President Joe Biden suggested that Americans may be negatively impacted at the pump as a result of a sanctions package targeting Russia he unveiled Tuesday.
“As we respond, my administration is using every tool at our disposal to protect American businesses and consumers from rising prices at the pump,” the president remarked at the White House on Tuesday. “As I said last week, defending freedom will have costs for us as well and here at home. We need to be honest about that.”
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An increasing number of Democrats believe Hillary Clinton should be investigated by special counsel John Durham in connection with her alleged involvement in manufacturing ties between 2016 presidential rival Donald Trump and the Russia, according to a recent survey.
The survey, by TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics, found 75% of respondents who follow the story think Clinton and her campaign advisers should be investigated for her role in so-called Russiagate, according to several news reports.
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Filings from Special Counsel John Durham this week allege the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign was working to establish a “narrative” linking the Trump campaign to a Russian bank, in an alleged gambit one expert said was an effort to “infiltrate” Trump servers to that end.
The allegations, first reported on by Fox News on Saturday, are another layer to the densely, multifaceted Durham investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, one that has continued long after Trump left office and that continues to produce fresh controversies on a regular basis.
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One way of understanding the 2009-2014 Obama Administration policy of “reset” with Vladimir Putin’s Russia is to recall two iconic incidents.
The first was the 2009 “reset.”
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The flow of natural gas through a key Russian-controlled pipeline suddenly stopped Wednesday as tensions continue to increase between Russia and the West.
The Yamal-Europe pipeline’s liquified natural gas (LNG) flows, which are operated by Russian state-run firm Gazprom and have usually been pumped westward from Russia to Germany through Poland, were halted early Wednesday, European data showed, according to Reuters. The sudden stoppage reportedly represented a setback after leaders expected the pipeline to return to its normal flow pattern.
In December 2021, Gazprom slowed the pipeline’s gas flows, which represent 10% of the region’s supply, and the company reversed the flow direction from westward to eastward. The sudden reversal sent natural gas prices, which had already spiked amid a European energy crisis, even higher.
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President Joe Biden plans to send another 3,000 troops to Europe amid continued tensions between Russia and Ukraine.
Biden is sending about 2,000 troops from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to Poland and Germany this week. The president is also moving about 1,000 soldiers based in Germany to Romania, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing administration officials.
“They are trained and equipped for a variety of missions during this period of elevated risk,” a senior defense official told the Wall Street Journal.
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The Washington Post has recused its new national editor, Matea Gold, from the news organization’s coverage of the FBI and Justice Department over a personal conflict of interest. A month before Gold was promoted, her husband, Jonathan Lenzner, was named FBI chief of staff.
A Post spokeswoman told RealClearInvestigations that the paper’s managing editor, Steven Ginsberg, will be overseeing coverage of the Justice Department and the FBI. Kristine Coratti Kelly, the paper’s chief communications officer, said the decision does not reflect on Gold’s objectivity or credibility.
“We have every confidence in Matea’s professionalism and high standards,” Kelly said. “She has recused herself from this area of coverage to avoid even the appearance of partiality.”
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Chaos is the new, the intentional, normal. A pandemic of nihilism has been unleashed upon the land. As in Lord of the Flies, when laws, rules, protocols, traditions, and customs are mocked and dismantled, primitive human nature in the raw is unleashed.
Madness now reigns in every quarter, from the iconic to the irrelevant to the fundamental. Statues of Lincoln, Douglass, and Jefferson are toppled or defaced. The rules of capitalization have been altered. We are told that 1619, not 1776, was our founding date—and this by a “civil rights” activist-journalist who had no idea of the date that the Civil War began.
Quite quickly after the revolutionary boilerplate, America began reverting to its natural Hobbesian or Thucydidean essence. If you dispute that, look at looted packages along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Try walking the nocturnal streets of Chicago or Baltimore. Visit the sidewalk homeless of San Francisco. Fly over our constipated ports. Drive into our empty new car dealerships. Pull up to our European-priced gas pumps. Shop in the emptying shelves of our Sovietizing food and discount stores. The common theme of the upcoming Super Bowl halftime show, apparently, is that the entertainers must have written lyrics threatening the police, denigrating women, using the N-word . . . and be worth $100 million.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday took a thinly veiled shot at Joe Biden, saying “I am the President of Ukraine. I am based here. I think I know the details deeper than any other president,” after Biden had warned him in a phone call that a Russian invasion was “imminent.”
According to a CNN report, which is disputed by the White House, Biden told Zelensky during an hour and 20 minutes long conversation on Thursday that the Capital city of Kyiv could be “sacked” by Russian forces, and to “prepare for impact.” Biden also reportedly said an invasion was “virtually certain” in February when the ground will be more frozen in Ukraine.
In response, Zelensky urged Biden to tone down his rhetoric about a potential invasion, citing concerns that it could cause panic or a run on supplies, CNN reported.
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Special counsel John Durham and his legal team say they’re just learning about a March 2017 meeting between Justice Department watchdog Michael Horowitz and former Hillary Clinton campaign Michael Sussmann – indicted last year for allegedly lying to the FBI while pushing now-discredited claims about the Trump Organization.
Durham’s team said Tuesday in a court filing they learned only a week ago about the meeting between Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Sussmann, who made the claims in 2016 about communications between a Russia bank and the Trump organization.
“The OIG had not previously informed the Special Counsel’s Office of this meeting with the defendant,” the filing by Durham’s legal team states.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned the West that its “panic” over Russia potentially invading his country risked hurting its economy, BBC News reported.
“There are signals even from respected leaders of states, they just say that tomorrow there will be war,” Zelensky told reporters at a press conference, BBC News reported. “This is panic – how much does it cost for our state?”
The Ukrainian criticized Western countries choosing to withdraw diplomats from Ukraine, calling the move a mistake, BBC News reported. “The destabilisation of the situation inside the country” is the biggest threat to Ukraine, he said.
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As usual, the media coverage on the Ukraine crisis is largely inadequate. Perversely, most of the aggressive left-wing media want to escalate the feud with Russian President Vladimir Putin to the point of driving Russia into the arms of China. This is the only way Russia (whose GDP is smaller than Canada’s) could seriously damage the West.
At the same time, some conservative commentators, including some of the stars at Fox News, are unreasonably accusing those who favor resisting Russian aggression in Ukraine of being warmongers and trying to propel America into endless, useless war. Again.
There is a legitimate American and Western interest in not allowing Russia to trample an independent nation of 40 million underfoot in the middle of Europe to the embarrassment of the Western alliance, and it is not a difficult scenario to avoid.
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Almost no one seems to grasp the colossal irony of the current American political condition. The uniquequality of it is that the country is divided between two political forces which, in the tedious hyperbole of contemporary political jargon, view each other as an “existential threat to democracy.” The Democrats can’t sell the bunk that January 6 was an “insurrection;” they can’t wish away concerns about the integrity of the 2020 election. All they have is the tired claim that Trump is a threat to democracy, and in their advocacy of that falsehood, they have made themselves the threat to democracy.
Trump emerged politically in 2015 to universal mockery. Nothing could have been more certain than that this vulgar and sleazy huckster (as he was portrayed,not without some reason), would bomb out trying to recalibrate his downmarket celebrity brand to catapult him into the White House.
As Trump cleaned up in the 2016 Republican primaries, the Democratic strategists reached to the bottom of their campaign bag of tricks. Late in the campaign came the 11-year-old Billy Bush tape, in which Trump had made some inelegant locker-room macho comments about how a celebrity could take almost unlimited liberties with women. This failed to kill him. It was stale, dated, and not exactly a startling revelation.
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Buffeted by a Russia scandal that proved false, Donald Trump ended the first year of his presidency on a high note with passage of historic tax cuts. In contrast four years later, Joe Biden’s first year in office is ending with a stunning rebuke from a senator in his own party.
On Sunday, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) gave a resounding “No” to Biden’s signature Build Back Better legislation, leaving an uncertain path for the Democrats’ ambitious agenda despite the fact they control the Senate, House and White House.
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History, it appears, is repeating itself—at least when it comes to the latest crusade to destroy Donald Trump and everyone around him.
For nearly three years, the American people were warned that Donald Trump had been in cahoots with the Kremlin to rig the 2016 presidential election. Trump-Russia election collusion, the original “stop the steal” campaign—that is, until questioning the outcome of American elections was designated a criminal conspiracy after November 2020—dominated the attention of the ruling class and the entirety of the national news media.
Every instrument of power—the FBI, a secret surveillance court, congressional committees, a special counsel—was leveraged to uncover the “truth” about the Trump campaign’s alleged dirty dealings with Mother Russia.
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A former U.S. defense contractor was arrested earlier this week on criminal charges in connection with espionage, according to the Justice Department.
John Murray Rowe Jr., a 63-year-old resident of Lead, South Dakota, allegedly attempted to provide classified national defense information to the Russian government.
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Russia’s looming invasion of Ukraine presents a clear and present danger to the safety of the European Union and a direct challenge to the NATO alliance, but only now are our major media waking up to this dire threat to Western security. We must now confront urgent questions: Did the United States strengthen Russia, did it weaken Ukraine, and did it do so under the nose of these media?
First, a quick run-through of American actions that strengthened Russia. In his 2009 inaugural address, Barack Obama promised to approach adversaries with an open hand, not a closed fist. For this, he won a Nobel Peace Prize, an oxymoronic name, equivalent to the Affordable Care Act.
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A senior Ukrainian military adviser floated the idea of handing over the country’s own weapons to its citizens in the event of a Russian invasion, The New York Times reported.
The official told the NYT that the government might have to open its weapons depots to its population so that people could defend their families if the Ukrainian military were to be defeated.
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A top general with the United States Space Force says that other nations often threaten and even outright attack American satellites in space, as reported by the New York Post.
General David Thompson revealed the alarming developments in an op-ed with the Washington Post, published on Tuesday. In the article, Thompson says that “the threats are really growing and expanding every single day. And it’s really an evolution of activity that’s been happening for a long time.”
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Is the United States becoming like the old Soviet Union in a way that people fail to see because of the noise and the distractions of electoral politics, mass entertainment masking as news, and mass indoctrination masking as entertainment?
We are becoming a meritocracy that punishes merit and rewards folly. We have all the disutility of a meritocracy—the snobbishness, the restless ambition, the inclination to see merit only in what can be measured or paid for; even the tendency to pull intelligent people out of their native regions and set them down, like gilded tumbleweeds, in places without memory or character. But we get none of the benefits. We punish truth-telling and intelligence, and reward stupidity.
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Under former President Donald J. Trump, for the first time in decades, the United States became a net exporter of natural gas and oil. That helped to keep global energy prices relatively low. It also gave the United States leverage over the international system in ways it had not enjoyed since before the 1970s.
Alas, the propagation of the novel coronavirus from Wuhan, China, along with the ceaseless lies of the Western “mainstream” media made such a prosperous and secure future under Trump an impossibility.
In the eight months since assuming office under a cloud of controversy, Joe Biden has done more to harm America’s inherent strategic advantages in the global energy market than any U.S. rival could have imagined. Under Biden, the United States has gone from being a net exporter of global energy to begging the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to produce more oil for the world to consume.
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Five years after the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded collection of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories known as the Steele dossier was published by BuzzFeed, news outlets that amplified its false allegations have suffered major losses of credibility. The recent indictment of the dossier’s main source, Igor Danchenko, for allegedly lying to the FBI, has catalyzed a new reckoning.
In response to what the news site Axios has called “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history,” the Washington Post has re-edited at least a dozen stories related to Steele. For two of those, the Post removed entire sections, changed headlines, and added lengthy editor’s notes.
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Sen. Rand Paul sharply criticized the “politicized” FBI and the Department of Justice, calling for more whistleblowers to expose government trampling of American liberties.
“I think anytime someone is breaking the law in government, it’s a good idea to hear about it,” the Kentucky Republican said in a Thursday interview with The Daily Signal. “And so, frankly, yes, I think it is a good idea for people to reveal when the government’s breaking the rules.”
Paul’s remarks follow news that the head of the FBI’s Criminal and Counterterrorism divisions reportedly ordered agents Oct. 20 to identify threats against school board members and teachers with a “threat tag”—although Attorney General Merrick Garland told lawmakers the next day that the FBI was not using counterintelligence tools to target parents.
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Thousands of migrants are stranded at the Belarus-Poland border, with Belarus and Russia performing military demonstrations amid rising tensions in the region, CNN reported Friday.
Up to 2,000 people are trapped between Poland and Belarus, enduring hunger and hypothermia in the freezing forests and camps along the border, CNN reported. The number of migrants at the border has the potential to grow to 10,000 people in the near future if the situation doesn’t change, according to Belarusian authorities.
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The congressional investigator who played a key role in unraveling the Russia collusion narrative says his next mission is to force the news media to make necessary corrections to the avalanche of false stories they produced over the last many years.
“The course correction that I’ve been trying to work on since I left government service is you have to find a way to correct the media,” Kash Patel told Just the News.
“Because for years, they lied to 50% of the American population who believe everything they said, that Trump was in bed with Russians and Putin and that Trump was getting paid. And Trump knew that Vladimir Putin was using U.S. dollars to kill American soldiers.”
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Former President Donald Trump on Sunday came to the defense of Steve Bannon, suggesting the Biden Justice Department’s prosecution of his ex-adviser on contempt of Congress charges was evidence that America is a “radicalized mess.”
“This Country has perhaps never done to anyone what they have done to Steve Bannon and they are looking to do it to others, also,” Trump said, making a likely reference to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows who also has been threatened with contempt charges if he doesn’t cooperate with the House investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
The 45th president suggested his former advisers were being treated more harshly than American adversaries like China and Russia.
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U.S. environmental policies pushed by the Biden administration and aimed at dramatically curbing domestic fossil fuel production have given Russian President Vladimir Putin more power on the world stage.
Since taking office, President Joe Biden has blocked domestic pipelines, ditched drilling projects, proposed sweeping regulations on the fossil fuel industry and attempted to ban oil and gas leases on federal lands while pledging to decarbonize the grid by 2035. But Biden has also turned to the Middle Eastern oil cartel the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Russia, asking the countries to increase their production of oil and natural gas respectively.
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After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.”
As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”
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Liberal tech billionaire Reid Hoffman, a funder of numerous disinformation projects, is backing a new media venture launched Tuesday that seeks to combat disinformation, according to a report.
Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, joined ranks with financier George Soros to fund Good Information Inc., which will “fund and scale businesses that cut through eco chambers with fact-based information,” Axios reported.
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Just as the special counsel’s investigation into the origins of Crossfire Hurricane—the FBI counterintelligence probe launched in the summer of 2016 to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—is showing signs of life, one of the central figures in the hoax is attempting to burnish his sullied image.
ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos has produced a documentary featuring Christopher Steele, the man responsible for the so-called dossier bearing his name. “Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier,” streamed on Hulu Monday night; promotional clips hinted that, far from a hard-hitting interview exposing Steele for the charlatan he is, Stephanopoulos gave Steele a chance to spin his story ahead of possible new indictments related to John Durham’s inquiry into the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax.
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Before the 2018 midterm elections, Trump’s political advisors were thinking about the president’s re-election bid and noticed a curious commonality among incumbent presidents who didn’t get re-elected: they all faced challengers from within their own party.
Five U.S. presidents since 1900 have lost their bids for a second term. William Taft lost to Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. While each election is determined by unique factors, all five of these failed incumbents dealt with internal party fights or serious primary challenges.
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In the wake of the recent arrest of Maryland nuclear engineer, Jonathan Toebbe, and his wife, Diana Toebbe on charges they tried to sell classified nuclear warship information to a foreign country, the mainstream media has focused on the “mystery” of how this could happen. But very little media coverage has focused on their progressive political background—the most likely key to their misdeeds.
In fact, strangely enough, husband and wife traitor teams are often linked to left-wing politics. Why hasn’t the establishment media focused on this tie?
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What was the purpose for the insane opposition of the Left between 2017 and 2021? To usher in a planned nihilism, an incompetent chaos, a honed anarchy to wreck the country in less than a year?
No sooner had Donald Trump entered office than scores of House Democrats filed motions for impeachment, apparently for thought crimes that he might, some day, in theory, could possibly commit.
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The majority of Americans believe U.S. politicians and social media companies spread more misinformation than any foreign government, including adversaries like China and Russia, according to a new poll.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, released Friday, found that about 75% of Americans believed politicians in the U.S., social media companies and social media users are the biggest drivers of misinformation. Just under half of respondents, however, thought that the U.S. government was responsible for misinformation, while just over half said the same for Russia and China.
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I remember a staggering conversation with my high school lunch table in the early 2000s. Everyone agreed with one kid’s statement that there was nothing special about living in America: Life in Canada, or anywhere else, would be identical except for maybe the weather.
At the time, I wondered what was going to happen to America when all these kids grew up. What happens when America’s young adults, far from having any intellectual commitment to freedom, don’t even understand what life would be like without it?
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Former President Donald Trump asked the Pulitzer Prize committee on Sunday to strip awards to The Washington Post and The New York Times, arguing their award-winning stories in 2016 and 2017 alleging Russia collusion lacked “any credible evidence “
The newspapers’ reporting was “based on the false reporting of a non-existent link between the Kremlin and the Trump Campaign. The coverage was no more than a politically motivated farce,” Trump wrote in a letter to interim Pulitzer administrator Bud Kliment.
Trump noted that multiple investigations have dismissed any notion of collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin and that a recent indictment by Special Prosecutor John Durham traced some of the key allegations to people tied to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
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White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan figures prominently in a grand jury investigation run by Special Counsel John Durham into an alleged 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign scheme to use both the FBI and CIA to tar Donald Trump as a colluder with Russia, according to people familiar with the criminal probe, which they say has broadened into a conspiracy case.
Sullivan is facing scrutiny, sources say, over potentially false statements he made about his involvement in the effort, which continued after the election and into 2017. As a senior foreign policy adviser to Clinton, Sullivan spearheaded what was known inside her campaign as a “confidential project” to link Trump to the Kremlin through dubious email-server records provided to the agencies, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
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As President Joe Biden vacationed at Rehoboth Beach, the disaster at the U.S. southern border continued to metastasize.
Anyone who has seen pictures of thousands of people crossing the Rio Grande en masse knows the administration has achieved complete failure.
Anyone who has seen the overhead drone footage of more than 12,000 people gathered under one bridge in South Texas knows that massive, historic incompetence is being allowed to flourish.
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I never thought I’d be writing about secession or anything close. Not in a million years. “America, the Beautiful” is my favorite national song, bringing tears to my eyes with its “sea to shining sea.” Giving up the magnificence that entails would be heartbreaking on so many levels.
But the times being what they are and the man occupying the presidency being who he is, not to mention those surrounding him being who they are, plus the issues that divide us from national defense to education to immigration to race to public safety to the pandemic to values in general being so intractable, I feel compelled to discuss secession or division as if they were a real possibility worth considering.
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When the Taliban assumed control of Afghanistan last month, the group took possession of a U.S.-funded weapons stockpile worth tens of billions of dollars.
The U.S. invested nearly $83 billion in bolstering the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), more than $24 billion of which went to funding weapons, vehicles and other equipment, according to a Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report published in July. The amount of funding for weapons, vehicles and equipment is based on a 2017 Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimate that roughly 70% of the investment went towards other budget items like training.
In the aftermath of the shocking collapse of the Western-backed Afghan government last month, U.S. defense officials estimated that Taliban militants took dozens of aircraft including Blackhawk helicopters and thousands of vehicles, communications equipment and weapons. Republican lawmakers demanded the Biden administration provide them with a full accounting of the equipment that was in the Taliban’s possession while GOP members of the House Armed Services Committee introduced a bill requiring the White House to share the information with Congress.
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For years, Democrats and their cable news echo chamber conjured up and broadly disseminated the most lurid and patently ludicrous rumors about former President Donald Trump being a corrupted and (literally) compromised agent of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. Democratic talking heads ultimately tried in vain to distance themselves from this sordid oeuvre‘s most far-fetched talking points, such as the infamous “pee video kompromat” from the discredited Steele dossier. But for four years, Democrats’ unquenchable obsession with the “Russiagate” hoax pervaded, distorted and sullied our politics.
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Oil prices climbed to a six-year high Tuesday as the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Russia continue to tamp down on global output, The Wall Street Journal reported.
An OPEC meeting was called off Monday, the WSJ reported. It was the group’s third attempt to discuss surging prices and an increase in oil consumption amid an opening global economy.
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Within months of President Joe Biden halting the Keystone Pipeline, pausing new oil and gas leases on federal lands, and imposing further restrictions on U.S. oil companies, U.S. oil imports from Russia set a new record in March.
According to International Energy Agency, U.S. imports of crude oil and petroleum products from Russia reached 22.9 million barrels in March, the highest level since August 2010. They had reached over 25 million barrels in April 2009.
Crude oil imports from Russia in March stood at 6.1 million barrels, making Russia the third-largest oil exporter to the United States.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin denied that he was behind the recent cyberattacks across the United States, calling the allegations against him “farcical.”
“We have been accused of all kinds of things,” Putin told NBC News Monday. “Election interference, cyberattacks and so on and so forth. And not once, not once, not one time, did they bother to produce any kind of evidence or proof. Just unfounded accusations.”
Russian intelligence and Russian-speaking groups have launched wide-ranging cyberattacks in recent months, affecting American consumer goods ranging from gasoline to meat. President Joe Biden imposed sweeping sanctions against Russia in April after U.S. intelligence determined that Putin personally ordered a massive SolarWinds hack on federal agencies and for his interference in the 2020 presidential election.
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Think about it: For about five years, anything candidate, president-elect, and President Trump said or did, the media, the Left, and progressive popular culture opposed in Pavlovian fashion.
Anything that Trump touched was ridiculed or discredited—regardless of evidence, data, or cogency. The merits of a Trump policy, a Trump assessment, a Trump initiative were irrelevant—given the primordial hatred of the Left of all things Trump: the president, the person, the family.
Under the reductionist malady of Trump Derangement Syndrome, facts and logic did not matter. Instead, anything not said or done in opposition to Trump empowered the supposed existential Trump threat. Ironically, some of the most deductive and reductionist Trump haters were supposedly professionals, the highly educated, and the self-proclaimed devotees of the Enlightenment. And yet in their uncontrolled aversion and detestation, they suspended all the rules of empiricism, logic, and rationality—and people died as a result.
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A former senior Treasury Department official was sentenced to six months in prison for leaking thousands of confidential reports on financial transactions related to people tied to former President Donald Trump and Russia, including former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, 42, pleaded guilty last year to a conspiracy charge. According to federal prosecutors, Edwards leaked the confidential documents to BuzzFeed News reporter Jason Leopold. Leopold then shared thousands of suspicious activity reports with publications worldwide.
Court documents reveal that beginning in 2017, she leaked banking reports related to people being investigated in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of foreign interference in U.S. elections. The material included reports concerning Manafort, his business associate Rick Gates, the Russian Embassy and Maria Butina, among others.
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Representative Mark Green (R-TN-07) introduced a bill Wednesday to sanction Russia for their invasion of the Donbas region of Ukraine.
If enacted, the Restraining Russian Imperialism Act would instruct the Biden administration to impose sanctions if Russia does not completely withdraw from the region within a year.
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Weeks before Donald Trump took office, Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer issued an ominous warning.
“You take on the intelligence community? They have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you,” the New York Democrat said in an interview with MSNBC on Jan. 3, 2017.
Schumer was responding to Trump’s criticism of an intelligence community assessment that said Russia interfered explicitly to help the Republican win the 2016 election.
“He’s being really dumb to do this,” Schumer said of Trump.
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United States Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan said Tuesday that he was returning to Washington for “consultations” with top American officials as tensions increase between the two countries.
The former deputy secretary of state and appointee of former President Donald Trump said that “it is important for me to speak directly with my new colleagues in the Biden administration in Washington about the current state of bilateral relations between the U.S. and Russia.”
Sullivan added that he was returning to see his family, and that he would “return to Moscow in the coming weeks before any meeting” between President Joe Biden and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
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Five days before the FBI formally opened the Michael Flynn probe in summer 2016, a confidential informant alleged to agents that Donald Trump’s national security adviser had left a 2014 foreign meeting alone with a Russian woman. Agents ultimately deemed the account “not plausible” and “not accurate” but proceeded to investigate Flynn anyway, newly declassified documents show.
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