Beet L. Jooz

A 34-year-old woman was knocked unconscious and robbed at the edge of the French Quarter Saturday, according to our partners NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune.  

‘Certainly the DNC was informed of what we saw and what we were seeing at the time’

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Alexis Landry may been in need of medication.

Denying reports that the nuclear testing facility at Punggye-ri has become unusable after one of its main access tunnels experienced a deadly collapse, North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un promised to shutter the facility - a continuation of his promise to halt nuclear and missile tests - as a gesture of sincerity to South Korea and the US.

Kim reportedly informed South Korean President Moon Jae-in of his decision during a brief private conversation between the two leaders during their historic meeting at a village along the demilitarized zone. During the talks, Kim stepped over the ankle-high barrier separating the two countries, becoming the first North Korean leader to cross into the South since the Korean War armistice that ended combat on the peninsula in 1953.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Kim told his South Korean counterpart that he saw no reason to "live under difficult conditions" because of his nuclear arsenal - presumably referring to the punishing economic sanctions that have been levied against the country since the beginning of the Trump era - if he could instead "build trust" with the US and the South.

"Why would we need to live under such difficult conditions with nuclear weapons if we’re able to build trust with the U.S. at future meetings, and the U.S. promises nonaggression and an end to the Korean War?" Mr. Kim was quoted as telling Mr. Moon by Yoon Young-chan, a spokesman for South Korea’s presidential office.

Pushing back against claims that his recent bid for peace has been nothing more than an opportunistic diplomatic distraction while the country rebuilds its nuclear testing capabilities, Kim claimed that two tunnels at Punggye-ri are still usable, and insisted that the country could carry on with tests if it wanted to, according to Bloomberg.

Furthermore, according to Reuters, Kim plans to invite experts and journalists from the United States and South Korea when the country shuts its nuclear test site in May.

Kim added that the North has "no intention" of ever using nuclear weapons against the South. And in what was another first for a North Korean leader, Kim also stopped to take questions from reporters during the summit.

Ahead of an historic meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump expected within the next three to four weeks, Kim told South Korea’s president that two tunnels at the nuclear test site are still in good condition, playing down international speculation that the site was so badly damaged by nuclear explosions that it can no longer be used. Kim’s pledges to Moon at their historic summit on Friday were detailed in Seoul on Sunday by Moon’s chief communication official.

Kim told President Moon Jae-in on the disputed Korean border that Trump will learn at their meeting that North Korea has no intention of using its nuclear arsenal toward South or the Pacific or to target the U.S. The North had no reason to own nuclear weapons if it and the U.S. promise non-aggression against each other, he said, according the the Seoul briefing.

Kim also told his South Korean counterpart that he would convince the US to abandon its "inherently hostile" attitude toward the North.

During Friday’s meeting, Mr. Kim said that he believed Washington was "inherently hostile" to the North Korean regime, but that he was confident U.S. officials would be convinced he isn’t the "kind of person to launch nuclear weapons towards the U.S.," according to Mr. Yoon. The North Korean leader also said at Friday’s summit that "there should never be another war on the Korean Peninsula," according to Mr. Yoon.

And in a promise that reminded the world of one of the country's most bizarre acts of political retribution, Kim promised to realign its time zone with the South after moving the country's clocks back 30 minutes three years ago, purportedly to somehow spite the South.

* * *

Meanwhile, back in the US, President Trump insisted that Kim is serious about coming to a peaceful agreement that would involve the North abandoning its nuclear arsenal during a Saturday night rally in Michigan.

"I’m not going to give you what’s going to actually happen because we don’t really know, but I’ll tell you one thing—we’re not playing games," he said.

At one point, the crowd burst into chants of "Nobel, Nobel, Nobel" suggesting that Trump should also be considered for the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize, an honor that was bestowed on his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, during his first term in office.

During the rally, Trump revealed that the US and North Korea had narrowed down the list of potential locations for the historic summit to two or three places, while reminding the crowd that by bringing North Korea to the table, a success that Trump has personally been credited with by senior South Korea officials, he had "once again proven all of his doubters wrong."

"If we would have said where we are today from three or four months ago, remember they were saying 'he’s going to get us into nuclear war'," Trump said. "Strength is going to keep us out of nuclear war; it’s not going to get us in."

Jason Zengerle publicly announced his profile of Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine with the snarky tweet, “My latest for the @NYTmag on Devin Nunes, who’s been propagating, not to mention falling for, conspiracy theories since before the Deep State was even in a gleam in Donald Trump’s eye.”

It’s an accurate summation of the hit he attempted to place on Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). The only problem is the case he attempts to make is riddled with errors and full of embarrassing and deliberate material omissions.

For example, Zengerle writes that a “suspicious” Nunes was wrong to believe that “Obama administration officials were ignoring evidence in a cache of documents collected from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, showing that Al Qaeda was much stronger than the administration publicly contended.” Zengerle says Nunes’ predecessor as chairman of the intel committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, agreed with Obama officials’ assessment and told Nunes the documents Defense Intelligence Agency officials were analyzing at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., showed nothing significant on that score.

“But Nunes wasn’t convinced. On a Saturday in May 2013, he flew from Washington to Tampa and paid a visit to Centcom headquarters himself, where he demanded to meet with the analysts reviewing the documents, in the hope of uncovering evidence of Al Qaeda’s strength—and an Obama administration cover-up,” Zengerle writes. “But after a meeting with the Army major general who headed Centcom’s intelligence wing, Nunes came back to Washington empty-handed.”

There are multiple problems with this supposed example of Nunes being a conspiracy theorist who chases after illusory and meaningless things. Primarily, it was Rogers and the intelligence officials who were wrong, and Nunes, Mike Pompeo, independent analysts, and others pushing for transparency who were right.

The cache did, in fact, dispute the public claims of the Barack Obama administration, which had overtly political reasons for claiming al-Qaeda was being defeated. Far from conspiratorial, Nunes’ pursuit of transparency was quite successful. Nearly half a million documents were finally made public in November 2017. One of the claims this release debunked was that al-Qaeda had been weakened by being cut off from an isolated Osama bin Laden.

The New York Times’ own terrorism reporter Rukmini Callimachi made this exact point in a panel discussion in November 2017, following the release of the cache. She noted she first started seeing problems with the official intelligence community claims about al-Qaeda through her reporting in Timbuktu, Mali:

Suddenly I was seeing that this group that I was told really had no ties … with no connection, exactly, was in fact being micromanaged by al Qaeda central. When the first set of Abbottabad documents came out, if you read them carefully with this knowledge in mind, you can find evidence of this micromanaging. For instance, in the letters from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula where you see them giving each other instructions, guidance, etc. But the overall narrative that I think was being pushed to the press, and if you look back at the editorials that were done when that trove came out, was an image of bin Laden isolated. He had lost control of this group. I remember one of the headlines describing him was a ‘lion in winter.’ In fact, the new trove that has now come out confirms very much what I was seeing in Mali, which is not just real connective tissue, but connective tissue to the point of them being micromanaged from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Very minor personnel decisions are being decided by the group thousands of miles away.

Far from being a right-wing conspiracy theory, the view that al-Qaeda was stronger than the Obama administration publicly contended has even been made by the Obama administration officials themselves. Mike Morell, the deputy director of the CIA during the relevant period, came to see the official narrative as false, a development he explains in his book “The Great War.” Morell specifically credits the cache of documents found in the bin Laden raid.

Other journalists who extensively reported on the bin Laden documents came to the same conclusion. “Obtaining the documents presented an opportunity to check what the intelligence community thought it knew about al Qaeda and its leaders against what actually happened. Who were our good sources? Who was providing misinformation? Was there a source who had better visibility into leadership decisionmaking than we’d assessed? Someone we relied on who wasn’t as important as we’d thought?” The Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes wrote. “In some important respects, the bin Laden documents were like the answer key to a test you’d taken. It’s telling that many in the intelligence community didn’t want to review their work or revisit their conclusions.”

Thom Joscelyn, senior editor of Long War Journal, worked on the bin Laden cache story for years. He told The Federalist that Zengerle’s characterization was wrong and flat-out inaccurate. He credited Nunes for being one of the officials who pushed the Obama administration to release a few more hundred files than the 17 hand-picked documents that were released to the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point in 2012. Nunes included language in the 2014 Intelligence Authorization Act requiring more declassification and release of files, which resulted in a few hundred more being made public by the end of Obama’s second term.

Joscelyn says the mounds of new data in the hundreds of thousands of documents released in November 2017 will change the history of the post-9/11 wars and reshape how we understand what was effective and what we got wrong in the al-Qaeda conflict. The files reveal the face of bin Laden’s “ideological and genetic heir” Hamza bin Laden, bin Laden’s private reflections on Arab uprisings and the appropriate response to them, that bin Laden was not a mere figurehead as previously assumed but fully in charge of al-Qaeda’s global network, al-Qaeda’s complicated relationship with Iran, and the history of the Iraqi insurgency and al-Qaeda’s role in it. More on the significance of the trove here, here, and here.

HPSCI had rarely done real oversight in its past, Joscelyn observes. “Real oversight means questioning everything you’re given and understanding that you’re dealing with interested parties, some of whom do wonderful work on behalf of the American people and other times their interests are not necessarily benign. You need constant scrutiny of the sprawling multi-billion-dollar intelligence complex whether you’re on left or right,” he said.

Not only did Nunes not come up empty-handed in his dogged pursuit of transparency with the bin Laden cache, he was completely vindicated about the need to not bend the knee to intelligence officials when they claim to know better than their congressional overseers about transparency.

The article’s central thesis—that good oversight is done by being a good boy and dutifully receiving and accepting reports from intelligence agencies, not by diligently scrutinizing those agencies—is repeated elsewhere. Former Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., of all people, is praised for studying reports from intelligence agencies in contrast to Nunes, who does his own research. It’s a dubious assertion, and a poorly made argument.

Zengerle falsely claims, for instance, that Nunes jetted off for a two-week trip to Djibouti. “Never been there,” says Nunes. But he points out the implication that such a trip would be foolish is also false, given that Djibouti is a critical location where the Chinese just a built a base, is becoming a gateway to Africa for some nations, and is near the entrance to the Red Sea.

The Farm Story That Wasn’t

Another example of Nunes’ supposed conspiracy-mongering was also dramatically false. Zengerle wrote that Nunes “began his political career, appropriately enough, because he believed he had uncovered a sinister plot.” He was “utterly convinced that his alma mater was secretly planning to close its campus farm.” The College of the Sequoias announced it was selling 160 acres on which its campus farm sat, and Nunes decided to run for the school’s board of trustees to save the farm.

Zengerle then writes:

There was just one problem: The farm didn’t need saving. ‘We were selling off the old farm, and we were putting the money in a fund to buy a bigger piece of land to build a new farm,’ says John Zumwalt, who was then on the board. ‘Of course we weren’t going to get rid of it.’ (Agriculture has long been one of the college’s largest departments.) But in a community like the Central Valley, Nunes’s theory about a plot to close the farm resonated with voters, and he unseated the incumbent.

There is just one problem: Zengerle’s story was wrong and he deliberately omitted key facts that upend it. I spoke with Zumwalt, who said Zengerle and The New York Times “did a good job of being accurate without being truthful.” He said the Times called him three times and by the second call, he could see what they were after.

“You could tell they wanted me to say that Devin Nunes, when he first got elected, was trying to chase windmills and save a farm that didn’t need saving,” Zumwalt said. While he says he spoke the words above, he also told The New York Times that the other trustees had never publicized their plans for replacing the farm. He said they intended to buy a new farm, but a whole lot of people were skeptical about their future plans.

“We knew what was in our heart but, generally speaking, citizens are wise for distrusting government,” Zumwalt told me. He added, “We didn’t do a very good PR job. Before we started selling off the farm, we should have had a new one. [The New York Times] left that part out.”

Nunes said his campaign focus wasn’t even on saving the farm, although it was an issue of concern to constituents, focusing instead on how he’d bring a “new vision” to the board of trustees. Zumwalt also found it interesting that the paper includes a complimentary quote from him praising Nunes’ work as trustee. “They weren’t trying to make the case that he was a lousy trustee, but that he jumps to conclusions,” he said.

Oversight Is For Reflexive Support, Not Scrutiny

Zengerle, who like many mainstream journalists rose through the ranks of liberal magazines, botches most of his description of a House Intelligence Committee probe of the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. In Zengerle’s description, then-committee chairman Mike Rogers did proper oversight, mostly thanks to his previous career as an FBI agent, which meant he implicitly trusted intelligence agencies.

Zengerle claims Nunes pushed Rogers to pursue leads that didn’t check out. He claims Nunes “had heard that a drone operator at an American air base in Germany said a drone had been flying over the Benghazi compound during the raid and captured video of the incident. According to a source familiar with the investigation, Rogers sent a committee staff member, Michael Ellis, to Germany to find and interview the American drone operator—who, it turned out, wasn’t even in the drone unit that covered Libya and had been telling tales to his parents, which had somehow made their way to Nunes.”

Apparently none of this is true. Ellis never went to Germany, according to multiple sources on the House Intelligence Committee familiar with his travels. And Nunes said the first time he even heard this story was with Zengerle telling it: “I don’t know anything about a drone operator and I have no idea what they’re talking about there.”

Zengerle then reports that Rogers was frustrated and conflict between the two grew, adding that “Nunes refused to endorse” the final report from the committee. That’s true, but Zengerle leaves out the fact that many Republicans declined to sign the report because it seemed designed to protect intelligence agencies rather than to analyze what went wrong, was riddled with errors, and lacked evidence to support its conclusions. As Hayes reported at the time:

‘If this was a high school paper, I would give it an F,’ says John Tiegen, a former CIA officer who fought on the ground that night in Benghazi and lived through many of the events the report purports to describe. ‘There are so many mistakes it’s hard to know where to begin. How can an official government report get so many things wrong?’

It’s a good question. Representative Tom Rooney, a Florida Republican who serves on the committee that produced the report, disputes the premise.

‘I don’t think this is the official government report. It’s Mike Rogers’s report,’ says Rooney. ‘The members of his own committee don’t even agree with it.’

A select committee that investigated Benghazi issued a separate report with reasonable and relevant findings, such as that the administration had misled the public about the attack both immediately and continually, that weak Benghazi security was a result of political considerations, that the military never sent any resources to help during the attack, that terrorists were not brought to justice, and that the administration obstructed the investigation.

The ‘Midnight Run’ and Other Untruths

The campaign against Nunes by the media and Democrats can be traced to his announcement that the Obama administration had engaged in worrisome collection and distribution of information on the Trump team during the transition. He said the information contained little to no foreign intelligence and had no reason to be shared in intelligence reports to Obama officials, that Obama officials may have flouted legally required attempts to minimize and mask personal identifying information, and that the information collection had nothing to do with Russia. He said he was worried the behavior may have been technically legal but improperly handled.

Many in the media responded by downplaying or denigrating his news, distracting with process complaints or quickly thrown-together stories from anonymous sources with no evidence claiming more breathless wrongdoing with Russia. When it turned out that former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice herself had been involved in the unmasking, influential members of the press rushed to clear her of the charge in a manner one might expect from a defense attorney, but unbecoming for a media organization.

Rice actually denied any knowledge of what Nunes was talking about—which was, again, that he’d seen dozens of unmaskings of Trump affiliates that arose out of incidental collection during Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act surveillance, had nothing to do with Russia, contained little to no intelligence value, and had been disseminated throughout intelligence agencies.

“I know nothing about this,” Rice emphatically stated to Judy Woodruff in a March 22 PBS Newshour interview. “I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today.”

Well, it turned out that she testified before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that she knew everything about this. She admitted that she unmasked information on Trump affiliates that arose out of incidental FISA surveillance connections, and that these collections were unrelated to Russia.

But rather than cover this as, “Susan Rice completely contradicted herself when she said she knew nothing about unmasking,” wrote CNN’s Manu Raju—a favorite and reliable leak recipient for the Democrats on the committee (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for example)—to spin the news as totally ordinary and justified. Amazingly, Raju never mentioned Rice’s comments to Woodruff that she knew nothing about any Obama people unmasking Trump people.

In Zengerle’s telling, Nunes was motivated to share this unmasking news because Comey had publicly announced he had launched a counter-intelligence investigation of the Trump team. Zengerle writes that “Nunes knew Comey’s announcement was coming.” Nunes, however, says this simply isn’t true: “We were not notified in advance.” He says Comey should have notified Republicans and Democrats on the committee, but he hadn’t done so. “Bottom line, totally false and fiction,” Nunes says. “I never knew that.”

Zengerle writes that the announcement seemed to be “lending credence to Trump’s preposterous accusation on Twitter” that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower. In point of fact, Nunes had begun his statement by saying, among other things, “there was not a physical wiretap of Trump Tower,” a point he’d made before. Zengerle repeats the false claim about Ellis chasing after an imaginary drone pilot in Germany.

Zengerle writes, inaccurately, “A few days later, after reporters exposed the ruse (including the fact that the Obama-era eavesdropping had been legal, incidental and inconsequential), Nunes recused himself from the committee’s Russia investigation, although he still refused to cede subpoena power to his replacement, Mike Conaway.”

Zengerle is apparently unfamiliar with the fact that Nunes always said the behavior might be legal, and he specifically noted that it came from incidental collections. And it was Nunes’ argument, not his opponents’, that the collection was unnecessary. As noted above, Rice admitted to doing what Nunes announced! As for Nunes’ supposed recusal, it never happened, although many media reports falsely claimed it did. He instead stepped away from chairing that portion of the investigation.

Zengerle then falsely describes Nunes’ trip to the White House as a “midnight run” that happened late at night. It was not a “midnight run,” however, but a visit to a national security staffer in the middle of the day, while the sun was out. Nunes corrected the false reporting on the record — on air with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, in fact — on March 27, 2017. It’s around at the 4:00-minute mark of an interview full of process questions.

Preposterously, Zengerle attempts to say that Nunes has singlehandedly crippled the committee with partisan fighting. Zengerle has not one critical word for Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking member who appears frequently appears on television — a Republican National Committee press release from December tallied he’d spent nearly 21 hours on screen since Trump took office — with never-ending claims of conclusive evidence of treasonous collusion with Russia.

Neither does Zengerle criticize Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. (See, e.g., “Adam Schiff’s Versions Of Events Are Frequently False Or Missing Key Details” and “How The Media Enable Rep. Adam Schiff’s Russian Bot Conspiracy Theories“). Further, Schiff or his Democratic intel committee staffers appear to be the source behind some very dubious and outright false reporting, such as Raju’s story that Donald Trump Jr. received hacked Democratic Party emails from WikiLeaks before they were publicly released. The story turned out to be entirely false, and was based on the misreading of the date on the email.

It is ludicrous to pretend that Democrats hadn’t politicized an investigation into Russian meddling by focusing instead on a theory of collusion with Trump. Here Schiff and Castro question Comey in the March 20, 2017, hearing by focusing exclusively on the unverified Steele dossier claims, for example.

Russia, and The Conspiracy That Wasn’t

The entire reason for The New York Times hit piece, of course, is that Nunes hasn’t allowed his committee to be used to push a conspiracy theory of treasonous collusion with Russia to steal the 2016 election. The Russia conspiracy is part of a major Democratic political operation.

Friday’s report from HPSCI revealed, for instance, that a former staffer for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., had put together $50 million from Democratic donors to continue promoting the Trump-Russia narrative. That’s the same one Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee secretly funded during the 2016 campaign. The $50 million is for Fusion GPS, the same organization that commissioned the infamous dossier and secretly got it into the FBI, to continue to place articles in the media, and otherwise push stories on the Russia collusion theory and related issues that help their Democratic clients.

Nunes has angered Democratic interests by exposing what has all the hallmarks of a well-funded coup attempt against the president. Fusion has been described by affiliated sources as “a shadow media organization helping the government.”

Zengerle writes that the committee released a memo on FISA abuse “over the objections of committee Democrats as well as the Justice Department and the F.B.I.” That memo detailed abuses at the DOJ and FBI regarding surveillance of a Trump campaign associate. It showed that federal investigators had failed to inform the FISA court that the research used to secure the surveillance was secretly bought and paid for by Clinton and the DNC.

Naturally, Zengerle neglects to inform readers that, again, this was not some conspiratorial view unique to Nunes. Leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee came to the exact same conclusion. Further, we now have reams of damning information about how the FBI handled the Clinton email investigation and its surveillance and investigation of the Trump campaign. With former director James Comey leaking to the press, an IG report that led to the recommendation of criminal charges for FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe’s repeated lies under oath about leaking, and the known political animus and unprofessional conduct of reassigned FBI counterespionage chief Peter Strzok, among dozens of other problems, is Zengerle really suggesting that Nunes is out-of-bounds for questioning the DOJ and FBI’s conduct?

Zengerle further claims that the committee “abruptly wrapped up the investigation into Russian meddling,” despite the fact they spent a full year on it, finding nothing. Zengerle attempts to portray these actions as being done only to help Trump. Additionally, Zengerle claims that Trump discussed with Nunes the possibility of Nunes becoming director of national intelligence. “Totally false. Never happened,” says Nunes.

The New York Times article is riddled with factual errors that are denied on the record by multiple sources. It fails to include information that was easily found and in the public record. And all for the goal of derailing rigorous oversight of intelligence agencies.

Nunes’ spokesman Jack Langer seemed unsurprised by The New York Times‘ partisan ax-grinding and lack of fact-checking, something he’s grown accustomed to in an era when many journalists no longer bother even pretending to aim toward objectivity or accuracy: “If people assume every sentence they read in The New York Times is either outright false or hopelessly biased, they’ll still be granting the Times too much credit.”

Asked why he didn't take some of the haul of potato chips he was transporting with him for his journey, man says: 'That's the load I was hauling and I didn't want to damage the property'

MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski has gone after Sarah Huckabee Sanders more than once, but she agrees with the criticism that Michelle Wolf‘s jokes about her last night went too far.

Brzezinski brought up when President Trump went after her for her looks and called the jokes about the White House Press Secretary “deplorable”:

Watching a wife and mother be humiliated on national television for her looks is deplorable. I have experienced insults about my appearance from the president. All women have a duty to unite when these attacks happen and the WHCA owes Sarah an apology.

— Mika Brzezinski (@morningmika) April 29, 2018

The WHCD should be about honoring the best in journalism. Enough with the comedians, enough with the late-night parties. These are serious times for both the free press and the public they serve.

— Mika Brzezinski (@morningmika) April 29, 2018

Women who use their government positions to spread lies and misinformation deserve to face the same withering criticism as men. But leave our looks out of it. Watching from home, I hurt for Sarah, her husband and her children.

— Mika Brzezinski (@morningmika) April 29, 2018

And …Michelle Wolfe Is talented. Comedians make us laugh/think/uncomfortable- but at WHCD we shld make fun of ourselves, &call it a night.

— Mika Brzezinski (@morningmika) April 29, 2018

[image via screengrab]

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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac

The owner said she did not take the term to have an overtly sexual or even negative meaning, adding that it is more nuanced than what critics have said.

Steve Wynn, who was forced out as chief executive of Wynn Resorts Ltd. after sexual miscondut allegations, is suing a former employee for defamation.

During her Saturday opening statement on Fox News Channel’s “Justice,” Jeanine Pirro had a question for anyone who was not convinced former FBI Director Jim Comey was involved in an attempted coup to take down President Donald Trump. “He’s a liar. He’s a leaker. And he’s a leftist liberal. If anyone was not convinced of former FBI Director Jim Comey’s involvement in the attempted coup from within our own government of the duly elected winner of the 2016 presidential election, I have just one question for you — are you stupid?” Pirro asked. She continued, “Comey’s book tour was supposed to convince us that he was an honorable, likable, decent man doing his darndest to protect the American people and the Constitution. … Unfortunately for Jim, it didn’t quite work out as planned. In fact, the man is in real legal jeopardy with his leaks being investigated by the Justice Department.” Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent

Joy Reid is a “homophobe” and a “liar” while MSNBC is “allowing her try to weasel her way out of this situation using ridiculous lies,” charged Michael Lucas, a gay pornographic film actor and director.

If President Donald Trump isn’t comfortable being the target of jokes, comedian Michelle Wolf gave him and others plenty of reasons to squirm Saturday night.

He hopped inside a sedan that pulled up and was robbed at a nearby gas station early Saturday morning, according to initial police reports.

Washington rocked by mean-spirited performance.

She woke up to find her bag missing and a pair of socks, with batteries inside, next to her.

'This guy is becoming an "ambulance chaser" attorney.'

Samsung and other DRAM manufacturers have been hit with a new class action lawsuit alleging a price fixing scheme was used to increase margins. According to law firm Hagens Berman, Samsung, Micron, and Hynix are being accused of conspiring to artificially limit the supply of DRAM chips to increase prices…

more…

During a press conference at NATO Headquarters on Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that “absent a substantial fix,” President Trump is “unlikely” to stay in the Iran nuclear deal past May. Pompeo said, “[T]he president has made clear, absent a substantial fix, absent overcoming the shortcomings, the flaws of the deal, he is unlikely to stay in that deal past this May.” Pompeo also stated that the concerns the president has about the deal and ways to address them will probably be topics of discussion during Pompeo’s trip to the Middle East. Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett

Release of John Podesta's emails prompted CrowdStrike to examine servers.

Victims injured in Algiers, Treme, New Orleans East

Trade tensions between the US and China appear to have abated - at least for now - as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and top Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow prepare to head to Beijing to kickstar long-awaited "trade talks" with senior Chinese officials.

But while fears of a global trade war led by the world's two largest economies have faded into the background, the military tensions in the South China Sea - which have been ignored by the markets for years - continue to escalate, per CNN.

Case in point: The US military has revealed that two US Air Force B-52 Stratofortress bombers flew a training mission over the South China Sea on Tuesday, eliciting a defiant response in the Global Times, one of the Communist Party's most widely read mouthpieces, per the South China Morning Post and Reuters. 

The widely-read Chinese state-run tabloid the Global Times said in an editorial on Friday that if the US bombers were meant to send a message to Beijing about Taiwan it would not work.

"The US cannot prevent the mainland exerting military pressure on Taiwan," it said.

The bombers took off from Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam, according to a statement from US Pacific Air Forces. The exercises also involved US F-15 Strike Eagle jets traveling near Okinawa. The mission was part of the US' "continuous bomber presence" in the region.

The US has been stepping up its military patrols in the South China Sea, which is claimed by China in defiance of competing claims by its neighbors and even a ruling by the International Criminal Court that recognized the Philippines' claim on some of the island territories presently dominated China. Meanwhile, using sophisticated "land-reclamation" techniques, China has been expanding rocky atolls in the area into full-fledged islands capable of supporting military infrastructure like airfields and naval bases.

US Admiral Philip Davidson, Trump's nominee to lead the US forces in the Pacific, has consistently sounded the alarm about China's intentions. Most recently, the release of a 50-page unclassified transcript on advance policy questions from Davidson detailed his view that Beijing's forces will soon be capable of "strategically overwhelming" US forces in the Pacific, largely thanks to the regime's activities in the South China Sea.

"China will be able to extend its influence thousands of miles to the south and project power deep into Oceania. The PLA will be able to use these bases to challenge U.S. presence in the region, and any forces deployed to the islands would easily overwhelm the military forces of any other South China Sea-claimants. In short, China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States."

In an interview with CNN on Friday, Davidson again articulated his view that, by dominating the South China Sea, China will be able to keep continuous military pressure on Taiwan (the stated goal of the largest-ever live-fire military exercises in the region, which China's navy initiated earlier this month). Tensions between Taiwan and the Mainland have escalated under Tsai Ing-wen, who made a congratulatory call to President Trump in defiance of the decades-old "One China" policy, angering the Communist Party establishment on the mainland. 

As the Global Times insisted, "the US cannot prevent the mainland from exerting pressure on Taiwan."

"Mainland military aircraft will fly closer and closer to Taiwan and in the end fly above the island," the paper added. "If the Taiwan authorities openly promote the 'Taiwan independence' policy and cut off all official contacts with the mainland, the mainland will deem Taiwan a hostile regime and has endless means to deal with it."

Taiwan and the South China Sea are two major faultlines between Washington and Beijing.

Finally, all of this is happening as Taiwan is preparing its own round of military drills that are intended to simulate a Chinese invasion (one which will somehow be stopped using private drones). Also, since the beginning of the year, the US Navy has carried out at least four "freedom of navigation" - or "freeop" - operations in the South China Sea, which entails sending a US destroyer to sail up to 12 miles away from one of China's artificial islands. These mini provocations have greatly angered Beijing for years, even if China has yet to respond forcefully to US presence in the region.

Ironically, amidst all these growing geopolitical and economic tensions, President Trump and President Xi Jinping continue to insist that they share a personal friendship, and that relations between the US and China have never been better, contrary to Trump's anti-China rhetoric from the campaign.

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