RUTHFULLY YOURS

It has always niggled me as to what the always arrogant 44th President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, actually meant when he was caught on an open microphone telling Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he needed more “flexibility” from the Russians. They needed to give him “space” since “it was [his] last election” but “after ‘[his] election, [he] would have more flexibility.”

Medvedev’s retort was “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

While Medvedev may have understood what Obama was saying, most Americans were left quite bewildered by this cryptic message.

Until now.

Enter the breathtaking information that the most intricate and shady backroom deals were happening both nationally and internationally while Congress and the American public were deliberately kept in the dark, not only by the Obama administration, but also by Obama’s Department of Justice and the very same FBI officials who are now attempting to concoct a fictitious collusion story about Trump.

John Solomon and Alison Spann have discovered that

Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States.

And even though it would have been an unbelievable law enforcement achievement “to have brought down a major Russian nuclear corruption scheme that compromised a sensitive uranium transportation asset inside the U.S. and facilitated international money laundering,” nary anything substantial was done to expose this deep-seated corruption.

For those who have, over the years, watched with horror and ire as Obama usurped power and ran the government like a dictator, the latest revelations are not especially surprising. For in our hearts we always believed that Obama was intent upon destroying this country in as many ways as he could. Now the facts have been established with incontrovertible evidence and they confirm what we always felt given Obama’s unending anti-American stance. An extremely serious national security breach was permitted under his watch.

But now that the smoking guns are being exposed, we also wonder if the few good people who have the power to effect change will now use that power. Will they recall the Psalmist who cried out

“O God, keep not Thou silence; Hold not thou silence, O God: hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God.

For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult: and they that hate thee have lifted up the head.

They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted against thy hidden ones.

When will “righteousness and peace” come together again? When will our country be restored and our faith in our leaders be re-gnited? “How long shall the wicked exult” and “speak arrogantly” as the “workers of iniquity bear themselves loftily”?

Until the swamp is truly cleaned out and our elected officials “stand up for ‘us’ against the workers of iniquity” and ensure that “the right shall return unto justice,” Obama and his ilk (Hillary Clinton, Lois Lerner, Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch, Bill Clinton, Samantha Power, James Comey, and Robert Mueller) will continue to wreak their evil. And we cannot look to the mainstream media to faithfully execute their job.

Today is the anniversary of former president Ronald Reagan signing into law the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The act was the second major law he signed to reform the tax code for the American people.

Republicans and Democrats came together to cut taxes for hardworking families in 1981, and again in 1986 to simplify the tax code, so that everyone could get a fair shake. The rest, as they say, is history.

The economy boomed, launching into one of the largest peacetime economic expansions in history. Dormant small businesses and factories sprung back to life. The famed American Worker produced at unprecedented levels. The median family income rose. And more American products than ever before reached foreign shores, stamped with those four beautiful words: “Made in the USA.”

The 1980s also saw extraordinary ideas transformed into reality by American inventors and entrepreneurs. Many of those creations dramatically improved our quality of life. Others connected us like never before and put an entire universe of information at our fingertips. Still others, like the space shuttle after its first launch in 1981, stretched the bounds of what we thought was possible for humankind.

It was a time of extraordinary optimism — it was truly “Morning in America,” an economic miracle for the middle-class.

A lot has changed since then, especially when it comes to taxes.

While our economic competitors slashed their taxes in hopes of replicating America’s success, our leaders remained complacent or, in some cases, reversed course.

We are now among the highest taxed nations in the developed world. Our tax code and laws have nearly tripled in length since the 1986 reforms. They now span 2,650 pages, with another 70,000 pages of forms, instructions, court decisions, and other guidance.

We have watched our leaders allow other countries to erode our competitive edge, take our jobs, and drain our wealth. And, for the first time in our history, Americans have feared that their children will not grow up to be better off financially than they are.

That era of economic surrender is now over.

In the nine months since I took office as president, we have removed intrusive, job-killing regulations at a record pace. We are leaving lopsided international deals that hurt America like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Paris Climate Accord. We have unleashed American energy by ending the war on coal and approving major projects like the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines. And earlier this month, I signed an executive order to take important steps to free our people from the grip of Obamacare.

And now, unemployment is at a 16-year low. Wages are rising. Manufacturing confidence is higher than it has ever been. The stock market is soaring to record levels. And GDP growth climbed to more than 3% in the second quarter.

The optimism has returned — the sun is once again rising over America.

But our economy cannot take off like it should unless we transform our outdated, complex and burdensome tax code, and that is exactly what we are proposing to do.

Revising our tax code is not just a policy discussion — it is a moral one, because we are not talking about the government’s money – we are talking about your money, your hard work.

According to the Tax Foundation, taxes cost Americans more out-of-pocket than housing, clothing, and food — combined.

Somehow, this has become “normal” in the Land of the Free, but it should not be.

American families should not have to send more money to the government than they spend on building a better life for themselves and their children. You are the ones who carry this nation on your back, and it is time for you to get the relief that you deserve.

That is why we are taking action to dramatically reduce the burden that the sprawling federal tax code has become on our citizens.

Our plan will transform the tax code so that it is once again simple, fair and easy to understand. We want you to spend your valuable time pursuing your dreams, not trapped in a tax compliance nightmare.

We will cut taxes for hardworking, middle-class families.

We will double the standard deduction, which means the first $24,000 of a family’s income will be tax-free. We will also expand the child tax credit. And we will lower rates so that families will keep more of their hard-earned money.

We will also restore our competitive edge so we can create better jobs and higher wages for American workers.

Our plan will provide tax relief to businesses of all sizes, and deliver our small and medium-sized businesses the lowest top rate in more than 80 years.

Finally, we will bring back trillions of dollars in American wealth currently parked overseas.

Today’s tax system foolishly penalizes companies that bring foreign profits back to the United States. Our plan encourages companies to bring this money home, where it can be invested in American companies, American jobs and American workers.

If Congress comes together to enact this commonsense plan, the Council of Economic Advisers estimates that it will raise the annual income of a typical, hardworking American household by an average of around $4,000.

Just imagine the possibilities.

We have the benefit of hindsight as we look back at the three decades since our country’s last major tax reform. We can see what worked and what did not. And most importantly, we can apply the lessons learned to the challenges of today.

The tax cuts and reforms of the 1980s show that when we empower the American people to pursue their dreams, they will not only achieve greatness and create prosperity beyond imagination, they will build an entirely new world.

It is time to ignite America’s middle class miracle once again.

From a Nov. 13, 2010, speech by then-Lt. Gen. John Kelly to the Semper Fi Society of St. Louis, describing a 2008 suicide bombing in Iraq that killed two Marines, Cpl. Jonathan Yale, 22, and Lance Cpl. Jordan Haerter, 20. Gen. Kelly’s son, Second Lt. Robert Kelly, 29, was killed in action in Afghanistan Nov. 9, 2010:

What we didn’t know at the time, and only learned a couple of days later after I wrote a summary and submitted both Yale and Haerter for posthumous Navy Crosses, was that one of our security cameras, damaged initially in the blast, recorded some of the suicide attack. It happened exactly as the Iraqis had described it. It took exactly six seconds from when the truck entered the alley until it detonated.

You can watch the last six seconds of their young lives. Putting myself in their heads I supposed it took about a second for the two Marines to separately come to the same conclusion about what was going on once the truck came into their view at the far end of the alley. Exactly no time to talk it over, or call the sergeant to ask what they should do. Only enough time to take half an instant and think about what the sergeant told them to do only a few minutes before: “let no unauthorized personnel or vehicles pass.” The two Marines had about five seconds left to live.

It took maybe another two seconds for them to present their weapons, take aim, and open up. By this time the truck was halfway through the barriers and gaining speed the whole time. Here, the recording shows a number of Iraqi police, some of whom had fired their AKs, now scattering like the normal and rational men they were—some running right past the Marines. They had three seconds left to live.

For about two seconds more, the recording shows the Marines’ weapons firing nonstop, the truck’s windshield exploding into shards of glass as their rounds take it apart and tore in to the body of the son-of-a-bitch who is trying to get past them to kill their brothers—American and Iraqi—bedded down in the barracks totally unaware of the fact that their lives at that moment depended entirely on two Marines standing their ground. If they had been aware, they would have known they were safe, because two Marines stood between them and a crazed suicide bomber. The recording shows the truck careening to a stop immediately in front of the two Marines. In all of the instantaneous violence Yale and Haerter never hesitated. By all reports and by the recording, they never stepped back. They never even started to step aside. They never even shifted their weight. With their feet spread shoulder width apart, they leaned into the danger, firing as fast as they could work their weapons. They had only one second left to live.

The truck explodes. The camera goes blank. Two young men go to their God. Six seconds. Not enough time to think about their families, their country, their flag, or about their lives or their deaths, but more than enough time for two very brave young men to do their duty—into eternity. That is the kind of people who are on watch all over the world tonight—for you.

This morning President Donald J. Trump tweeted:

He’s referring to yesterday’s news that, as CNN headlined its story on the matter, “Fusion GPS partners plead Fifth before House Intel.”

Fusion GPS is the firm that paid for and disseminated the discredited dossier that former FBI director James Comey briefed President Obama and President-elect Trump about in January. The almost immediate and well-sourced leak of that briefing to CNN is what got the Russia scare really going in January. BuzzFeed published the dossier very soon after CNN’s story ran.

So, as Trump and CNN note, folks at the firm took the Fifth in a House investigation into that dossier and the firm that helped put it together (Fusion GPS executives similarly refused to testify under oath in a separate Senate inquiry). As to the questions of who paid for it, we still have absolutely no idea, although there have been published reports in The New York Times and Washington Post that Fusion GPS does anti-Magnitsky Actwork on behalf of Russia, that the dossier was funded by Democrats, and that the FBI also tried to pay for the dossier. Fusion GPS has also made the unsubstantiated claim that an unnamed Republican donor got the ball rolling on the dossier.

You might think that Russia-obsessed journalists would share the president’s curiosity about who funded the dossier and why Fusion GPS partners are worried about their legal jeopardy. You might think otherwise. Jake Sherman, a Politico senior writer, was utterly shocked to learn that there are questions about the FBI paying for the dossier. To wit:

Fun fact: the FBI was also in the U.S. government when word first got out that they tried to pay for opposition research on the out-of-power party’s nominee! Here’s theWashington Post’s Karen Tumulty:

Before I respond, a quick digression. Sometimes readers or viewers complain that “the media” haven’t covered a story. And it will turn out that the story was covered, deep in one media outlet’s newspaper. Or for a few seconds of a newscast. The Journolisters of Twitter don’t help the story go viral. They don’t dig further. It dies. But when readers complain that the story wasn’t covered, they point to that piece on page D14 and say, “See! We covered it!”

If I were a Fusion GPS-connected journalist desperate to bury news of the firm’s refusal to cooperate with a congressional investigation into Russian meddling in U.S. affairs, that is the approach I would have taken, instead of the one taken by journalists today. The approach they took today was to pretend that the story was made up. Instead, they could have pointed to the story that ran in the Washington Post on February 28 about how the FBI tried to pay the dossier drafter to continue his work:

The former British spy who authored a controversial dossier on behalf of Donald Trump’s political opponents alleging ties between Trump and Russia reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work, according to several people familiar with the arrangement.

When a Twitter interlocutor pointed out to Tumulty that her own paper had published the report that the FBI had tried to pay for oppo on the Republican nominee, she replied:

She’s quoting from the Post story. That story, incidentally, is based on anonymous sources, as all stories these days are. This from The New York Times also says that the FBI tried to, but ultimately did not, pay Christopher Steele for his dossier work. (Read on to get to the part about how the FBI did pay him, according to CNN’s anonymous sources.) It should be the first of many stories digging into how it was possible that the FBI got into the oppo research business on political opponents. As that story itself notes: