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Top Republican senators dismissed leaked details from former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s upcoming book, saying the allegations were not new.“There’s nothing new here. It does seem to be an effort to sell books,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, told reporters in Washington on Monday.“The basic dynamic of the obligation of the House to take the time they have to put a case together doesn’t change. I don’t think it changes any fundamental information, nor does it change the basic case that the House has to put the case together,” added Sen. Roy...

“Urgent Concern” Determination by the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community A complaint from an intelligence-community employee about statements made by the President during a telephone call with a foreign leader does not involve an “urgent concern,” as defined in 50 U.S.C. § 3033(k)(5)(G), because the alleged conduct does not relate to “the funding, administration, or operation of an intelligence activity” un- der the authority of the Director of National Intelligence. As a result, the statute does not require the Director to transmit the complaint to the congressional intelligence committees. September 24, 2019 MEMORANDUM OPINION FOR THE GENERAL COUNSEL OFFICE...

A CIA official who had a top role during the run-up to the Iraqi war charges the White House with ignoring intelligence that said there were no weapons of mass destruction or an active nuclear program in Iraq. The former highest ranking CIA officer in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, also says that while the intelligence community did give the White House some bad intelligence, it also gave the White House good intelligence — which the administration chose to ignore

The failed former secretary of state remains a hashledemaine. Yes, I made the word up. Because nothing really describes the mixture of chaos, lunacy, illogic, and absent dignity that characterizes Madeleine Albright, who once ran U.S. foreign policy back when Bill Clinton was president, famously chasing Yasser Arafat around a parking lot in Paris and most recently declared "a special place in hell" for U.S. women who somehow failed to cast a vote for Hillary Clinton. Now she's gotten even battier as she grows less relevant. The former secretary of state, who's shilling a book called Fascism: A Warning, is...

WASHINGTON — Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal stated Thursday that he believes some Senate Republicans are concerned with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s approach to working with the White House on how to handle the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump in the Senate. “I’ve talked to anywhere from five to 10 of my colleagues who have very severe misgivings about the direction that Mitch McConnell is going in denying a full, fair proceeding with witnesses and documents. My hope is that they will say publicly what Senator Murkowski did, and really hold Mitch McConnell accountable,” the senator said during “Capitol News...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was right to so eloquently smack down cryin’ Chuck Schumer’s request for a “Schumer do-over” of the House impeachment process with unheard-from witnesses. If, as House Democrats insist, the “evidence” is “uncontested,” why does Schumer seek new evidence and want to hear new witnesses, providing a list of White House advisers but not a list that includes the alleged Ukraine whistleblower? Schumer whines that McConnell has said he will take his cues on a Senate trial from President Trump, whom the House denied due process and the right to confront his accuser. Too bad, cryin’...

Hillary Clinton is back, and so is Chris Steele, this time in the United Kingdom. They are no less than implying that current Conservative (Tory) Prime Minister Boris Johnson is a Russian plant. And it’s no mistake that these allegations are being made just before a U.K. general election on December 12 that will decide the fate of Brexit. It started last month, when the U.K.’s leftwing Guardian newspaper reported the existence of a secret report that said the Russians spent five years “cultivating leading Tories including Johnson…” The 50-page “dossier” from the U.K.’s intelligence and security committee is “based...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Hardball,” Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) stated that he thinks up to ten Senate Republicans will vote to convict President Trump, but that there could be “unpredicted evidence” and the number of GOP defections could increase. Blumenthal said, “I would give the high end probably five to ten. I think that’s a realistic number. But, and I want to emphasize the but, we need to keep in mind what’s unpredictable here. Remember the Watergate case, where the Nixon tapes emerged, seemingly by chance…and that was the end of his presidency. So, never underestimate the possibility of...

Christopher Steele, the British ex-spy and author of the anti-Trump dossier, was reportedly told that the Justice Department will release information about him that was previously blacked out in the department’s internal watchdog report on the investigation into President Trump’s 2016 campaign due on Monday. The New York Times, citing two individuals with knowledge of the situation, reported that Attorney General William Barr approved the release of the previously redacted information in Michael Horowitz’s 400-page report. The report called Steele’s heads-up unusual and said he was not given any indication of whether the information would benefit or hurt him. An...

Law scholar Alan Dershowitz predicted the next Democrat elected president of the United States will be impeached as a result of the same "open-ended" criteria the party is currently using to impeach President Trump. "They have created open-ended criteria which bear no relationship to the word of the Constitution itself," Dershowitz said Sunday on Fox News. "If President Trump is impeached, it will set a terrible precedent, which will weaponize impeachment, and the next Democrat who gets elected will be impeached." How many foreign policy decisions have been made by presidents over the years in order to help them get...

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said his colleague Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) would end up regretting investigating 2020 presidential hopeful former Vice President Joe Biden. Blumenthal said, “I really regret that he has launched on this course. I think he’ll regret it too, because not only is it completely spurious, he knows it’s been debunked, it’s also, in fact, relying on this, insane as you have correctly called it, conspiracy theory involving Ukraine. It endangers our national security. This Ukrainian theory is one of the central tenets and tropes of Russian propaganda and disinformation

The Democrats believe that Trump, who is the president of the executive branch, is not allowed to discuss anything with the US Attorney General without their permission. Senate Democrats are now seeking documents over an alleged request by Trump for US Attorney General Bill Barr to hold a press conference to clear him of any wrongdoing with Ukraine. The Washington Post earlier this week reported that President Trump asked Bill Barr to hold a presser clearing him of wrongdoing and affirm that no laws were broken during his July 25 phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Bill Barr was...

Clinton family ally Sidney Blumenthal said a new book telling of a "deep state" plot to undermine President Trump contained "factual errors" about him and that he asked the publisher to correct them. An Oct. 25 Fox News report cited a source who said Blumenthal sent "threatening letters" to investigative journalist Lee Smith and his publisher Center Street, a division of Hachette Book Group, in an effort to stop the publication of Smith's book because he viewed it as defamatory. But the source said the publisher's legal team found the threat to be "meritless," and the book, The Plot Against...

Clinton family associate Sidney Blumenthal has made legal threats to the publisher of a forthcoming book featuring allegations against Democrats in connection with the Russia investigation in an attempt to stop publication, Fox News has learned. A source familiar with the matter told Fox News that Blumenthal claimed the book – “The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History,” by Lee Smith – was defamatory. “Blumenthal tried to stop it from being published,” the source told Fox News, saying the Hillary Clinton confidant sent threatening letters to...

President Trump announced Saturday night that his administration will no longer consider his personal resort in Doral, Fla., to host the 2020 G-7 summit, and suggested he might consider Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland instead. “Based on both Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility, we will no longer consider Trump National Doral, Miami, as the Host Site for the G-7 in 2020,” the president tweeted. “We will begin the search for another site, including the possibility of Camp David, immediately. Thank you!” The announcement followed earlier tweets in which he said he thought he “was doing something very...

The Washington Post "Fact Checker" column gave former CIA operative and current Democratic New Mexico congressional candidate Valerie Plame three "Pinocchios" for her claim that former George W. Bush administration official I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby leaked her identity. Plame blamed Libby for the leak in a campaign ad released Monday, but according to the Post's fact-check, there is no evidence he disclosed her role to columnist Robert Novak. Novak wrote the piece that reported that Plame, identified as a CIA operative, suggested sending her husband, Joe Wilson, to Niger to look into a report that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium...

Although Sudanese president Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir meets more than all of the requirements that qualified Libya's Muammar Gaddafi for regime change -- the U.S. has shown an alarming amount of empathy for the oppressor and his cabal in Khartoum. In fact, Gaddafi's sins pale in comparison to those of Bashir, whose transgressions were concisely enumerated by Doyle McManus in the L.A. Times on Tuesday. Because of his role as the architect of the Darfur genocide -- a campaign which claimed over 300,000 lives -- Bashir became the first sitting head of state indicted for war crimes by the International...

The people of South Kordofan have become caught up in the unresolved contradiction of the post-John Garang Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), which is now leading South Sudan into independence; what happens when a national federalist political movement becomes an ethnic separatist political movement? This is the problem in several areas of Sudan outside the new borders of South Sudan, areas in which the then federalist SPLM/A recruited fighters to combat the Khartoum regime in the interests of creating a federal “New Sudan.” With South Sudan declaring full independence on July 9, a force of roughly 40,000 Nuba SPLA fighters...

Records recently posted online by the FBI indicate that it did little to investigate allegations from private sources connected to Republicans about a scheme in which associates of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to exploit their connection to her to profit from the turmoil in Libya in 2011. The FBI received the documents in June 2016, around the same time it launched an exhaustive, three-year investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia based, in part, on information from private sources connected to Democrats that in the main would prove to be false – the Steele dossier. ... Why...

Full title: Judicial Watch Files Complaint With Rhode Island Supreme Court Against U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse For Unauthorized Practice of Law Alleges Whitehouse filed a brief with U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of four clients while maintaining inactive status and that the brief was nothing more than an attack on the federal judiciary and an open threat to the U.S. Supreme Court (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a complaint with the Unauthorized Practice of Law Committee of the Rhode Island Supreme Court against U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who is a member of the Rhode...