The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Is President Trump the Subject
of a Criminal Investigation?
by Judge Andrew Napolitano
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. Top Headlines
Ryan shares vision for tax reform, pledges action in 2017. (The Daily Signal)
Senate health-care draft repeals liar-nObamacare taxes, provides bigger subsidies for low-income Americans than House bill. (The Washington Post)
DNC's May fundraising at its lowest since 2003. (CNS News)
Johnson testifies DNC rejected DHS help on hack, Russia meddling did not alter ballots. (Fox News)
California court dismisses 14 criminal charges against Center for Medical Progress. (National Review)
Nearly 30% of illegal immigrant children at border have ties to MS-13 or other gangs. (The Washington Times)
Trump announces prospects for "solar wall" along U.S. southern border. (Fox News)
Michigan Police officer assaulted by jihadi. (WEYI)
Oh no! Evergreen College president: Disruptive students will be given a stern warning. (Hot Air)
Humor video: WOW!!! Trudeau Sets World Record In Avoiding Questions!!! (YouTube)
Policy video: liar-nObamaCare has failed the American people. (The White House/YouTube)
Policy: Sex in Red and Blue America. (Institute for Family Studies)
~The Patriot Post
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Democrats Complain about Trump despite
Clear Collusion between liar-nObama and Russians
by FRANK J. GAFFNEY, JR.
{familysecuritymatters.org} ~ On Wednesday's Breitbart News Daily, Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney suggested the House and Senate "broaden the lens" of Russian conspiracy investigations to include... "examples of collusion between U.S. government officials and Russian influence operations, including in our elections" under the liar-nObama administration. Gaffney looked back to the infamous hot-mike moment of President Barack liar-nObama "telling Vladimir Putin through an intermediary, ‘Just give me a little space in this election cycle, would ya, dude? I'll have more flexibility after I'm re-elected in my last election.'" "I mean, criminy, that is as clear-cut an example as you can, and you've got the guy on video doing it, of collusion to interfere with our elections for the purposes of achieving an outcome that would suit and serve the Russians," Gaffney exclaimed. "That ought to be front and center in these Senate and House hearings today, as well as one other that doesn't get nearly enough attention: uranium and the Podesta boys."... http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/democrats-complain-about-trump-despite-clear-collusion-between-obama-and-russians?f=must_readsby FRANK J. GAFFNEY, JR.
The Ongoing Drama of Palestinian Lies
Jared Kushner (left) meets with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas
by Bassam Tawil
{gatestoneinstitute.org} ~ US envoys Jason Greenblatt and Jared Kushner, who met this week in Jerusalem and Ramallah with Israeli and Palestinian Authority (PA) officials to discuss reviving the peace process... have discovered what previous US Middle East envoys learned in the past two decades -- that the PA has not, cannot, and will not change. During their meeting in Ramallah with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, the two US emissaries were told that the Palestinians will not accept anything less than an independent state along on the pre-1967 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital. Abbas also made it clear that he has no intention to make concessions on the "right of return" for Palestinian "refugees." This means he wants a Palestinian state next to Israel while flooding Israel with millions of Palestinian "refugees" and turning it, too, into another Palestinian state...Its not going to happen. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10573/palestinian-liesby Bassam Tawil
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Feds paid $1 billion in Social Security
benefits to individuals without a SSN
by Elizabeth Harrington
{foxnews.com} ~ The Social Security Administration paid $1 billion in benefits to individuals who did not have a Social Security Number (SSN), according to a new audit... The agency’s inspector general found errors in the government’s documentation for representative payees, otherwise known as individuals who receive retirement or disability payments on behalf of another person who is incapable of managing the benefits themselves. The audit released Friday found thousands of cases where there was no SSN on file. Over the last decade, the agency paid $1 billion to 22,426 representative payees who "did not have an SSN, and SSA had not followed its policy to retain the paper application."...SSA needs to take corrective actions, now. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/02/22/feds-paid-1-billion-in-social-security-benefits-to-individuals-without-ssn.html.
McCabe’s FBI Hosts Gay Pride Summit
by Cliff Kincaid
{aim.org} ~ The FBI may not be able to detect and prevent left-wing violence directed at Republicans playing baseball. But it sure knows how to pander to and entertain the LGBTQ community... with a full-blown conference featuring discussions about the oppressive “identity hierarchy.” In an amazing development, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, whose wife ran with liar-Hillary’s support for the state senate in Virginia, has now put the entire FBI apparatus at the disposal of a key Democratic Party constituency group, the LGBTQ lobby, with “Q” meaning queer. It is a direct affront to the conservative Christians who voted for President Donald Trump... http://www.aim.org/aim-column/mccabes-fbi-hosts-gay-pride-summit/?utm_source=AIM+-+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Email%20Jun-22-2017&utm_medium=email.
Top Headlines
Judicial Watch: Susan Rice’s unmasking documents of Trump team now sealed at liar-nObama Library. How convenient. (CNS News)
Shake-up underway: Sean Spicer leaving White House podium for behind-the-scenes role. (The Washington Times)
Humor: Trump picks Alex Jones as new press secretary. (The Babylon Bee)
ISIS setting up support networks to move terrorists to Europe and Asia. (The Washington Free Beacon)
Jihadi shot dead during terror attack in Belgium. (The Guardian)
Poland shuts border to Islamic migrants to keep terrorists out. (CNS News)
67% of Hispanics in U.S. 15 years or more are functionally illiterate. (Washington Examiner)
Philando Castile dash-cam footage released. (National Review)
Colin Kaepernick: The cops are pretty much like fugitive slave patrols, you know. (Hot Air)
Chelsea Clinton takes first step toward political run. (The Washington Free Beacon)
Policy: The constitutional crisis that almost was. (American Enterprise Institute)
Policy: North Korea must pay a massive price for Otto's murder. (Hudson Institute) ~The Patriot Post
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by Judge Andrew Napolitano
{townhall.com} ~ I was surprised last weekend when one of President Donald Trump's lawyers told my colleague Chris Wallace twice on "Fox News Sunday" that the president is being investigated by the FBI and then told him twice that he is not. This same lawyer repeated the "not being investigated" argument on a half-dozen other Sunday shows but did not repeat the "is being investigated" remark.
This produced substantial consternation in the news media and at the White House, since the president himself had tweeted over the weekend that he is being investigated for firing FBI Director James Comey by the same person -- Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein -- who recommended Comey's firing and that the investigation is a "witch hunt."
So, who is correct, the president or his lawyer? Is the president under criminal investigation by the FBI? If he is being investigated as he claims, is the investigation a witch hunt? Here is the back story.
When Donald Trump began running for the Republican nomination for president in June 2015 and made novel arguments indicating that his view was that Europe should essentially pay for its own military defense, this triggered concern in European capitals, and it resulted in the commencement of now well-documented British surveillance of Trump and his principal adviser on national security matters, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. The foreign surveillance was eventually passed on to American spies, who acceded to demands from the West Wing of the liar-nObama White House and handed over transcripts of conversations and names of participants.
This went on throughout the presidential campaign and into the transition period after Trump had been elected. President Barack liar-nObama's national security adviser, Susan Rice, recently confirmed that she ordered transcripts of surveilled conversations and names of participants -- this is called "unmasking" in intelligence community lingo -- and James Clapper, the liar-nObama administration's director of national intelligence, recently acknowledged under oath the existence of the foreign and domestic surveillance of Trump in 2015 and 2016, as well as the unmasking.
One of the unmasked conversations handed over to Rice was between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak. Portions of that conversation were leaked to The Washington Post, and that generated interest in the relationship, if any, of the Trump campaign and transition team to the Russian government. This provoked a preliminary FBI investigation into Flynn. Flynn apparently was interviewed by the FBI while ignorant of the FBI's possession of transcripts of his conversations with Kislyak. If Flynn lied in that interview as has been reported and speculated in the press, he committed a felony. When Trump learned Flynn had lied to others, he fired Flynn.
Flynn's firing ratcheted up the investigation of him, as well as the investigation of whether anyone from the Trump campaign had assisted Russian intelligence agents in hacking into computers in America in order to affect the outcome of the election. When Trump asked then-FBI Director Comey whether he, Donald J. Trump, was being investigated by the FBI, Comey thrice said no. That was, no doubt, true at the time. The Trump campaign and the Trump transition team were being investigated, but not Trump personally.
Then the president, according to Comey, asked Comey to drop the investigation into whether Flynn had lied to FBI agents and others. Then, according to Comey, the president suggested to him that he could keep his job as FBI director if he dropped the Flynn investigation. Then the president fired Comey.
After Comey released a portion of a memo containing his recollections of his conversations with Trump, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as independent prosecutor to investigate and charge, if appropriate, anyone criminally implicated in the Flynn investigation, the investigation of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election, the investigation of whether any assistance was provided to the Russians by any Americans, and all related matters.
Because Comey presented a credible case for the possibility that the president interfered with a federal criminal investigation, Mueller no doubt is investigating that as one of the related matters. In that respect, President Trump is under investigation by the FBI, which seeks to determine whether he attempted to influence a federal criminal investigation for a corrupt purpose.
Yet as a sitting president, Trump cannot be indicted for any criminal behavior committed while in office. Hence he cannot be a "target" of an FBI investigation. I use the word "target" in quotation marks because it has a technical meaning -- namely, that the Department of Justice plans to seek an indictment. So though it is true that the president is being investigated by the FBI, it is also true that he is not a target of that investigation.
Of what value is a criminal investigation of a person if that person cannot be charged criminally? Can't the president fire an FBI director without fear of a criminal investigation of his purposes? Can't he order the cessation of a criminal investigation without fearing that the FBI will investigate the reasons for his order?
Sometimes criminal investigations exonerate a person, and the FBI, without fanfare, will just drop it. In the case of the president, any evidence of guilt will go to the House Judiciary Committee, not a grand jury, as the constitutional remedy for presidential criminal behavior is impeachment, not indictment. Of course, the president can fire a director of the FBI for any non-corrupt reason, but if he does so after a rejected quid pro quo as Comey has publicly claimed that Trump did, that can trigger the woes Trump now endures.
We live in perilous times -- times that demand fidelity to first principles. The core of those principles is the rule of law: No one is beneath laws' protections, and no one is above their requirements. No one.
Is President Trump the Subject
of a Criminal Investigation?
{townhall.com} ~ I was surprised last weekend when one of President Donald Trump's lawyers told my colleague Chris Wallace twice on "Fox News Sunday" that the president is being investigated by the FBI and then told him twice that he is not. This same lawyer repeated the "not being investigated" argument on a half-dozen other Sunday shows but did not repeat the "is being investigated" remark.
This produced substantial consternation in the news media and at the White House, since the president himself had tweeted over the weekend that he is being investigated for firing FBI Director James Comey by the same person -- Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein -- who recommended Comey's firing and that the investigation is a "witch hunt."
So, who is correct, the president or his lawyer? Is the president under criminal investigation by the FBI? If he is being investigated as he claims, is the investigation a witch hunt? Here is the back story.
When Donald Trump began running for the Republican nomination for president in June 2015 and made novel arguments indicating that his view was that Europe should essentially pay for its own military defense, this triggered concern in European capitals, and it resulted in the commencement of now well-documented British surveillance of Trump and his principal adviser on national security matters, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. The foreign surveillance was eventually passed on to American spies, who acceded to demands from the West Wing of the liar-nObama White House and handed over transcripts of conversations and names of participants.
This went on throughout the presidential campaign and into the transition period after Trump had been elected. President Barack liar-nObama's national security adviser, Susan Rice, recently confirmed that she ordered transcripts of surveilled conversations and names of participants -- this is called "unmasking" in intelligence community lingo -- and James Clapper, the liar-nObama administration's director of national intelligence, recently acknowledged under oath the existence of the foreign and domestic surveillance of Trump in 2015 and 2016, as well as the unmasking.
One of the unmasked conversations handed over to Rice was between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak. Portions of that conversation were leaked to The Washington Post, and that generated interest in the relationship, if any, of the Trump campaign and transition team to the Russian government. This provoked a preliminary FBI investigation into Flynn. Flynn apparently was interviewed by the FBI while ignorant of the FBI's possession of transcripts of his conversations with Kislyak. If Flynn lied in that interview as has been reported and speculated in the press, he committed a felony. When Trump learned Flynn had lied to others, he fired Flynn.
Flynn's firing ratcheted up the investigation of him, as well as the investigation of whether anyone from the Trump campaign had assisted Russian intelligence agents in hacking into computers in America in order to affect the outcome of the election. When Trump asked then-FBI Director Comey whether he, Donald J. Trump, was being investigated by the FBI, Comey thrice said no. That was, no doubt, true at the time. The Trump campaign and the Trump transition team were being investigated, but not Trump personally.
Then the president, according to Comey, asked Comey to drop the investigation into whether Flynn had lied to FBI agents and others. Then, according to Comey, the president suggested to him that he could keep his job as FBI director if he dropped the Flynn investigation. Then the president fired Comey.
After Comey released a portion of a memo containing his recollections of his conversations with Trump, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as independent prosecutor to investigate and charge, if appropriate, anyone criminally implicated in the Flynn investigation, the investigation of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election, the investigation of whether any assistance was provided to the Russians by any Americans, and all related matters.
Because Comey presented a credible case for the possibility that the president interfered with a federal criminal investigation, Mueller no doubt is investigating that as one of the related matters. In that respect, President Trump is under investigation by the FBI, which seeks to determine whether he attempted to influence a federal criminal investigation for a corrupt purpose.
Yet as a sitting president, Trump cannot be indicted for any criminal behavior committed while in office. Hence he cannot be a "target" of an FBI investigation. I use the word "target" in quotation marks because it has a technical meaning -- namely, that the Department of Justice plans to seek an indictment. So though it is true that the president is being investigated by the FBI, it is also true that he is not a target of that investigation.
Of what value is a criminal investigation of a person if that person cannot be charged criminally? Can't the president fire an FBI director without fear of a criminal investigation of his purposes? Can't he order the cessation of a criminal investigation without fearing that the FBI will investigate the reasons for his order?
Sometimes criminal investigations exonerate a person, and the FBI, without fanfare, will just drop it. In the case of the president, any evidence of guilt will go to the House Judiciary Committee, not a grand jury, as the constitutional remedy for presidential criminal behavior is impeachment, not indictment. Of course, the president can fire a director of the FBI for any non-corrupt reason, but if he does so after a rejected quid pro quo as Comey has publicly claimed that Trump did, that can trigger the woes Trump now endures.
We live in perilous times -- times that demand fidelity to first principles. The core of those principles is the rule of law: No one is beneath laws' protections, and no one is above their requirements. No one.
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