Secret Service Agent: DEI Contributed to Near-Killing of Trump

Donald Trump, Assassination Attempt July 13, 2024

A Secret Service agent is for the first time publicly speaking out against the agency’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, which he says contributed to the first assassination attempt against President Trump last summer.

A 13-year veteran of the agency who has served in an elite unit and top protective assignments, Rashid Ellis sat down for an interview with the Independent Women’s Forum, a Virginia-based conservative nonprofit.

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Commentary: Trump Is Right to Disband FEMA and Return Disaster Funding to the States

FEMA worker

During visits to disaster-affected areas in North Carolina and California, President Trump criticized the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s performance and suggested dismantling the agency. “FEMA has turned out to be a disaster,” Trump said while touring a North Carolina neighborhood destroyed by September’s Hurricane Helene. “I think we recommend that FEMA go away.”

Trump’s proposal fits his America First agenda of fiscal responsibility and efficiency. He’s correct that FEMA has been a failure and that states can manage disaster relief funding more effectively.

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Commentary: Trump’s Big Stick Strategy Will Make America Respected Again

Donald Trump

Despite his best efforts at saber-rattling, Colombia’s socialist president Gustavo Petro bent the knee and agreed to take in American deportation flights carrying Colombian nationals, after only a day of receiving tariff threats from President Donald Trump.

While America and Colombia have been long-time partners in coordinating anti-narcotics efforts, newly elected President Trump hit a sore spot this past Sunday after he commenced deportation flights to the South American country. While world leaders reasonably expected Trump to execute his immigration policy the moment he stepped back into the Oval Office, this knee-jerk resistance from Petro only exposes the corrupt and unbalanced relationship the United States has had with Colombia for the past four years under the Biden-Harris administration.

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Commentary: The Cavalry Has Arrived with President Trump in the War for Reliable Energy

Oil Worker

President Donald J. Trump’s swearing in this week was like the horn of a cavalry charge backing up the soldiers fighting on the front line for sanity. On day one, President Trump prioritized actions to undo some of the many harmful, radical policies (250+ actions) from the Biden Administration and set America on a course toward energy independence. His executive orders will grow U.S. fossil fuel production by incentivizing new investments and unleashing new areas of production, which will lead to more energy, cheaper costs, and a more secure nation.

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Commentary: Congressional Budget Office Lowers U.S. Population Projections

New born baby

by Bill King   This week, the Congressional Budget Office once again reduced its population projections for the U.S. for 2025-2055. Last year, in its 30-year forecast, the CBO had projected that the U.S. population would be about 383 million by 2054. This week’s projection lowered the 2055 projection to 372 million, approximately a 2.8% decrease. If the CBO is correct, the U.S. population will grow by about 22 million or 6% (350 million→372 million) over the next thirty years. It will be the slowest population growth in the country’s history.The lower projection is based on the fertility rate continuing at a very low level and a slowdown in immigration. The most recent data on the fertility rate (the average number of children born to each woman) was 1.62 in 2023. The CBO projects that it will slightly decline to 1.60 for the balance of the forecast period. However, it warns that the rate could go even lower. A fertility rate of about 2.1 is necessary to have a stable population. The CBO breaks down the fertility rate between women born in the U.S. and those who have emigrated here. I was surprised that there is relatively little difference, with women born…

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Commentary: Democrats Can’t Bully Their Way to a ‘Free Pass’

Democrats gather on the House floor

I believe in restraint, tradition, decorum, and the precepts of our system of criminal justice: deterrence, punishment, and retribution. Turning the other cheek accomplishes none of these. Joe Biden’s last-minute pardons for his family, and his unprecedented preemptive pardons for members and staff of the January 6 Committee, Anthony Fauci, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Milley, underscore the necessity for Congress and Donald Trump’s Justice Department to perform their duties to investigate crime.

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Trump to Tap Sean Curran for Secret Service Director: Sources

Donald Trump (July 13, 2024)

President Trump plans to announce Secret Service agent Sean Curran, who heads his detail, to be the agency’s director, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.

Curran, who has served in the agency for more than two decades, leads a team of roughly 85 agents who protect the president-elect and has done so over the last two and a half years of his presidential campaign. Curran has the closest relationship to Trump of any current agent and is usually physically closest to him at any given moment in the innermost ring of Secret Service security dedicated to protecting the incoming president’s life on a daily basis.

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Clemency Request ‘Pending’ for Leaker of Trump’s and Others’ Taxes

Charles Littlejohn, Donald J Trump

The Biden administration is formally considering commuting the sentence of the convicted felon who stole and leaked incoming President Trump’s tax records along with those of thousands of other taxpayers, in the biggest tax data heist in U.S. history.

A search of the Justice Department’s pardon database reveals Charles Edward Littlejohn – who just began his five-year sentence in May – has been assigned a clemency case number. It says a petition for “commutation of sentence” was recently sought and is “pending.”

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Commentary: If You Care About Healthy Food, Confirm RFK Jr.

Mollie Engelhart, Robert F. Kennedy Jr

As a vegan chef turned regenerative cattle rancher, I’ve traversed the narrow divides between two worlds: the health-conscious, progressive enclaves of Los Angeles and the rugged, often misunderstood landscapes of rural Texas. For years, I lived and breathed the principles of organic farming and plant-based eating, firmly rooted in the belief that our food systems should be safe, resilient, and free from harmful chemicals. My community was predominantly left-leaning, passionate about clean water, food safety, and the dangers of over-medication. It felt like common sense.

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Commentary: Intifada in America

Crown Heights Shrmira Attack

On the same day that an ISIS-inspired terrorist killed 15 civilians in a deadly car attack in New Orleans, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protestors marched in Times Square chanting, “There is only one solution: intifada revolution.” After a year of such scenes and with domestic terror attacks escalating, the threat from those calling to “globalize the intifada” has never been more acute.

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Commentary: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Will Rebuild Trust in Public Health

Jay Bhattacharya

Just weeks before President-elect Trump announced that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya would be his nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Bhattacharya and I were together at Stanford University for a bold, first-of-its-kind symposium on public health decision making during the COVID-19 crisis. The idea behind the symposium was to shatter the public health echo chamber and bring diverse perspectives together in respectful dialogue. Dr. Bhattacharya and I are close friends, but our backgrounds are quite different. He is firmly at home at Stanford, having gone there as an undergraduate, and then going on to get a medical degree and a Ph.D. there before joining the faculty as a Professor of Health Policy. I, on the other hand, am a blue-collar Midwesterner who enlisted the in U.S. Navy after high school. I carry no titles of academic distinction and was likely the only participant at the symposium without a medical degree or PhD.

Yet, I was invited by Stanford to moderate the symposium’s opening panel with seven leading public health authorities from top institutions across the world. What brought me into this unusual position was my expanding work to rebuild truth and trust in public health—a collaboration that began with former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and the Braver Angels organization, which is nation’s largest movement working to bridge the partisan divide.

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Commentary: Nearly Four Years Later, No Letup in Jan. 6 Prosecutions, Possible Pardons or Not

Biden and Garland

by Julie Kelley   Even as President-elect Donald Trump promised on Sunday to act “very quickly” on pardons for many of the protesters involved in the events of January 6, the Biden administration’s Justice Department is continuing to arrest and try people for actions that occurred almost four years ago while opposing motions to delay trials because of the need for “the prompt and efficient administration of justice.” If the defeat of Kamala Harris constituted at least a partial repudiation of the lawfare against Trump and his supporters, the message appears to be lost on top brass at the DOJ. Prosecutors are pushing ahead with what they consider the department’s crowning achievement: the so-called “Capitol Siege” investigation into the events of Jan. 6, 2021. In what Attorney General Merrick Garland describes as the biggest criminal investigation in Department of Justice history, more than 1,560 people have been charged for federal crimes never before used against political protesters, including under a post-Enron obstruction statute overturned by the Supreme Court in June. At least 1,000 of these defendants have been convicted – either at trial or by accepting plea offers –  with some 650 defendants ordered to serve time in a federal prison. Sentences range…

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China’s Digital Strategy: Cyber-Espionage and Biometric Surveillance in Global Technological Expansion

Agriculture Robot

by J.V. Caro   China’s infiltration into agricultural IoT (Internet of Things) networks represents a critical yet underexplored dimension of its global technological strategy. Through key players such as Huawei and Alibaba Cloud, Beijing has embedded IoT technologies into agricultural systems in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. These initiatives, often framed as development partnerships aimed at improving food production and supply chain resilience, concurrently enable the collection of extensive agricultural and environmental data with profound strategic and geopolitical implications. Agricultural IoT systems are revolutionizing farming practices by collecting real-time, high-resolution data on variables such as soil moisture, nutrient levels, weather conditions, pest infestations, irrigation patterns, crop growth rates, and logistical movements. Chinese companies like Huawei and Alibaba are at the forefront of this technological advancement, designing platforms that support precision agriculture through the integration of advanced sensors, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence to optimize farm management. In Kenya, Huawei has actively collaborated with local partners and the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization to implement smart farming solutions aimed at enhancing agricultural productivity and sustainability. By deploying IoT sensors that monitor critical agricultural parameters and transmitting this data to cloud platforms where AI algorithms provide actionable insights, farmers have reportedly…

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Commentary: President Biden Needs to Find the Missing Unaccompanied Migrant Children

Border Surge

In recent months, a disturbing revelation has emerged from the heart of our nation’s immigration system: Over 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S. border during the Biden-Harris administration are unaccounted for. An internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report dated Aug. 19, 2024, confirms this alarming statistic, highlighting a profound failure in our duty to protect the most vulnerable.

The DHS report reveals that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has lost track of at least 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children, with the whereabouts of up to 323,000 remaining unknown. Without a doubt, we cannot deny the fact that many of these children are now tools and victims of the human sex trafficking industry – a heinous trade that represents the worst of the worst. This staggering number raises urgent questions about the safety and well-being of these children. They are left to fend for themselves in a dangerous world without proper oversight.

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Commentary: Trump’s Wild Bunch Is Ready for Action

Donald Trump

If for no other reason than that it will elicit fear in the hearts of autocracy-phobics, I propose that Donald Trump’s second-term Cabinet be known as “The Wild Bunch.”

The name is best known as the title of Sam Peckinpah’s classic 1969 western featuring a colorful cast of aging outlaws – William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Edmond O’Brien, Warren Oates, and Ben Johnson – who give it their all as they battle bounty hunters, the Mexican Federal Army, and the passage of time in order to make their mark while they still have a chance.

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Commentary: The Undercounted Statistics of Illegal Immigrants

In June, Victor Martinez-Hernandez was charged with the murder of Rachel Morin, a mother of five in Maryland. Police in Oklahoma tracked the accused repeat offender down with a sample of his DNA recovered from a Los Angeles home invasion in which a nine-year-old girl and her mother were assaulted. Police say he came to the U.S. illegally to escape prosecution for at least one other murder in his native El Salvador in December 2022. 

“That should never have been allowed to happen,” said Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler, referring to the numerous missed red flags the case presented. His office apprehended Hernandez in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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Commentary: John F. Kennedy – A Remembrance

Sixty autumns have passed since the assassination of John F. Kennedy that Friday, Nov. 22, a day that traumatized a generation of children and revealed the impermanence of their innocence. For many, it was their first rendezvous with death. It endured as a vivid remembrance even as other memories lapsed with the passage of age. Many of those children are now grandparents, having lived past the average American life expectancy in 1963. Others, like my father, are not here for the somber milestone. But until his own twilight, my father – like any Irish-Catholic child of that period – remained haunted by that afternoon, transfixed by what Kennedy meant at that time, and committed to imparting those reminiscences unto his three sons.

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Food Lobbyists Plot to Have It Their Way with RFK Jr.

RFK Trump

America’s most famous fast-food fan may be an unlikely candidate to make America healthy again, but Donald Trump seems willing to tackle the eating habits that have led to skyrocketing rates of obesity. The junk food industry is not lovin’ it.

RealClearInvestigations has learned that representatives of companies that make snack foods, sugary beverages, and cooking oils are already meeting to discuss how to thwart the reform agenda of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former consumer rights attorney Trump has said he will nominate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Their response provides an early example of what experts predict will be a massive effort by D.C. lobbyists to position their clients in response to Trump’s pledge to change how Washington does business.

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Trump Takes His Time with Secret Service Director Choice

Secret Service

It just might be the most personal hiring decision President-elect Trump will ever make, but if he’s already chosen, he’s keeping the contenders in suspense.

After surviving two assassination attempts in roughly two months, Donald Trump is in the awkward position of owing his life to the Secret Service agents and officers who intervened to protect him, even as he remains deeply critical of the failures that allowed the near-misses to occur.

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Analysis: Helene Gave Way to ‘Hurricane SNAFU’ in the Carolinas

FEMA Worker

It wasn’t as if the Tar Heel state didn’t see Hurricane Helene coming. On Sept. 25, one day before Helene stormed ashore, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency as the storm’s path showed it churning northward toward Appalachia after making landfall in Florida.

Yet that advance declaration was not followed by any state evacuation orders, and the population largely sheltered in place as Helene hit the steep, wooded hills of western North Carolina, squatting over the area, unleashing more than an inch of water an hour for more than a day. The unprecedented, relentless downpour, falling on ground already saturated by rain the week before, tore old pines and hardwoods out by the roots, creating arboreal torpedoes that rocketed down the steep inclines; water that turned photogenic stony creeks into whitewater torrents, lifting ancient streambed boulders and tossing them like chips on to roads and into homes and buildings. The storm left 230 people dead, nearly half of them in North Carolina, with dozens still missing as of early November.

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Commentary: Trump’s Win Is a Victory for American Prosperity and Practical Energy Solutions

Oil Rig

Donald Trump’s win is a big victory for the American energy industry and for all Americans. The climate crazed don’t want to recognize the fact that more than 80% of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas. They don’t want to admit that the use of all three are at record highs and are continuing to grow. Or that a thriving economy needs reliable, affordable, and abundant energy. Because the cost of energy is built into everything that we do, consume or use, even watching Netflix.

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Secret Service Brass Interfered in Inspector General Assassination Probe

U.S. Secret Service

Secret Service leaders meddled in an independent government investigation of the July 13 assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump and are still not following many basic agency security protocols for presidential candidates, presidents, and vice presidents in the final days before the election, according to emails reviewed by RealClearPolitics and several sources in the Secret Service community.

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Commentary: Tim Walz’s Progressive Education Policies Could Doom Harris

Tim Walz

Donald Trump currently holds a razor-thin 0.6 percent lead over Kamala Harris in the RealClearPolitics Polling Average for Pennsylvania. With this key swing state potentially deciding the outcome of the Electoral College, Democrats can only wonder how different the polls might look if Pennsylvania’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro – once considered a frontrunner for Harris’ VP pick – were on the ticket instead of Tim Walz.

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After the Deluge: On the Ground in North Carolina Three Weeks After Hurricane Helene

After Hurricane Helene

At 7:30 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 27, Chris Trusz was standing on one of the bridges spanning the Broad River in Chimney Rock. He wanted to get a photo. It had been raining steadily for 36 hours and the river was running 10 inches above normal. Trusz, who’d moved to the western North Carolina mountain town 18 months earlier, wasn’t worried; residents had been warned there might be a bit of flooding. He got his picture and walked up the hill to his home.

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Commentary: The Real Threat to American Democracy

US Capitol

Heading into Election Day, we hear constantly that the presidential candidates are mortal threats to American democracy. Anxieties about Donald Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, rampage at the U.S. Capitol and his declaration that he would act as “dictator for a day” are countered by Elon Musk’s warning that if Harris wins, “this will be the last election,” or alarms that Harris’ designs on overhauling the Supreme Court will lead to an end to the rule the law.

The very idea that our republic’s future hangs on the outcome of a single presidential contest, however, reveals the deeper, unacknowledged, underlying danger: a Congress incapable of performing its constitutional duties as our country’s lawmaking body and the guarantor of our representative democracy.

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Commentary: Feds Set Record for Improper Payments

Government Spending

In 2021, near the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, investigators tailed a Jeep Cherokee stolen from an airport Avis to a New York City apartment they called a “fraud factory” – no furniture, just an air mattress, a computer, stacks of loan and tax forms, and a shredder. 

Two men who had first met in prison – Adedayo Ilori, 43, and Chris Recamier, 59 – were using stolen identities and fake paperwork to falsely claim they employed 200 people, bilking the federal government’s pandemic-relief programs of more than $1 million, according to federal prosecutors. They used the stolen money to splurge on big-ticket purchases, such as cryptocurrency, leasing luxury apartments and a Mercedes, the evidence showed.

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Commentary: Biden’s Climate Splurge Gives Billions to Nonprofit Newbies

Solar Panel Installation

Although there isn’t much public information available about the Justice Climate Fund, it appears to have been an overnight success.

After gaining nonprofit status in August 2023, the organization was awarded $940 million by the Biden administration just eight months later in connection with the White House’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which aims to provide financial assistance to reduce carbon emissions and reduce pollution.  

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Commentary: The Role of Federalism in Trump’s Second Term

Donald Trump

The presidential election is in its final stretch and the race is neck-and-neck, according to the polls. The outcome will have a profound impact at all levels of government and business, so preparing for a second Trump term would be prudent.

In office and on the campaign trail, former President Trump has championed federalism and granting the states greater latitude to implement policies and programs. He has voiced a commitment to reducing the footprint of federal regulations. As president, he implemented executive orders and other actions that sought to ease regulatory costs and effects. The Trump Administration also galvanized deregulatory efforts at the state and local level through the Governors’ Initiative on Regulatory Innovation. A similar effort can be expected in a second term.

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Secret Service, FBI Downplay Threat to Trump at California Rally

Secret Service

The U.S. Secret Service and the FBI are downplaying the threat to former President Donald Trump posed by a man arrested outside a California rally Saturday night – despite assertions made by a local sheriff that his detention likely thwarted a third assassination attempt.

Deputies working for the Riverside County sheriff’s office arrested a man, identified as Vem Miller, and subsequently discovered a shotgun, loaded handgun, and high-capacity magazine in his car about a quarter mile from the entrance to Trump’s campaign rally in Coachella Valley. Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco, who endorsed Trump publicly in June, said Miller’s car, identified as a black SUV, had a fake license plate that was unregistered and possessed several phony passports and driver’s licenses with different identities, as well as what Bianco described as a fake press pass.

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Buying the News: Documenting the Takeover of Local Journalism by Leftwing Donors

"The Chronicle" Newsroom, 2007

American journalism has experienced a spectacular collapse in the last 25 years – daily newspaper circulation has declined from over 60 million subscribers to just over 20 million. And the trend is accelerating: According to the Pew Research Organization, the average monthly number of unique visitors to the websites of the country’s top 50 newspapers plummeted 20 percent in one year from 2021 to 2022.

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Commentary: The Unexpected Pennsylvania Voters Deciding the Next President

People casting their votes

Unexpectedly, Pennsylvania’s Millennial and Gen X voters are poised to elect the next president of the United States. 

No longer adolescents, Millennials are adults striving for families and homeownership in a world of uncertainty. For Gen X, 30-year mortgages locked in at 3% feel great, though the launch of MTV is now closer to the attack on Pearl Harbor than today. Life is coming fast for both generations.

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Commentary: America in the Age of Nero

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump

Americans are like members of a quarrelsome family, so intent on arguing their petty grievances around the kitchen table that they don’t smell the rising smoke from the oven. As our nation fumes and the world burns, neither major party presidential candidate is addressing the lapping flames around us.

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are not simply ignoring our frightening national debt – both vow to ramp it up. Neither candidate has a serious plan to respond to the threats posed by China, Russia, or Iran.

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Commentary: Foreign Censorship Threatens American Free Speech

Facebook User

On the eve of a highly-anticipated live X “Spaces” conversation between Elon Musk and former president Donald Trump, the powerful European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton warned in August that authorities would be “monitoring” the conversation for “content that may incite violence, hate, and racism.” 

While reminding Musk that the EU was already investigating X for alleged failures “to combat disinformation,” Breton said he and his colleagues “will not hesitate to make full use of our toolbox … to protect EU citizens from serious harm.”

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Commentary: Vaccine Ad Blitz Sidestepped Transparency Rules

COVID Shot

“A bun in the toaster oven,” a woman exclaims off-camera, handing an ultrasound image to family members who erupt into tearful emotion over the news. “Oh my God!” 

The touching baby announcement video then gets down to business as text appears on the screen amidst the ongoing celebration, suggesting the best way to stay alive for this joyous birth is by becoming vaccinated against COVID-19. “Why will you get vaccinated? …  Because some people you just want to meet in person.” 

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Secret Service Agent Accused of Sexually Assaulting Harris Aide

A Secret Service agent has been accused of sexually assaulting a staffer who works for Vice President Kamala Harris, according to four sources in the Secret Service community.

The incident in question took place sometime over the last week during a trip devoted to providing advance security work and planning for a Harris campaign event in Wisconsin that ultimately did not take place. Several Harris staffers and Secret Service agents were in Green Bay to provide advance security and other planning for an upcoming Harris campaign event. The Harris campaign opted to go to Atlanta instead of Wisconsin on Friday, Sept. 20.

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Commentary: Media Push Misleading Crime Stats to Protect Democrat Narrative

Crime Scene

Crime is a major issue in this year’s election, yet major media ignored the release of a significant new government report showing a surge in violent crime. The increase in violent crime during the Biden administration is a record increase.

The latest data released last Thursday from the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) reveal a sharp increase in violent crime under the Biden-Harris administration compared to when Trump left office.

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Commentary: DOJ Gets Political Before 2024 Election

Attorney General Merrick Garland broke precedent just weeks before the November election, delivering politically charged remarks at the U.S. Attorneys’ National Conference in Washington – pointedly speaking publicly rather than privately in a departure from his usual practice. “Our norms are a promise that we will not allow this department to be used as a political weapon,” he said before a packed house, gathered in the Great Hall of DOJ headquarters on Sept. 12. “Federal prosecutors and agents may never make a decision regarding an investigation or prosecution for the purpose of affecting any election or the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”

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Commentary: Don’t Jail Parents for School Shootings – Arm Teachers

Teacher Guns

Understandably, we want to blame someone besides the 14-year-old who murdered four people last week at Apalachee High School in Georgia. People are shocked and upset that the father taught the boy to shoot and hunt and bought the boy a rifle for Christmas. But that doesn’t mean it made any sense for police to arrest the father the day after the school shooting on two counts of second-degree murder, four counts of involuntary manslaughter, and eight counts of cruelty to children.

This isn’t the first time that parents are being held liable for their children’s actions. Jennifer and James Crumbley were sentenced to prison for 10 to 15 years after their son perpetrated the 2021 Oxford High School shootings in Michigan. Their crime? Letting their son have access to the father’s pistol, which was used in the murders.

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Commentary: A Viewer’s Guide to Harris vs. Trump Debate

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will soon meet in a high stakes nationally televised debate, perhaps the only one of this campaign.

In previous elections – 1960, 1976, 1980, 2000, and 2020 come immediately to mind – the election contests were heavily influenced by such encounters. This year, for sure, it is “high risk, high reward.” With an election so close, we believe this debate will be important – maybe even decisive – in determining the winner.

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Commentary: McCormick Outlines ‘Playbook’ in Tight Pennsylvania Senate Race

Dave McCormick

With August in the rear-view mirror, Dave McCormick admits he never really made much of “brat summer,” the amorphous Gen Z meme that no one can exactly define but that Vice President Kamala Harris has adopted while in pursuit of younger voters.

A catch-all term for “cool” that is also sort of kitsch, “brat” is one of the vibes that Harris has cultivated amidst a slow policy rollout to capture the imagination of voters and catapult herself in front of former President Donald Trump in the polls.

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Commentary: Understanding Mitochondrial Dysfunction and Its Impact on Our Health

Robert Kennedy Jr.

Last Thursday, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. withdrew (kind of) from the 2024 presidential race.  He didn’t have to, and in the case of 40 out of 50 states, he actually didn’t.  But, he also didn’t have to endorse Donald J. Trump, and yet he did.  As I waited for his press conference, I wondered: What could drive a lion of Democratic party royalty to side with Trump?  The answer turned out to be a trio of existential crises.  As RFK Jr. explained, he and Trump are aligned on three critical issues, and they are of such existential importance that he was willing to set aside their differences to work together.

Beyond being a refreshing break from the mind-numbing drumbeat of Trump’s opposition, RFK Jr.’s remarks were a stark reminder of why two-thirds of Americans believe the country is moving down the wrong track. He first took aim at the military-industrial complex’s perpetual provoking of foreign wars and followed up with the alarming assault on free speech.  These were, however, just the warmup acts for his primary grievance: the moral and legal corruption of the food and pharmaceutical industries, assisted by their captured agencies, e.g., the FDA and USDA.

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Commentary: Reversing the Military Decline

Marine Corps

Since 2020, the nation’s military has undergone one of the most humiliating periods in its history. The disgraceful rout at Hamid Karzai International airport during the Afghanistan withdrawal. Soon after, the decrepit state of naval maintenance and shipbuilding is the worst since the Navy’s founding.

Further compounding the humiliation, the Marine Corps has been castrated into a regional force whose legendary force in readiness is being replaced by a combination of colonial light infantry and coastal defense artillery.

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Commentary: No, the Electoral College Is Not a Relic of Slavery

"Signing of the Declaration of Independence" painting by Howard Chandler Christy

Since the 2000 presidential election, the left has worked to undermine the legitimacy of the Electoral College, labeling it a relic of slavery. No doubt, if Donald Trump returns to the White House while again losing the popular vote, these attacks will be renewed with fervor. In fact, it has already begun as commentators denounce the undemocratic nature of the system. Just last month, the New York Times published a piece trashing the Constitution and asserting that the Electoral College’s only purpose was to protect slavery. These critiques are based on misconceptions and hostility toward the very structure of our Constitution.

The History

Our method of electing the president came about through compromise. The framers agreed upon a system that ensured the states had a say in choosing the president. The Constitution gives each state a share of electors, and the states decide for themselves how to select those electors.

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