Secure Freedom Minute

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.      

Ronald Reagan wanted to bankrupt a Communist enemy seeking our destruction. He told our allies they could help the Soviet Union build a Siberian gas pipeline or they could do business with us. U.S. government lawyers said he couldn’t use the International Economic Emergency Powers Act – known as IEPPA – “extraterritorially.” He ignored them. The rest is history: the USSR is no more.

Now, government lawyers are telling Donald Trump he can’t use IEEPA to prevent federal retirement funds from enabling the Chinese Communists’ ambitions to destroy us. Yesterday, Mr. Trump acknowledged they’re also trying to terminate his presidency.

Trump China advisor Michael Pillsbury says the Chinese are “laughing at us,” contemptuous that we’re so corrupt, we’ll actually reward them for their pandemic. If President heeds the lawyers, the Communists will, indeed, laugh – all the way to the bank named BlackRock or Goldman Sachs.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.      

We rightly hear a lot these days about the heroic service being provided by health care workers in the frontlines of the fight against the virus the Chinese Communist Party deliberately unleashed on the rest of the world.

Unless, that is, they conclude – on the basis of firsthand experience and analysis of available data – that the lock-downs imposed nationwide have not been justified and are now causing immense and unwarranted harm.

According to YouTube, two California doctors recently violated the company’s “community guidelines” by reaching such conclusions in video-taped remarks. According to its CEO, “Anything that goes against World Health Organization recommendations would violate our [community standards] policy.”

We’re in real trouble if an international agency that’s been a puppet of Communist China is allowed to dictate what we know about the attack it unleashed on us and the appropriate response to it.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.      

Senator Tom Cotton believes the Chinese Communist Party deliberately sent overseas hundreds of thousands of people from Wuhan and elsewhere in China to ensure its virus – and the accompanying devastation – would be spread worldwide.

Even before that revelation, many Americans thought the CCP should be punished for its misconduct that made this pandemic so costly. Especially if Sen. Cotton is right, they would be furious at the prospect that our military and civilian federal employees would be forced to reward the perpetrators.

Yet, unless they act quickly, many federal officials and lawmakers – whose own retirement funds are managed by the Thrift Savings Plan – will have to invest them in Chinese Communist companies. An open letter sent to President Trump recently points out that among those companies are ones that threaten us.

Go to PresentDangerChina.org to tell our leaders that must not happen.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.      

When this traumatic period’s history is written, one public figure will stand out as having presciently and courageously warned of the threats we are facing from the Chinese Communist Party. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton often is assailed for making observations that flout the prevailing conventional wisdom, only to be proven right.

That’s likely true of his latest accusation that the CCP “deliberately and consciously” allowed vast numbers of Chinese to travel abroad after it determined how dangerous the Wuhan virus was, but before the rest of us had a clue. The CCP did it malevolently, Sen. Cotton contends, to infect and damage the rest of the world, rather than contain the suffering and cost within its own borders. 

If Sen. Cotton’s right about this charge, too, it would constitute an epic crime against humanity and the CCP perpetrators must be punished.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.      

When the Iranian regime last year threatened to kill Americans in Iraq, President Trump issued a stern warning. And when its surrogates in Iraq did just that, he retaliated by taking out the mullahs’ top general, Qasem Soleimani.

Lately, Iranian gunboats have been menacing US warships in the Persian Gulf. President Trump has issued another warning: Vessels engaging in such threatening behavior will be sunk. My guess is that other senior figures will pay a price, too.

Faced with crushing US sanctions, a severe drought, a Biblical-scale plague of locusts and the devastation wrought by the Chinese Communist Party virus, the ayatollahs may think it’s time to precipitate apocalyptic attacks against this country and Israel.

All the more reason to make the express object of American policy not just punishing the regime in Tehran, but helping the Iranian people bring it down.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.      

John Solomon is one of America’s best investigative reporters, having broken stories for years that have rocked the political establishment and shaped our history. His latest revelation may be one of his most important ever.

On April 22nd, Solomon reported at Just the News about a natural treatment that the U.S. Army’s highly regarded biodefense research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland has demonstrated is effective in “slowing and halting” even worse diseases than the Chinese Communist Party virus, having been successfully tested by it against Ebola and Marburg.

If tests now underway at Ft. Detrick on this extract of the oleander plant prove it works against another “enveloped virus,” officially known as COVID-19, we just may have what it takes to begin reopening America quickly and safely – namely, the confidence we all can go back to work, school and normal life. Stay tuned.   

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.      

In this pandemic crisis, President Trump is wrestling with unenviable choices including immigration, reopening the country, maintaining the Navy’s readiness and the investment of federal retirement funds in malevolent Communist Chinese companies.

Mr. Trump has to balance competing interests, often involving public health considerations versus the need to resuscitate the economy and/or protect the national security. If there is any rule of thumb as to how to resolve such dilemmas, it probably should be “America First.”

In practice, that would mean we should do the following: Put all foreign immigration on hold for sixty days. Implement the phased reopening plan Mr. Trump announced last week, supported by aggressive use of promising therapies to reduce the risks, especially for the Navy and other military services to maintain readiness. And don’t underwrite our enemies by investing public pension funds in problematic Communist Chinese businesses.  

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.      

Mort Klein is the President of the Zionist Organization of America, the most robust Jewish advocacy group in the country. His parents survived the Holocaust and he became a tireless opponent of anti-Semitism and defender of America, Israel and their bilateral relationship.

Mr. Klein consequently rightly opposes the nomination of Dianne Lob to chair the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. She formerly chaired HIAS, a group that used to help resettle Jews in the United States. Under Ms. Lob’s leadership, however, HIAS became preoccupied with making money on government contracts by resettling mostly unassimilable Muslims here.

Were Dianne Lob actually to get the job, she’d surely promote the hard Left’s efforts simultaneously to dominate and vilify American Jews, while currying favor with Sharia-supremacist Muslims and their fellow travelers. That would be terrible for the Conference of Presidents, for Israel and for America.

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

“It’s no accident, Comrade” is a traditional Communist response when something bad happens – meaning, the regime in question caused it. One has to wonder whether that explains recent, ominous developments that accrue to the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party.

Consider Hong Kong. For over a year, mass demonstrations proved that widespread popular opposition to the repressive Communist regime in Beijing would not surrender to its threats or actual coercion. Suddenly, the CCP virus ended such public gatherings. And now fifteen of their leaders have been arrested, presaging more crackdowns.

Then, in March, several Taiwanese naval vessels visited Palau, an island without COVID-19. Suddenly, members of their crews were diagnosed with the disease, sidelining their vessels, just as Chinese threats to Taiwan intensify. The USS Theodore Roosevelt was similarly stricken after a port call in Vietnam last month.

Are all these accidents, Comrades?

This is Frank Gaffney.

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Efforts to dismiss credible people like Senator Tom Cotton as “conspiracy theorists” remind me of former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy’s observation that, “Every conspiracy begins with a conspiracy theory.”

Sen. Cotton has warned for weeks that the Chinese Communist Party conspired to conceal the true provenance of its virus and the pandemic it spawned. That’s no longer a “theory.” It’s a fact. So, apparently, is the conclusion that the CCP virus came out of a laboratory in Wuhan, not some nearby “wet market.”

Now, the so-called “smart people” insist that the virus that came from the PRC lab was not engineered to be a biological weapon. We’ll see. What’s no conspiracy theory is that the Chinese Communists have an illegal biological warfare program and that they have learned much about its utility from the damage the CCP virus has done to America. 

This is Frank Gaffney.