Support for Donald Trump is surging after news broke that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg plans to indict the former president this week.
Watch Amanda explain the latest developments below:
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In a stunning revelation, congressional investigators reveal the Central Intelligence Agency reviewed, approved and may have even recruited signers for an October 2020 public letter from 51 intelligence officials that falsely claimed damaging information against Democrat nominee Joe Biden had been “planted” the Russian government.
Specifically, the letter, produced with the help of the CIA, claims Russian agents faked the contents of a laptop computer, abandoned at a Delaware computer shop by Biden’s middle-aged son Hunter. Files, documents, and photograps on the laptop show Hunter Biden using drugs, frequenting prostitutes and engaged in shadowy business deals with foreign officials, which may also allegedly Joe Biden.
As part of a plan to assist Biden’s campaign and defeat President Donald Trump, 51 intelligence officials signed their name to a public letter claiming, without evidence, the laptop was planted by the Russian government.
That claim has since been proven to be a lie.
It is now also revealed the CIA had a hand in its production.
After an investigation, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael Turner (R-OH) have released a report revealing
the CIA’s “Prepublication Classification Review Board” or “PCRB” “reviewed and approved the statement before its release.”
“Furthermore, evidence suggests that one CIA employee working at the PCRB may have shopped the letter to a former CIA officer who later agreed to add his name to the statement,” the lawmakers reveal in a statement.
The House Judiciary Committee, in a statement, further reveals:
On April 5, 2023, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell testified before the Committees that Secretary Blinken, then serving as a senior Biden campaign advisor, was the impetus of the public statement. Documents also revealed that Morell rushed the statement through the PCRB process in order for Vice President Biden to have a “talking point” to use during the October 22, 2020, presidential debate.
Additionally, evidence suggests that senior Biden campaign officials, including now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, now Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates, and now Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti, took active measures to discredit the allegations about Hunter Biden by exploiting the national security credentials of former intelligence officials and coordinated efforts to disseminate the statement with members of the media. Morell’s testimony also exposed that the CIA’s PCRB reviewed and approved the statement before its release.
According to a written statement provided to the Committees by former CIA official David Cariens, the CIA—or at least an employee of the CIA—may have helped in the effort to solicit signatures for the statement. Cariens explained that he spoke with the PCRB in October 2020 regarding the review of his memoir and during that call the CIA employee “asked” him if he would sign the statement.
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Capitol Hill is in a frenzy over the latest debt deal reached between lawmakers.
Watch Amanda explain the situation below:
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It’s difficult for Joe Biden to see down from his ivory tower.
Biden found himself the target of criticism from both sides of the aisle after a major environmental faux pas…
Watch Amanda explain the controversy below:
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A flurry of emails between Justice Department figures reveal the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked former President Donald Trump’s attorneys to shut off Mar-A-Lago’s security cameras to prevent any recording of agents searching for classified documents, fearful that Trump would release the footage to his supporters.
The non-profit public interest law firm Judicial Watch reports it received 477 pages of records pages from the Justice Department revealing top officials within the National Security Division “discussing the political implications of Trump allowing CNN to use closed-circuit TV (CCTV) footage of the raid on his Mar-a-Lago home. The documents confirm that the Justice Department had asked that Mar-a-Lago CCTV be turned off before the raid.”
The records were released to Judicial Watch in response to a September 2022 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, filed after the Justice Department failed to respond to an August 2022 request for records about the August 8, 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid.
An August 17, 2022, email exchange, with the subject “CNN – Mar-a-Lago CCTV Footage,” reveals officials discussing efforts to shut off Trump’s security cameras to prevent him releasing footage of any searches.
“I just received a call from our case agents at FBI, and apparently the Bureau has been given a heads-up by CNN that CNN has CCTV [closed circuit television] footage from Mar-a-Lago (presumably of agents executing the search) that they may air as soon as tonight [Redacted],” writes an attorney, whose name is redacted, with the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the National Security Division.
“I have no further info on what, specifically, CNN has. But [redacted],” he or she adds.
“CNN is saying FPOTUS [former president] is still weighing whether to release the footage,” Jay Bratt, chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section adds.
“Got a call from Evan [likely then-Trump attorney Evan Corcoran]. As Jay says, Trump team is still weighing the release. Per Evan, some say it will energize base, others say not a good look for FPOTUS to have it out there” writes Communications Advisor Luis Rossello.
“CNN is working on a story that Jay requested Trump team to turn off the cameras and they refused,” Rossello continues.
Justice Department official George Toscas replies, “We’re waiting to hear back from FBIHQ on their recommended approach.”
Bratt writes, “We did. This was in the call [redacted] and I had with Evan Corcoran before the search. It is standard for [redacted].”
At one point, Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Marshall Miller forwards the email exchange to a personal email account of Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco.
It is generally not recommended for government officials to use personal email addresses, which can evade public disclosure.
Miller’s comment is entirely redacted, Judicial Watch reports, “to which a Justice Department National Security Division official, whose name is redacted, responds, ‘Kelsey/Luis: Will we also plan to communicate to CNN the law enforcement safety need to blur agent faces if footage ends up being released?’”
Anthony Coley, Director of the DOJ Public Affairs Office, replies, “Done.”
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ANALYSIS – In his Twitter Spaces debut Tuesday night, called “Tucker on Twitter,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson immediately accused Ukraine of being responsible for the catastrophic attack on the Nova Kakhovka dam in Southern Ukraine.
And he may be right.
Ukraine and Russia have routinely accused each other of shelling the dam, the hydroelectric station and the nearby Zaporizhia nuclear power plant.
Both sides have blamed the other for the attack, in what appears to be a war crime. Kyiv blamed Moscow for the “terrorist attack,” but the Kremlin claimed that Ukraine had struck the dam to impact Russian-controlled Crimea’s water supplies.
As Newsweek reported, that is part of Tucker’s claim, too.
And, despite his spotty track record on speculation, in this case, he may be right. Or at least, the assumption that Russia is always the culprit is no longer valid.
Based on recent reporting, which I wrote about here, Ukraine may, in fact, have been responsible for the serious sabotage of the Nord Stream undersea gas pipelines in September 2022, which was long blamed on Russia.
This makes the always-blame Russia crowd look less credible. But that doesn’t mean Tucker’s always-blame-everyone-except-Russia approach is any better.
While on Fox, Tucker repeatedly blamed the United States and Joe Biden for being behind the Nord Stream attack.
On Feb. 24 he said: “So the Biden administration committed the single largest most profound act of industrial terrorism of sabotaging history. They blew up the Nord Stream pipeline …”
And that has always been a stretch. Instead, The Post reporting today reinforces my earlier conclusion that it is “likely, the U.S. was aware but turned a blind eye.”
Thus, as far as we can tell, Biden knew about it beforehand but was unwilling or unable to do anything about it.
Tucker’s claims aren’t helped when he spouts pro-Russian talking points in his video, such as:
The Kakhovka dam was effectively Russian. It was built by the Russian government. It currently sits in Russian- controlled territory. The dam’s reservoir supplies water to Crimea, which has been for the last 240 years home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
Firstly, the ‘Soviets’ built the dam during the USSR, not the ‘Russians,’ and the USSR no longer exists. Secondly, it doesn’t matter how long Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was based in Crimea; it belongs to Ukraine because that’s what happened when the USSR dissolved in 1991 and Ukraine became independent.
Tucker’s Trumpian personal insults, like describing Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a “sweaty and rat-like comedian-turned-oligarch,” probably don’t help his credibility much either.
Tucker is on firmer ground when he argues that: “Blowing up the dam may be bad for Ukraine, but it hurts Russia more, and for precisely that reason, the Ukrainian government has considered destroying it.”
Especially when he cites a December report from The Washington Post in which a Ukrainian general spoke of using U.S.-made HIMARS launchers to “test strike” on the Kakhovka dam.
So, what are the facts?
The dam spanning the Dnipro River was breached on Tuesday, flooding swaths of territory and threatening crucial water supplies to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.
At least 42,000 people and 1,500 square miles of land are at risk from the flooding caused by the destruction of the dam, likely slowing any potential Ukrainian military advance in the Dnipro River delta.
Much of the Dnipro River delta will become inaccessible for land operations, raising suspicions that Russia deliberately sabotaged the dam to prevent an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive.
However, the flooding has disproportionately affected the Russian-occupied side of the river.
The Kakhovka reservoir does supply Russian-occupied Kherson Oblast and the Crimea peninsula with fresh water.
Zelensky has said that the only way to destroy the dam is through mining and explosives and emphasized that Russian forces have now occupied the dam for over a year.
In a statement, Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command said, “Russian occupation troops blew up the dam” at Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region.
Blaming “Russian terrorists” for the attack, Zelensky said on Twitter that “the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam only confirms for the whole world that they must be expelled from every corner of Ukrainian land.”
In the end, Tucker may be right. Ukraine could have been behind the attack.
But he is far more credible when he is less bombastic and emphatic with his theories. Such as when he states:
So really, once the facts start coming in, it becomes much less of a mystery what might have happened to the dam, and a fair person would conclude that the Ukrainians probably blew it up, just as you would assume they blew up Nord Stream, the Russian natural gas pipeline last fall.
Tucker ended his new Twitter show by promising to be back with “much more, very soon.” I’m looking forward to it.
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ANALYSIS – While many of us recently celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ, also known as the ‘Prince of Peace,’ 2023 brings a year of danger and turmoil, with multiple regional flash points that could lead to a major war.
But longer term, another global danger is brewing, more slowly, but inexorably.
This danger is mostly political, ideological, and religious.
And while it may take a couple of more decades to come to pass, this steady shift will have profound historic repercussions and will change the world mostly for the worse.
I am talking about the steady death of Christianity in the U.S. and Europe, and the global growth and potential dominance of Islam in large parts of the world.
And this future looks bleak.
Symbolically, as we just celebrated Christmas, let’s begin with the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. It is built above the site where Jesus was reportedly born on the West Bank of the Palestinian territories.
It still broadcasts beautiful Christmas Eve services worldwide on TV.
However, most who watched the service on TV aren’t aware that the Christian population of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christianity, has been decimated under Muslim rule.
It has plummeted from 85% in 1947 to 15% today.
Christians worldwide aren’t faring too much better.
There are now 2.2 billion Christians in the world, at least nominally. But Islam has 1.97 billion followers, and rising.
And Islam is growing in two ways – it is advancing by the sword and the cradle.
Islamist extremist violence, terrorism, insurgency, and war, which in a major victory just recaptured Afghanistan, is spreading extremist Islam from the Middle East to Africa at a rapid pace.
Meanwhile, combined with the militant spread, a higher global Muslim fertility rate (2.9 children per woman, versus 2.6 for the rest of the world), means that by 2075, Islam will be the world’s dominant religion.
And where Islam is dominant as a religion it is also dominant politically and legally, as the Prophet Mohammed prescribed.
Of course, Islamist apologists, and Christian-hating leftists, will immediately denounce any criticism of Islam as racist or ‘Islamophobic.’
So let me quickly note that hundreds of thousands of Christian American soldiers have fought, and died, on multiple battlefields to defend Muslims, everywhere from Bosnia to Iraq and Syria to Afghanistan, and even Africa.
I personally served as a Marine Corps officer and military attache’ in Arab Muslim countries as well as in Bosnia where we were protecting Muslims.
I also spent many long days and nights during several months last year, remotely from Washington, DC trying to save hundreds, if not thousands of our Muslim brothers and sisters abandoned in Afghanistan by Joe Biden.
I also did what I could to help these worthy allies come and relocate to the U.S. when possible.
I did this due to my Christian values, my family’s experience being abandoned by another Democratic administration in another previously allied country (JFK and Cuba), as much as my sense of patriotic duty.
Sadly, we likely will never see the actions on a similar scale in reverse.
But the issue is far beyond whether individual Muslims are good, Christians are bad, or vice versa. The issue is what a world dominated by Muslim values, politics, and law – versus one which has been dominated by Christianity – will look like.
And based on what we see in too many Islamic-led countries today, that future will be far worse than what we have now.
Most, if not all, of our western liberal values the left hold so dear, and so do many conservatives, originate directly from Christianity, and indirectly from Judaism.
Yes, Christianity, when wrongly wedded to the state during the Middle Ages, was often used by ruthless monarchs to justify war and intolerance.
But that history is long gone, along with the politically powerful royal families of Europe.
Since at least the reformation, Christianity, including my own Catholic Church, has been free of the state and has been (even if imperfectly) a bulwark of tolerance, peace, and positive social change.
Sadly, the same cannot be said of Islam.
Though many call Islam a religion of peace, Islam literally means submission, and bloody jihad has been integral to its core since Mohammed.
And except when it has been effectively contained by the West, Islam has been an aggressive militant force.
And while Christianity during the past few centuries has firmly returned to its peaceful, almost pacifist, roots of Christ, its founder, Islam struggles with the fact that at its core and founding, Islam is violent and intolerant.
As was Mohammed – Islam’s founder – the warrior prophet.
And whereas in the West we have the separation of church and state, based in part on Jesus’ teaching of ‘give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s,’ in Islam it’s the opposite.
There is no similar separation in Islamic tradition. Islam is as much a political ideology and legal structure as it is a religion.
And though the vast majority of individual Muslims are good, peaceful, tolerant, and loving people, Islam itself allows for officially sanctioned violence and intolerance.
It all too often even rewards it.
And this is why to this day, a small but significant minority of Muslims openly support violence.
As Boston Herald columnist Don Feder writes in the Washington Times:
…worldwide, 8% of Muslims say suicide bombings are “sometimes” or “often” justified in the name of Islam. That 8% may not seem like much, but it means more than 100 million condone coldblooded murder to defend perceived attacks on Islam.
Feder adds: “Even in the West, many Muslims want to live under Islamic law (Sharia), where adulterers are stoned to death and converts to other faiths are murdered.”
To be more precise he notes: “In Russia, where Islam is expected to be the largest religion by 2050, 42% of Muslims support Sharia, as do 71% in Nigeria, 46% in France and 40% in the United Kingdom.”
Feder continues:
While Muslims in the West demand tolerance, Christians rarely get it under Islam. In Egypt, Coptic churches are bombed, congregants shot, and girls kidnapped and forced to convert. All over the Middle East, ancient communities have been uprooted.
Meanwhile, half the population growth worldwide between now and 2050 will be concentrated in Africa, including Congo, Nigeria, and Tanzania.
The growth there is much more by the sword than the cradle, as all these countries have active violent Islamist insurgencies.
In Europe it is the opposite. Europeans are simply dying off by choice, and being replaced, often by Muslims.
Feder explains:
…the European fertility rate is 1.49, well below the replacement level of 2.1. Europe lost 1.1 million people last year. That’s the first rumbling of a coming earthquake. The fertility rate for European Muslims is 2.54. You don’t need to be a statistician to see which way the demographic winds are blowing.
It’s estimated that by 2085, 13 European countries will have Muslim majorities — this in a continent once known as Christendom. Christians are writing their own obituary by failing to heed the commandment to be fruitful and multiply.
And while in the United States, Islam has not yet become big enough to endanger our liberal western culture and legal system, there have been rumblings and testing of our resolve.
This usually occurs at the local level where Muslims may dominate, and opportunistic ‘civic’ leaders may use that as leverage to try to force change in their favor.
However, the bigger threat in America is simply the loss of Christianity. And the moral and spiritual vacuum that this is creating.
Christianity, the former bedrock of American society and the system it was built on, has rapidly declined in the U.S. from 91% as recently as 1976 to 73.7% in 2016, to 64% in 2022.
A third of the clueless Generation Z (or ‘Zoomers’) say they are unaffiliated with any religion or denomination.
According to a recent Pew Research study, Christians will be a minority of 47% in this country by 2050.
So, a belated Merry Christmas to all. We won’t be celebrating it as much in the not-too-distant future.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
That’s the thing about celebrities, they never seem to recognize when their immense wealth and status have officially removed them from what would be considered a “common man.”
Drew Barrymore, a longstanding name in Hollywood, thanked President Joe Biden for a “great year.”
Watch Amanda break down the controversy below:
The Sam Brinton luggage saga seems to be never-ending…New details about the crime are coming to light and are sure to upset taxpayers…
Watch Amanda explain the situation below:
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The non-profit public interest law firm Judicial Watch reports they filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Energy for “records about the retroactive termination of former President Donald Trump’s security clearance and/or access to classified information.”
Judicial Watch reports the lawsuit “cites Trump’s January 12, 2024, motion to compel discovery in his criminal prosecution in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, in which the former president asserts that DOE attempted to terminate his security clearance retroactively after his June 2023 indictment by Special Counsel Jack Smith.”
“It looks like the Department of Energy is trying to manufacture a criminal case,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “What are they hiding?”
Judicial Watch reports the lawsuit “points to the February 2024 response to Trump’s January 2024 motion in which Smith acknowledges the existence of a June 2023 memorandum prepared by an Energy Department official regarding the security clearance.”
“The Special Counsel’s office describes the memorandum’s contents and asserts that it had produced the record to Trump,” Judicial Watch reports. “Smith also acknowledges requesting and receiving additional ‘responsive’ records from DOE, including ‘approximately 30 pages of records and eight emails.’ Smith asserts that he was ‘now producing’ the 30 pages to Trump and withholding the eight emails.”
“Trump’s lawyers suggest in the January 2024 motion to compel discovery that Trump had a high-level security clearance as recently as 2023,” Judicial Watch notes.
“Lawyers for Trump say a government document from June 2023 still listed him with a “Q” clearance from the DOE. The document was dated a few weeks after prosecutors indicted Trump in the classified documents case,” Judicial Watch reports. “A ‘Q’ clearance refers to a type of security clearance handled by the Department of Energy, which holds classified information focused largely on nuclear secrets.”
Judicial Watch reports it “filed the lawsuit after the Energy Department failed to comply with a January 18, 2024, FOIA request for its records and communications concerning retroactively terminating Trump’s security clearance and/or access to classified information.”
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