RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/trump-we-hope-to-work-something-out-on-a-fair-trade-deal-with-europe.html

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said the United States and the European Union had launched a “new phase” in their relationship, saying that the two major economies would start negotiations immediately on a number of areas including working toward “zero tariffs” on industrial goods and further cooperation on energy issues.

“We agreed today first of all to work together towards zero tariffs, zero nontariff barriers and zero subsides for the non-auto industrial goods,” Trump said Wednesday.

The announcement came during a joint press fconference in the White House Rose Garden with Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Juncker said the two leaders agreed that as long as negotiations were ongoing, “we’ll hold off further tariffs and reassess existing tariffs on steel and aluminum” put in place by the Trump administration. “This was a good, constructive meeting,” he added.

The major averages rallied earlier in the day following a report in The Wall Street Journal stating that Trump had secured a number of concessions from the E.U.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average popped more than half a percent to a session high Wednesday afternoon. The NASDAQ rose about 1 percent. The euro also rose, hitting a session high against the dollar.

European Commission spokesperson Kinga Malinowska said that Juncker had not yet made any concessions.

“All I can say is that the talks are ongoing,” Malinowska said in a statement. “President Juncker is working to avert new tariffs. No concessions made.”

Trump said earlier on Wednesday, during a meeting with Juncker, that he hoped “to work something out on a fair trade deal with Europe.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tricky-dick-schumer-1532474954

Spare a thought for Chuck Schumer. The Senate Minority Leader is under enormous political pressure to defeat Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, or at least pretend that he’s trying very hard. His strategy so far is to stall for time and compare the nominee to Richard Nixon. Bear with us; you’ll enjoy this.

As expected, Mr. Schumer has demanded millions of documents from Mr. Kavanaugh’s years in government to push a confirmation vote past the November election. The New Yorker has refused even to meet with Mr. Kavanaugh unless Republicans first agree to let Democrats dive through the Bush and Clinton archives. When he was Minority Leader in 2013, Mitch McConnell met with nominee Elena Kagan within two days.

This Democratic sitzkrieg isn’t likely to work. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota have already said they’ll meet with the nominee, date to be determined. Others running for re-election will likely follow as their opponents back home highlight the pettiness of not meeting.

More substantively, Republicans have no reason to agree to what are unreasonable Democratic demands. Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley is trying to work out a document deal with ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein. But Democrats are seeking literally millions of documents from Mr. Kavanaugh’s years as Staff Secretary in the George W. Bush White House that are irrelevant to his views or his qualifications for the Court.

The White House has said it is willing to produce some 80,000 document pages and 200,000 email pages from Mr. Kavanaugh’s time in the White House counsel’s office. This is more than the 173,000 pages produced for Justice Kagan’s White House service, and the 182,000 pages for Neil Gorsuch’s time in the George W. Bush Justice Department.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/25/vindication-for-carter

Carter Page’s nightmare began exactly two years ago this week.

On July 26, 2016, a reporter with the Wall Street Journal sent him a text, asking the then-Trump campaign advisor about his ties to Russia, including alleged meetings with Kremlin officials: he responded that the suggestion was “ridiculous.” But other media calls followed. Page, a Ph.D. and Naval Academy graduate, rebuffed the inquiries and continued to go about his business as a global energy financier.

What Page did not know at the time is that—aside from unwittingly becoming the latest human slab tossed into the Clinton machine’s meat grinder—his own government was already watching him, perhaps even setting him up. As Team Clinton, the DNC, and the Obama White House ratcheted up the Trump-Russia collusion fairy tale before the presidential election, Page emerged as the villain. In October 2016, at the behest of Jim Comey’s FBI, a secret court gave the government permission to spy on Page. The surveillance lasted one year, during which time his personal and professional life imploded; he was the target of persistent media harassment and even death threats.

Now, thanks to the partial release of documents submitted by the Justice Department to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2016 and 2017, we know that Page is far from a villain: He was framed by Democratic Party operatives (with their own ties to Russia); had his constitutional rights stripped away by the government; was forced to testify before Congress, and to submit to questioning from the FBI and perhaps a special counsel; and endured painful, humiliating public scrutiny while most of the media ignored—even cheered—his plight.

Crimes Against Democracy
Two years later, he has not been charged with any crime.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/russianism-democrat-scapegoating-over-trump-victory-and-presidency/

Trump’s critics need a scapegoat to explain why they haven’t managed to vanquish him.

Russianism is a psychological malady in which furor at Donald Trump’s election victory and presidency — and the ensuing depression resulting from the inability to abort it — finds release through fixation on Russia.

‘Extremely vigorous in our outreach’

The recent orthodox progressive and Democratic view of Russia — until the appearance of Donald Trump — was largely what it had been throughout the Cold War: one of empathy for Russia and understanding of its dilemmas, and shame over supposed right-wing American paranoia over a bogus “Russian bear.”

Obama’s 2009 reset was birthed as a correction to George W. Bush’s modest sanctions against the Putin government for going into Ossetia. What then followed during the Obama administration was the embarrassing red reset-button rhetoric that was usually couched in anti-Bush-administration snark.

Or, as Hillary Clinton put it:

We believe that there are a lot of challenges and threats that we have inherited that we have to address. But there are also opportunities, and we are being extremely vigorous in our outreach. Because we’re testing waters, we’re determining what is possible. We’re turning new pages and resetting buttons.

Then we witnessed a “turning new pages” effort by the Obama administration to downplay Russian aggression and emphasize its own new creative outreach to Putin. They thought the Russian strongman would be charmed by humanitarian sanctimoniousness and the hope-and-change charisma of Barack Obama. Instead, Putin, true to character, saw weakness accompanied by pious sermonizing. That is always a fatal combination when dealing with a brute. And so, Putin proceeded to gather up his easy pickings.

What variously ensued was the inadvertent hot-mic offer of quid pro quo collusion with Putin by President Obama when he was up for reelection. Obama more than fulfilled this promise when, in early 2013 — after Putin’s 2012 hiatus in aggression — he cancelled the final phase of missile defense based in Eastern Europe. There was the iconic but cheap attack on candidate Mitt Romney for supposedly being obsessed with Russia as a geopolitical enemy. The Obama administration showed indifference to the absorption of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. There was also not much anger over prior Russian cyberattacks on the United States. In October 2016, Obama offered a haughty, flat-out dismissal of the notion that Russia could change the way people vote in any election:

There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America’s elections, there’s no evidence that that has happened in the past or that it will happen this time.

http://jamieglazov.com/2018/07/24/glazov-moment-leftist-traitors-accuse-trump-of-trea

In this new Jamie Glazov Moment, Jamie discusses Leftist Traitors Accuse Trump of Treason, analyzing when communists and Sharia-enablers point fingers about loyalty.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch Jamie shed disturbing light on Iranian Woman’s 20-Year Sentence for Protesting Hijab — where he asks: Who will stand for the women and girls brutalized by Islamic Law?

https://spectator.us/2018/07/who-benefits-from-john-brennans-security-clearance/

John Brennan had a tough time when he took his first CIA lie-detector test in 1980. He was asked a standard question as to whether he had ever belonged to an organisation dedicated to the overthrow of the United States government. Not quite, but almost: just four years earlier Brennan, then a student at Fordham University, had cast his first vote for president for the candidate of the Communist Party USA. Brennan had never been a party member—just a Communist voter.

The CIA let him in. A little more than thirty years later, he was appointed by Barack Obama to lead the agency. But now, ex-CIA director Brennan is questioning the patriotism of Obama’s successor, accusing the president of being an agent of Moscow. “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors,’ Brennan wrote on Twitter. “It was nothing short of treasonous.”

Comrade Brennan would know, right? But no—a dumb college kid’s vote for the CPUSA is no more treasonous than a president who takes a less adversarial approach to Russia than Democrats demand. Brennan has evidently never had a good grasp of the U.S. Constitution, whether as a Communist-voting student or the nation’s top spy. That he now turns policy disagreements and personal disgust into “nothing short” of treason is par for the course.

Sen. Rand Paul, the Republican who votes against Trump more often than any other in the U.S. Senate, has called on the president to strip Brennan of his inactive security clearance. Trump is considering doing just that. He’s contemplating depriving Michael Hayden, Susan E. Rice, James R. Clapper Jr., and other former intelligence officials who have been critical of him of their clearances as well. Democrats claim that this is intimidation, though the question on many observers’ minds is: why do so many ex-officials have these clearances in the first place?

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/23/trump-threatens-to-revoke-security

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders today confirmed that President Trump is considering revoking the security clearances of former law enforcement and intelligence officials who are waging a public relations war against the president and his administration.

The list reads like a Rogues’ Gallery of Liars from the Obama Administration: Former CIA Director John Brennan; former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper; former FBI Director James Comey; former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe; and former National Security Advisor Susan Rice. General Michael Hayden, a Bush administration intelligence chief, also made the list.

“The president is exploring the mechanisms to remove the security clearance because they’ve politicized and, in some cases, monetized their public service security clearances,” Sanders said. “Making baseless accusations of improper contact with Russia or being influenced by Russia against the president is extremely inappropriate. And the fact that people with security clearances are making these baseless charges provides inappropriate legitimacy to accusations with zero evidence.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/trump-may-revoke-security-clearances-of-brennan-clapper-mccabe-comey-hayden-and-rice/

The White House is looking into revoking the security clearances of several top Obama-era intelligence and law enforcement officials, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Monday during the daily press briefing.

A reporter asked Sanders about Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) tweets Monday morning, calling on President Trump to remove the security clearance of former CIA director John Brennan and others.Not only is the president looking to take away Brennan’s security clearance, he’s also looking into the clearances of Comey, Clapper, Hayden, Rice, and McCabe. The president is exploring the mechanisms to removing security clearance because they’ve politicized and in some cases monetized their public service and security clearances. Making baseless accusations of improper contact with Russia or being influenced by Russia against the president is extremely inappropriate, and the fact that people with security clearances are making these baseless charges provides inappropriate legitimacy to accusations with zero evidence. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbis-fisa-faults-1532388874

The FBI over the weekend finally released its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications for warrants against former Trump aide Carter Page, and now we know why the bureau resisted disclosure. Even in heavily redacted form, the applications confirm that the FBI relied on dubious partisan evidence to justify its warrant and withheld relevant information from the court.

The applications also vindicate the criticism of the FBI’s surveillance requests that were laid out in February by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes. The committee’s findings were based on a review of the FISA applications, which were still classified at the time. The main Nunes claim was that the FBI made the Steele dossier—which was commissioned by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee—“an essential” part of its initial application. The FISA documents confirm this.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/carter-page-fisa-applications-fbi-steele-dossier/

A salacious Clinton-campaign product was the driving force behind the Trump–Russia investigation.

On a sleepy summer Saturday, after months of stonewalling, the FBI dumped 412 pages of documents related to the Carter Page FISA surveillance warrants — the applications, the certifications, and the warrants themselves. Now that we can see it all in black and white — mostly black, as they are heavily redacted — it is crystal clear that the Steele dossier, an unverified Clinton-campaign product, was the driving force behind the Trump–Russia investigation.

Based on the dossier, the FBI told the FISA court it believed that Carter Page, who had been identified by the Trump campaign as an adviser, was coordinating with the Russian government in an espionage conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.

This sensational allegation came from Christopher Steele, the former British spy. The FISA court was not told that the Clinton campaign was behind Steele’s work. Nor did the FBI and Justice Department inform the court that Steele’s allegations had never been verified. To the contrary, each FISA application — the original one in October 2016, and the three renewals at 90-day intervals — is labeled “VERIFIED APPLICATION” (bold caps in original). And each one makes this breathtaking representation:

The FBI has reviewed this verified application for accuracy in accordance with its April 5, 2001 procedures, which include sending a copy of the draft to the appropriate field office(s).

In reality, the applications were never verified for accuracy.