Yesterday, the very day of President Trump’s inauguration, these praiseworthy actions were carried out:

The White House’s page on climate change was taken down.

The sculptured head of Winston Churchill was put back in the Oval Office. Here he is re-instated among happy allies, friends, admirers:

And today – the first full day of his presidency – President Trump will talk to the CIA.

The Express informs us:

The President plans to visit the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The visit may well be a tense one after he criticized the CIA for concluding Russia was involved in hacking email to interfere in the presidential election.

We doubt it will be tense. Donald Trump doesn’t do tense. He deals.

And he keeps his promises:

President Trump appears to have dropped the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the US and the European Union (EU) … During the election campaign Donald Trump said he would bin the beleaguered deal and it appears just hours into his presidency he has kept his promise.

He will, however, meet the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, perhaps “as early as next week”:

Theresa May is expected to meet Mr Trump as soon as possible following his remarks signalling a close relationship between the UK and the US.

January 20, 2017

This is the part of PRESIDENT TRUMP’S inauguration speech that we liked best:

For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.

Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth.

Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed.

The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.

Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.

That all changes – starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you.

It belongs to everyone gathered here today and everyone watching all across America.

This is your day. This is your celebration.

And this, the United States of America, is your country.

What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people.

January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.

The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.

Everyone is listening to you now.

You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before.

Ad we hope he will fulfill this promise:

We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones – and unite the civilized world against Radical Islamic Terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth.

(The full text of President Trump’s inaugural address may be read here.)

Our anti-Trump media accepted the January 6 report, Declassified Intelligence Community Assessment of Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections, because it was designed to convey the impression that Trump was favored by the Russians.

But it is the Democrats who have long enjoyed (if that is the right word) a warm relationship with Russian regimes in both their Soviet Socialist and crony-capitalist mode. At least the Dems wanted to. Whether the Russians ever reciprocated the warm feeling remains a matter of conjecture. Skeptics and Republicans will have one opinion, Democrats and other Leftists another.

We quote from an article by Cliff Kincaid at GOPUSA:

The Russians obtained favored nation trading status under President Obama, giving them access to U.S. capital, and New START, a nuclear weapons agreement giving Moscow a strategic advantage.

Historically, the Russians have always found the Democrats to be friendlier to their global ambitions.

Professor Paul Kengor broke a story on how “the liberals’ lover-boy”, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), had “reached out to Victor Chebrikov at the KGB and Yuri Andropov at the Kremlin” to work against President Ronald Reagan.

Remember that, you who are outraged by the notion – born in your own minds – that President-elect Trump conspired with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton in the recent election.

Such a charge [of Trump-Putin conspiracy] was welcomed by the liberal media, in particular because it allowed them to divert attention away from the substance of the WikiLeaks revelations that showed how major journalists worked hand-in-glove with Hillary Clinton-for-president staffers. These disclosures were in emails hacked from the account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee.

Not even the persons most eager to smear Donald Trump claimed that the scandalous contents of the purloined emails (see here and here) were not true or not genuine. In fact the intelligence report positively states that they are true.

The IC report says that WikiLeaks, an alleged Russian agent, disseminated truthful information. “Disclosures through WikiLeaks did not contain any evident forgeries,” the report says.

This is quite a turnaround for the Russians. In the past the Russians would alter or forge documents to make people look bad. This time, the Russians revealed the truth. … Of course, the Russians do not provide accurate and truthful information to their own people and they conduct propaganda and disinformation campaigns targeting foreign audiences. Their alleged illegal hacking into the private accounts of Americans cannot be justified. But Podesta and other Democrats can be criticized for failing to safeguard their own information and virtually inviting foreign hacking.

Russian intentions in allegedly providing the emails to WikiLeaks are a subject worthy of attention. But the conclusion that the Russians favored Trump over Clinton cannot be sustained by the evidence in the report. The IC report fails miserably in articulating how the Russians use dialectical maneuvers in playing both sides of the political street in the U.S.

One of the glaring omissions in the report on Russian interference in “recent elections” is the failure to address the evidence that RT [Russia Today] television was giving enormously favorable coverage in the 2012 presidential campaign to then-Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), a libertarian with pro-Russia views on foreign policy. He ran in the Republican presidential primary. …

Of course, Obama won that election, after dismissing his Republican opponent Mitt Romney’s claim that Russia was a geopolitical threat to the United States. Obama had been caught on an open mic before the election promising to be “flexible” in changing his positions to benefit Russia. These comments provide more evidence that Obama was never the anti-Russian figure he postured as in the final days of his second term. …

Obama’s various federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, the FCC and the FEC, refused to take any direct action against RT over the years when it was engaging in anti-Republican activities and supporting the progressive movement.

But when they saw they could use RT as a weapon against Trump, they suddenly became concerned about foreign interference in the U.S. political process.

Although the IC report insists that the Russians had a “preference” for Donald J. Trump for president … back in August of 2015 …  RT was backing “Bolshevik Bernie” Sanders for president. … Yet the intelligence community report makes no mention of RT programs backing Sanders, whose Russian connections included visiting the Soviet Union on his honeymoon. Sanders was a fellow traveler of the Moscow-controlled U.S. Peace Council.

The focus on Trump runs counter to the stated purpose of the report and reflects the political bias therein. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says that “On December 9, 2016, President Barack Obama directed the Intelligence Community to conduct a full review and produce a comprehensive intelligence report assessing Russian activities and intentions in recent U.S. elections.” (emphasis added). Yet, nothing is said about RT’s involvement in the 2012 contest that Obama won.

The U.S. Intelligence Community is described as “a coalition of 17 agencies and organizations, including the ODNI,” but only three were involved in the report. They were the CIA, FBI and NSA. It is generally believed that CIA Director John Brennan was the guiding force behind the Obama administration effort to blame the Russians for Trump’s election victory. Former CIA officials Michael Morell, Michael Hayden and Philip Mudd had all denounced Trump. …

It certainly looks as if the CIA interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Perhaps blaming the Russians was an attempt to get the attention off the agency.

Brennan was accused of converting to Islam when he was stationed in Saudi Arabia. His CIA under Obama’s orders directed the shipment of arms to jihadist groups in the Middle East. At a congressional panel on diversity in hiring, he admitted voting Communist when he was in college.

His focus at the agency has been on hiring people with “diverse” backgrounds, such as transgenders, and he even signed a policy document on a “Diversity and Inclusion Strategy” for the years 2016 to 2019, beyond his tenure as director.

Rather than go down in history with a reputation for defending America, … Brennan “would prefer his legacy be the way he fought to nurture a workforce that reflected America’s diversity”. The Journal added, “During his tenure he has put particular emphasis on promoting the interests of gay, lesbian, and transgender officers. He was the first CIA director to attend an annual social gathering of LGBTQ employees and has been known to wear a rainbow lanyard around the office as a symbol of solidarity.”

It looks like the focus on “diversity” in hiring has taken precedence over getting the facts right about foreign threats. Indeed, some observers, such as former FBI agent John Guandolo, have suggested that President Trump should abolish and replace the CIA with a new organization. “In 15 years they haven’t gotten a strategic analysis of the threat right — yet”  …

The CIA will have to answer to its new director, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), Trump’s pick to run the agency.

But the media have a lot to answer for as well.

If WikiLeaks has suddenly became a Russian front or conduit, why are American news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post still included among the “partners” with WikiLeaks in distributing its information? Other partners include the British Guardian, The Intercept, The Nation, McClatchy, The Wall Street Journal, and, of course, RT. 

If WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a Russian agent, why did major U.S. media organizations partner with him? Why did they not investigate him …? Assange was considered a courageous whistleblower by the liberal press. They hailed WikiLeaks for releasing the classified documents that were stolen by Army intelligence analyst Bradley/Chelsea Manning, whose sentence for espionage has been shortened by Obama.

Obama has commuted Bradley’s 35 year sentence, allowing the convict to be freed in May 2017 – iniquitously, and in contradiction to his outrage at the Russian interference that he alleges.

In addition to these issues and questions, some parts of the report lend themselves to a far different interpretation of Russian motives in U.S. politics.

For example, the IC report notes that RT ran a story against fracking, a technique that has sparked U.S. oil and gas production. The report says, “RT runs anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on public health. This is likely reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking and US natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to Gazprom’s profitability.”

The 2016 Democratic Party platform is highly critical of fracking. So does this mean the Democrats are doing the bidding of Putin? The progressive movement is almost completely against fracking. Does that mean that the progressives are puppets of Putin? …

By [an] objective measure of actual policies,Trump will prove to be more harmful to Russia than Hillary Clinton could ever hope to be. …

And she surely would not have hoped to be harmful to Russia – not to Russia – when she was still in a position to hope for any effect on international relations. Fortunately, that time has passed.

We had noted RT’s favorable coverage of the Occupy movement. Of course, Occupy Wall Street was a left-wing political movement aligned with the progressives and even encouraged by President Obama. So does this mean that Obama was doing the bidding of the Russians?

The IC report explains how RT bypassed American laws such as the Foreign Agents Registration Act “by using a Moscow-based autonomous nonprofit organization to finance its US operations”. The report goes on, “According to RT’s leadership, this structure was set up to avoid the Foreign Agents Registration Act and to facilitate licensing abroad. In addition, RT rebranded itself in 2008 to deemphasize its Russian origin.” Still, the financing for the channel comes from the Russian government, the report says.

So RT is, and has been, a foreign state-funded entity that should be subject to federal oversight from agencies such as the Department of Justice, the FCC, and the FEC. Yet, only now, after Hillary Clinton has lost the presidential election, has the IC been ordered to release a public report on what the Russian channel has been doing in U.S. elections.

The only thing that has changed over the years is that RT is now somehow considered to be a factor in Hillary Clinton’s defeat. …

If the liberal media are now truly concerned about Russian influence in the U.S. political process, rather than just using the issue as a weapon against Trump, they should … review their own “partner” relationship with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

After this review is complete, they should take another look at the IC report and determine why and how agencies like the CIA became adjuncts of the Democratic Party with a partisan bias against the new Republican president.

Since we know that the media and the Democrats work hand-in-glove, perhaps it’s time to investigate the CIA’s relationship with the media.

Yes. Tomorrow, January 20, 2017, will be the day when that becomes possible, and sometime soon may it become an active process!

Nasty Leftists – but I repeat myself! – boast of their plot to disrupt the inauguration of President Trump on January 20, 2017.

James O’Keefe is in the business of exposing the crimes of the Left. Here is one of his Project Veritas videos doing just that:

The scurrilous “intelligence” dossier on President-elect Donald Trump, claiming that he did disgusting, low, disreputable things on a visit to Russia (which he never made) –  the alleged antics being on film and in the possession of Russian snoop officials, so the Putin government has a hold on him forever (and that’s why Putin wanted Trump to win the election and therefore wrecked poor Hillary’s otherwise perfect campaign) – was concocted by an erstwhile MI6 agent, now having even more fun running his very own espionage company. His name is Christopher Steele.

He has been accused of lying! And he feels so got-at that he’s gone into hiding.

Which is – we are to understand – awfully unfair, because, you see, the information in the dossier never was intended to be TRUE. Good grief! TRUE? When was “intelligence” ever intended or expected to be TRUE?

A corrective to so naive an expectation comes from an article by Tom Burgis in the Financial Times of January 14, 2017. We quote from the print version:

[Intelligence agents] argue that the rush to shoot the messenger [Christopher Steele] represents a misunderstanding of what intelligence is, whether amassed by state agencies or private companies. It does not deal in true or false, they say, but in shades of confidence in sources. “When you are in the corporate intelligence world, everyone knows that, in every report you get, not everything is true,” says a British investigator who knows Mr Steele.

So in every report you get, there are falsehoods. In every report you get, everything may be false, nothing true. There is no way of knowing.

Now you’ve been educated, now you know that trade secret, how do you feel about your country’s intelligence services? Confident in them? Safer?

No intelligence service detected signs that the 9/11 terrorists attacks on New York and the Pentagon were coming. Nor subsequent mass killings by Muslim terrorists in the US, Britain, France, Germany, and Spain.

However, US intelligence has uncovered many violent plots and prevented them. They have found, or stumbled upon, the truth very often. So it is possible for them to find out what is really happening, has really happened, is going to happen. They surely  do strive for accurate information. They are a vital part of the defense of the nation. They cannot take that responsibility as lightly as the colleagues of Christopher Steele insouciantly brag that they do.

The important point about the dossier on Donald Trump in Russia is that it was a work of pure fiction, of cruel malice, of witless irresponsibility. It was extremely unintelligent.

And the chiefs of the US intelligence services knew that it was all those things. Yet they “leaked” the tainting lies to media hostile to the president-elect. That is distressing and horrible to contemplate.  

We expect President Trump’s appointees to the headship of the intelligence services – in which many persons of integrity do labor for the truth –  to be better and to do better.

Brilliant as always, Trey Gowdy on (some of) Hillary Clinton’s lies – to the discomfort of a State Department official:

The World Economic Forum meets this month, 17-20 January, in the Swiss Alpine city of Davos, “the highest city in Europe”.

At Fox News, Peter Schweizer exposes the nasty facts about the World Economic Forum – the dirt on Davos:

Later this month hundreds of private jets are expected to descend on a small town in the canton of Graubünden, Switzerland, for a few brief days.

They will be carrying the elite of the elite, who will be attending the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Held in the beautiful Alpine mountain resort of Davos-Klosters, attendance [at it] is strictly by invitation only. Basic membership in the WEF costs $50,000. A premium membership can set you back $500,000. But in recent years the WEF has enjoyed another source of income. Since 2013, the Obama administration has been sending foreign assistance dollars to the WEF through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). According to government records, the tab to taxpayers thus far is $26 million.

Davos attendees include a global elite, including heads of state, business titans, and celebrities. There are cocktail parties sponsored by multinational corporations and dinners catered by world-class chefs and served by bartenders performing magic tricks.

Celebrities like Leo DiCaprio and Bono mingle with current heads of state and tech billionaires from around the world. Attendance is so tight for the 2017 event the WEF is considering housing staff in “temporary containers” to make room for guests.

This is without a doubt the most connected non-profit on the planet.

The organization boasts that it “provides a platform for the world’s 1,000 leading companies to shape a better future’.

The globalist missionary zeal of the organization combined with its luxurious parties has earned it – the Davos meeting – the nickname “Burning Man for Billionaires.”

Not surprisingly, the WEF is also flush with cash. According to the non-profit’s 2015-2016 annual report, the organization took in $223 million (current exchange rate) in revenue, most of it from membership dues and partnership fees.

Despite the obvious wealth of the WEF and its members, USAID has given “assistance” to the WEF in the form of tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money.

Since 2013, USAID has given the World Economic Forum $26,091,370 under its Foreign Assistance to Programs Overseas initiative, which comprises nearly two-thirds of all grant and other funding WEF took in over that time period.

So why is USAID, which is supposed to focus on disaster relief and poverty relief, subsidizing such an organization?

According to the federal government’s spending website usaspending.gov, it’s unclear. The money came in sizable grants of $9.5 million in 2013, $11.1 million in 2015, and $5.7 million in 2016.

The taxpayer money began to flow the same year USAID administrators began attending the luxurious confab. USAID administrators Rajiv Shah (2011-15) or Gayle Smith (2016) have attended every Davos meeting since 2011.

In 2013, USAID changed its mission statement to make its prime goals to “end extreme poverty and promote resilient, democratic societies”.  Well, Switzerland is a “resilient democratic society”. They got that part right.

According to government contract reports, it’s unclear if taxpayer funds were taken by the WEF and sent to Africa or Asia, but it doesn’t seem so.

The “principal place of performance” of these grants was Switzerland, with the “recipient” city of Cologny, where the WEF has its headquarters. Not surprisingly, a search of online real estate records reveals the town has a substantial luxury real estate market.

A USAID official, when asked to comment, said this:

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) works with public and private partners to advance America’s security and prosperity by promoting resilient, democratic societies and ending extreme poverty. USAID has awarded grants to the World Economic Forum (WEF), including an innovative public-private partnership to spur economic growth and reduce poverty by reducing the time and costs to trade in developing countries. USAID remains committed to stringently vetting, tracking and evaluating the results of awarded grants, to include those disbursed to the WEF, and to its public and private sector partners.

How the global elite choose to spend their time is their business, but U.S. taxpayers should not be subsidizing their social lives.

The 47^th annual World Economic Forum convenes on January 17^th and the theme is “responsive and responsible leadership”.

In keeping with that idea, the responsible thing for the incoming Trump administration to do would be to halt grants and funding of this elite organization with taxpayer dollars.

Victoria Friedman writes at Breitbart:

The political and business elite, who attend the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, are beginning to admit their push for globalization and open borders contributed to the worldwide populist backlash and the rejection of the mass integration project.

Harvard professor and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund Kenneth Rogoff told Bloomberg that following WEF 2016 he “started to grow concerned” then-candidate Donald J. Trump would become the next president of the U.S. because his fellow frequent attendees of the gathering in the Swiss town of Davos were certain that Mr. Trump would not win. “A joke I’ve told 1,000 people in the months since leaving Davos is that the conventional wisdom of Davos is always wrong,” said the former IMF chief who is scheduled to attend Davos again this year along with some 3,000 other members of the political, business, media, and academic elite.

“No matter how improbable, the event most likely to happen is the opposite of whatever the Davos consensus is,” he added.

Davos also failed to predict the rise of populism in Europe, Italy’s rejection of constitutional change that led to the resignation of Prime Minister Mattheo Renzi, or the UK voting to leave the European Union (EU) which Forbes described as the “populist revolt against Davos Man”.

“Davos Man” was coined by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington who described “these transnationals” as “[having] little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations”.

One of the eight Oxford University academics set to attend the meeting, Ngaire Woods, dean of the Blavatnik School of Government, said, “There has to be some humility. For 30 years the elite have said, ‘We’re managing globalization, and we’re making it work for everyone’.”

“They cannot just keep repeating that,” added the frequent Davos visitor.

However, WEF founder Klaus Shwab has alleged that globalization was an “easy scapegoat” for world angst, and argued that populism wasn’t the answer, saying, “We cannot just have populist solutions”.

Good grief, no! Imagine a world in which people make their own choices instead of being forced to do what their betters know is best for them!

With populism high on the agenda at Davos, one of the sessions will include a panel of psychologists offering thoughts on “cultivating appropriate emotions in a time of nationalist populism”.

It’s not enough that we must act as they wish; we must also think and even feel according to their superior understanding of what is “appropriate”.   

Managing Director of the IMF Christine Lagarde, who was found guilty in December of criminal negligence in an arbitration case over the misappropriation of funds, expressed that she wanted to rehabilitate the appearance of globalism. She said she wanted a “move toward globalization that has a different face, and which is not excluding people along the way”.

“Globalism” – aka their rule from the commanding heights – must somehow be made to look nicer. 

Lagarde will be headlining a session at Davos entitled: “Squeezed and Angry: How to Fix the Middle Class Crisis” along with hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio.  Days before the EU referendum vote, the French lawyer belittled Brexit voters by implying they were small-minded, called for a “united Europe”, and launched a report claiming a ‘Leave’ vote would lead to half a million job losses.

It didn’t – quite the opposite. But then, as Professor Rogoff said, the wisdom of Davos is always wrong. 

Also anticipated to attend the exclusive conclave is billionaire open borders activist and founder of the Open Society Foundations George Soros, who admitted involvement in Europe’s Migrant Crisis and called national borders “an obstacle” [to world communist government] …

George Soros has bought himself the power to spread despair and death on at least three continents. The fact that he attends the Davos SUMMIT is enough all on its own to condemn the World Economic Forum and all its works.  

The arrogance of this new royalty, the risen Left which marched through the institutions of the West and reached this snow-capped peak, is typified by the reaction of the European  Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström who, when asked a question by a poverty campaigner regarding the unpopular Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal between America and the EU, which was opposed by millions of Europeans, responded,“I do not take my mandate from the European people”.

Many of these kings and queens were Communists in their youth (and would still say they are “on the Left”). They “identified” with the “masses”. Their aim was to overthrow the ruling class and establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat” – represented of course by them, the intelligentsia, bourgeois intellectuals hungry for power. They got power. They are using it to destroy nation-states, to abolish borders, to pour the Third World into the First World, to make themselves rich at the expense of the powerless – to rule the globe.

The British and American electorates woke up to what was happening to them and saved themselves; the British by voting to leave the Union of Socialist European Republics aka the EU, the Americans by voting against the Left and for Donald Trump, champion of the people. Now dozens of rebel populist movements in Europe are clamoring for the chance to do the same.

The New Royals of Davos hope to destroy them by calling them “neo-Nazi” movements.

Because the rebels are patriots, the New Royals call them “xenophobes”. Because they do now want the savage Third World to flood their countries and impose nasty primitive alien ways on them, the New Royals call them”racists”. Because they do not want to be conquered by Islam they are called “Islamophobes” – fear of terrorism and sharia cruelty being deemed an “inappropriate emotion”.

From Davos go out the bat-winged minions of the earthly devils to implement their evil schemes. They must be stopped.

Power to the People!

What disservice have these four men done to the Intelligence Services of the United States – which they have been in charge of under Obama, the Disserver-in-Chief?:

James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, who informed Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood was “largely secular”.

Mike Morell, former Director of the CIA, who helped concoct White House lies to cover-up the horrific treachery that was “Benghazigate”.

John Brennan, Director of the CIA, who defends Islam in this age of a renewed Islamic onslaught on the West. 

James Comey, Director of the FBI, who protected Hillary Clinton from prosecution for her many serious crimes.

Have they turned the Intelligence Services into the enemies of the new United States administration? A Democratic Senator and a journalist who “held positions as the Germany bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal and Germany correspondent for Time magazine” and is now with the Brookings Institution, claim that that is what has happened.

Cliff Kincaid writes at Canada Free Press:

Echoing New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s warning that the intelligence community is out to “get” President-elect Trump, a Brookings Institution expert who served in the Clinton administration says that Trump’s treatment of his spies will “come back to bite him” in the form of “devastating” leaks to the media that will make him look foolish or incompetent.

“Leaking by intelligence officials and analysts is, of course, illegal. The intelligence community doesn’t leak as much as the Pentagon or Congress, but when its reputation is at stake, it can do so to devastating effect,” says Daniel Benjamin of the Brookings Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence. Benjamin previously served as the principal advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on counterterrorism and was embroiled in the controversy over Mrs. Clinton’s failure to stop the massacre of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.

The Bookings Institution is generously funded by Arab governments.

Benjamin’s article, How Trump’s attacks on the intelligence community will come back to haunt him, did not refute the widely held belief that President Obama’s CIA and its director John Brennan were behind the recent leaks to The Washington Post and New York Times depicting Trump as a Russian puppet. In fact, the implication is that the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community will seek further revenge on Trump if he continues to criticize them.

At his recent news conference, in regard to the leaks about his meetings with intelligence officials, Trump noted that “I think it’s pretty sad when intelligence reports get leaked out to the press. I think it’s pretty sad. First of all, it’s illegal. You know, these are classified and certified meetings and reports.”

But it appears that some intelligence officials believe they are above the law and can use illegal leaks to damage an elected President who has been critical of their work product. In the most recent case, CNN and BuzzFeed were leaked a document offering unsubstantiated claims of Trump being sexually compromised by Russian officials. CNN summarized the document; BuzzFeed published the whole thing.

Trump denounced these leaks, with Director of the Office of National Intelligence James Clapper disclosing that he had called Trump about them and had declared his “profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press …”. He said that he and Trump “both agreed that they are extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security”.

Trump said Clapper “called me yesterday to denounce the false and fictitious report that was illegally circulated.”

“I do not believe the leaks came from within the IC [Intelligence Community],” Clapper said. However, he did not indicate what investigation, if any, he had conducted to make this determination.

“When something goes wrong — say a military deployment to combat jihadi insurgents in the Middle East blows up in the Trump administration’s face — the press will overflow with stories telling of intelligence reports that were ignored by the White House and briefings the president missed,” Benjamin wrote. Such stories, of course, would be based on illegal leaks.

“Imagine what an aggrieved intel community might do to a genuinely hostile president,” he said. Benjamin’s comments suggest that the intelligence community will use the media to blame Trump for things that go wrong in foreign affairs, in order to protect its own reputation. …

It’s reputation? It’s reputation now, thanks to its own leaders, needs improving, not protecting.

The Brookings expert said, “The CIA is usually one of the very first agencies to establish a relationship with new chief executives, because of the briefings it delivers before elections have even occurred and the beguiling prospect it offers of handling missions quietly and efficiently.”

It’s not clear what he means by this. The Obama CIA’s “covert” arms-running program in Syria has backfired in a big way, provoking a Russian military intervention, the loss of up to 500,000 lives, and a refugee crisis which threatens the future of Europe.

Benjamin speculated that Trump will ask the CIA to organize a covert operation to undermine the regime in Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism, and that the agency will offer him options that don’t guarantee success and which he may have to reject. He wrote that “…it is an iron law of bureaucracy that no agency will knock itself out for a leader it deems capricious, especially one who cannot be relied on to defend his own if something goes wrong.”

“The answer from the intel community will never be no,” he said. “Instead, the planners will brief the president on three different approaches. Then they will assess the risk of failure for each at 60-80 percent, providing the Oval Office with a dare it cannot possibly accept. For some, of course, this could turn out to be a silver lining in an otherwise dismal story.”

In short, the CIA will look for excuses not to proceed, and then get back to the business of leaking damaging stories to the press when terrorist incidents and other problems occur.

Is the CIA really the “invisible government” that the so-called “conspiracy theorists” have warned about? Is there a “deep state” that tries to run the government behind-the-scenes? 

Here is the video clip – we view it gain and again for the sheer pleasure of it – in which President-elect Trump treats journalists who try to traduce him with the powerful scorn they deserve:

Obama paid the mullahs who rule Iran vast sums, whatever they demanded – anything, anything! –  to pretend they had a deal with him.

At immense cost to the American tax-payer, he bought a deal that he pretends will keep Iran from becoming a nuclear-armed power, but which in fact permits it to make nuclear bombs after a few years.

The Iranians insisted on payment in dollars and gold, to fund its proxy war in Syria and Iraq.       

Adam Kredo reports at the Washington Free Beacon:

The Obama administration has paid Iran more than $10 billion in gold, cash, and other assets since 2013, according to Iranian officials, who disclosed that the White House has been intentionally deflating the total amount paid to the Islamic Republic.

Senior Iranian officials late last week confirmed reports that the total amount of money paid to Iran over the past four years is in excess of $10 billion, a figure that runs counter to official estimates provided by the White House. The latest disclosure by Iran, which comports with previous claims about the Obama administration obfuscating details about its cash transfers to Iran — including a $1.7 billion cash payment included in a ransom to free Americans — sheds further light on the White House’s back room dealings to bolster Iran’s economy and preserve the Iran nuclear agreement.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi confirmed last week a recent report in the Wall Street Journal detailing some $10 billion in cash and assets provided to Iran since 2013, when the administration was engaging in sensitive diplomacy with Tehran aimed at securing the nuclear deal. …

“This report is true but the value was higher,” Ghasemi was quoted as saying. “After the Geneva conference and the resulting agreement, it was decided that $700 million dollars were to be dispensed per month … In addition to the cash funds which we received, we received our deliveries in gold, bullion, and other things.”

Regional experts who spoke to the Free Beacon about these disclosures said that the $10 billion figure offered by the Obama administration should be viewed as “a conservative estimate for what Iran was paid to stay at the table and negotiate“. …

It is likely Iran spent a portion of this money to fund its regional terror operations and military enterprise to bolster embattled Syrian President Bashar al Assad …

One veteran foreign policy insider familiar with the administration’s outreach to Iran told the Free Beacon that the White House has a history of deflating these figures in order to obfuscate details about its contested diplomacy with the Islamic Republic.

“This is how it always happens when the Obama administration secretly sends money to Iran,” said the source … “They deny it until they’re caught, then they lowball it until they’re caught again, then they say it’s old news. In every single case where Iranian officials confirm these transfers while Obama officials denied them, it later turned out the Iranian officials were the ones telling the truth.”

“This money is going to pay for a great deal of jihad terror,” Robert Spencer comments at Jihad Watch.

In reference to the Kredo article, which he quotes, Spencer recalls the definition of Treason:

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

And he recommends:

There ought to be an investigation into whether Obama’s actions regarding Iran, where the mullahs have ordered the people to chant “Death to America!” in the mosques every Friday, constitute treason.

Yes, there ought to be.

And he ought to be tried and convicted. And he ought to be executed.

But none of that is likely to happen.

It is a source of joy we can only imagine, never experience.

CNN is “fake news”, Trump said, and BuzzFeed “is a failing pile of garbage”.

Right!  President-elect Trump says it as it is. (That’s why he’s been elected president.)

Here’s the story as Cliff Kincaid tells it at GOPUSA, somewhat shortened:

On Tuesday, January 10, … the CIA used CNN to air unsubstantiated …

And completely false … 

… charges against [President-elect] Trump.

CNN didn’t delineate the bizarre sexual nature of those charges; that was left to a left-wing “news” organization by the name of BuzzFeed, which posted 35 pages of scurrilous lies and defamation.

Demonstrating the sad state of ethical standards at CNN, Wolf Blitzer hyped the story into “breaking news”, when the allegations had been circulating for months, and Jake Tapper was brought on the air, “joining me with a major story we’re following right now.” Blitzer emphasized, “We’re breaking this story.” It was the beginning of CNN regurgitating what President-elect Trump called “fake news”. 

What followed was a low point in Tapper’s career, as he willingly participated in a ginned-up controversy using anonymous sources to report on “information” about Trump that started falling apart shortly after CNN aired its “breaking news”.

“That’s right, Wolf, a CNN exclusive,” said Tapper, apparently unaware that he was recycling a document that had been passed around for months. It was CNN, which uses former CIA official Michael Morell as an on-air contributor, that ran with it. Morell has worked for Beacon Global Strategies, a firm founded by former Hillary Clinton aide Philippe Reines, since November 2013.

Trying to distance himself from the controversy, Morell went on CNN to refer to some of the information as “unverified” in the “private document”.

But the damage had already been done, and Morell knew it. CNN had manufactured a controversy over Trump yet again …

Ironically, CNN is a “partner” in an effort known as the First Draft Coalition that is dedicated “to improving practices in the ethical sourcing, verification and reporting of stories that emerge online”.

Sure it is. It’s the ethical way. Same way Saudi Arabia heads a Human Rights agency of the UN.

“CNN has learned that the nation’s top intelligence officials gave information to President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama last week about claims of Russian efforts to compromise President-elect Trump,” said Tapper. “The information was provided as part of last week’s classified intelligence briefings regarding Russian efforts to undermine the 2016 U.S. elections.”

Trying to pump up the “claims”, Jim Sciutto, Chief National Security Correspondent for CNN, said, “To be clear, this has been an enormous team effort by my colleagues here and others at CNN.”

A team effort to verify what? It looks like they were handed a 35-page document from the CIA and decided to publicize it. They failed to reveal the details precisely because they could not verify the document.

Sciutto said, “Multiple U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN that classified documents on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election presented last week to President Obama and to President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claimed to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.” …

Later, Tapper said the charges were “uncorroborated as of now”, indicating that they might be confirmed by somebody at some time in the future. There was “no proof” of the claims but “confidence by intelligence officials that the Russians are claiming this”.  …

CNN was reporting “news”, since a two-page CIA summary of this dirt was attached to a classified CIA report on Russian hacking and election influence that was given to Trump … But it was “fake” in the sense that CNN had no way of knowing if the charges had been completely made up.

On this basis, the story could and should have turned against the Intelligence Community, with reporters asking why unverified information had been used against Trump and whether this was retaliation for his criticism [of the “Intelligence Community”]. But this course of action by CNN would make it impossible for CNN reporters to go back to these same sources for scurrilous information and false charges in the future. This fact makes it abundantly clear that the news organization was being used by anonymous sources in the Intelligence Community, most likely the CIA.

Since CNN likes anonymous sources, I will use one of my own. “This is a classic CIA blackmail operation where the CIA under Director John Brennan uses someone else’s dirt for the blackmail, and postures themselves as ‘innocent’ in presenting it to Trump,” one observer of the Intelligence Community told me. This is certainly the real story — that an intelligence agency run by Obama’s CIA director would use an American television network to attack the President-elect with scurrilous and unsubstantiated charges. …

Is America a constitutional republic ruled by the people through their elected representatives? Or do the intelligence agencies rule America and try to blackmail our leaders?

The President-elect said it would be “a tremendous blot” on the record of the Intelligence Community if they did in fact release the document to the media. At another point, he said, “I think it was disgraceful, disgraceful that the intelligence agencies allowed any information that turned out to be so false” get released in that fashion to CNN and BuzzFeed.

CNN is “fake news”, Trump said, and BuzzFeed “is a failing pile of garbage”. 

The intelligence chiefs are being unintelligent. The media people who are continuing to malign and antagonize President-elect Trump are being foolish.

Thing is, “gentlemen” and “ladies” of the fourth estate, if you like your toadying you can keep your toadying – only change the object of it from crushed Clinton to triumphant Trump. It’s the smart thing to do. If you can’t change your nature, change your idol. Serve your own interest. Be nice where the power lies.

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Post Script: Republican Senator John McCain, who has great guts but little brain, has admitted it was he who gave the FBI the fake dossier that smeared Donald Trump.

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Post Post Script: Newsmax reports that Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer posted in Britain’s Moscow embassy in 1990, is the author of the controversial dossier on President-elect Donald Trump. He now runs the private Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. in London. He reportedly prepared the dossier on Trump at the request of Republicans running against him in the presidential primaries and later by the Hillary Clinton campaign. It was  obtained by a former British ambassador, who forwarded it to Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain last year, who passed it along to the FBI.  Steele, fearing anger over the matter by Russia, has fled his London home. Though he is no longer a British agent and compiled the dossier for his private company, the U.K. government was nonetheless concerned the matter could damage relations with the incoming administration, and British security services attempted to block news agencies from reporting Steele’s name.