Trump Doubles Down on His Claim That Obama Created Islamic State

By Christine Rushton. Donald Trump doubled down Thursday on his accusation that President Obama created Islamic State, insisting that he didn’t simply mean that Obama’s troop draw-down in Iraq left behind chaos in which the terrorist group thrived.

The Republican nominee first called Obama the “founder of ISIS,” another term for Islamic State, during a rally Wednesday in Florida. He was asked Thursday in an interview on CNBC whether that was appropriate.

Trump responded: “He was the founder of ISIS, absolutely.”

Islamic State grew out of Iraq’s Al Qaeda affiliate founded around 2004, a half-decade before Obama took office. Its capabilities ebbed and flowed over the next decade as the group merged and split with other extremists. Around 2013, it increasingly began carrying out attacks in Iraq, and the group began overtaking large swaths of territory in both Iraq and neighboring Syria a year later. Islamic State has also claimed responsibility for attacks elsewhere, branching out as coalition-led forces roll back its territorial gains in the Middle East. (Read more from “Trump Doubles Down on His Claim That Obama Created Islamic State” HERE)

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GOP Rep: Obama Responsible for Manipulated Intel About ISIS

By Julian Hattem. President Obama and other senior administration officials created a political climate that led intelligence officials to create warped reports about the United States’s fight against Islamic extremists, a leader of a Republican task force studying the matter said on Thursday.

“They wanted a good news story,” Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), one of three GOP lawmakers leading a House task force into alleged intelligence manipulation at the Pentagon’s Central Command, told The Hill.

“Is there a memo from Barack Obama saying, ‘Don’t send me bad news’? We haven’t yet found that,” he added.

“But in every organization I’ve ever been a part of … leaders set a culture and the team that works around that leader understands the expectations of that leader,” Pompeo said. “Here that led to manipulation of an intelligence product that was extremely important to keeping our kids safe.”

The comments magnify the criticism in an initial report published by the task force on Thursday that concluded that Centcom reports about the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were “consistently more optimistic” than analysts on the ground. (Read more from “GOP Rep: Obama Responsible for Manipulated Intel About ISIS” HERE)

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