On Friday’s Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – Michael Patrick Leahy talked to Tennessee Star panelist and decision desk operator weighs in on the origins and reasoning behind the ‘whistleblower’ in Washington, D.C.
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by Brandon Weichert When Donald Trump took office, his predecessor warned him that North Korea was going to be his biggest international headache. Within months of receiving that warning from Barack Obama, the Trump team was faced with escalating nuclear threats from Pyongyang. The world braced as a nuclear standoff appeared to unfold and as President Trump moved U.S. forces into the region, issuing threatening tweets in response to escalating North Korean provocations. Meanwhile, the hateful Left and its allies embedded within the so-called deep state, decried the president’s supposed “warmongering” against North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Once Trump stunned the world and met with Kim in Singapore last summer—without preconditions—those same Leftists and deep staters insisted Trump was appeasing an intractable dictator intent on acquiring nuclear weapons to use against the United States and its allies. In reality, Trump was pursuing an America First strategy that used all the tools of statecraft available to his—tools most of these “experts” had forgotten how to use. Those Who Want Respect Give Respect For too long, American policymakers had an all-or-nothing view of foreign policy. Either the United States got everything it wanted through force or it got nothing. Threats, such as those from…
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A local Ohio Tea Party leader believes Robert Mueller’s statements today were an attempt by the “Deep State” to help House Democrats push for impeachment after efforts to oust President Trump through the Special Counsel’s office failed. Tom Zawistowski, the President of We the People Convention, thinks it was not happenstance that Mueller’s press conference was the same day as former FBI Director James Comey’s op-ed appears in the Washington Post. “Today, wasn’t it a coincidence, that out of nowhere, Robert Mueller pops up on my TV at 11:00 AM to make a statement about his infamous ‘Mueller Report?’ Just happens to be the same day that Jim Comey has an op-ed in the Washington Post attacking the Barr investigation. Just happens that Attorney General Bill Barr is in Alaska and not part of this event,” the grassroots leader wrote in a statement. Mueller appeared in-person to deliver remarks Wednesday to address on-going concerns about his two-year-long investigation. He defended his investigation and reiterated that “insufficient evidence” existed to charge a “broader conspiracy.” Even though the Special Counsel defended his investigation, he did not fully clear President Donald Trump of any wrongdoing – although such a declaration would be well beyond the…
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by Brandon J. Weichert During a private dinner last week at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington, D.C., I was taken to task by a Republican congressman after I pressed him on his lack of support for President Donald Trump’s proposed space force. The congressman is a war hero. His service is unimpeachable and I maintain a deep respect for his commitment to our country. Yet his responses to my questions were flippant, painfully uninformed, and dangerously rooted in a reflexive NeverTrumpism that is unworthy of the man. When first confronted about the space force, he insisted that it “isn’t his problem,” as he is neither a member of the House Armed Services Committee nor of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Fair enough. It’s not his specialty. But as I delved deeper into the matter with him, the Republican congressman finally snapped that he did not support “creating Starfleet” (uh, why not?) because he did not believe that “greater bureaucracy was the solution” to our space woes. Of course, this is the kind of prepackaged nonsense that reflexive NeverTrumpism supplies. Don’t question the checklist. Low taxes and small government mantras are the only objectives. Stick it to the president when…
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by Robert Romano “This is probably done in conjunction with Fusion GPS that was making this stuff up, they conveniently were able to get this into the FBI, willing takers at the FBI, and this was all to dirty up the Trump campaign. I mean, I have to say, you can’t make this stuff up, but… that’s exactly what they did.” That was Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Devin Nunes’ (R-Calif.) reaction in an interview with John Batchelor on May 9, who asked him about a report from The Hill’s John Solomon that details a meeting former British spy Christopher Steele — author of the false allegation paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign that President Donald Trump was a Russian agent — had with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on Oct. 11, 2016. The meeting was memorialized in a memo Kavalec typed up afterward, and cast serious doubts on some of the allegations Steele was making, as well as his credibility. According to Kavalac, Steele was “keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8” to have an impact on 2016 election. The documents came from a Freedom of Information Act…
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by Victor Davis Hanson Right after the 2016 election, Green Party candidate Jill Stein – cheered on by Hillary Clinton dead-enders – sued in three states to recount votes and thereby overturn Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College. Before the quixotic effort imploded, Stein was praised as an iconic progressive social justice warrior who might stop the hated Trump from even entering the White House. When that did not work, B-list Hollywood celebrities mobilized, with television and radio commercials, to shame electors in Trump-won states into not voting for the president-elect during the official Electoral College balloting in December 2016. Their idea was that select morally superior electors should reject their constitutional directives and throw the election into the House of Representatives where even more morally superior NeverTrump Republicans might join with even much more morally superior Democrats to find the perfect morally superior NeverTrump alternative. When that did not work, more than 60 Democratic House members voted to bring up Trump’s impeachment for vote. Trump had only been in office a few weeks. Then San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer toured the country and lavished millions on advertisements demanding Trump’s removal by impeachment – and was sorely disappointed when he…
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by Thaddeus G McCotter I listened the other day to Tucker Carlson’s populist dirge on what’s ailing America. Then I perused some rejections, critiques, and commendations of it. Then I shrugged. To be charitable, it certainly wasn’t their fault. It’s the fruit of our communication revolution, wherein the head rush from new media’s immediacy renders antiquated the sober digestion of more lengthy philosophical debates. Small wonder, then, one so frequently searches for abiding comfort in these trying times by, again, turning back the dog-eared pages written by Burke, Kirk, Buckley, Röpke, and Nisbet, among so many other titans of conservative thought. But I digress . . . Or do I? In what does the current debate instruct us that aforementioned works haven’t already? The predatory economy Carlson describes is not market capitalism; it is the “business-government model” of crony capitalism long ago defined and decried by Belloc and Chesterton. Its remedy was found in the “German Miracle” outlined in Röpke’s A Humane Economy. One would also know from Burke, Kirk, and Buckley that, since the French Revolution, it is not greed but ideology—the Enemies of the Permanent Things’ lust to desecrate all you hold dear in order to remold humanity according to their own insidious whims—that has…
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by Chuck Ross Former FBI Director James Comey told Congress Friday that the FBI had not verified the Steele dossier prior to relying on the salacious document to obtain spy warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. According to a transcript of Comey’s testimony released on Saturday, the former FBI chief also asserted that it was “not necessary” for the FBI to assess the sources that dossier author Christopher Steele used to compile his report, which was funded by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign. “I think I’ve dealt with warrants where you just identify that your primary [confidential informant], or primary source, has subsources, and so long as the court is aware of that phenomenon and that you’re speaking to the reliability of the primary source, to my mind, that’s a totally legit warrant application,” he said. Comey told lawmakers that “work was ongoing” by the time he was fired on May 9, 2017, to “to replicate, either rule in or rule out” as much of the dossier as possible. He said that by the time he was fired on May 9, 2017, he “still didn’t know whether there was anything to it,” referring to the investigation into possible…
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by Joseph Duggan A future American history exam will ask students to recall a U.S. president who relied heavily on the political intelligence-gathering and counsel of one or more of his adult children. This president bypassed the foreign policy and diplomatic bureaucracy and practiced a notably personal style of international deal making. He also invested what some considered an inordinate amount of trust in his direct relationship with a controversial Saudi Arabian sheikh and the strategic importance of the Desert Kingdom’s oil resources. One acceptable answer would be Franklin Roosevelt. The White House during his era had no one styled “chief of staff.” Jefferson’s White House with Meriwether Lewis, and Lincoln’s with John Hay, had top aides known as “private secretary” or a similar title. For part of FDR’s presidency, his de facto chief of staff was his eldest son James, snarkily described by Henry Luce’s Time magazine in 1938 as the “Assistant President of the United States.” FDR famously conducted direct diplomacy with Churchill and Stalin to guide the Allies to victory over Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. His personal chemistry and understandings with the British statesman and the Soviet dictator were essential both to the war’s success…
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by Chuck Ross Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein discussed wearing a wire to record President Donald Trump and volunteered to recruit cabinet officials to potentially remove the Republican from office, according to a bombshell report from The New York Times. Rosenstein made the remarks in meetings with Department of Justice and FBI officials shortly after the May 9, 2017 firing of James Comey as FBI director, The Times reported Friday. Rosenstein took part in Comey’s ouster, writing a letter recommending that he be fired because of his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. According to The Times: “Mr. Rosenstein made the remarks about secretly recording Mr. Trump and about the 25th Amendment in meetings and conversations with other Justice Department and F.B.I. officials. Several people described the episodes, insisting on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The people were briefed either on the events themselves or on memos written by F.B.I. officials, including Andrew G. McCabe, then the acting bureau director, that documented Mr. Rosenstein’s actions and comments.” Rosenstein, who is overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, also reportedly told McCabe that he could potentially persuade Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to…
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by Rick Manning Project Veritas’ latest video exposé reveals that the #Resistance movement runs deeply within the federal government. However, due to the civil service laws, those who refuse to do their jobs are nearly impossible to root out and fire. The only way to fix this broken federal civil service system is for Congress to pass the MERIT Act. Federal civilian workers know that they cannot be fired even under the most egregious circumstances, and under current civil service law they are correct. The sad truth is that it takes between six months and a year to fire the 0.53 percent of federal workers who are terminated with cause. When you include layoffs and terminations for cause, the Office of Personnel Management reports that the percentage of federal career civil servants asked to leave against their will swells to 2.68 percent in 2017. Unfortunately, the federal government does not track the private sector termination rate for cause, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics does show that a federal civil servant is 6.4 times less likely to be fired or laid off than those in the private sector who pay their salaries. What few people realize is that President Obama signed an Presidential…
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by George Rasley, CHQ Editor The New York Times recently published what it touted as a bombshell anonymous op-ed by a “senior” Trump administration official that trashed President Trump for being among other things “amoral” and showing “little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people.” The op-ed, which we have read and re-read several times, is all about Trump’s style, as opposed to the substance of his policy accomplishments. Indeed, it reads like nothing so much as a #NeverTrump manifesto ghostwritten by a NeverTrumper, like Bill Kristol or Jonah Goldberg, rather than a senior White House or administration official with inside knowledge of Trump’s decision-making process and the alleged failures thereof. It will surprise no one who voted for Donald Trump that he does not hew to the Republican establishment’s idea of “presidential” style – that’s one reason why we voted for him. And Trump understands that better than the #NeverTrump gang in and out of the halls of government. One of the more compelling (and hilarious) moments of Trump’s recent speech and rally in West Virginia was when he did an imitation of a “presidential” establishment Republican robotically walking back and forth behind the…
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by Robert Romano White House Chief of Staff John Kelly needs to serve up whoever wrote the Sept. 5 anonymous New York Times oped, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” or he needs to go and President Donald Trump needs to find a new chief of staff who will get control of those men and women who have the privilege of serving in the White House. The oped contends, dramatically, that “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda” and “I would know. I am one of them.” The oped offers very few specifics over which policy disagreements led to the drafting of the oped. But what it alleges is that there is a conspiracy in the White House to undermine the constitutionally elected, sitting President of the United States and the agenda he ran on. This goes to the heart of the President’s sole authority in executing the laws of the United States under Article II of the Constitution. The White House is a place where robust deliberations should be had, but, at the end of the day, the President decides the direction the administration…
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By Printus LeBlanc To say the relationship between the mainstream media and President Trump is rocky would be an understatement. The mainstream media has waged a jihad against Trump since he descended from the escalator in Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, to announce his candidacy for President. The press is upset the President calls them out on their blatant bias, but when looking at the details, does the press have a leg to stand on. While the sad status of journalism began its decline generations ago, the people got a glimpse of it after the 2008 election. It was a widely held belief the mainstream media was left-leaning, but the JournoList scandal solidified it was not only left-leaning but pretty much left-wing propaganda. In February of 2007, a private google group was created containing 400 left-leaning academics and journalists. This was no big deal until after the 2008 election. The Daily Caller got a hold of some of the conversations going on in the group, and it was shocking. What they found were “journalists” colluding with one another to kill storiesthat would make then-candidate Obama look bad, while coordinating the effort to boost the future President. The attained documents were…
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President Trump said Friday he plans to revoke the security clearance of Bruce Ohr, a Justice Department official whose wife was employed at the company that was involved in producing the dossier on Trump’s links to Russia. Trump called Ohr a “disgrace” outside the White House and said, “I suspect I will be taking it away very quickly.” Ohr is under intense Republican scrutiny for his contacts with Glenn Simpson, who co-founded the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. The president also suggested he may revoke Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s security clearance, and said, “Mr. Mueller has a lot of conflicts also, directly himself.” Trump said, nevertheless, that Mueller should be allowed to finish a report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Trumps remarks came after he revoked the security clearance earlier this week of former CIA Director John Brennan. Twelve former senior intelligence officials have issued a statement on what they call “the ill-considered and unprecedented remarks and actions by the White House regarding the removal of John Brennan’s security clearances.” “The president’s action regarding John Brennan and the threats of similar action against other former officials has nothing to do with who should and should not…
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by Printus LeBlanc Over the 4th of July holiday, NBC News published a disturbing article alleging sexual abuse at Ohio State University. The story went out if its way to implicate a high-profile member of the Republican Party, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). The story alleges Jordan knew or should have known about the abuse at the university. The real oddity about this case is the timing and law firm at the center of the case. For anyone that pays attention to Capitol Hill, Jim Jordan is a name on the rise. He is a member of the Freedom Caucus and has been mentioned by several conservative groups for the next Speaker of the House. Jordan is also at the tip of the spear in uncovering corruption at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Just last week, he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein got into a heated debate over the DOJ and FBI’s role in Russiagate. If the timing wasn’t suspicious enough, the law firm involved in the matter is raising eyebrows. Perkins Coie is the counsel of record for the much of the Democrat Party, including the Democratic National Committee, both Congressional Democrat committees (DSCC &…
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by Senator Chuck Grassley These are the remarks as prepared for delivery Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, delivered in a speech at The Heritage Foundation on June 25. Watch Senator Grassley’s speech in the video embedded below. In 1980, I was elected to the U.S. Senate. During my early days in the Senate, I met a man who had a significant impact on my career. His name is Arthur Ernest Fitzgerald, but everybody calls him Ernie. You’ve probably heard of him—Ernie’s reputation preceded him even way back then. In 1968, Ernie testified before Sen. William Proxmire’s Joint Economic Committee about the Air Force’s C-5 transport aircraft program. That testimony changed his life. The C-5 aircraft was an important military priority. But it took longer and cost more than planned, and the government did not want anyone to know. Although he knew it might damage his career, Ernie told Congress that this prized program cost the taxpayers $2 billion more than the Pentagon would admit. $2 billion. That was in 1968. In today’s dollars that’s more than $14.5 billion. [ The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out…
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by Printus LeBlanc The FBI is in serious trouble, not just the people in the bureau that lied to the Office of Inspector General, fixed the Clinton investigation, and spied on a political campaign. The American people are losing confidence in the bureau. FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich stated in January, “When I look through the prism of risk for our organization, I find the No. 1 risk for our organization is losing the faith and confidence of the American people.” The FBI has reason to be fearful because public trust in the institution is headed in the wrong direction. A recent poll by Axios showed that less than half of America had confidence in the FBI, with only 38 percent of Republicans having faith in the bureau. This should be extremely worrying to any prosecutor using the FBI’s evidence or agents as a witness at a trial — and a dream for any defense attorney. Half the jury pool has an unfavorable opinion of the feds, and recent revelations about the once revered law enforcement agency are sure to increase the unfavourability. The FBI’s treatment of Carter Page was reprehensible. The propaganda outlets never mention it, but Carter Page was a witness…
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by Jason Hopkins In what is seen as another major blow to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, two officials have resigned from the agency. Albert “Kell” Kelly and Pasquale “Nino” Perrotta — two Pruitt allies engulfed in their own separate scandals — tendered their resignations on Monday. Kelly served as head of the Superfund, a program that is tasked with cleaning up contaminated sites. Perrotta was in charge of leading Pruitt’s 24/7 security detail. Kelly, a former banking executive, is leaving following public revelation that he was barred from working in the finance industry for violating regulations. A report in December 2017 by The Intercept revealed Kelly and Pruitt to be close friends in their home state of Oklahoma, with Pruitt appointing him to the EPA not long after he was banned for life from the finance industry by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. “Kell Kelly’s service at EPA will be sorely missed. In just over a year he has made a tremendous impact on EPA’s Superfund program, serving as chair of the Superfund Task Force and presiding over the development of the steps necessary to implement the recommendations in the report,” Pruitt said in a Tuesday statement. Perrotta, on the other hand, is…
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by Chuck Ross Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper gave inconsistent testimony to a House panel about his contacts with CNN’s Jake Tapper regarding the infamous Steele dossier, according to a report released by congressional Republicans on Friday. The report, published by the GOP side of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, shows that Clapper acknowledged speaking with Tapper about the dossier while he was still serving as director of national intelligence. That is in direct conflict with Clapper’s claim to CNN’s Don Lemon last month that he did not interact with the media prior to leaving the Obama administration on Jan. 20, 2017. “I didn’t have any contact with media until after I left the government on the 20th of January, so I don’t quite understand, at least what I’ve read, that somehow I leaked about the dossier,” Clapper told Lemon in the interview. “So you didn’t leak anything about the dossier to any media?” Lemon asked. “No, not — I mean, I talked about it after I left the government, but not during that period, and certainly not between the 6th of January and the 10th when the president-elect himself talked about it.” CNN, where…
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by Robert Donachie Former FBI Director James Comey hired the lawyer who represented Michigan State University in its investigation into shamed sports doctor Larry Nassar to join his legal team. Comey hired Patrick Fitzgerald, former U.S. attorney, in May 2017, Talking Points Memo first reported Tuesday afternoon. Fitzgerald’s name was floated as a possible Comey attorney during the former FBI director’s testimony on Capitol Hill in the Summer of 2017, which Tuesday’s report now corroborates. Fitzgerald and Comey have been “close friends” for over three decades. The pair cut their teeth together in the 1980s in the Southern District of New York’s U.S. Attorney’s Office and knew each other before that. Comey’s child even has the honor of calling Fitzgerald “godfather.” While Fitzgerald is known for winning big, national cases — like prosecutions of now-pardoned “Scooter” Libby, Abdel Rahman, and other terrorists, including Osama bin Laden — he is best known in recent years for his representation of Michigan State while it investigated Nassar, a man who was convicted this year of molesting over 150 young women while he was a doctor at the university and for the national gymnastics team. The attorneys who represented Nassar’s victims in the case believe Fitzgerald used his…
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Former FBI Director James Comey’s redacted memos released Thursday detailing his early conversations with President Donald Trump show that Comey “was dishonest with the president from the very beginning and continues to be” to this day, Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) said Thursday on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”
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Inspector General of the Department of Justice (DOJ) Michael Horowitz’s report is “devastating” for former FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said Monday on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.” The DOJ’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) released its internal report Friday reviewing the department’s conduct during its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct official business while serving as Secretary of State.
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Yes, the Deep State is real, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Tuesday. The libertarian-leaning former presidential candidate said on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that the term — maligned by Democrats and the liberal mainstream media — accurately describes how unelected officials in national security positions exercise power without checks from America’s elected representatives.
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by Jeffery Rendall Every company, organization and family has one – a so-called “Devil’s advocate.” Wikipedia defines “Devil’s advocate” as “someone who, given a certain point of view, takes a position he or she does not necessarily agree with (or simply an alternative position from the accepted norm), for the sake of debate or to explore the thought further.” Needless to say American politics is full of loathsome “Devil’s advocate” troublemakers. These naysayers take cover behind self-styled “principled” objections to deserving actions when they’re really just seeking sympathetic media attention for themselves – or even worse, they have an axe to grind against rivals in the party. Sometimes they’re known as “independents” or “mavericks” but they’re not individualistic at all – they’re agitators. Senator John McCain played “Devil’s advocate” last week after the newly released House Intelligence Committee memo detailed multiple abuses by FBI officials in pursuit of a vendetta against then candidate and now President Donald Trump. While conservatives and Republicans reacted with stunned horror to the notion of government officers deliberately employing surveillance powers to play politics, “D.A. McCain” took the opposite approach. Elena Schor of Politico reported, “The statement from McCain, who is away from Washington undergoing treatment for…
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Rep. Francis Rooney said Tuesday that some federal agencies need to be “purged” of those biased against President Trump in order to know they have “a good, clean government.” “I would like to see the directors of those agencies purge it and say, ‘look, we’ve got a lot of great agents, a lot of great lawyers…
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By Printus LeBlanc Another day, another hearing and the America public learn more about the mountain of evidence pointing towards the entire Mueller special counsel team being filled with conflicts of interest. Rod Rosenstein said he would not fire Robert Mueller stating, “If there were good cause, I would act.” Well Mr. Deputy Attorney General, not counting the tens of thousands of dollars in political donations to Hillary Clinton, there is plenty of evidence to suggest a biased Special Counsel, if you would only open your eyes. The Department of Justice supposedly has strict rules regarding conflicts of interests. The DOJ regulation regarding personal conflicts of interest states, “In addition to the impartiality regulation, 28 C.F.R. § 45.2 prohibits a DOJ employee, without written authorization, from participating in a criminal investigation or prosecution if he has a personal or political relationship with any person or organization substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution, or any person or organization which he knows has a specific and substantial interest that would be directly affected by the outcome of the investigation or prosecution.” Why does it seem like Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has never seen this regulation? Peter…
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Fifteen years ago, I would have suggested a tinfoil hat for anyone who believed in the deep state. But recent events have made me rethink my diagnosis. The term “deep state” intimates a conspiracy somewhere in the woodshed. But it’s basically two or more people who get together and agree on something bad. In the case…
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President Donald Trump retweeted Fox News host Sean Hannity’s Friday tweet in which he previewed his opening monologue on the “Deep State’s allies in the media” and the dangers facing the president. Prior to his opening segment of Friday’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel, Hannity promoted the monologue and an interview with former House Speaker…
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The leakers of classified intelligence information are chipping away at our democratic institutions. It’s becoming a dangerous game where those who are feeding sensitive information to the media are also creating distrust within our intelligence agencies and damaging relationships with our allies abroad. These leakers are on a mission to weaken President Trump and disrupt his…
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