Marathon bombing, this should get a big hmmmmm.  Russia took the unusual step of arresting an American attache to the US Embassy in Moscow for espionage: Russia’s security services say they detained a U.S. diplomat they claim is a [...]

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Stovepipe Central.

Yesterday, the Boston Chief of Police told the House Homeland Security Committee that the FBI and DHS never warned them about Tamerlan Tsarnaev or informed him of his six-month sojourn to Dagestan, where radical Islamist networks operate. When asked if that information would have been useful, Chief Davis responded affirmatively. The FBI responded by pointing [...]

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FBI looking more closely at 6-month trip to Dagestan.

“Why are we still having problems connecting the dots?” asked House Homeland Security chair Michael McCaul, and he asked one of the right people.  In a hearing this morning, McCaul invited DHS co-creator and former Senator Joe Lieberman to analyze the issues of stovepiping that the 2002 consolidation was supposed to address, in the context [...]

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Coincidence?

Connection or coincidence? The FBI and Russian investigators have begun to plumb the potential links between former Gold Gloves boxer-turned-terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev and a now-dead Canadian boxer-turned jihadi named William Plotnikov. Plotnikov fought in Dagestan for an Islamist terrorist network and was killed by Russian forces just days before Tamerlan returned to the US. CNN [...]

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"You f***ing asshat.”

Via Raw Story and Mediaite, enjoy as a local confronts a representative from one of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s favorite sites. There are two ways to respond to a crank. One: Rebut him point by point. That’s effective when done correctly, but often it requires patience and easy recall of available facts in order to spot the [...]

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Suspicions.

Is this a reference to mystery-man “Misha”? To Tsarnaev’s wife, who allegedly seemed not as surprised by what happened as she should have been? To some as-yet unnamed figure who showed these two degenerates how to build something a little more advanced than Al Qaeda’s magazine described? Or to someone else? Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) [...]

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"It’s still not clear exactly what did this.”

The FBI briefed the Senate yesterday and today on the progress in the Boston Marathon bombing case, but more questions than answers may have arisen from it.  The Boston Globe quotes multiple sources from within the briefing that the FBI didn’t just get one warning from Russia about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, they got warned repeatedly — [...]

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Be sure to let the FBI know.

He did? We certainly suspect this might be the case, given Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s unusual six-month sojourn to Dagestan and Chechnya, but, er … no one has actually established that as fact. At least judging by media reports, the current case theory postulates that Tsarnaev self-radicalized, and apparently approached bombmaking with the same auto-didactic enthusiasm.  And yet, Secretary [...]

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But he was on the ... welfare list?

First, everyone wondered how Tamerlan Tsarnaev could have left the country without triggering an alarm after a Russian warning to the FBI in 2011 about his radicalization.  Yesterday, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said that Tsarnaev’s travel did set off warning bells, at least when he left.  Last night, though, CNN reported that Tsarnaev had never been on [...]

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Hmmmm.

An important follow-up to Lindsey Graham’s claim yesterday that Tsarnaev didn’t ping the federal watch list before his trip to Dagestan because of a spelling error. The Free Beacon asks a good question: Is Napolitano suggesting here that DHS knew when he left, but not when he came back? Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said [...]

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Democrats hardest hit.

Take some comfort in the fact that this will almost certainly be the last dumb meme in the gun-rights debate for a long time to come.  After the Tsarnaev brothers allegedly planted bombs at the Boston Marathon, shot a cop to death in an ambush, and then wounded several more in a gun battle, the [...]

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And what happened while he was there?

After discovering that Russia had alerted the FBI in 2011 to suspicious activity involving Tamerlan Tsarnaev, critics have asked how the FBI could have missed the now-dead suspect in the Boston Marathon for so long. In Russia, they’re asking similar questions about their own security services, after Tamerlan’s trip to Dagestan became known over the [...]

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CIA and FBI have plenty of them.

For a while, it appeared that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev might not recover fully enough to answer questions from interrogators.  Boston Mayor Thomas Menino suggested that might be the case over the weekend.  Yesterday evening, though, news outlets reported from sources within law enforcement that while Tsarnaev might not be talking, he was writing responses to questions [...]

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Lurkers.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a 26-year-old Chechen immigrant, also harbored an increasingly alarming hatred of his adopted country. “He said in Russian, ‘I don’t like what America is doing,’ ” a Latvian neighbor told The Post yesterday, recalling a chat he had with the Boston bombing suspect, who was killed early yesterday in a shootout with police [...]

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Why.

Once the FBI learned the identities of the two brothers today, the FBI reviewed its records and determined that in early 2011, a foreign government asked the FBI for information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The request stated that it was based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and [...]

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Lockdown.

I’d like to tell you where things stand as of noon ET but no one seems quite sure. Police were on the lookout for a Honda with Massachusetts plates, suggesting that Tsarnaev’s on the run, but the car’s now been recovered. Meanwhile, I keep seeing tidbits on Twitter suggesting he might be holed up somewhere [...]

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Whodunnit?

5 p.m. ET, all across the dial. The feds announced this morning that they’re planning to release images of the two suspects from the surveillance video sometime today. Presumably that means at the presser itself or shortly before or after; once they’re online, they’ll be posted below. A key detail via the Globe: “The official [...]

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"Substantial progress."

If you believe John King, there’s surveillance video from Lord & Taylor department store of someone carrying and “perhaps” dropping a black bag near the site of the second bombing. What that means, I take it, is that they don’t have video of the drop itself but still frames of someone with, and then without, [...]

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Questions.

They certainly should have plenty of questions to answer in the press conference starting momentarily. Expect plenty of questions about the “foreign” patient held as a “person of interest” at a local hospital for one, and more on the raid on an apartment in nearby Revere covered by local media overnight. Mostly, though, people want [...]

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