A bipartisan group of lawmakers is calling on President Trump to delay permanently lifting sanctions on Sudan – a dictatorial African regime with which the former President Obama sought to build a relationship with during his final days in office.

A letter signed by 53 members of Congress urges the Trump administration to hold off on making any lasting decisions on the U.S.-Sudan relationship, especially as key foreign policy positions at the White House and State Department remain unfilled.

The case for keeping Sudan cut off is exceedingly clear to those who are concerned about the country’s atrocious human rights record, unrepentant history as a state sponsor of terrorism, and the fact that the country’s Islamist dictator – Omar al-Bashir – has been on the lam for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide for over eight years now.

“The Sudan government has one of the worst human rights records in the world,” the congressional letter reads. “Over the past thirty years, President Omar al-Bashir has presided over the murder and violent displacement of millions of Sudanese people.”

The reason this is currently being discussed is due to yet another parting gift from the Obama administration. In an executive order signed a week before leaving office, the 44th president also temporarily lifted sanctions on the country – sanctions which had been in place for 20 years.

The prior administration temporarily lifted the economic and trade blockade with the intention of trying to “normalize” relations with the regime, giving the next administration six months – until Wednesday – to decide whether the move should remain permanent.

“I did not support this executive order when it was issued by the Obama Administration and I don’t believe the actions of the Sudanese government warrant any sanctions relief at this time,” co-signer Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Fla., said in a statement.

“The reality is that violence and displacement at the hands of government forces still persists in Sudan, and there has been no credible, widespread evidence of increased humanitarian access to the abused populations.”

“Warming relations and lifting sanctions with a genocidal regime in the final days of President Obama’s term in office is not only deeply upsetting to rights advocates,” wrote Jewish World Watch’s Mike Brand in January, when Obama lifted sanctions. “[I]t is a slap in the face to all those who suffer under Bashir’s reign of terror, the hundreds of thousands who have been killed, and the millions who have been displaced.”

Off the Hill, other voices in the international religious freedom movement have been calling on the U.S. to reverse Obama’s softened stance and retake the harder line against the Sudanese government’s abuses.

In May, Rev. Thomas Reese, S.J., chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, penned a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urging him to put the pressure back on Bashir, citing several abuses from recent memory alone:

Since South Sudan’s secession in 2011, USCIRF has documented a deterioration of religious freedom conditions year after year. During this period, the Sudanese government has arrested nearly 200 Christians, including 14 religious leaders. Of these detentions, three pastors were prosecuted on spurious capital charges, including waging war against the state and espionage.

Sudan remains one of 10 “Countries of Particular Concern” (CPCs) which the commission designates every year – putting it in the same league as other notorious religious oppressors like North Korea, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

More recently, a coalition of seven non-governmental organizations has also called on the State Department to take a serious look at Bashir’s various atrocities, urging that no sanctions should be lifted before the regime meets a long list of requirements.

“Sudan remains a disaster for religious freedom,” Travis Wussow, general counsel and vice president for public policy at the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission told the Baptist Press. “The Sudanese government should not be rewarded with sanctions relief when so many are crippled under the oppressive status quo found throughout the country.” (For more from the author of “Deadline Looms on Obama’s Parting Gift to Genocidal Islamist Thug” HERE)

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New education regulations initiated by former President Obama will go into effect this summer. This worries education experts. The regulations will make colleges and universities financially and legally vulnerable — and some colleges could shut down.

Borrower Defense to Repayment Regulation

The revised Borrower Defense to Repayment (BDR) rule takes effect on July 1. The new BDR makes it much easier for borrowers of student loans to walk away from their debt. The new regulation also puts an already flawed system of measuring colleges’ success on steroids, said Jeff Andrade. Andrade is the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education. He was also the Director of the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education under George W. Bush.

To qualify for debt forgiveness, students must provide documentation supporting their claim. They must prove 1) substantial misrepresentation; 2) breach of contract or 3) fraud. Under the new BDR, the Education Department decides whether a student will repay their debt. In the past, local judges or arbitrators ruled on the issue.

This change could create immediate financial repercussions for the schools. Andrade said the real kicker is that the bar for qualifying a student is very low. Merely an accusation of misrepresentation or breach of contract could trigger immediate financial sanctions on the institution. And colleges are concerned about frivolous claims. It “takes it out of the normal venues for deciding these disputes … and puts it into a venue where nobody knows how they will rule on claims. Colleges don’t know the risks.”

Closing Small Private and Faith-Based Schools

But small private or faith-based colleges face the greatest risk because they don’t have large endowments. The new regulation makes it easier to put those colleges in financial jeopardy before they could defend themselves.

Congress agreed in a July 14, 2016 letter to the U.S. Department of Education. They warned that the proposed rule “could increase tuition (by increasing schools’ legal liability) [and] bankrupt proprietary schools.” Many nonprofit schools could close as a result. This would also limit education options for students. A misrepresentation could result in the Secretary ruling for a group of thousands of borrowers. The cost to taxpayers would be great, even by the Department of Education’s admission. It would be “anywhere from $646 million to $41.3 billion over 10 years.”

Current Financial Responsibility Regulation

The current financial responsibility regulation measures key aspects of schools’ financial strengths. Schools are rated on a scale of 0 to 3.0. Schools rated 1.5 or lower must secure a letter of credit to assure the government they aren’t going under. This is a problem because of many “false positives” triggered by the analyses. In 2014, for example, Georgetown University had an almost perfect score. Then the value of the stocks in its endowment funds dropped. As a result, the university almost had to post a letter of credit of over $25 million. This while the university had endowments of almost $1.3 billion. The current system, said Andrade, “can put even a college with a strong cash flow in financial jeopardy.”

Sometimes a university has to wait for reimbursement of student loans. This can cause the school to be rated financially unstable, said Andrade. “Creditors are less willing to extend to colleges subjected to these sanctions, and some institutions have gone under.” Once again, the greatest risk is to those smaller private or faith-based institutions.

Gainful Employment Regulation

The Obama administration also put in place the Gainful Employment regulation. This regulation stigmatized private career-based programs. As a result, it became harder for borrowers to get financial aid for schools offering those programs.

“Most colleges, … could be doing a better job in preparing students for the workforce and seeing to it that they graduate,” said Andrade. The career-based schools often do a better job at preparing students for the workforce. The Gainful Employment regulation knocks out programs that are producing good results. But it protects programs at public institutions with worse outcomes. Andrade believes that the Left wants to push students out of independent schools. He thinks they want students in directly-subsidized institutions. The Left is making it look like our “K-12 system — which has been a disaster for decades, particularly for the working class and the poor.”

The Threat of the Culmination of These Actions

Right now, the higher education system offers students a lot of options. There are many choices from career-based schools to universities offering almost any program imaginable. Currently, financial aid follows students to their school of choice. But that could change as the new regulations take effect. Some of these policies are threatening opportunities particularly for poor and working class students, said Andrade. “It can destroy the private and faith-based components of our current system of higher education.” (For more from the author of “Obama’s 11th-Hour Education Regulations Worrying Experts” please click HERE)

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Once top-secret documents reveal that the Obama administratipn routinely violated Americans’ privacy while conducting “overseas” surveillance over the past five years. John Solomon and Sara Carter at Circa obtained a ruling issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 26 denouncing the practice. The FISA court is the secret judicial body that oversees surveillance.

The court learned that the NSA was conducting large numbers of prohibited searches of databases. The administration did not disclose the surveillance until then. It had to do that to meet a court deadline for renewing surveillance authorities. The requirement is part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The Circa expose found that more than 5 percent of the upstream searches violated data privacy safeguards. The Obama administration had said it would follow those safeguards in 2011. Instead, surveillance increased by 300 percent.

Defying a Court Ruling

This increase defied a 2011 FISA court ruling. The court said the NSA had to find ways to limit what it collects and how long the data is kept. The FISA court realized at the time the collection was a problem. Searches were being done for the names of U.S. citizens in the databases.

The FISA court also revised the rules that year to prohibit these types of searches without a warrant. Nor longer could intelligence agencies search on an American’s email address or phone number. But the practice continued to occur after 2011. Not just a few times, but routinely and extensively. Some of those searches took place from the White House. Two years later, Edward Snowden disclosed the surveillance.

The FISA court accused the NSA of “an institutional lack of candor.” The ruling called the searches a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue.” The monitoring required no warrant, reasonable suspicion or probable cause. Without those checks, the agency pursued an unconstitutional search and seizure. Part of the opinion, which would have revealed the full extent of the surveillance, was blacked out.

In a responsive notice filed January 3, 2017, the NSA claimed the thousands of improper searches were due to “human error” and “system design issues.”

In April, the director of National Intelligence issued a report on the intelligence community’s use of data gathering techniques and compliance with the FISA process. In 2016, there were 5,288 occasions where the NSA searched for an American in its database. This was a slight increase over the number of those searches in 2015.

Upstream and Downstream Data Collection

However, searches for the metadata of known Americans more than tripled between 2013 and 2016. Searches increased from 9,500 in 2013 to 30,355 in 2016. That was the year the Obama administration may have spied on the Trump campaign,

Section 702 of FISA authorizes both “upstream” and “downstream” collection of data. Upstream refers to data moving through massive data highways within the U.S. Downstream collection snags data as it’s leaving the country. About 9 percent of the data NSA collects comes from upstream searches. In the process of collecting emails, the NSA sweeps up large numbers of emails. They are then stored in vast databases.

The surveillance is for monitoring foreign agents outside of the U.S. (The FBI is responsible for monitoring foreign agents within the U.S.) The FISA court requires “minimization” procedures. This means “masking” the identify of any American incidentally monitored.

The masked version is what is shared with other intelligence agencies. Intelligence official may unmask the name if he thinks he needs to do so to understand the data better.

Unmasking increased at the end of the Obama administration. Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice was caught lying about her involvement in unmasking Trump campaign officials. She refuses to testify to Congress about it.

Congress passed The USA Freedom Act in 2016 to curtail bulk surveillance. But in 2016, the NSA collected 151 million phone records.

The FISA court also had harsh words for the FBI. This is due to the agency disclosing raw surveillance data to sectors of its bureaucracy “largely staffed by private contractors.” It went “went well beyond what was necessary to respond to the FBI’s requests.” The bureau discontinued the practice on April 18, 2016.

Where to Go From Here

The NSA decided on March 20 that it will no longer monitor communications of people who merely mention a foreign intelligence target. Instead, the agency will limit collection to communications between someone and a target. The agency asserts it will delete “the vast majority” of the information it collected through the previous method. The change was announced publicly on April 28, two days after the FISA court’s ruling.

Civil liberties hawkSen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said if this information is accurate, this story “will dwarf all other stories.” It constitutes “an enormous abuse of power.”

The watch dog organization Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the DOJ and the NSA requesting records relating to the unmasking of Trump campaign officials, including former National Security Advisor Susan Rice’s involvement. (For more from the author of “Obama Administration Illegally Spied on Americans for Years” please click HERE)

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