There's an old Jewish joke that says the definition of chutzpah is a murderer who kills his parents and then asks the court to have mercy on him because he's an orphan.
Matt Olsen has plenty of chutzpah. He just wrote a Time Mag pro-Hillary piece headlined, "Why ISIS Supports Donald Trump". His bio names him only as "the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center".
A more apropos term would be the head of Terrorist Defense for Islamic terrorists. Here's who Matt Olsen actually is and what he did.
Matthew G Olsen heads the US task force deciding the fate of the remaining detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
While hopes of meeting President Barack Obama's January 2010 deadline for closing the camp have ended, Mr Olsen and other US officials have been meeting at secure locations to try to resolve the outstanding cases.
Translation, free terrorists, free terrorists and free yet more terrorists.
For Obama, freeing Al Qaeda terrorists from Gitmo was a major priority and Olsen was his guy for getting it done. Olsen urged closing Gitmo. And terrorists, deadly figures, continue being shuttled out of Gitmo.
Matt Olsen's task force has approved the transfer of more than 100 Guantanamo prisoners to other countries and 42 have already gone.
Yes, this is the man barking that Trump is a friend to ISIS and that Hillary Clinton is the best choice for national security.
Here's Congressman Frank Wolf on Olsen.
I believe Mr. Olsen exercised questionable judgment and made misleading statements while serving as the special counselor to the attorney general and executive director of the Obama Administration's Guantanamo Review Task Force, where he led the interagency process to implement the president's executive order that led to the release of a number of dangerous terrorist detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
Dozens of high risk terrorist detainees recommended for release by the task force led by Mr. Olsen were released abroad to dangerously unstable countries, including Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan. As then-ranking member and now chairman of the House Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations subcommittee--which funds the Justice Department, Federal Bureau of Investigations, Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Marshals Service and which helped fund the NCTC's predecessor, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center--I was disturbed by decisions and statements made by Mr. Olsen in 2009 while he led the task force.
These concerns have deepened based on new information that has come to light in recent articles from Newsweek, The Washington Post, The National Journal and The Weekly Standard. These reports have raised troubling questions about Mr. Olsen's leadership of the task force and his actions in response to White House influence.
Additionally, my personal interactions with Mr. Olsen, as well as these subsequent news reports, lead me to conclude that he was not forthright with the Congress and may have changed detainee assessments under political pressure from administration officials. I believe these are troubling concerns which deserve a thorough investigation and should give the Senate serious pause as it considers who should lead the NCTC. I have visited the NCTC on several occasions and have met with a number of its former directors, as well as the former and current directors of National Intelligence. I have seen firsthand the critical work that is done by the center and fully understand the need for an independent, capable and principled director to lead the operation.
There are three concerns that have led me to oppose Mr. Olsen's nomination. First, it is clear to me that in order to achieve the president's promise to close Guantanamo Bay during his first year in office, Mr. Olsen may have been susceptible to the immense political pressure placed on the interagency task force to re-classify detainee threat levels. Second, it has become clear that Mr. Olsen's task force may have altered some detainee assessments--overturning Department of Defense assessments--in order to clear and expedite the release of a large number of detainees. Third, I have recently learned that Mr. Olsen was not forthright with me and my staff about the effort to release a number of Uighur detainees to northern Virginia in 2009.
And there's lots more there. Suffice it to say that if ISIS supports anyone, it's the candidate likely to put people like Matt Olsen in critical national security positions.