By Sean Moran
Along with nine of her grandchildren, Pelosi invited legendary crooner Tony Bennet, Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, and television personality and fashion guru Tim Gunn to sit in the House gallery during the House’s for Speaker.
Washington, D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser, Stephanie Shirock and Ellen Malcolm of Emily’s List, as well as the presidents of Georgetown and Trinity Washington University, came to the Capitol building on Thursday.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, also came to witness Pelosi assume the Speaker’s gavel.
Bennett also attended Pelosi’s first swearing-in in 2007 as Speaker, along with actor Richard Grere. Bennet reportedly performed at a dinner on Wednesday night, according to Politico, which also featured former President Bill Clinton and failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Italian Ambassador Armando Varicchio hosted the dinner at the Italian embassy in Washington, D.C. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, California Lt. Gov.-elect Eleni Kounalakis, and other luminaries attended the exclusive Wednesday dinner for Pelosi.
Democrats retook control of the House of Representatives after the 2018 midterm elections. Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats pledged to protect Obamacare and its protections for pre-existing conditions. Progressive Democrats have pushed for climate change legislation and a single-payer “Medicare for All” government-run healthcare program.
Pelosi, along with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), continue to fight with President Trump and congressional Republicans over the president’s requested $5 billion in border wall funding.
In an interview, Pelosi told a reporter that she will not provide any money for Trump’s border wall.
“No, no. Nothing for the wall,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi has continued to state that she can strike a deal with Trump to end the partial government shutdown; although, she will not give Trump any increased border wall funding.
By Patrick Howley
Big League Politics’ expose on the alleged Roberts hack has rocked the corridors of power. Now, we have more information coming to light about the FISA court — which infamously held no hearings regarding the fraudulent FISA warrant applications to surveil Carter Page and by extension other members of President Trump’s team. And there’s more: James Comey’s henchmen at the FBI are proven to have covered it up. (RELATED: How Deep State ‘Journalist’ Michael Isikoff Has Been Setting Up Mueller’s Enemies For Years).
Tapes released by Federal Judge G. Murray Snow — preserved on a Whistleblower Soundcloud page — show real estate billionaire Timothy Blixseth explaining Brennan and Clapper’s surveillance program to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and detective Mike Zullo. The existence of this surveillance program has been corroborated by Wikileaks’ “Vault 7” release and by the public comments of former CIA and NSA contractor Dennis Montgomery, who says he worked on the program for Brennan and Clapper.
Montgomery has gone public with his claims exposing how the program was used to spy on President Donald Trump when he was a private citizen. Montgomery has gained immunity and desperately wants House Intelligence Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes or other lawmakers to call him to testify about what he knows.
Latest: WATCH: Tucker Says ‘Leaders Show No Obligation to American Voters’ in Bruising Monologue
On the explosive tapes, Blixseth walks Arpaio and Zullo through the details of the program on a computer screen. At one point, the three begin pulling up specific names of targeted individuals.
“You know who that guy is? That’s the head of the FISA court they hacked into, Reggie Walton,” Blixseth tells the investigators.
“John Roberts, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, was hacked,” Blixseth tells Arpaio and Zullo.
LISTEN TO THE TAPE HERE (18:00 Minute Mark)
Insiders have always been skeptical of Roberts’ motives for siding with President Obama on the 2012 Obamacare case. While there’s still no available evidence that Roberts was blackmailed, the allegation that he was “hacked” by Obama officials provides some more context into the justice’s controversial career.
As Big League Politics reported, former FBI director James Comey seized and buried volumes of information that demonstrated this wide-ranging government surveillance operation targeting Donald Trump before he became president.
Larry Klayman, attorney for former NSA and CIA contractor and whistleblower Dennis Montgomery, delivered to the FBI 47 hard drives and data amounting to more than 600 million pages of documentation on the surveillance scheme. Then-FBI director James Comey’s general counsel James Baker took the data into his possession, according to multiple sources. But despite possessing Montgomery’s bombshell whistleblower revelations, Comey never acted on or publicized the information.
Additionally, Comey’s former firm Lockheed Martin granted entry to Montgomery to one of its facilities to help him work on the alleged mass surveillance program, which was allegedly overseen by Obama administration officials John Brennan and James Clapper and specifically targeted Trump.
“This guy showed me 900 million phone calls. And I see myself in there. I see people I know. I see Donald Trump in there a zillion times, and Bloomberg is in there,” Blixseth said on the tape, referring to information that Montgomery allegedly showed him.
“We don’t have any comment,” the FBI told Big League Politics when questioned about the existence of the program.
“I provided to the FBI seventeen businesses of Donald Trump, including the Trump Tower, the Trump leasing programs, all of these different programs, and including Trump himself and the various family members that had been wiretapped under these programs,” Montgomery said in a recent interview. “There has been a wiretap on Trump for years.”
“I started by going to Maricopa County and showing that Sheriff Arpaio himself was wiretapped under the Obama administration,” the whistleblower said.
“I was a CIA contractor both under John Brennan and under James Clapper and these individuals were running domestic surveillance programs in the United States collecting information on Americans. This isn’t political. They were collecting information on Republicans and Democrats. But they collected everything they could find. Bank accounts, phone numbers, chats, emails, and they collected a massive amount of it under the Obama administration,” Montgomery said.
I reported on how Peter Strzok, an agent of Comey’s FBI, was the point man on every single aspect of Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the failed Deep State plot to target President Donald Trump for destruction.
WASHINGTON — More and more details are pouring out about the underhanded conspiracy to damage and impeach President Donald Trump by Obama operatives John Brennan, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates and a few others. The effort even has a special code name: Operation Crossfire Hurricane.
They used Peter Strzok as their go-to guy, which is why their operation is now falling apart. Strzok’s massive illegal activities and incompetence could open up the entire Crossfire Hurricane team to numerous federal charges.
Both John Brennan and James Comey used Peter Strzok to damage President Donald Trump. Strzok is the disgraced FBI agent and fired Robert Mueller team member whose text messages with mistress Lisa Page form the biggest scandal in FBI history. The lovers conspired to illegally bring down Trump, all while the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign.
Strzok interviewed Hillary Clinton without putting her under oath, and granted immunity to Cheryl Mills and Clinton’s other associates right before he flew to London to meet with Christopher Steele to work on the anti-Trump dossier, which was sponsored by the Clinton-funded firm Fusion GPS. That dossier was used to fraudulently obtain FISA warrants to surveil Trump Tower. Barack Obama read bits of the dossier in his daily presidential briefings, courtesy of Brennan. Fusion GPS, meanwhile, sent operatives into Trump Tower to entrap Don Jr. and Jared Kushner in a meeting with planted Russians.
When it was time for the conspirators to focus on Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, Strzok was there to run information about the adviser to the Australians. When it was time to take out Trump’s national security adviser General Michael Flynn, Strzok was there to stage an “ambush” interrogation of Flynn without Flynn’s lawyer present.
Let’s walk through Strzok’s amazing Zelig-like role in every facet of Operation Crossfire Hurricane:
Brennan hired Strzok to write the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) in January 2017.
This was an official document used to spur on the Robert Mueller investigation. But the document did not actually find any evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia, it merely said that Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Trump and that Russia “developed a clear preference for Trump.” The Christopher Steele dossier was added as an “appendix” to the ICA report, even though Brennan lied and told Congress that it was never used.
Comey Sent Strzok To London To Meet With The Australians About George Papadopoulos
George Papadopoulos was surveilled in real time by the FBI. Who set him up? Peter Strzok, whose meeting with the Australian ambassador in London provided key basis for the creation of Robert Mueller’s investigation, according to none other than the New York Times.
Strzok Cleared Hillary Clinton Right Before He Left For London
Big League Politics called attention in July 2017 to the fact that Strzok was serving on the Mueller team after personally overseeing the Hillary Clinton email investigation at the FBI and personally conducting the interview with Hillary Clinton that was not under oath and which led to no incarceration for the Democrat candidate.
Strzok also withheld information about the Hillary case from Congress according to this text:
With the pressure on, Strzok’s wife Melissa Hodgman, Associate Director of the enforcement division of the Securities and Exchange Commission, is scrubbing herObama and Clinton links. Hodgman was promoted by Obama just two weeks before FBI director James Comey re-opened the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal in 2016, leading political insiders to suspect that Hodgman might have been involved in the federal government’s cover-up.
Some of the Liked pages on her Facebook account on December 3 included “Thank You Obama” and “We Voted For Hillary.”
Strzok Sets Up Flynn
On January 24, 2017, Peter Strzok interviewed General Michael Flynn inside the White House alongside another agent. Flynn’s lawyer was not present. Flynn apparently did not tell the White House about his meeting. Guess who did? Sally Yates, the anti-Trump deputy attorney general whose underling told the FBI to shut down the Clinton Foundation case. Yates informed the White House on January 26 that Flynn met with the FBI.
That was the beginning of the end for the original Trump White House.
Strzok was close personal friends with the foreign intelligence judge Rudolph Contreras who accepted General Flynn’s guilty plea. Contreras recused himself after he already accepted Flynn’s guilty plea.
Strzok and Page detailed their plan to meet with Contreras in a July 25, 2016 series of texts:
PAGE: “Rudy is on the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court]! Did you know that? Just appointed two months ago.”
STRZOK: “I did. I need to get together with him.”
PAGE: “said he’d gotten on a month or two ago at a graduation party we were both at.”
Strzok and Page’s Texts Revealed Their Anti-Trump Plot
It is well known that Strzok and Page discussed their anti-Trump conspiracy many thousands of times over text messages that have been mostly released. The lovers’ repeated references to “CF” refer to “Crossfire.” Here are Hot Air’s favorites:
“Strzok: God Hillary should win. 100,000,000-0.
Strzok: Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support…
Strzok: I am riled up. Trump is a f***ing idiot, is unable to provide a coherent answer.”
Clapper Tried To Use The Supreme Court To Block Trump’s Inauguration
In January, as Brennan was having Strzok write the fraudulent ICA report, Brennan’s partner in crime, Obama director of national intelligence James Clapper, was cooking up his own side plot to stop the Trump inauguration from happening. Clapper held a meeting in his office in January 2017 to discuss using a female Supreme Court justice to block Trump from becoming president due to the “Russia” conspiracy.
A high-level member of the intelligence community who witnessed the meeting said that Clapper discussed going to one of three female Supreme Court justices to make the case that alleged Russian interference could invalidate Trump’s claim to the presidency.
Another text the witness sent to BLP’s source around the same time described how the Deep State was making General Michael Flynn a “rising target” for his alleged involvement with Russians, and stating that House Speaker Paul Ryan is a “wild card” in the Deep State wars.
President Donald Trump further ridiculed failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney for continuing to criticize him and his presidency.
By Charlie Spiering
“If he fought really hard against President Obama like he does against me, he would have won the election,” Trump said.
Romney criticized Trump in a Washington Post op-ed for failing to “seize the mantle” of the presidency by leading with dignity to inspire the world, criticizing his bad approval numbers around the globe.
“I was expecting something, but I’m surprised he did it this quickly,” Trump said, noting that he expected criticism from Romney, despite his endorsement. Romney ran and won his race for Senator of Utah with Trump’s endorsement in 2018.
“I wish Mitt could be more of a team player,” Trump said. “I endorsed him and he thanked me profusely.”
Trump defended his low approval ratings in foreign countries, noting that he was elected as president of the United States.
“I shouldn’t be popular in Europe. If I were popular in Europe I wouldn’t be doing my job,” he said.
JANUARY 2, 2019
Live-streamed cooking videos.
After Cortez’s live stream got good press, every Democrat appears to have followed.
This is the greatest outreach strategy since Hillary Clinton said she carries “hot sauce” in her bag!
DECEMBER 20, 2018
All of the economic numbers tell us that the economy is slowing down, and on Wednesday Fed Chair Jerome Powell even admitted that economic conditions are “softening”, but the Federal Reserve raised interest rates anyway. As one top economist put it, raising rates as we head into an economic downturn is “economic malpractice”. They know that higher rates will slow down the economy even more, but it isn’t as if the Fed was divided on this move. In fact, it was a unanimous vote to raise rates. They clearly have an agenda, and that agenda is definitely not about helping the American people.
Early on Wednesday, Wall Street seemed to believe that the Federal Reserve would do the right thing, and the Dow was up nearly 400 points. But then the announcement came, and the market began sinking dramatically.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 720 points in just two hours, and the Dow ended the day down a total of 351 points. This is the lowest that the Dow has been all year, 60 percent of the stocks listed on the S&P 500 are in bear market territory, and at this point approximately four trillion dollars of stock market wealth has been wiped out.
We haven’t seen anything like this since the last financial crisis. This is officially the worst quarter for the stock market since the fourth quarter of 2008, and it is the worst December that Wall Street has experienced since 1931.
It is insanity to raise interest rates when stocks are already crashing, but the Federal Reserve did it anyway.
They knew what kind of reaction this would cause on Wall Street and in other global markets, but that didn’t stop them. The financial world is in utter turmoil, and this move by the Fed has definitely added fuel to the fire.
Could it be possible that they actually want a stock market crash?
Some are suggesting that the reason why the vote was unanimous was because they wanted to send a “strong signal” to President Trump. He has been extremely critical of the Federal Reserve in recent weeks, and this could be a way for the Fed to show Trump who is really in charge.
They are calling this “the Trump economy”, but that is simply not true. And when Barack Obama was in the White House, it wasn’t “the Obama economy” either. Ultimately, it is the Federal Reserve that is running the economy, and they fiercely guard their independence and their authority.
President Trump knows that the only way that he is going to win in 2020 is if the economy is doing well, and he also understands that higher interest rates will slow the economy down.
So essentially the Federal Reserve has a tremendous amount of political power in their hands.
During the Obama era, the Fed pushed interest rates all the way to the floor and kept them there for many years.
But now the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates seven times since Donald Trump took office, and four of those rate hikes have been under current Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
Needless to say, it certainly doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out how Donald Trump is feeling about Powell at this moment.
Meanwhile, we continue to get more indications that the U.S. economy is heading for difficult times. Just consider the following news about FedEx…
FedEx shares are plunging after what Morgan Stanley called a “jarring” cut to its annual forecasts, suggesting global growth is slowing far more than most expect – in fact, the bank hinted at the possibility of a “severe recession” unfolding – and prompting expectations of an “uber-dovish hike” by the Fed.
The global logistics bellwether slashed its outlook just three months after raising the view, reflecting an unexpected and abrupt change in the company’s view of the global economy amid rising trade tensions between the U.S. and China. Not only were the cuts were deeper than the Street expected according to Morgan Stanley analyst Ravi Shanker, but everyone is pointing to the following comment from the press release: “Global trade has slowed in recent months and leading indicators point to ongoing deceleration in global trade near-term.”
To see the term “severe recession” used in such a context is more than just a little bit alarming.
The last time the U.S. economy went through a recession, millions of Americans lost their jobs and we saw a wave of mortgage defaults unlike anything we had ever seen before in modern American history.
Are we about to go through something similar?
Earlier today, a CNN article also used the term “recession”, and it discussed the fact that investors now want big corporations to focus on paying down their debts instead of buying back shares of stock…
Fears of an economic slowdown — or even recession — have turned a spotlight on the debt that businesses piled up during the past decade, when borrowing costs were historically low.
For the first time since the Great Recession, investors want companies to prioritize paying down debt rather than investing in the future or share buybacks and dividends, according to a Bank of America Merrill Lynch survey of global fund managers.
But stock buybacks are one of the only things that has been propping up the stock market. The only way for the bubble to continue is for corporations to go into dizzying amounts of debt in order to fund massive stock buybacks, because the Federal Reserve clearly does not intend to support the markets right now.
At least for the short-term, the Federal Reserve could have calmed the markets and encouraged economic activity by leaving interest rates alone.
In the end, they decided not to do that, and that makes one wonder what they are really trying to achieve.
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