Free Republic

The Trump administration on Monday will formally approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline, according to media reports, finally ending a years-long series of starts, stops and delays, and kicking off the kind of massive infrastructure project the president promised during his campaign.

Halfway there.... It’s not a gigantic line item in the federal budget, but don’t get caught up in the Washington way of thinking: A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money! It’s $10 billion. That’s lots and lots and lots of real money. And while cutting half of it might only be a blip on the radar screen as far as the overall federal budget is concerned, it’s would represent around 10 percent of the UN’s budget if Trump and Tillerson really do eliminate it.

State Department staffers have been instructed to seek cuts in excess of 50 percent in U.S. funding for U.N. programs, signaling an unprecedented retreat by President Donald Trump’s administration from international operations that keep the peace, provide vaccines for children, monitor rogue nuclear weapons programs, and promote peace talks from Syria to Yemen, according to three sources. The push for such draconian measures comes as the White House is scheduled on Thursday to release its 2018 budget proposal, which is expected to include cuts of up to 37 percent for spending on the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International...

Fox News anchor Heather Nauert has been hired by the State Department to be its spokeswoman, according to a report Saturday.Nauert accepted the job this week, Bloomberg News ...

Judicial Watch at CPAC: Scandal Matters to the American People Federal Court Hearing Set for Next Week on Clinton Email Scandal U.S. Gives Soros Groups Millions to Destabilize Macedonia’s Government JW Goes to Court After Army Stonewalls on Opiate Use by Americans in Afghanistan U.S. Gives Soros Groups Millions to Destabilize Macedonia’s Government Even as we pursue the truth about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails from a recalcitrant State Department, we are learning of another of the department’s nefarious activities. Our Corruption Chronicles blog has the story . The U.S. government has quietly spent millions of taxpayer...

As part of his proposed budget, President Trump will instruct federal agencies on Monday to assemble a spending plan for the coming fiscal year that includes sharp increases in Defense Department spending and "drastic cuts" to domestic agencies such as the State Department, the EPA and other non-defense programs, so that he can keep his promise to leave Social Security and Medicare alone, according to four senior administration officials cited by the NYT. The budget outline will be the first move in a campaign this week to reset the narrative of Mr. Trump’s turmoil-tossed White House. Coming one day before...

At this point it is no great surprise that the Trump administration is the victim of an attempted "soft coup" led by so-called career politicians, most of whom are liberal, Obama/Clinton loyalists, staffing the various agency buildings sprinkled around Washington D.C. As we noted a few days ago, here is just a small sample of what has been leaked by these career politicians in just the past couple of weeks: {..snip..}

The State Department legal office prepared a four-page memo for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warning of the dangers of leaking by State Department employees. It promptly leaked, to me. That’s only the latest sign that the relationship between the Trump administration political appointees and the State Department professional workforce is still very much a work in progress. The Feb. 20 memo by State Department acting legal adviser Richard Visek to Tillerson is entitled “SBU: Protecting Privileged Information.” The SBU stands for Sensitive But Unclassified, a designation used on documents that are not technically secret but also not supposed to...

The much-ballyhooed Vault 7 Opening Deadline, Feb 19th, has come and gone everywhere on planet Earth. I love Assange, I don't care how wirey or bleached his hair is, I don't care how wraithish his frame: The man comes through with the goods; when he says something big will happen? Big things happen. This time..? Zip, zilch, NADA. What gives? There has got to be a reason for this. The election in Ecuador..? I'm not OWED anything, I don't like the Entitlement Mentality. It's just that THIS time, it's all different.

..Again, if you’ve followed the internal dynamics of the players, and their ideological intentions over time, you can see a clear motive to undermine King Abdullah (Jordan), al-Sisi (Egypt), Netanyahu (Israel) and President Trump – by stirring up domestic oppositional extremists (ie. The Muslim Brotherhood) within each nation. (Reuters) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met secretly a year ago with the leaders of Egypt and Jordan in a failed attempt by the Obama administration to convene a wider regional summit on Israeli-Palestinian peace, Israel’s Haaretz daily said on Sunday.... Jan 20th – President Trump takes office. Jan 26th – President Trump...

The State Department Swamp was partially drained today. Secretary of State Tillerson fired Clinton’s rogue, self-described Shadow Government. trump-welcomes-tillersonMaking good on a Trump campaign promise, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson drained the Clinton swamp snakes, aka Obama administration holdovers. Thus the personnel responsible for the corrupt handling of Clinton’s emails and the Benghazi cover-up have left the building. Lurking in the Shadows In the Clinton State Department, a rogue shadow government existed in secret from the 7th floor. These policy makers publicly boasted about their secretive operations. And you can bet that some of them have been responsible for much...

While Rex Tillerson is on his first overseas trip as Secretary of State, his aides laid off staff at the State Department on Thursday. Much of seventh-floor staff, who work for the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources and the Counselor offices, were told today that their services were no longer needed. Remember, the "7th Floor" of the State Department was the 'SHADOW GOVERNMENT'.

While Rex Tillerson is on his first overseas trip as Secretary of State, his aides laid off staff at the State Department on Thursday.  Much of seventh-floor staff, who work for the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources and the Counselor offices, were told today that their services were no longer needed. These staffers in particular are often the conduit between the secretary’s office to the country bureaus, where the regional expertise is centered. Inside the State Department, some officials fear that this is a politically-minded purge that cuts out much-needed expertise from the policy-making, rather than simply...

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions today asking Sessions to consider convening a grand jury or bringing charges against Hillary Clinton’s former IT guy, Bryan Pagliano. Pagliano was subpoenaed to testify before the committee last year but refused to appear on two occasions. After the second refusal, the Oversight Committee voted to hold Pagliano in contempt. Chaffetz’ letter to AG Sessions reads in part, “Because Pagliano’s job functions included supporting mobile computing issues across the Department, he was uniquely positioned to answer questions regarding State Department policies and practices...

State Department documents released through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the government watchdog Judicial Watch reveal, contrary to Obama administration claims, the State Department knew as early as Sept. 12, 2012 that the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya was a "direct breaching attack." It was not sparked "under the cover of a protest" or in response to an anti-Islamic YouTube video. 

Obama officials and the establishment media continue to wave the scalp of resigned National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, trying to squeeze every last drop of anti-Trump narrative from the matter.As I had said privately, Flynn was not long for remaining as NSA. It's not because he's a bad guy, and accusations that he was compromised by Russian intelligence are as absurd as the Trump dossier BuzzFeed published last month. It's just that Flynn wasn't ready for prime time; hopefully his replacement will be.So here's the latest.The New York Times published a report last night claiming "Trump associates" had repeated contacts with...

The CIA’s War on Trump by Cliff Kincaid on December 12, 2016 You couldn’t fault Donald J. Trump for concluding that the CIA is out to get him even before he starts his presidency. Former CIA officials Michael Morell, Michael Hayden and Philip Mudd have all denounced him. Plus, former CIA operations officer Evan McMullin ran against him as an independent presidential candidate. Obama’s director of the CIA is John Brennan, who recently disclosed that he voted for the Communist Party (CPUSA) ticket when he was in college. He was hired by the CIA anyway and quickly rose through the...

Donald Trump promised during the campaign to get tough on radical Islamic terror groups as well as force Iran to renegotiate terms on Barack Obama’s nuclear deal. The next executive orders from the president may address both pledges — and create more controversy. According to Reuters, Trump will designate the entire Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), expanding current sanctions applied at the moment to only its Quds Force: A designation of the entire IRGC as a terrorist group would potentially have much broader implications, including for the 2015 nuclear deal negotiated between Iran and...

President Donald Trump has squashed Eliot Abrams’ hopes of being picked for a crucial State Department post. Abrams had emerged as a possible contender for Deputy Secretary of State, it was reported on Monday, and even met with Trump to discuss the position, according to Politico. Trump, however, reportedly vetoed Abrams’ appointment after learning Abrams had been a vocal critic during the campaign. Abrams, a Republican Establishment neoconservative, was incredibly hostile toward Trump’s campaign and its America first message. “This was Donald Trump’s thin skin and nothing else,” a Republican source reportedly told Politico. But it’s not difficult to see...

Submitted by Duan via Free Market Shooter blog,Shortly after Trump took office, and before Rex Tillerson was even confirmed as Secretary of State, a slew of State Department officials were removed from their positions (or were forced to resign) as part of an effort to “clean house” at the State Department.  The whole affair was haphazardly covered by the media, especially by Jeff Bezos’s blog, which insinuated that the departures were “an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.”Further analysis revealed that the officials were actually removed from...