Saturday Noon ~ TheFrontPageCover

The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Donald Trump's Seven Days in May
by Judge Andrew Napolitano
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 Top Headlines 
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House may need to vote again on GOP liar-nObamaCare repeal bill. (Bloomberg)
 
Trump administration announces plans to renegotiate NAFTA. (ABC News)
 
FCC votes to advance net neutrality repeal. (The Hill)
 
Trump seeking replacements for some of his senior team. (CBS News)
 
More than seven million voter registrations are duplicated in multiple states. (The Washington Free Beacon)
 
House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz retiring next month. (Chaffetz press release)
 
California professor bans college Republicans from Women's History Month events. (Washington Examiner)
 
U.S. strikes Syria militia threatening U.S.-backed forces. (The Washington Free Beacon)
 
Judge: Lerner's Tea Party-targeting testimony can stay secret for now. (The Washington Times)
 
Woodward: Reporters "binge drinking the anti-Trump Kool-Aid." (Washington Examiner)
 
Policy: The one change the government could make to drive down college prices. (The Daily Signal)
 
Policy: Health care reform: Mission possible. (Washington Examiner~The Patriot Post
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Trump Tries a ‘Waive-and-Slap’
Approach to Tehran
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by Mark Dubowitz
{defenddemocracy.org} ~ The Trump administration had no sooner renewed a waiver on U.S. sanctions against Iran’s crude-oil exports Wednesday than it introduced a raft of new sanctions against the regime... Call it the waive-and-slap approach. The oil-exports sanctions waiver, which will continue to temporarily allow Iran to sell its crude oil to international customers despite the statutory sanctions, had come due as part of the Iran nuclear deal. But their renewal is no sign that President Trump is flip-flopping on his campaign promise to “tear up” the deal. The Trump administration is currently conducting an Iran-policy review. The last thing Mr. Trump should do before this policy is finalized is to make drastic and premature decisions that could incite a diplomatic backlash... http://www.defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/dubowitz-mark-trump-tries-a-waive-and-slap-approach-to-Tehran/
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Terror Finance Briefing Book
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by Yaya J. Fanusie and Alex Entz
{defenddemocracy.org} ~ The Terror Finance Briefing Book is a new product of FDD’s Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance (CSIF) created to help policymakers better understand how terrorist groups fund their operations... so that they may be targeted more effectively. This publication will compile financial assessments of select jihadist organizations in the Middle East and Africa. Each report will identify the key financial strengths and vulnerabilities of each group, review U.S. and international countermeasures, highlight possible wildcard scenarios which could impact future funding, and recommend the main areas where policymakers and counter-illicit finance strategists should focus their action. For each report, the first four pages serve as a visually-engaging briefing aid, providing a concise overview of the respective organization’s finances...http://www.defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/yaya-j-fanusie-terror-finance-briefing-book/
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Why Trump’s Iran Sanctions Waiver
Should Worry the Mullahs
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by John Hannah
{defenddemocracy.org} ~ As part of the Iran nuclear deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that he inherited from his predecessor... President Donald Trump yesterday was forced to decide whether to renew the U.S. waiver on sanctions targeting Iran’s oil exports. Rather than violate the JCPOA and risk an early diplomatic crisis, the president — who has dubbed the nuclear deal the “worst” in history — swallowed hard and waived. But before the narrative takes hold that — despite all Trump’s huffing and puffing — he’s simply following in the footsteps of the liar-nObama administration’s Iran policy, a few pertinent observations:... http://www.defenddemocracy.org/media-hit/john-hannah-why-trumps-iran-sanctions-waiver-should-worry-the-mullahs/
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Democrats Are Losing Winnable
Special Elections—Here’s Why
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by John A. Tures
{observer.com} ~ With an energized base, Washington D.C. in turmoil, and being the party not associated with the chaos, Democrats should be picking off special election seats effortlessly... From Kansas to Omaha to Georgia, the party has fumbled several winnable races. It could get swept in all of them, if Democrats can’t win in Georgia, South Carolina and Montana. The question is why. There are several theories floating around. I’ll provide the best explanation for the party’s missed opportunities... http://observer.com/2017/05/why-democrats-are-losing-special-elections/?utm_campaign=national-politics&utm_content=2017-19-05-9652209&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=channel-national-politics-distribution
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Trump Cancels Trip To Revered Israeli
Historic Site Masada
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by Randy Desoto
{westernjournalism.com} ~ President Donald Trump has canceled a scheduled trip to the mountain fortress of Masada after Israeli authorities informed his team that the president would not be able to land his helicopter at the ancient site... Trump was slated to give a speech at the location, but the address will instead be delivered at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. “The president will deliver remarks at the Israel Museum and celebrate the unique history of Israel and of the Jewish people while reaffirming America’s unshakable bond with our closest ally in the Middle East,” said U.S. national security adviser H.R. McMaster at a White House press briefing... http://www.westernjournalism.com/trump-cancels-trip-to-revered-israeli-historic-site-masada/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=minutemennews&utm_campaign=dailypm&utm_content=libertyalliance
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Donald Trump's Seven Days in May
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by Judge Andrew Napolitano
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townhall.com} ~ In a period of seven days this month, President Donald Trump fired James Comey as director of the FBI and was accused of sharing top-secret intelligence data with the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador to the United States, the latter a known Russian spy.

The Comey firing was clumsy and rude. Comey learned of it from FBI agents in Los Angeles who noticed reports of it on television monitors that they could see while he was speaking to them. The White House initially claimed Comey had been fired because of his poor judgment in the liar-Hillary Clinton email investigation, in which he announced that she would not be indicted even though there was ample evidence to indict her and then reopened the case two weeks before Election Day even though there was no evidence to justify doing so.

Then the president said he had fired Comey because he objected to Comey's public personality. Then the president claimed that though Comey had told him he was not the subject of any FBI investigation, Comey had not been investigating Trump administration intelligence community leaks with the same vigor with which he had been investigating allegations of collusion between Trump's campaign and the Russian government.

Then Trump met with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador. Then someone who was at the meeting or privy to it afterward, American or Russian, revealed to The Washington Post that at the meeting, Trump had boasted of intelligence data related to the Islamic State group. Then Trump himself admitted sharing this intelligence with the Russians.

A leak of top-secret material by the president or by an anonymous source is potentially catastrophic, and the charge that the president himself revealed top secrets to a known Russian spy is grave, perhaps the gravest ever leveled at an American president in the modern era. The Americans and the Russians at the meeting with Trump denied that he had compromised intelligence sources or revealed the location of American military, but they did not deny that he had revealed top secrets.

All of these events took place in seven days. Here is the back story.

When Comey usurped the authority of the ethically challenged then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and announced that liar-Hillary Clinton would not be indicted for espionage -- the failure to safeguard state secrets that had been given to her for safekeeping -- even though there was a mountain of evidence of her guilt, it seemed to me that he was trying to have it both ways. He was trying to keep his job by pleasing both Republicans and Democrats. Instead, he grossly miscalculated and substantially irritated leadership in both parties, including liar-Clinton and Trump.

At the same time he was exonerating liar-Clinton legally while damning her politically, he was investigating the Trump campaign, about which he quite properly did not say a public word. And he authorized his agents to engage a former British intelligence agent to dig up dirt on candidate Trump and to pay him $50,000 for it. The story the agent dug up was so lurid and unbelievable that the FBI declined to make the payment.

Comey's leadership of the FBI was flawed, but not so flawed as the reasons given for his summary firing. Those inconsistent reasons fed the Democrats' narrative that Comey had been onto something in the Russia/Trump campaign investigation and the president had known it and wanted to derail it. The president has yet to deny this.

Though the president has complained that Comey failed to investigate leaks of intelligence data from within his administration, The Washington Post effectively accused the president himself of becoming the leaker in chief by revealing to the Russians information so secret that only a handful of Americans legally possessed it. That information consisted of the name of a city in Syria from which spies had reported that the Islamic State group was plotting to plant bombs on commercial airliners.

What is so secret about that? Intelligence data almost always requires reading between the lines. Doing so here reveals the country from which the intelligence came, as there is only one friendly country that has sufficient intelligence resources in that city to develop local human spies. That country, which the president did not name but which we know is Israel, at first threatened to cut off providing intelligence data to the U.S. because of the president's private revelations but later said that all is forgiven. So, the president told the Russians where to find Israeli spies in Syria.

The fact that these revelations were private is of legal significance. Under federal law, the president can declassify any secrets, even the most highly sensitive and guarded ones. He can do so by whispering the secret into someone's ear or by formally removing the secret from its classified status. But because he did not do the latter, the secret is still a secret -- yet The Washington Post has this material and may now legally reveal it.

How can a newspaper reveal a top secret that the president has not made public? If someone reveals the secret to the newspaper, it can. The person who did so in this case committed a felony, and the president is right to be angered over it. That person is probably a member of the intelligence community bent on frustrating or destabilizing or controlling the Trump presidency. Because that person gave it to the Post and because there is enormous public interest in knowing what Trump told the Russians, the Post is free to publish it.

All of this demonstrates that rogue intelligence agents can engage in their own form of agitprop -- agitation propaganda. And they can cause political harm with it. Yet the questions of whether Donald Trump revealed top secrets to the Russians and, if he did so, whether it was intentional or not and whether it was harmful to national security are questions to which we are entitled to answers. And was Jim Comey fired for getting too close to the truth or not close enough?

Why do these questions keep coming? 
 
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