TRUMP.

[Silver]

And this:

hands3.jpg (129.15 KiB) Viewed 1707 times

And this:

hands4.jpg (52.71 KiB) Viewed 1707 times

And this:

hand symbol.jpg (68.46 KiB) Viewed 1707 times

[Silver]

There's some history:

hands on.jpg (26.71 KiB) Viewed 1707 times

Over there, too:

putin kiss.jpg (49.29 KiB) Viewed 1707 times

And this:

putin kiss2.jpg (63.15 KiB) Viewed 1707 times

[Joel]

[Joel]

A Washington-based artist and filmmaker briefly illuminated President Donald Trump's Washington hotel with projected messages, including "pay Trump bribes here" and "emoluments welcome." (May 16)

[Joel]

[Silver]

Satan cares little about who actually sits in the Oval Office as long as the secret combination continues to strengthen, and it clearly is. However, I'm sure he delights when the whole country is in turmoil over the current occupant.

https://www.lds.org/general-conference/ ... n?lang=eng

The Canker of Contention
Russell M. Nelson
Of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles
April, 1989

Creator of Contention

To understand why the Lord has commanded us not to “contend one with another,” we must know the true source of contention. A Book of Mormon prophet revealed this important knowledge even before the birth of Christ:

“Satan did stir them up to do iniquity continually; yea, he did go about spreading rumors and contentions upon all the face of the land, that he might harden the hearts of the people against that which was good and against that which should come.” (Hel. 16:22.)

When Christ did come to the Nephites, He confirmed that prophecy:

“He that hath the spirit of contention is not of me [saith the Lord], but is of the devil, who is the father of contention, and he stirreth up the hearts of men to contend with anger, one with another.

“Behold, this is not my doctrine, to stir up the hearts of men with anger, one against another; but this is my doctrine, that such things should be done away.” (3 Ne. 11:29–30.)

Origin of Contention

Contention existed before the earth was formed. When God’s plan for creation and mortal life on the earth was first announced, sons and daughters of God shouted for joy. The plan was dependent on man’s agency, his subsequent fall from the presence of God, and the merciful provision of a Savior to redeem mankind. Scriptures reveal that Lucifer sought vigorously to amend the plan by destroying the agency of man. Satan’s cunning motive was unmasked in his statement:

“Behold, here am I, send me, I will be thy son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor.” (Moses 4:1.)

Satan’s selfish efforts to alter the plan of God resulted in great contention in heaven. The Prophet Joseph Smith explained:

“Jesus said there would be certain souls that would not be saved; and the devil said he could save them all, and laid his plans before the grand council, who gave their vote in favor of Jesus Christ. So the devil rose up in rebellion against God, and was cast down.” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, sel. Joseph Fielding Smith, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1938, p. 357.)

This war in heaven was not a war of bloodshed. It was a war of conflicting ideas—the beginning of contention.

Scriptures repeatedly warn that the father of contention opposes the plan of our Heavenly Father. Satan’s method relies on the infectious canker of contention. Satan’s motive: to gain personal acclaim even over God Himself.

[Joel]

[Silver]

The 2 minute video at the link below should give even the biggest of Alex Jones fans a moment of quiet reflection. This should also silence anybody who complained about a comedian, Colbert, speaking poorly of Trump. Pot-Kettle-Black

https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2017 ... ddy/216487

Trump Ally Alex Jones Lashes Out At H.R. McMaster, Suggests He's Gay And A "Leather Daddy"
Jones: McMaster “Looks Like He Could Suck A Golf Ball Through A Garden Hose”
Video ››› May 16, 2017 5:05 PM EDT

ROGER STONE: I want to raise this question, though. Why is it that General [James] Mattis, General [H.R.] McMaster, John Brennan, formerly of the CIA, Michael Hayden, formerly of the CIA, and James Clapper. Why do these guys all have shaved heads?

ALEX JONES (HOST): Because that’s part of being a leather daddy.

STONE: Is it some secret club or something that they’re in? I mean, it defies the odds of coincidence, that every one of these guys have the same kind of look. There it is. Extraordinary. By the way [McMaster’s] smirk at the end of this kind of gives the whole thing away.

JONES: He looks like he could suck a golf ball through a garden hose.

[Joel]

[Joel]

[Joel]

WikiLeaks cable Robert Mueller delivering highly enriched stolen Uranium to Russia in 2009 https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09STATE85588_a.html

[Silver]

WikiLeaks cable Robert Mueller delivering highly enriched stolen Uranium to Russia in 2009 https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09STATE85588_a.html

The plot, she thickens.

[Joel]

In a private meeting, President Trump allegedly urged Comey to imprison journalists

President Trump asked former FBI Director Jim Comey to lock up journalists for publishing classified information during a February Oval Office meeting, according to a memo written by Comey shortly after the meeting summarized Tuesday by The New York Times.

Trump urged Comey to imprison journalists at the beginning of an exchange during which he also asked the former FBI chief to back off an investigation into then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, according to the story:

Mr. Comey had been in the Oval Office that day with other senior national security officials for a terrorism threat briefing. When the meeting ended, Mr. Trump told those present — including Mr. Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions — to leave the room except for Mr. Comey.

Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.

This isn't the first time President Trump has threatened to curtail press access or punish leakers. On March 20, he tweeted, "must find leaker now!" in response to successive stories about the ongoing FBI investigation into possible collusion between Trump's associates and Russian officials.

This latest revelation is "a disturbing yet unsurprising culmination of Trump's war on the press," Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in an email.

"Reporting on classified information is a bedrock right of journalists, and so I guess it's only natural, given his past statements, that Trump wants to take that away," he said. "Any prosecution of reporters for publishing true information about our government would strike at the very heart of press freedom."

The comments by President Trump "cross a dangerous line," Bruce Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, said in a statement.

"But no president gets to jail journalists," he continued. "Reporters are protected by judges and juries, by a congress that relies on them to stay informed, and by a Justice Department that for decades has honored the role of a free press by spurning prosecutions of journalists for publishing leaks of classified information."

"Comments such as these, emerging in the way they did, only remind us that every day public servants are reaching out to reporters to ensure the public is aware of the risks today to rule of law in this country," he said. "The president’s remarks should not intimidate the press but inspire it."

Perhaps the most troubling thing about the exchange is that it represents an "unprecedented" departure from the practices of previous presidential administrations with regard to leak investigations, said Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. In the Obama administration, reporters were ensnared and subpoenaed in investigations that targeted leakers, not journalists. This is more direct, Simon said.

And it's in line with an analysis conducted by CPJ that found prosecution of journalists in leak investigations is the No. 1 threat to press freedom posed by the Trump administration, Simon said.

"We did our own internal analysis of what we perceived as the greatest potential threats of the Trump administration," he said. "This was at the top."

[Joel]

Report: Russian bank whose CEO met secretly with Jared Kushner helped finance Trump's Toronto hotel

A Russian state-owned bank under US sanctions, whose CEO met with President Donald Trump's son-in-law in December, helped financed the construction of the president's 65-story Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto, according to a new report.

The bank, Vnesheconombank, or VEB, bought $850 million of stock in a Ukrainian steelmaker from the billionaire Russian-Canadian developer Alexander Shnaider, who was constructing the hotel at the time, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

Shnaider initially purchased the stock via his company, Midland Resources Holding, for about $70 million after the collapse of the Soviet Union, according to The Journal.

The money from the sale of that stock to VEB — which The Journal said went through while Russian President Vladimir Putin was chairman of VEB's supervisory board — was used to help finance the construction of the Toronto hotel "at a key moment for the project."

From the Journal:

"After Mr. Shnaider and his partner sold their stake in the steelmaker, Mr. Shnaider injected more money into the Trump Toronto project, which was financially troubled. Mr. Shnaider's lawyer, Symon Zucker, said in an April interview that about $15 million from the asset sale went into the Trump Toronto project. A day later, he wrote in an email: 'I am not able to confirm that any funds' from the deal 'went into the Toronto project.'"

Zucker, Shnaider's lawyer, told The Journal that Midland Resources "has never had any relationship with VEB" and "does not dictate where their purchasers borrow funds." He told Business Insider that the Journal " got their facts all wrong."

"Trump was never a partner," Zucker said. "He never had an equity interest. We licensed his name and there was a contract for him to manage the hotel."

The Trump Organization has distanced itself from the Toronto project, which faced financial difficulties last year. The organization "merely licensed its brand and manages the hotel and residences," it told The Journal in a statement.

The project was initially a joint venture between Trump and Shnaider, who approached Trump in 2004 asking to license the Trump name for the 65-story tower. Trump said at the time that he would "manage the hotel's operations," according to The Journal, while Shnaider and his business partner, Val Levitan, would focus on the development.

Additionally, Zucker claimed, "we had nothing to do with VEB... the infusion of cash [into the hotel] didn't come from the Russians -- Alex [Shnaider] borrowed $350 million from an Austrian bank and invested some of his own" into the project.

Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and a top White House adviser, met with the Vnesheconombank CEO Sergey Gorkov in December, The New York Times reported in late March. Putin appointed Gorkov in January 2016 as part of a restructuring of the bank's management team, according to Bloomberg.

At the time, Kushner was trying to find investors for an office building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Hope Hicks, a White House spokeswoman, told The Times that Gorkov and Kushner didn't discuss the Kushner Tower project, and a White House official said in a statement that Kushner met with Gorkov as part of his role as "the official primary point of contact with foreign governments and officials."

But the meeting was reportedly orchestrated by Russia's ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, who also met with Kushner in December, and it caught the eye of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has invited Kushner to testify about his meetings with Gorkov and Kislyak. The committee is investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 election and whether any members of Trump's campaign colluded with Russian officials.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared to signal during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month that the intelligence community was scrutinizing Trump's business ties to Russia.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on crime and terror, asked Clapper if he ever found "a situation where a Trump business interest in Russia" gave him "concern."

"Not in the course of the preparation of the intelligence community's assessment," Clapper said.

Graham pressed Clapper on whether he had ever come across such a situation, to which Clapper replied, "I can't comment on that because that impacts an investigation."

As Trump praised and defended Putin along the campaign trail, many questioned whether the real-estate mogul had any financial incentives — including business ties or outstanding debt — to seek better relations with Moscow.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

[Joel]

It's been fun to watch! Trump puts on a great show....he makes the hunt so easy =))

[Joel]

[Elizabeth]

http://humanevents.com/2017/05/17/every ... ampaign=nl

"Every time I try to be mad at Trump, the media reel me back in by launching some ridiculous, unprovoked attack. This time, it’s the fake news story about Trump “leaking” classified information to the Russkies.
The president can’t “leak” classified information: It’s his to declassify.
The big secret Trump allegedly revealed is that Muslims might try to blow up a plane with laptops. I already knew that. I read it in The New York Times.
The New York Times, March 22, 2017:
Devices Banned on Some Planes Over ISIS Fears
“Intelligence showing that the Islamic State is developing a bomb hidden in portable electronics spurred the United States and Britain on Tuesday to bar passengers from airports in a total of 10 Muslim-majority countries from carrying laptop computers … two senior American counterterrorism officials said. …”
This totally secret, Deep Throat-level information has been widely published in thousands of news outlets throughout the civilised world. There was yet another round of stories last week with the update that the U.S. is considering a laptop ban on flights from Europe as well.
Hey, you know what might make more sense than banning laptops? How about banning Muslims? Bear with me here, I’m still working out the details, but I’m almost certain a federal judge in Hawaii can’t block a president’s temporary ban on Muslim immigration just because he’s testy with Trump over some campaign statements.

As Northwestern law professor Eugene Kontorovich explained in The Washington Post, courts have never examined a politician’s campaign statements for improper motive, because 1) campaigns are not part of the deliberative process; and 2) to start doing so would open the door to “examinations of the entire lives of political officials whose motives may be relevant to legal questions.”
Nonetheless, Kontorovich says, that is the legal argument being advanced against Trump’s travel ban: “Trump is a bigot, and thus his winning presidential campaign in fact impeaches him from exercising key constitutional and statutory powers, such as administering the immigration laws.”

To preserve their judicial coup, this Monday, the 9th Circuit sent out the geriatric ward to hear an appeal of the Hawaii judge’s absurd ruling. At their ages, there’s a good chance the judges will be dead by the time the Supreme Court overturns them.
Arguing against Trump’s exercise of his constitutional and statutory powers was first-generation American, Neal Katyal. (There are plenty of 10th-generation America-haters. You couldn’t get one of them to argue that we should end our country through mass immigration?)
At oral argument before the three wheezing gargoyles, Katyal announced that, before enforcing federal immigration laws passed by generations of Democrats and Republicans working together in Congress, the president of the United States is required to profess: “Islam is peace.”
There’s a new legal principle!
Asked by one of the crypt-keepers if Trump is the only president who would be prohibited from issuing this precise travel ban because of his statements about Muslims, the smarmy, preening, pretentious Katyal answered: “I think the most important point is, if you don’t say all these things, you never wind up with an executive order like this.”
As lawyers say: Nonresponsive!
But as long as we’re operating under these new rules for determining a U.S. president’s rights and responsibilities, how about looking at everything Trump has said about Muslims?

For example, may the courts consider this quote from September 2015?
Trump: “I love the Muslims. I think they are great people. … Would I consider putting a Muslim-American in my Cabinet? Oh, absolutely. No problem with that.”
Lawyers like Katyal aren’t telling the courts what Trump said; they’re telling courts their own crazy interpretations of what Trump said. No liberal is capable of accurately reporting Trump’s position because the left never understood his position in the first place. As Peter Thiel said, the media take Trump literally, but not seriously, while the people take him seriously, but not literally.
After the San Bernardino terrorist attacks in December 2015, Trump made the perfectly reasonable suggestion that we curtail our breakneck importation of Muslims, some of whom periodically erupt in murderous violence. The media concluded: TRUMP HATES MUSLIMS! Nothing Trump or anyone else said could persuade them otherwise.

Here’s what Trump actually said:
“What’s happened is, we’re out of control. We have no idea who’s coming into our country. We have no idea if they love us or if they hate us. … I have friends that are Muslims. They are great people. But they know we have a problem. They know we have a real problem. ‘Cause something is going on. And we can’t put up with it, folks. …
“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on. … Where the hatred comes from and why — we’ll have to determine, we’re going to have to figure it out. We have to figure it out. We can’t live like this. It’s going to get worse and worse. You’re going to have more World Trade Centers. …”
Throughout the campaign, Trump supporters tried in vain to explain the so-called “Muslim ban” to a hostile media dead set on interpreting everything out of Trump’s mouth in the ugliest possible way. For example, our general policy on Muslim immigration would be “No, thanks!” but there would be exceptions. So Charles Krauthammer can stop worrying about King Abdullah of Jordan.

In March, Trump supporter Andy Dean told a dense CNN anchor:
“He’s talking about the culture of Islam in the Middle East. … We love Muslims in America and they love us. Why? We have a great culture that respects women’s rights. … The thing about Muslims in the Middle East is they don’t respect women’s rights. If a woman wants to get a divorce in the Middle East, that woman could be killed. If you want to leave the religion of Islam in the Middle East, you can be killed. It’s very real.”
To the same blockhead anchor, Trump supporter Kayleigh McEnany had to fill in an edited quote the network had just shown of Trump:
“It’s important to know what happened 15 seconds later. Anderson Cooper said to him, ‘Are you speaking of radical Islam or are you speaking of Islam?’ He said radical; sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, though. So he did say radical Islam. He said it repeatedly during his campaign. He said, ‘I have Muslim friends. I love the Muslim people.’ …”

One of Trump’s vast number of African-American supporters told HLN’s Drew Pinksy:
“I love what (Trump) is doing with the Muslims getting out of the country, because if they really knew what that was about — if they knew that that was about freedom. It was about freedom versus enslavement.”
He’s right. It’s not about religion. It’s not about nationality. It’s about hitting the pause button on bringing in radical Islam’s dysfunctional, misogynist, violent, exploding-airplane culture.
The voters understood Trump. (At least some of us did — barely enough of us to elect him president!) Liberals didn’t. But now the courts are blocking Trump’s exercise of presidential powers based on the left’s own idiotic misinterpretations of what he said." Ann Coulter

[Elizabeth]

" Russian President Vladimir Putin said : “political schizophrenia” has seized Washington, impeding Trump’s ability to function as president.“It’s hard to imagine what else can these people who generate such nonsense and rubbish can dream up next,” said Putin.“What surprises me is that they are shaking up the domestic political situation using anti-Russian slogans,” he said. “Either they don’t understand the damage they’re doing to their own country, in which case they are simply stupid, or they understand everything, in which case they are dangerous and corrupt.”

[larsenb]

" Russian President Vladimir Putin said : “political schizophrenia” has seized Washington, impeding Trump’s ability to function as president.“It’s hard to imagine what else can these people who generate such nonsense and rubbish can dream up next,” said Putin.“What surprises me is that they are shaking up the domestic political situation using anti-Russian slogans,” he said. “Either they don’t understand the damage they’re doing to their own country, in which case they are simply stupid, or they understand everything, in which case they are dangerous and corrupt.”

Thanks for posting, Elizabeth. Putin is right on the money regarding the irrationality directed toward Trump, and what the likely end-result will be.

[Silver]

We are a warlike people. Spencer W. Kimball

More blood and horror in the name of the American people.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/15/ ... re-likely/

MAY 15, 2017
As Trump Cozies Up to Saudi Arabia, War With Iran Becomes More Likely
by PATRICK COCKBURN

Many people view Donald Trump as the most dangerous man on the planet, but next week he flies to Saudi Arabia for a three-day visit during which he will meet a man who surely runs him a close second as a source of instability. This is deputy crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, 31 – the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia since his father King Salman, 81, is incapacitated by old age – who has won a reputation for impulsiveness, aggression and poor judgement in the two-and-half years he has held power. Early on he escalated the Saudi role in Syria, thereby helping to precipitate Russian military intervention, and initiated a war in Yemen that is still going on and has reduced 17 million people to the brink of famine. Combine his failings with those of Trump, a man equally careless or ignorant about the consequence of his actions, and you have an explosive mixture threatening the most volatile region on earth.

Prince Mohammed, who is also defence minister, is not a man who learns from his mistakes or even notices that he has made them. Less than a year after his father became king in January 2015, the BND German intelligence agency issued a warning that Saudi Arabia had adopted “an impulsive policy of intervention” abroad and blamed this on the deputy crown prince whom it portrayed as a naïve political gambler. The degree of alarm within the BND about his impact on the region must have been high for them to release such a document which was swiftly withdrawn at the insistence of the German foreign ministry, but its predictions have been fulfilled disastrously in the following eighteen months.

The deputy crown prince is turning out to be not only a gambler, but one who recklessly raises his stakes when in trouble. Proof of this came in an extraordinary but under-reported interview he gave earlier this month, broadcast on al-Arabiya TV and Saudi TV, in which he threatens military intervention in Iran. “We will not wait until the battle is in Saudi Arabia, but we will work so the battle is there in Iran,” he says. Speaking in highly sectarian terms, he claims that the Iranian Shia leaders are planning to seize Mecca and to establish their rule over all the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. He believes that “their logic is based on the notion that Imam Mahdi will come and they must prepare the fertile environment for his arrival and they must control the Muslim world.” His diatribe is as anti-Shia as it is anti-Iranian and likely to provoke fears among Shia in Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia itself, where Shia make up a tenth of the population, that they will be the victims of an anti-Shia crusade.

It is absurd to imagine that the four or five Shia countries have the ambition or the ability to take over the fifty or more that are Sunni, though Sunni fundamentalists accuse tiny Shia minorities in countries like Egypt, Tunisia and Indonesia of plotting to do so. Prince Mohammed appears to give credence to the theory of a grand anti-Sunni conspiracy orchestrated by Iran, saying that, since the Iranian revolution in 1979, Iran has been trying to “control Muslims in the Islamic world and spread the Twelver Jaafari [Shia] sect in the Islamic world so Imam Mahdi comes.”

There is more at play here than Prince Mohammed whipping up religious and nationalist feelings in Saudi Arabia to secure his own power base and fend off his rivals within the royal family. None of his foreign ventures have so far achieved their aims: in Syria in the spring of 2015 Saudi Arabia gave support to the so-called Army of Conquest, consisting primarily of the al-Qaeda affiliate the al-Nusra Front and its then ally Ahrar al-Sham. This won a series of victories against pro-Assad forces in Idlib province but their success led to Russian military intervention later the same year that was a turning point in the war. Saudi influence was marginalised, something that he blames on “former American President Barack Obama [who] wasted many significant opportunities he could have seized to achieve great change in Syria.” In practice, Saudi Arabia was hoping for US military intervention to enforce regime change in Syria along the lines of Iraq in 2003 or Libya in 2011. Obama was privately critical of Saudi actions and the tradition of the Washington foreign policy establishment of giving automatic support to Saudi Arabia and its allies.

Nevertheless, in Yemen Mr Obama gave backing until the last days of his presidency to the Saudi-led bombing campaign which has been devastating the country since March 2015 but has so far failed to win the war for the Saudis’ local allies. It has brought terrible suffering to the Yemeni population of 27 million, of whom the UN estimates that 17 million are “food insecure” including 3.3 million pregnant and breast-feeding mothers and children, some 462,000 under the age of five, who are “acutely malnourished” or, in other words, starving. Saudi-backed forces are poised to attack the Red Sea port of Hodeida, through which come 80 per cent of Yemen’s imports which make up most of its food supplies. If the port is closed then Yemenis will face the worst man-made famine since Mao Tse-Tung’s Great Leap Forward. Prince Mohammed says the war is all but won, though, mysteriously, in finishing off the other side, “thousands of our troops can fall victims. There will be funerals in all Saudi cities.”

Trump has already ordered greater US support for the Saudi war effort in Yemen, but the deputy crown prince will be primarily bidding for US backing for his confrontation with Iran. Words are already turning into action with reports of the US and Saudi Arabia being at one in planning to stir up an anti-government insurgency among minorities in Iran such as the Baluchis in the south east, something that has been done before but with limited impact.

Saudi leaders were overjoyed by the election of Trump whom they see as sympathetic to them and the Gulf leaders whom he will meet after he arrives in Saudi Arabia on 19 May, before going on to Israel. It is a chilling tribute to the authoritarian instincts of Trump that his first foreign visit as President should be to the last arbitrary monarchies left on earth and to a state where women are not even allowed to drive. On the question of confronting Iran, he is unlikely to be restrained by his Defence Secretary, James Mattis, and his National Security Adviser, HR McMaster, both former generals scarred by America’s war in Iraq, where they see Iran as the main enemy.

The White House is doubtless conscious that the one-time Trump has won universal plaudits in the US was when he fired missiles in Syria and dropped a big bomb in Afghanistan. Trump and Prince Mohammed may be very different in some respects, but both know that fighting foreign foes and waving the flag shores up crumbling support at home.

[Joel]

Donald Trump For President 2016 Snowflake Blinking Holiday Christmas Tree Ornament




https://www.amazon.com/President-Snowfl ... B01JM8J92A

[Joel]

[lundbaek]

The following comes from Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs, Congressional Representative for Arizona CD 5. Prior being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives last November, Andy served more years than I can remember in the Arizona State Legislature, most recently as President of the State Senate. I hope you find it enlightening and interesting. -- Lundbæk

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/freed ... le/2623643

Freedom Caucus member Andy Biggs: False claims against Trump are reaching the height of absurdity

www.washingtonexaminer.com

The false claim that Trump conspired with Russia to engineer the 2016 election has reached the height of absurdity. The media and Democrats are trying to bamboozle the country by conflating several isolated incidents. They have no evidence but have created a story that combines the allegations about the Russians and the firing of FBI Director James Comey.

Claim 1: Trump conspired with Russia to interfere with the election

The first bogus allegation by the radical media and carried forward by many Democrats is that Trump somehow participated with Russia to influence the 2016 election. The advocates of this disinformation hit this off-tune piano key early and often. But Obama-era Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified under oath that there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
The FBI and two congressional committees continue to investigate the extent of Russian activities. Unlike those who keep throwing wet wood on a match and producing smoke where there is no fire, I am content to wait for the outcome of those investigations and not jump to unwarranted and unsubstantiated conclusions.

Claim 2: Trump disclosed confidential information to Russian diplomats

The media and Democrats, sensing that people are not buying their first false Russian claim, have turned to an unnamed source who cites an unseen memo to make their second false claim. They allege that Trump disclosed confidential information to high-level Russian officials. No independent evidence to date corroborates the assertions.
Unlike the Washington Post, CNN, New York Times, and other outlets using unnamed sources, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who were actually in the meeting, publicly deny the reports.
The media have buried the lede. The real problem here is that either there was a criminal leak by someone in attendance at the meeting that jeopardizes national security and stature, or the media has once again grabbed a false story in its zeal to delegitimize the Trump presidency.

Claim 3: The firing of FBI Director James Comey and his memo

The Washington Post was the first to try and get the fire started, but was joined by radical members of the media. Here is a line from a CNN piece: "Comey wrote, quoting Trump in the document, which CNN has not viewed but which was described by the sources."
Democrats keep fanning the wet wood, producing only smoke. In their effort to delegitimize Trump and encourage a never-will-happen impeachment proceeding, they claim that the as-yet-unseen Comey memo is evidence of obstruction of justice.
Oddly enough, the unobservant media failed to acknowledge that an actual witness testified under oath before the Senate. In a recent hearing, Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe said, "There has been no effort to impede our investigation today." That's right – the FBI testified under oath that there has been no obstruction of the investigation.
If Comey believed that his conversation with Trump constituted obstruction, he was obligated to report the offense to his superior (See 18 U.S.C. Section 4).
Democrats looked the other way when 30,000 emails were deleted from Hillary Clinton's server. They do not care that the alleged Russian interference with our election occurred under Obama's administration. The media's double standard for the Trump administration is unseemly. Simply put, the media and the Left have become unhinged over unsourced accusations.

The American people can clearly see there is an unprecedented, orchestrated effort to undermine Trump, in an attempt to subvert the will of the American people. I have never seen this level of fervor in American politics where anonymous sources dictate talks of impeachment, special counsels, investigations and obstruction of justice.

In spite of this incredible divisiveness, Trump has been productive. In the first four months of his administration, he has saved taxpayers billions of dollars by repealing government regulations, aided a rapid rise in economic growth, enforced our nation's immigration laws to help lower illegal border crossings and given us Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. He has an ambitious agenda, and I believe that he will receive more successful outcomes in the future as he works to keep his promises.

Republicans in Congress can keep our promises to the American public by maintaining focus on our agenda to repeal Obamacare, reform tax structure for every American, build the border wall and facilitate creation of jobs and economic growth by reducing additional regulations. I look forward to working with my colleagues and the White House to these ends.

[Elizabeth]

lundbaek, thankfully we have yourself and larsenb ( and a few others) who bring some intelligence and sense to this forum.

[Joel]