No wonder the President was so upset he tweeted this earlier today (6/07).  He was reminded how bad this scandal is when he saw Luke Rosiak’s latest report on it in The Daily Caller Wednesday (6/05):  Wasserman Schultz Screamed At House Officials To Kill Hacking Probe.

The woman is terrified and for good reason.

The curious case of Imran Awan, which sounds like an international spy thriller, is entering its third act. Awan was a congressional IT aide to Florida Dem Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and he was finally fired just after he was arrested trying to fly to Pakistan last summer.

Awan and his wife, Hina Alvi, were charged last summer with bank fraud. They now appear poised to strike a plea deal with the Department of Justice. A plea agreement hearing is set for July 3 before U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan in Washington, Fox News reported Wednesday.

Theft of congressional equipment, massive data breaches of Congress members’ emails, massive espionage and more are all wrapped up in this case that involves data from 40 or more Democrat members of Congress.  After endless delays, we may have explosive traction.

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Sandra Bullock is Miss Congeniality

New York Times headline yesterday (6/05), “Miss America Ends Swimsuit Competition.”

Gretchen Carlson, chairwoman of the now-swimsuit-free Miss America, would very much like you to know that she isn’t just a pretty face. She also has a degree from Stanford and spent a year studying Virginia Woolf at Oxford.

Even so, let’s pause and ponder for a moment which  elements on her CV got the studio executives most excited when considering her for her jobs on TV.  Choose a) or b).

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Avignon, France—The Rhone River Valley in southern France is a storybook marriage of high technology, traditional vineyards, and ancestral villages. High-speed trains and well-designed toll roads crisscross majestic cathedrals, castles, and chateaus.

Traveling in a Europe at peace these days evokes both historical and literary allusions. As with the infrastructure and engineering of the late Roman Empire right before its erosion, the Continent rests at its pinnacle of technological achievement.

There is a Roman Empire-like sameness throughout Europe in fashion, popular culture and government protocol—a welcome change from the deadly fault lines of 1914 and 1939.

Yet, as in the waning days of Rome, there is a growing uncertainty beneath the European calm.

The present generation has inherited the physical architecture and art of a once-great West—cathedrals, theaters, and museums. But it seems to lack the confidence that it could ever create the conditions to match, much less exceed, such achievement.

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On Sunday, June 3, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a press statement regarding the 29th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre by the Chinese Communist Government on June 4, 1989.   In part it read:

“We join others in the international community in urging the Chinese government to make a full public accounting of those killed, detained or missing; to release those who have been jailed for striving to keep the memory of Tiananmen Square alive; and to end the continued harassment of demonstration participants and their families.”

While this was seriously displeasing to China’s rulers, they are in fact more worried about what is happening in their country right now. It’s being called the “Rice Bunny” movement for women’s rights in Communist China.  The characters for “rice bunny,” you see, are pronounced “me-too.”

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“FBI Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy,” read the headline on a lengthy New York Times story May 18.

“The Justice Department used a suspected informant to probe whether Trump campaign aides were making improper contacts with Russia in 2016,” reads a story in the May 21 Wall Street Journal.

So much for those who dismissed charges of Obama administration infiltration of Donald Trump’s campaign as paranoid fantasy. Defenders of the Obama intelligence and law enforcement apparatus have had to fall back on the argument that this infiltration was for Trump’s — and the nation’s — own good.

It’s an argument that evidently didn’t occur to Richard Nixon’s defenders when it became clear that Nixon operatives burglarized and wiretapped the Democrat National Committee in June 1972.

Until 2016, just about everyone agreed that it was a bad thing for government intelligence or law enforcement agencies to spy (er, secretly collect information?) on a political campaign. Especially a campaign of the opposition party. Liberals were especially suspicious of the FBI and the CIA.

Nowadays, they say that anyone questioning those agencies' good faith is unpatriotic.

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The words “Deep State” evoke images of evil geniuses carrying out schemes in hollowed-out mountains with submarine entrances.

What if they’re not that smart, though? Just malicious?

The New York Times earlier this month reported that a joint interagency task force met at CIA headquarters beginning in the spring of 2016 to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. The task force attracted a group of acolytes that reads like the cast of characters in a Hollywood script about a ragtag band of rogues turned commandos.

In the top role was their temperamental leader, CIA Director John Brennan, adding a Lee Marvin-esque gravity to the production.

Also starring Peter Strzok, the love-struck FBI agent who bonded with his paramour Lisa Page via virulently anti-Trump text messages.

Add to the mix National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who once perjured himself before the United States Senate.  His skill-set would be particularly helpful to this group of misfits.

For comic relief there was FBI Director James Comey.  In Comey-world, it was never enough to just be a gumshoe detective enforcing mundane things like immigration laws.  He had to be saving the world in an epic battle against Russians.

Can you imagine what Mack Sennett, creator of the Keystone Cops, would have done with these characters?

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The first thing I noticed when I walked into the Trump rally in Nashville last night (5/29) was that Trace Adkins was singing. Not bad! (Hey, it’s Nashville.)

The second thing I noticed was that Jim Acosta wasn’t smiling, virtually the only person in the auditorium who wasn’t. If you don’t like Adkins, either you don’t like music or your Trump Derangement Syndrome is so great you couldn’t even groove to Bach or The Beatles in their heydays. Too bad for Jim.

Which leads me to another Nashville moment. Being here in Music City, isn’t it high time for the right to take back the arts, or at least some decent part of them?

Why is it CBS, NBC, and ABC are all slavish soldiers of the moribund and increasingly boring Left? (Can you watch “Good Morning America” without feeling you are having your brains drilled?)

But enough diversion. Trump’s on.  Time to enjoy the show.

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The 75-year-old post-war order crafted by the United States after World War II is falling apart. Almost every major foreign-policy initiative of the last 16 years seems to have gone haywire.  And not because Trump wrecked it.

Donald Trump’s presidency was a reflection, not a catalyst, of the demise of the foreign-policy status quo. Much of the world now already operates on premises that have little to do with official post-war institutions, customs, and traditions, which, however once successful, belong now to a bygone age.

Historic forces have made post-war thinking obsolete and thereby left many reactionary “experts” wedded to the past and in denial about the often-dangerous reality before their eyes.  This is true everywhere you look – from Turkey to Russia to China to the European Union, not to mention North Korea and Iran.

The “experts” deny the reality while America’s president sees it clearly – which is why they hate and fear him so much.

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Italy’s pro-euro elites have overreached disastrously. President Sergio Mattarella has asserted the extraordinary precedent that no political movement or constellation of parties can ever take power if they challenge the orthodoxy of monetary union.

He has inadvertently framed events as a battle between the Italian people and an eternal ‘casta’ with foreign loyalties, playing straight into the hands of the insurgent Five Star ‘Grillini’ and anti-euro Lega nationalists. He unwisely invoked the specter of financial markets to justify his veto of euroskepticism.

Taken together, his actions have made matters infinitely worse.  First the background, then what’s happening right now.  Italy has had 65 governments since WWII, so political chaos is almost the norm – but this is bizarre even by Italian standards.

Yet this crisis has been wholly manufactured by Berlin, Brussels, and the EU power structure.  They may have made a mortal blunder.

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The “Deep State” is in a deep state of desperation.

It is hard to see how a yearlong investigation of this won’t come down hard on former FBI Director James Comey and perhaps even former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who definitely wasn’t playing mahjong in a secret “no aides allowed” meeting with former President Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac.

With little time left before the Justice Department inspector general’s report becomes public, and with special counsel Robert Mueller having failed to bring down Donald Trump after a year of trying, they know a reckoning is coming.

With this report on the way and congressional investigators beginning to zero in on the lack of hard, verified evidence for starting the Trump probe, current and former intelligence and Justice Department officials are dumping everything they can think of to save their reputations.

Here’s how that is backfiring.

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On December 29, 2016, the Obama Administration – with three weeks remaining in its term – issued harsh sanctions against Russia over supposed election interference.  Two compounds in the United States were closed and 35 Russian diplomats were ordered to leave the country.

Russia responded by calling the actions “Cold War déjà vu.”

In the two years that have elapsed since, it has been learned that the “intelligence” that formed the basis for the sanctions was beyond dubious.

As a dog that chases its tail, the fake “intelligence” was being used to cause the investigation which itself lent credibility to the notion of Russian interference.

James Comey’s FBI and John Brennan’s CIA thumbed the eye of an armed nuclear state based on false intelligence.  Why?

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Many liberals and critics are under the mistaken belief that President Trump is violating the rule of law and civil liberties by criticizing the Robert Mueller investigation and by ordering the Justice Department’s Inspector General to investigate whether or not the FBI spied on his 2016 presidential campaign.

In fact, the president is behaving totally lawfully, and it is Robert Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein who are acting unconstitutionally and who are violating Trump’s civil liberties.

As I explained in the Wall Street Journal last week (5/13), Robert Mueller’s appointment is unconstitutional under Chief Justice Rehnquist’s majority opinion in Morrison v. Olson. In this investigation, Mueller is acting like a U.S. attorney, who is a principal officer and who must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The unconstitutionality of Mueller’s appointment renders everything he has done since May 17, 2017, unconstitutional as well.

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[Note by JW – When even Karl Rove denounces Trump Derangement Syndrome, of which he was once afflicted, you know the Trump Takeover of the GOP is nearing completion.]

State Rep. Stacey Abrams’s victory in Tuesday’s (5/22) Georgia Democrat primary is historic: She’s the first black woman to win a major party’s nomination for governor in any state.

But it’s also an example of the gamble Democrats are taking this midterm season.

Unlike most Democrat candidates for statewide office in the South, Ms. Abrams shows little interest in appealing to independents or disaffected Republicans. She blames the Georgia Democrats’ poor showing in 2014 on efforts to appeal to what she calls the “very middle of the road.”

Is support from the Democrats’ “Resistance” base enough to carry her to the governor’s mansion?  In a state that has a GOP Governor, both Senators, 10 out of 14 Members of Congress, and which Trump won by 211,000 votes in 2016?

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech Monday (5/21) at the Heritage Foundation marked a pivotal moment in U.S. foreign policy.

Pompeo made several important arguments in the course of his half hour address, in which he set out President Donald Trump’s policy regarding Iran in the wake of his May 8 announcement that he is abandoning Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

The key line in his speech was, inarguably, “As President Trump said two weeks ago, he is ready, willing and able to negotiate a new deal [with Iran]. But the deal is not the objective. Our goal is to protect the American people.”

The basic insight that there is no intrinsic value to any agreement – or foreign policy initiative of any sort – that does not advance the interests of the United States or protect the American people is striking, because it has been absent from American foreign policy in relation to rogue regimes and entities for better part of the last generation.

Welcome to the Trump Doctrine.  It is brilliant in its simplicity and straightforwardness.

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From its start, the Trump administration has been plagued by charges of “chaos.”

From the revolving door of senior staffers — including two secretaries of state, three national security advisers and two chiefs of staff — to the president’s brash and sometimes boorish personal style, to his politically incorrect taunt-tweeting, Donald Trump has refused to conform to his political opponents’ conventional notions of what constitutes an effective White House operation.

Yet, because Trump is such a Black Swan, his has been the most effective administration since FDR’s first term.

And it’s being accomplished in the teeth of the so-called “Resistance,” which includes the overt hostility of nearly all the mainstream media, the embedded civil service, the Democrats, the never-Trump Republicans, rogue elements of the intelligence and investigative agencies, and Robert Mueller’s witch hunt regarding charges of “collusion” with the Russians.

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If you want to understand why Donald Trump is President today (and why he could very well win a second term), look to the Democrats' hysterical response to two of Trump's major foreign policy achievements over the past week.

Last Thursday (5/10), the President traveled to Joint Base Andrews to greet three American hostages whose release he had secured from North Korea. Unlike his predecessor, Trump did it without sending the offending regime an unmarked plane loaded with hundreds of millions in hard currency.

The return of these American captives should have been a moment of celebration and bipartisan unity. So how did Democrats respond? By blasting Trump for the way he welcomed the U.S. hostages home.

Seriously? How do Democrats take a positive event such as the release of American hostages and turn it into an excuse to attack Trump?  Are they so deranged with hate they can’t see their behavior helps Trump, not hurts him?

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Whatever uproar is occurring from and at Monday's (5/14) opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, that change of venue -- promised by several presidents of both parties and mandated by Congress in 1995 but accomplished only by Donald Trump -- constitutes an extraordinary development in the seemingly endless history of the Middle East.

And the suspicion is that, after not too long, it will be seen as a hugely positive one.

This isn't happening because of Trump alone, obviously.  But the man, possibly because of his lack of foreign policy preconceptions, has a unique knack for seizing the moment and moving forward as he is doing in Korea.

He allows his gut to prevail over the advice of a legion of experts.  Thanks to that, and believe it or not, Donald Trump may actually bring peace to the Middle East.

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[We all know how desperate Democrats are to rig elections with voter fraud.  Often, it’s the only way they can win.  It’s why they hysterically oppose Voter ID.  Yet as Joseph Stalin said, “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.”  Today, the “who” is computers.  Here, computer security expert Bruce Schneier explains what to do about this. –JW]

Today, we conduct our elections on computers. Our registration lists are in computer databases. We vote on computerized voting machines. And our tabulation and reporting is done on computers.

We do this for a lot of good reasons, but a side effect is that elections now have all the insecurities inherent in computers. The only way to reliably protect elections from both malice and accident is to use something that is not hackable or unreliable at scale.

Recently, there have been two graphic demonstrations of how bad our computerized voting system is.

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Explosives require careful handling. Sometimes they blow up in your face.

After the 2016 election, the so-called deep state was confident that it had the power easily to either stop, remove, or delegitimize the outlier Donald Trump and his presidency.

Give it credit, the Washington apparat quite imaginatively pulled out all the stops. But now the administrative state’s multifaceted efforts are starting to unwind, and perhaps even boomerang, on the perpetrators.

In truth, it’s not just Washington apparat.  The entire multiplex world of the establishment is crumbling in a variety of arenas, from entertainment to Silicon Valley to the workplace.

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It would probably give Robert Mueller a nervous breakdown, not to mention James Comey, Andrew McCabe and the rest of the FBI cabal, past and present, but at this point the special counsel seems to be actually causing the reelection of Donald Trump.

Most of the country, other than the greed heads in the media and extreme Democrat Party operatives, no longer gives a hoot in Hades about the "Russia Probe."  They're frustrated and sick of it.

There's a dawning national consensus of "enough already" reflected by Judge Ellis when he demanded to know exactly what Paul Manafort's possible money laundering schemes of years ago had to do with Trump colluding with Russia in the 2016 election. The same might be said of Stormy Daniels, whose Russia connection is even more remote.

But let's skip past the subplots of the moment to the greatest of all unintended consequences of this endless investigation -- the decline and fall of the Democrat Party.

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