HALF-FULL REPORT 06/21/19

Iran shot down a (very expensive) U.S. reconnaissance drone over international waters Thursday (6/20), escalating tensions.

Rogue elements in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps may have been responsible, President Trump said.

https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1141760585308233728

A power struggle between hard liners and harder liners is plausible. I doubt Ayatollah Khamenei would order an attack on a Japanese tanker while Prime Minister Abe was visiting.

Perhaps the most reassuring thing about the mullahs is they’ve squirreled away billions in Swiss banks. Such people are not likely to start World War III in the hopes it will prompt the return of the Mahdi.

The mullahs are between a rock and a hard place. President Trump’s sanctions are strangling them.

The president is willing to lift sanctions, provided the mullahs (1) absolutely, positively for verifiable certain sure give up their pursuit of nuclear weapons, and (2) stop supporting international terror.

The mullahs can’t agree to this without giving up their raison d’etre. But after 50 years revolutionary ardor can fade.

If Iran were to stop fomenting terror, what happens to the IRGC? Some in it may fear a loss of power, prestige, job security.

It was a rogue general who ordered the strike on the drone, former Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Jack Keane said this morning (6/21).

The president explains in these tweets why he cancelled a retaliatory strike. Even if Trump was just offering Khamenei a face-saving way to back down, what he said was smart. Even Schiffless praised the president’s restraint.

A sword of Damocles hangs now over the mullahs, which should enhance the president’s already immense leverage in negotiations. Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” is working, Gen. Keane said.

If there are further Iranian provocations, and Trump retaliates then, it will be difficult to accuse him of having acted rashly.

The almost, but not quite retaliatory strike the president cancelled may have been a PSYOP from the get-go.

“I guarantee every member of the Iranian military (soiled) their pants last night,” said former Air Force intelligence officer Fiona Mikayes. “They saw it coming and I guarantee they were scared to death.”

“From this day on, they will be at constant GQ (General Quarters), and my military brethren know how bad that is.”

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Iran’s provocations so far have stopped short of a casus belli. If the provocations escalate — especially if any Americans are killed or wounded — there will be a military response. But it will be far short of “war.”

How many of the ninnies, left and right, who equate a military response of any kind to “war” remember that on April 6, 2017 the president ordered a cruise missile strike on a Syrian air base to punish Bashir Assad for using poison gas against civilians?

Only two things would prompt a major military response. The president won’t permit Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon, and there will be Hell to pay if the mullahs try to close the Strait of Hormuz.

Even then, there’d be no U.S. ground troops, no invasion of Iran, no effort to force regime change. No “war.”

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The president’s decision to call off the strike forced Democrats and the Lying Swine into an abrupt change of narrative. Prepared to call Trump a reckless warmonger, they now assert he’s a pussy.

Unseen1 summarizes well how the PR battle is going.

None of the president’s enemies – in Iran or here at home – know what he’ll do next. Sun Tzu would be proud.

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John Kerry and other Obamunists have urged the mullahs not to make a deal with Trump, to hang on until he is impeached, or a Democrat is elected to succeed him.

Did they also urge the mullahs – or rogue elements within the IRGC – to provoke a military strike?

If so, and it can be proved, Kerry et al have lots more to worry about than a Logan Act violation.

That proof could be forthcoming, if indeed it was a rogue IRGC general who ordered the strike on the drone. Stay tuned.

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President Trump formally announced Tuesday (5/18) his intention to run for re-election before by far the largest crowd ever to attend a political rally in the United States.

The president’s speech was perhaps his best. He spoke for an hour and 20 minutes, his “dragon energy” apparent.

Trump was, even for him, unusually blunt and direct.

“No matter what label they give, a vote for any Democrat in 2020 is a vote for radical socialism and destruction of the American dream,” he said.

“On no issue are Democrats more extreme – and more depraved – than when it comes to border security,” the president said. “The Democrat agenda of open borders is morally reprehensible. It is the great betrayal of the American middle class and our Country as a whole.”

“Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice and rage,” Trump said.  “They want to destroy you and destroy our country as we know it.”

“No other president in my lifetime has gone after the Democrats so definitively and so decisively, name by name and position by position,” said Larry Schweikart. “These aren’t ‘our friends across the aisle.’ These are enemies of our very nation.”

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Did the president foreshadow a revelation to come?

Speaking of Hillary Clinton deleting 33,000 emails from her insecure private server, Trump said: “they acid wash these emails, never to be seen again, but we may find them somewhere deep in the State department…”

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Fifteen current or former State Department employees committed “multiple security incidents” in their handling of Hillary’s emails, the State Department revealed Monday (6/17).

The investigation, still ongoing, has so far found 23 “violations” and 7 “infractions” of State Department rules for handling classified information, Mary Elizabeth Taylor, Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, said in a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who requested the security review.

Ms. Taylor didn’t name the offenders, but said there will be consequences. She expects more breaches of security will be uncovered before the probe concludes Sept. 1.

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“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States,” President Trump tweeted Monday (6/17).

First to be deported will be illegals who’ve committed crimes, and the more than one million who have exhausted their appeals, but remain in the country. But eventually they’ll get around to the non-criminal illegals, said Acting ICE Director Mark Morgan.

If non-criminal illegals aren’t deported, “the message is you will never be touched,” Morgan said. “The incentive is so strong, they’re going to keep coming.”

There were roughly 11 million illegals in the USA in 2017, the Pew Foundation estimated.

They obviously can’t all be deported at once. But Robert Romano reminds those who say it can’t be done that President Eisenhower deported more than a million illegals in 1954.

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In accordance with its deal with President Trump to avoid tariffs, Mexico evidently is cracking down hard on “migrants” from Central America. Nearly 800 were nabbed in just one day.

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A House Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing Wednesday (6/19) on reparations for slavery. Dems didn’t like what they heard from former NFL safety (Jets and Raiders) Burgess Owens:

Socialism/Marxism is a racist evil targeting black people. Yup!

And the DNC needs to run me my restitution. Mr. Burgess Owens is Hotep!

Stop telling our kids they can't make it in this great nation!! 🙌🏾 pic.twitter.com/vqUk5YNAQm

— Hotep Jesus (@HotepJesus) June 19, 2019

Reparations are a bad idea, Owens said, but if anyone should pay them, it should be Democrats.

“I used to be a Democrat until I did my history and found out the misery that that party did to my race,” he said. “Let the party of slavery, KKK, Jim Crow pay restitution to my race.”

In this thoughtful, articulate statement, Coleman Hughes said the only blacks who are owed reparations are those still living who suffered under Jim Crow.

He grew up in an upper middle class home in the suburbs, attended an Ivy League college, Hughes said. He’s no victim.

“Reparations by definition are given only to victims, so the moment you give me reparations, you’ve made me a victim without my consent,” Hughes said.

It’s stupid to make people who never owned slaves pay reparations to people who never were slaves, said this black teenager.

* * * *
Sarah Sanders is departing as White House press secretary, perhaps to run for governor of Arkansas. She got a tribute at President Trump’s speech in Orlando.

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Cementing her reputation as the dimmest bulb in the Democrat chandelier (or perhaps as the foremost Trump Judas goat) Alexandria Occasional-Cortex said Tuesday (6/18) the U.S. has established “concentration camps” along the Mexican border.

AOC did her usual shuck and jive after being caught saying something stupid. Republicans are so silly to be upset, she said. There’s a difference between a concentration camp and a Nazi death camp. It’s “universally non-controversial” to refer to ICE facilities as concentration camps, she told CNN.

That wasn’t a distinction she’d made in her original post, noted Ryan Saavedra.

Prominent leftie journos raced to defend the indefensible.

America is heading toward implementing the same death camps that Nazi Germany used during the Holocaust, said CNN “contributor” Angela Rye.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes was rebuked by the Auschwitz Memorial for downplaying the Holocaust in his defense of AOC.

AOC and her MSM apologists have made an enormous in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign, said John Hayward.

“The biggest idiot in Congress drove a dump truck full of flaming toxic waste off a cliff and most of the left leaped into the void after her,” Hayward said. “The Dems played perfectly into Trump’s pitch as the only defense Middle America has against a gang of raging leftwing kooks.”

No wonder Nancy Pelosi starts drinking in the morning.

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NXIVM sex cult leader Keith Raniere was found guilty Wednesday (6/19) on all seven charges against him, which could put him away for life. Sentencing is Sept. 25.

You’d think the lurid elements of the trial – branded sex slaves, human trafficking, a Hollywood actress, money laundering, pedophilia – would have attracted media attention.

It mostly didn’t, because the Lying Swine are not eager to report on the cult’s connections to prominent Democrats, among them Hillary Clinton and New York Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand (her dad worked for the cult, her stepmom was part of it, she may have been, too).

Seagram’s heiress Clare Bronfman, NXIVM’s director of operations, plead guilty to two felonies in April, but may face additional charges pertaining to her role in sex trafficking (underage girls smuggled in mostly from Mexico).

Bronfman’s lawyers are two high profile Obamunists, former U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke and John Sandweg, who may be involved in her visa fraud.

Patrick Howley of Big League Politics has done a first rate job of reporting on the cult and the trial. This is a good primer on NXIVM.

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Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced a bill Wednesday (6/19) that would strip big tech companies such as Google, You Tube and Twitter of their immunity from lawsuits if they continue to censor conservative speech.

In essence, the bill would treat big tech as “publishers” and not as “platforms.” Here’s the bill. Here’s Hawley’s statement about it.

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Overruling lower court injunctions, the 9^th Circuit of Appeals ruled Thursday (6/20) that President Trump may cut federal funding to Planned Parenthood.

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The prosecution of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher took a bizarre turn Thursday (6/20) when, under cross examination, a prosecution witness said it was he who killed the ISIS prisoner.

Earlier this month the lead prosecutor was removed for spying on the defense team.

* * * *
President Trump said he may live tweet during the Democrat presidential debates next week.

Two groups of 10 will “debate” Wednesday (6/26) and Thursday (6/27). MSNBC has exclusive coverage.

The DNC put Fauxcahontas Warren on the undercard, despite the fact she’s polling 2^nd or 3rd both nationally, and in Iowa.

Biden and Sanders go Thursday night. So do Buttigieg and “Heels Up” Harris, who poll in the high single digits.

Biden holds a commanding lead in national polls. Will any of the others go after the frontrunner?

Slow Joe gave critics more ammunition Tuesday (6/18) when he praised segregationist senators James Eastland (D-MS) and Herman Talmadge (D-GA).

You can give the man hair plugs and a facelift, keep him away from the little children he likes to sniff and fondle, but there is no cure for stupid.

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I’m running long, as usual, so that’s a wrap for this week. See you next Friday. Until then, keep well, keep safe, stock up on popcorn. Things are going our way.

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.