HALF-FULL REPORT 04/07/17

The Senate confirmed Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch today (4/7), after nuking the filibuster on a party line vote yesterday.

Congrats to Mitch McConnell for keeping all the weak sisters on board. If Dems hadn’t filibustered Gorsuch, there may not have been enough votes to nuke the filibuster for President Trump’s next nominee.

Who may come this summer. Here’s background on President Trump’s opportunity to remake the federal courts.

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Early this morning (4/7), Tomahawk cruise missiles from U.S. warships struck the air base in Syria from which the chemical weapons attack that shocked the world Tuesday was launched.

The strikes targeted aircraft, runways, fuel supplies, weapons stores. They were enough to hurt – but not enough to start another war.

“Tearful Syrians cheer U.S. missile raid,” said the London Daily Mail, which has some great pictures.

“I’ll name my son Donald,” said Qusai Zakarya, who survived a chemical attack in 2013.

“President Trump just put an end to the Obama era of vacillation and cowardice,” said former Army intelligence officer Ralph Peters. “(He) just sent a vital message – to the butcher Bashar al Assad, and also to North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un and other rogue leaders: the United States is back.”

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Remember when Obama Secretary of State John Kerry and National Security Adviser Susan Rice assured us “100 percent” of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile had been destroyed?

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The Russians are plenty peeved, may be playing a game of chicken with President Trump.

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The missile strike caused cognitive dissonance among Democrats. Trump is a reckless warmonger, the strike was unconstitutional, some Dems said. But Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi (grudgingly) supported what he did.

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The strike also dismayed Alt-Right kooks, who think President Trump has been deceived by “globalists” and “neocons,” is becoming just another “cuck.”

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What’s next? At a news conference at Mar a Lago last night (4/6) Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster indicated the next steps to oust Assad will be political.

“The process by which Assad would leave is something that I think requires an international community effort, both first to defeat ISIS within Syria, to stabilize the Syrian country to avoid further civil war, and then to work collectively with our partners around the world through a political process that will lead to Assad leaving,” T-Rex said.

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President Trump and Secretary of State Tillerson met last night and today (4/7) with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The most important thing they talked about was what to do about North Korea.

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Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi met with President Trump at the White House Monday (4/3). Jordan’s King Abdullah II visited Wednesday (4/5).

Doubtless they talked about ISIS, Iran, Syria. Did they also discuss whether the president should declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization?

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In the special election for the House seat formerly held by HHS Secretary Tom Price, Democrat Jon Ossoff is sinking.

Republicans reminded voters Ossoff is a Democrat. He wasn’t helped when voters learned he doesn’t live in the district, inflated his resume, 95 percent of his campaign funds are from out of state.

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Fauxcahontas pays women who work in her Senate office just 71 percent of what she pays men.

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President Trump removed Steve Bannon from the National Security Council’s principals committee Wednesday (4/5).

He also restored the DNI and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the “principals” committee, added the CIA Director, the Secretary of Energy, and the UN ambassador to it.

“H.R. McMaster engineers the most complete victory since the battle of Midway,” said Streiff at Redstate.

If this is true, Bannon may not be in the White House much longer.

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Chelsea Clinton has advice for young women on how to succeed in business. Step 1: be born on third base.

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Bureaucrats at the EPA are having a sad, the LA Times reports.

Interior department officials were paid $6 million while being investigated for misconduct.

Secretary Ben Carson found $500 billion in “errors” in audit of Obama HUD.

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The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee will recuse himself from the Russia investigation. This seems like a mighty big scalp for Dems. But a former flack for Hillary freaked when she learned who will replace him.

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-CA, is vindicated on what he said about “unmasking.” Dems assert an appearance of impropriety to distract attention from actual impropriety.

Now that Nunes has stepped away from the Russia probe, he’ll have more time to investigate Obama’s spying.

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I don’t know anything about it, President Obama’s national security adviser told PBS Mar. 22.

I didn’t break the law when I did it, Susan Rice told MSNBC Tuesday (4/4).

“It” is the “unmasking” of Trump transition team members “incidentally” collected during surveillance of foreign targets.

Unmasking was done dozens of times in intercepts that had nothing to do with Russia. It began before Donald Trump won the Republican nomination.

Ms. Rice asked the IC to make detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates. The unmasked reports had info about “everyday lives.”

She wanted unmasked names for the President’s Daily Brief, Ms. Rice indicated.

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“Unmasking” is, in most instances, a felony, punishable by up to ten years in prison.

There are exceptions, but it’s unlikely they apply to Ms. Rice, because the National Security Adviser is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it.

“There would have been no intelligence need for Ms. Rice to ask for identities to be unmasked,” said former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy. “If there had been a real need to reveal the identities…the unmasking would have been done by the investigating agencies.”

There is “no operational justification” for relaxing rules regulating sharing of NSA raw intelligence, said former CIA station chief Scott Uehlinger.

On multiple occasions, (Rice) asked the (National Security Agency) to do things they regarded as unethical and perhaps illegal,” said former NSA counter-intelligence officer John Schindler.

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Obama’s NSC redefined Jewish American opponents of the Iran deal as “agents of Israel,” ordered NSA to surveil them, used the intelligence gleaned for political purposes, charged Lee Smith.

“We began to notice the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having,” a pro-Israel political operative told Smith.

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The Lying Swine were in a quandary when the Rice story broke. Should they ignore it? Refute it? Defend what Rice did?

The story was “fake news,” so they wouldn’t report it, CNN said Monday. The next day, Ms. Rice admitted it was true.

That torched options 1 and 2. So the narrative abruptly changed. Out was: “Trump lied when he said Obama spied on him.” In is: “Obama HAD to spy on Trump.”

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What the Lying Swine excuse is a breathtaking abuse of power — Watergate 2.0. (There’d have been no Watergate if Nixon felt he could order FBI or CIA to bug Spencer Oliver’s phone at the Democratic National Committee.)

The articles of impeachment against Nixon said he’d directed the FBI, CIA and IRS to investigate Americans for reasons unrelated to national security or law enforcement. Sounds like what Obama/Rice did.

Dems will resort to legalisms to excuse Rice et al (what they did wasn’t illegal).

The only person we know for absolute certain sure committed a crime is whoever told David Ignatius of the Washington Post about former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn’s telephone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

Ms. Rice will wear an orange jumpsuit only if she were the leaker, ordered the leak, or ordered widespread distribution of unmasked SIGINT transcripts to facilitate leaks (almost certainly true, but hard to prove).

We must keep the spotlight on the abuse of power.

“The claim that Susan Rice was unmasking merely to arrive at the ground truth of Russian behavior would be easier to swallow if the information she gleaned from the unmasking hadn’t been used to perpetrate a fraud,” said former NSC staffer Michael Doran.

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Once again, the Lying Swine rely on fact-free innuendo to imply President Trump is Putin’s prison wife.

It’s a harder sell now. The more time elapses, the more we learn of how extensive surveillance was, the more it seems if there’d been anything to find, it would have leaked by now.

Mark Cuban has a plausible take on what The Donald’s relationship with Russia actually was.

Rice, Evelyn Farkas and others will be called to testify before Congressional committees. Here are some questions they should be asked under oath.

Republicans are attacking Ms. Rice only because she’s a black woman, said MSNBC contributor David Corn. A black woman named Rice was national security adviser during the Bush administration.

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This may be the week when the leftist coup failed, so the glass is way more than half full.

Our friend Ralph Peters was so concerned about Candidate Trump’s bromance with Putin, he voted for Hillary. Boy is he on board now!

T-Rex wanted Elliott Abrams to be deputy secretary of state. Trump vetoed him, because Abrams had been so harsh a critic. Read what Abrams is saying now.

“In the first major test of Trump’s mettle as president, he has just put the world on notice,” said #NeverTrumper John Podhoretz.

Finally, #NeverTrump conservatives are paying more attention to what the president does than to things he’s said.

Matt Lewis, a conservative critic of Mr. Trump, noticed the president is “quietly, steadily racking up big wins.”

Calling out Russia over Syria makes the narrative about Trump a hard sell. Panicked lefties at Salon said it was suspicious Russians were warned to get out of Dodge before the missiles struck.

The exposure of the “unmasker” as a Democrat pol who’s lied flagrantly means more attention will be paid to Obama’s spying.

The president must be more careful about what he says and tweets. Trump “is going in the right direction, but seems determined to step in every pile of (dung) along the way,” said Brit Hume.

More will notice, now, he’s going in the right direction.

The Hero of the Week is President Trump, with shout-outs to Tillerson, Mattis and McMaster – and to Nikki Haley, who’s been doing us proud at the UN.

Putz of the week is Susan Rice.

I hope you’ll have a better weekend than Assad and Rice. Jack Wheeler will be back next week.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret, and was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration.  Until his retirement in January 2017, he was the national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.