Well, well, well, the Huma Abedin controversy has finally hit the legacy media. Okay, okay — it’s not the Huma Abedin controversy, but it’s one Obama’s court stenographers apparently feel comfortable talking about.

It seems Ms. Abedin, accurately described by the New York Times as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s  ”longtime aide and confidante,” spent her last months at the State Department not really at the State Department. Despite maintaining her title as Secretary of State Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, she was permitted, upon returning to government service from maternity leave in mid-2012, to remain at home in New York with her newborn child and her husband, the disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner — he of the notorious Weiner all aTwitter photos. While the State Department was paying her $135,000 as a “special government employee,” Abedin was also permitted to moonlight as a “strategic consultant” for Teneo, a firm founded by Doug Band, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton. (Teneo, the Times informs us, advises such firms as MF Global, the brokerage firm whose investors were broken by Jon Corzine — the former New Jersey governor and Obama campaign bundler.) In addition, Abedin found time in her busy “special government employee”  schedule to do consultant work for the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation.

With that familiar Clinton flare, Abedin did not disclose her consultant income on government financial disclosure forms. According to the State Department, you see, her new “part-time” position as “special government employee” meant the usual disclosure requirements did not apply to her … notwithstanding that, the Atlantic Wire reports, Abedin continued to be referred to in official documents as deputy chief of staff to the United States secretary of state. The arrangement finally came to an end in March when Ms. Abedin officially left the State Department to head up Mrs. Clinton’s six-person “transition office” — i.e., the transition from secretary of state to what the tongue-in-cheeky Atlantic calls Mrs. Clinton’s “version of private life.”

Apparently not to the great delight of the Clintons, Weiner, as part of his effort to come back from his virtual sex scandal and maybe make a run for New York City mayor, decided to release the couple’s 2012 tax returns. They show that these dedicated public servants made just shy of a half-million dollars last year. Turns out Weiner’s been “consulting” too, but the couple is not saying how much of the haul comes from Abedin’s extracurricular activities while she was still on the government payroll.

With each new revelation, what has always been obvious becomes more pronounced: the State Department’s self-proclaimed final word on the Benghazi Massacre, the risibly named “Accountability Review Board” investigation, is a fraud. Yet, like the rest of the Obama administration’s obstructive wagon-circling, the ARB’s report continues serving its intended purpose: to thwart efforts to hold administration officials accountable. Even on Fox News, which has been admirably dogged covering a scandal the Obamedia has done its best to bury, the refrain is heard: How could the ARB report be a whitewash when its investigation was run by such Washington eminences as Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Admiral Michael Mullen?

The answer is simple: Pickering and Mullen were not chosen by accident; then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tapped them because, to insulate herself, she needed a pair of Beltway careerists held in high esteem by the progressive-friendly Republican establishment. As night follows day, Pickering and Mullen produced exactly the shoddy, politicized report that was expected of them – bleaching away the malfeasance of Clinton, a central figure in the scandal whom they did not even bother to interview.

Mrs. Clinton is a master of this game.

Recall that her top advisor at State was Huma Abedin, a longtime associate of Omar Abdullah Naseef, a rabid Islamic supremacist and financial backer of al Qaeda. For a dozen years, during most of which she was also working for Mrs. Clinton, Abedin worked at Naseef’s Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs – a building block of the joint Saudi regime and Muslim Brotherhood project to promote sharia enclaves in the West, encouraging Muslims to resist assimilation.

Abedin had begun working for then-First Lady Hillary Clinton in the nineties, while a member of the executive board of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at George Washington University. Founded in the early sixties, the MSA is first building block of the Brotherhood’s American infrastructure, and its GWU chapter has quite a history: In 2001, its “spriritual guide” was Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda operative who was then ministering to some of the eventual 9/11 suicide-hijackers. As Patrick Poole has demonstrated, it was in the MSA that Awlaki first cut his Islamic supremacist teeth – as have a number of prominent Islamists, including (to name just two) Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood stalwart turned Egyptian president, and Abdurrahman Alamoudi, a now convicted al Qaeda financier who was a favorite “moderate” Muslim leader of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

Abedin continued at Naseef’s journal until moving to the State Department with Secretary Clinton in 2009. Naseef, a wealthy, well-connected Saudi, was secretary general of the Muslim World League, perhaps the most significant Saudi-Brotherhood collaboration in the world. In addition to founding the journal, Naseef  also started the Rabita Trust, a formally designated international terrorist organization. His partner in that venture was Wael Jalaidan, a founding member of al Qaeda who –whaddya know! – ran the MSA chapter in Arizona. The Rabita Trust that was an important funding source for Osama bin Laden. Ms. Abedin’s close tie to Naseef stems from the fact that he is the patron of her parents – Muslim Brotherhood operatives both. Abedin’s mother, Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin, is a close associate not only of Naseef but of top Muslim Brotherhood sharia jurist, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. In fact, Dr. Abedeen runs an organization, the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child, that is part of Qaradawi’s Union of Good. Formally designated as an international terrorist organization, the Union of Good is a major supporter of Hamas.

President Obama made a number of ill-conceived remarks in his press conference Tuesday, but the topper was the one reported by the New York Times regarding the performance of federal investigators in the aftermath of a 2011 warning from Russian intelligence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev — one of the eventual Boston Marathon bombers — was an Islamic radical:

Mr. Obama said that after the Russian warning, federal agents “had not only investigated the older brother; they interviewed the older brother. They concluded that there were no signs that he was engaging in extremist activity.”

Translation: There is to be no change in our approach — we refuse to acknowledge the causative nexus between Islamic supremacism and the terrorism committed by Muslims. Yes, the agents confirmed that Tsarnaev had adopted the aggressor ideology, but he had not — yet — moved on to aggressive activity. Until activity happens, we take no note of someone’s beliefs … unless they are right-wingers, Second Amendment defenders, or pro-life advocates.

You cannot combat an ideologically driven threat absent an understanding of the ideology and acknowledgment of its catalyzing effects. But President Obama says, no, the FBI shouldn’t take any action until agents have proof that someone is engaging in violent acts – or at least conspiring to do so (since the president favors approaching jihadist terror as a crime, rather than a war, I assume his understanding of “activity” includes conspiracy). This takes us back to September 10^th America.

The Bush administration was no stranger to political correctness when it came to Islam, but President Bush and Vice President Cheney were nonetheless steadfast — heroically so, I think — in their determination that jihadist terror was a national defense challenge, not a crime-wave; that the priority had to be pro-active prevention of attacks, not reactive post-attack prosecution; and that this meant the top imperative was gathering intelligence to thwart those who might be inclined to become violent, even if that inevitably meant Leftists and Islamic supremacists would smear the government as “at war with Islam.”

Distinguished members of the bar, right and left, cast brickbats my way for labeling as the “Gitmo Bar” their friends – other distinguished members of our self-congratulatory profession –who volunteered their services in order to file lawsuits against the American people on behalf of our jihadist enemies in wartime. Later, when President Obama came to office, the same sort of caterwauling occurred in response to what I thought was the commonsense point that we oughtn’t want counterterrorism policy to be made by members of the Lawyer Left who had volunteered to work for the enemy and had labored assiduously to erode the law-of-war approach to counterterrorism (i.e., the Bush approach) – such lawyers having by then been recruited to serve in top policymaking posts in the Justice Department and throughout the Obama administration.

We have been seeing the wages of government-by-Gitmo Bar for over four years now, but maybe never as starkly as in the last few days.

It has now been reported by Fox’s Megyn Kelly that the FBI’s interrogation of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was short-circuited when the Justice Department arranged for him to be given a presentment hearing in the hospital.

In point of fact, it was not the hearing that caused the suspension of vital intelligence-gathering. It was the Obama Justice Department’s decision over the weekend immediately to file a criminal charge against Tsarnaev. Once that was done, the presentment hearing was inevitable. It is required by Rule 5 of the federal rules of criminal procedure. An arrested person must be brought before the nearest available magistrate. The purpose of the proceeding is to get him out of the clutches of law enforcement, have a neutral judicial officer advise him of what he’s been charged with, make certain that he has counsel assigned, and – most significantly – ensure that he knows he is under no obligation to make statements to the police and that, if he has already made some statements, he may stop.

From a national security standpoint, there was no good reason to file a criminal charge so soon and thus trigger procedures that, as everyone involved in the decision well knew, would stop the interrogation. The only reason to do it is political: The Obama administration is philosophically hostile to the law-of-war counterterrorism paradigm. It is determined to regard every terrorist as a criminal defendant rather than an enemy combatant – even if there may be evidence connecting the detained terrorist to our wartime enemies and thus justifying, at least temporarily, an enemy-combatant designation that would allow interrogation to continue for intelligence purposes.

I’ll be debating that question with the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim on Sean Hannity’s radio show at a few minutes after 4, Eastern time.

Misinformation rather than enlightenment has been the order of the day in the investigation of Monday’s terrorist bombing of the Boston Marathon. The anxiety stemming from the attack and the stream of inaccurate news about it is further freighted, moreover, by the FBI’s confirmation that two letters addressed to top political officials — President Obama and Senator Richard Wicker (R., MS) — tested positive for ricin, a deadly poison. As noted below, a man identified as Kenneth Curtis of Tupelo, Mississippi, has reportedly been arrested in connection with the mailings.

Early this afternoon, massive confusion was generated when mainstream media outlets first reported that an arrest had been made in the bombing case, then retracted that claim. CNN, in particular, kept insisting there had been an arrest even after other press agencies denied it. When all was said and done, though, it appeared that no suspect had even been in police custody, much less been formally charged — and that perhaps no suspect has even been identified yet.

This is a common phenomenon in the high profile investigations that follow terrorist attacks. The investigators actually working the case would rather there were no disclosures made about the status of the investigation. At this point, their work is best done in secret — or, at least, as much secrecy as is possible. Otherwise, any conspirators who may not already have fled will be alerted that it’s time to skip town, destroy evidence, and intimidate witnesses. These investigative agencies actually work for the public, however, and the public has an extraordinarily high level of interest in the progress of the case. Thus the agencies have official press agents whose job it is to keep the public reasonably informed without compromising investigative leads and tactics — not an easy job.

Then there is the most unruly and damaging dynamic in the equation: the media and its anonymous law-enforcement sources. It seems every media outlet is in a rabid competition to be first, rather than most accurate, with every breaking development. This combines toxically with the fact that sources who hide behind anonymity — precisely because they are not supposed to be running off at the mouth — have widely varying levels of knowledge about the actual goings-on in the case.

Couple this with the fact that most journalists and many agents are not well-versed in the esoterica of the justice system — in which, for example, “arrest” is different from “custody”; a “suspect” is different from a “person of interest”; and “detention” is different from “apprehension” — and you have the roadmap to error-ridden reporting. The problem is not that reporters and sources are intentionally misleading the public. It is that their information is both less reliable than they think it is and easily given to miscommunication. A potential witness’s voluntary submission to a law-enforcement interview could be mistaken for a suspect’s surrender to police custody. Solid leads on a potential bomber based on video and forensic evidence could be miscommunicated as a solid identification of a suspect. The issuance of an arrest warrant for a person not in custody could be miscommunicated as an actual arrest.

In most circumstances, this would not create torrents of misinformation. Reporters would corroborate new information through multiple, independent sources (rather than dependent sources who may just be echoing the same bad information). They would refrain from publishing until they were sure. But what is happening in Boston is not normal. It is a frenzy. And even worse than its effect of confusing and angering the public is the help it gives the terrorists. The leak-generated misinformation puts pressure on investigative agencies to correct the record; these public corrections give the terrorists insights into the state of the investigation that they would not otherwise have. It makes them harder to catch. It makes critical evidence harder to obtain.

The Obama administration, which generally chokes on the word “terrorism” and fought against applying it to the jihadist atrocities at Fort Hood and Benghazi, is calling yesterday’s Boston Marathon bombing “terrorism.” Its reasoning, coupled with the way the term was rolled out, is intriguing.

Initially, President Obama made a brief statement to the nation last night in which, characteristically, he did not use the word “terrorism.” Moments afterward, however, an unidentified “senior administration official” pronounced that the bombing was a terrorist attack, telling Fox News, “When multiple devices go off, that’s an act of terrorism.”

In point of fact, while bombing is a common tactic of terrorists for obvious reasons, the choice of attack-method is not what makes violence “terrorism.” If, say, the mafia were to use two or three car bombs to rub out several rival gangsters at the same time, that would not be terrorism even though “multiple devices” would be involved. Terrorism is violence directed at political communities — usually, nations and their governments. It is carried out for the specific purpose of intimidating the political community into submitting to the terrorists’ preferred policies, and, significantly, it is almost always ideologically motivated.

That last attribute of terrorism is the cause of the Obama administration’s paralyzing misgivings about the T-word. The president is mulishly determined to cultivate Islamic-supremacist governments and movements like the Muslim Brotherhood. The stubborn problem is that al Qaeda — the only Muslim outfit the administration seems willing to hang the “terrorist” label on — is also Islamic-supremacist. That is, al Qaeda is adherent to the same ideology — based on sharia, Islam’s legal code and societal framework — as the groups the administration considers “allies” and “moderates.”

Organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood have tactical disagreements with al Qaeda about what situations call for the use of violence to advance the supremacist agenda and how quickly sharia should be imposed. At bottom, though, they are in agreement with al Qaeda about the imperatives of imposing sharia, eradicating Israel, destroying the West, and eliminating Western influences from Islamic countries. Islamic supremacism is a mainstream Islamic ideology — held by tens of millions of Muslims, not just a few thousand al Qaeda members and collaborators. Thus, if the administration were to admit that this ideology and agenda catalyze terrorism, they would logically have to admit the problem is much bigger than al Qaeda.

The Obama administration continues to find millions of dollars in aid and materiel for anti-American Islamists, even as it fraudulently claims the infinitesimal “sequester” is requiring draconian cuts in government services for Americans. Topping the list, besides a continuation of Obama’s policy of arming the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt with military aircraft and tanks, are more millions for the Syrian mujahideen “rebels” — inconveniently timed to coincide with the pledge by several “rebel” groups aligned with al Qaeda to replace the Assad regime with a sharia state.

As Obama, egged on by the GOP’s McCain faction, increasingly looks poised to repeat in Syria the debacle they jointly executed in Libya — a policy of empowering Islamic supremacists that led directly to the Benghazi massacre of September 11, 2012, it is worth noting a new UN report reaffirming that the administration’s unauthorized war to topple Qaddafi has resulted in the arming of jihadists throughout the region. As detailed by Israeli National News and the Washington Post:

A United Nations panel says weaponry from Libya is spreading across North Africa to Gaza and Syria “at an alarming rate.” The five-expert committee said in a 94-page report sent Tuesday to the U.N. Security Council that illegal transfers of arms from Libya to armed groups and terrorists have been proven.

The arms trafficking violations involved more than 12 countries and included light and heavy ordnance, such as portable air defense systems, mines, explosive materials, ammunition and small arms….

Libya has over the past two years become a significant and attractive source of weaponry in the region,” since the fall of 41-year Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi in 2011,” the report said. “The lack of an effective security system remains one of the primary obstacles to securing military materiel and controlling the borders.”… The areas into which Libyan arms have flowed included West Africa, the Levant “and potentially even the Horn of Africa,” the report noted. “Illicit flows from the country are fueling existing conflicts in Africa and the Levant and enriching the arsenals of a range of non-state actors, including terrorist groups.” The panel also warned that armed terrorist groups in Libya, who it said are the best financed, are strengthening their position.

Bill Bennett presides as Michael Ledeen and I discuss it, here.

My friend and fellow PJM columnist Michael Ledeen are trying to do it this morning on Bill Bennett’s radio show. Michael and I will be continuing the conversation in Philadelphia next week — details here.