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Full Title Russian Foreign Minister Scolds US Reporter Andrea Mitchell for Blurting Out Question: “Who Brought You Up?” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov scolded a US reporter for shouting out a question just before the start of a protocol meeting with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Moscow, Wednesday. RT UK ✔ @RTUKnews "Who brought you up? Who taught you manners?" Russian FM scolds US journalist for shouting out during Rex Tillerson meeting. 11:40 AM - 12 Apr 2017

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“I like you. You and me, we’re going to be best friends.” It is early January, and Eric Schneiderman is sitting in his 25th-floor office above Lower Manhattan, doing his best Donald Trump impression, puckering his lips into a duck face, scrunching up his nose and lowering his voice into something that resembles the president’s outer-borough growl. Schneiderman is recalling his meeting with Trump in 2010. Back then, Schneiderman was running for attorney general of New York, and Trump was still in his pre-birther, reality TV host phase. Trump had donated money to one of Schneiderman’s opponents in the Democratic...

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recertified Iran's compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal late Monday, but senior administration officials emphasized that Tehran is a dangerous threat to both U.S. interests and Middle East stability. Under U.S. law, the State Department is required to recertify to Congress Iran's compliance with the nuclear deal every 90 days. Despite President Trump's harsh criticism of the agreement forged under his predecessor, it is the second such certification since he took office. The controversial agreement, which came into force in July 2015, was ironed out among Iran, the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, the United...

U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said on Wednesday he would oppose President Donald Trump’s nomination of CIA Director Mike Pompeo as secretary of state, in a blow to the nomination. “I believe our nation’s top diplomat must be forthright, and more critically his past sentiments did not reflect our nation’s values and are not acceptable for our nation’s top diplomat,” Menendez said. Nine of the 10 Democrats have announced they oppose Pompeo, and none has announced support. Every committee Democrat also opposed the nomination of Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson.

Trump transition team official and Breitbart News contributor Robert Wasinger had some harsh words for certain Trump administration officials on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Saturday. Talking with Breitbart News Washington Political Editor Matt Boyle and Deputy Political Editor Amanda House, Wasinger continued his campaign against the establishment and NeverTrump elements he sees as locking out actual Trump supporters who worked to get Donald Trump elected president from getting jobs in the administration. LISTEN: Wasinger, who helped craft the transition, especially in the State Department, has been frustrated by the lack of progress in staffing the administration, particularly in so-called “Schedule C”...

Rex Tillerson has all but vanished from the State Department’s website as his unceremonious firing by tweet took effect over the weekend. The “Secretary of State Tillerson” link at the top of the department’s homepage (www.state.gov) disappeared overnight Saturday and was replaced with a generic “Secretary of State” tab. When clicked, it leads to a page that informs visitors in a brief statement that Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan “became acting Secretary of State on April 1, 2018.” It shows a photo of Sullivan signing his appointment papers as deputy in June 2017 but offers no explanation for the...

President Donald Trump is freezing more than $200 million in funds for recovery efforts in war-torn Syria amid a reassessment of the role the U.S. should play in the drawn-out conflict there, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The White House ordered the State Department to put the funds on hold, the report said. According to The Journal, Trump did so after reading a news report saying that the U.S. had recently committed an additional $200 million to early recovery efforts. Exiting Secretary of State Rex Tillerson pledged the money in February in Kuwait at a meeting of the...

“Given Pompeo’s credentials, the New York Times assured us this Tuesday that this Trump appointment could actually manage to get the world to miss Rex Tillerson.” (Cuba’s Communist-party paper Granma, March 13.)No surprise here. In fact, historically it’s very commonplace. To wit: when the propaganda ministry of the mass-murdering, terror-sponsoring totalitarian regime whose lifelong craving was to nuke the U.S. seeks to vilify the U.S.—instead of tasking their KGB-trained apparatchiks with cranking out a vicious, lie-filled anti-U.S. diatribe, they simply quote the editorial board of The New York Times.But perhaps the term “historically-commonplace” strikes some of my amigos as unnecessarily...

‘Trump’s dangerous shift on Iran’ author received approval from Foggy Bottom.' The U.S. State Department under former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson vetted and approved the publication of fiercely anti-Trump news articles written by a current State Department official, Conservative Review has learned. On October 13 in the White House, President Trump announced that he had ordered a complete strategic review concerning the United States’ Iran policy. “Today, I am announcing our strategy, along with several major steps we are taking to confront the Iranian regime’s hostile actions and to ensure that Iran never, and I mean never, acquires a...

In what really could only be described as a completely bonkers conspiracy theory, The Nation magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel suggested Sunday that Rex Tillerson was fired from the secretary of state position because his replacement was funded by the Koch brothers and because the administration wanted a war with Iran. If youÂ’re confused, donÂ’t worry, the rest of the liberal panel on ABCÂ’s This Week didnÂ’t seem to be able to follow her convoluted mess either. The ridiculousness began when a conversation about the firing of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was derailed by vanden Heuvel, who decided...

US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley is making good on her threat to cut US aid to countries that vote against the US in the United Nations. In December, 128 countries voted in the United Nations General Assembly against the United States’ recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. At the time, President Trump and Haley threatened that there would be grave repercussions for recipients of US aid who failed to stand by their benefactor on such issues. On Thursday, Foreign Policy reported on a 53-page memo issued by Haley. Titled “America First Foreign Assistance Policy”, the new...

U.S. foreign policy toward adversaries such as Russia, North Korea and Syria may turn more aggressive if CIA Director Mike Pompeo becomes secretary of state. Pompeo has lambasted Moscow's aggression toward the West and other countries: January 2018: "I continue to be concerned not only about the Russians but about others' efforts as well. We have many foes who want to undermine Western democracy. So there's this Washington-based focus on Russian interference. I want to make sure we broaden the conversation." North Korea October 2017: Pompeo said Pyongyang was would soon be able to threaten a U.S. city with nuclear...

the White House held a Middle East summit that demonstrated Tillerson’s basic assumptions have the problems of the Middle East precisely backwards.Under the leadership of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, along with Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s senior negotiator, Israeli officials sat in the White House for the first time with Arab officials from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, and Qatar. Representatives from Egypt and Jordan, with which Israel enjoys open diplomatic relations, were also in attendance. Canadian and European officials participated as well. Although they were invited, the Palestinians chose to boycott the conference. Their boycott was...

President Donald Trump sent a clear message to European allies and senior administration officials Tuesday when he fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson:  the President remains steadfast on implementing his strategy to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons, even if it means dismantling the 2015 Iran nuclear deal established by President Obama, sources told this reporter.Trump, who ‘begrudgingly’ recertified the Iran deal January, will not re-certify in May if Germany, France or Great Britain back down from the conditions the administration set in place at the beginning of the year to hold Tehran accountable for its nuclear program, a White House official...

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley tells a Security Council meeting that "the U.S. believes Russia is responsible for the attack on two people in the United Kingdom using a military grade nerve agent." She also urges Russia to account for its actions. Video at link above

Video at Link. Some insight from Morris about what Trump wants to do in foreign affairs and with the mindset at the State Dept.

With Ambassador Haley continuing to represent the United States at the United Nations and Mike Pompeo serving as the new Secretary of State, America’s national security interests should be very well protected The ouster of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was long overdue. He was not a team player in the Trump administration. To the contrary, during his tenure, Mr. Tillerson moved further and further apart from President Trump’s thinking on critical foreign policy issues. He would have done well to follow the example of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, rather than try unsuccessfully at times to...

The abrupt firing Tuesday of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson follows months of infighting between the State Department and White House over efforts by Tillerson to save the Iran nuclear deal and ignore President Donald Trump's demands that the agreement be fixed or completely scrapped by the United States, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the situation who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon. In the weeks leading up to Tillerson's departure, he had been spearheading efforts to convince European allies to agree to a range of fixes to the nuclear deal that would address Iran's ongoing ballistic missile...

The Evening Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends) So, what to make of the Rex Tillerson firing? ThereÂ’s a lot to unpack here, so IÂ’ll try to do it in a fairly orderly fashion. First, letÂ’s state up front the undeniable truth that Rex Tillerson was the nationÂ’s finest Secretary of State in a decade. Unlike his two immediate predecessors in the job, Mr. Tillerson is a patriot, a lover of America, a believer in promoting American-style Democracy around the world and protecting U.S. national security at home. He had no interest in selling AmericaÂ’s foreign policy to the...