U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration — less than a year and a half into its tenure — has helped secure the release of at least 14 Americans, including three children born in captivity to an American woman and her Canadian husband held by the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani Network.
Marking the latest in a series of victories by the Trump administration in winning the release of Americans held abroad are the three U.S. citizens liberated this week by the murderous and oppressive North Korean regime.
Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump
I am pleased to inform you that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in the air and on his way back from North Korea with the 3 wonderful gentlemen that everyone is looking so forward to meeting. They seem to be in good health. Also, good meeting with Kim Jong Un. Date & Place set.
Not known for paying praise to President Trump, the liberal Vox news outlet acknowledges:
The Trump administration seems to have made freeing US hostages held abroad more of a priority, and it has unquestionably had more success than the Obamaadministration.
Ranging from college students caught shoplifting to a couple — an American woman and a Canadian man — who had three children while in captivity, below are an account of some of the U.S. hostages liberated under the Trump administration:
Kim Dong Chul, Kim Hak Song, and Tony Kim: All three Korean-Americans, accused by the Kim Jong-un regime of anti-state activities. The North Korean regime imprisoned them for terms ranging between one and two years. The three young men are expected to reach U.S. soil in the early hours of Thursday.
Aya Hijazi: The Trump administration negotiated the April 2018 release of aid worker Aya Hijazi, imprisoned in Egypt for three years. She was liberated soon after a meeting between President Trump and his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to secure Hijazi’s release. Ultimately, the Egyptian judicial system acquitted her of charges of child abuse that human rights groups and U.S. officials deemed baseless.
Sabrina De Sousa: The Trump administration won the release in March 2018 of the former CIA agent who was scheduled to be extradited from Portugal to Italy over the kidnapping of radical Egyptian Muslim cleric Osama Mustapha Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Referring to her release, Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), a spokesman for De Sousa, told Fox News, “I can confirm that this wouldn’t have happened without extraordinary help from the Trump administration.”
UCLA Basketball Players LiAngelo Ball, Cody Riley, and Jalen Hill: In November 2017, President Trump personally took credit for asking his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to release the three players held in the communist country for shoplifting. Chinese authorities accused them of stealing designer sunglasses from a Louis Vuitton store. President Trump wrote on Twitter after the players returned home, “You’re welcome, go out and give a big Thank You to President Xi Jinping of China who made your release possible.”
American Caitlan Coleman, her Canadian husband Joshua Boyle, and their three children: The Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorist group the Haqqani Network, deemed by the Pentagon as the top threat facing U.S. troops in Afghanistan, kidnapped the couple in October 2012. Haqqani terrorists held them for five years until their release in October 2017. The couple had three children while they were held captive.
Otto Warmbier: The Trump administration negotiated the release of the 21-year-old American student in June 2017 after he was detained by the Kim regime for 17 months for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster in his hotel. He died shortly after he was returned to the United States in a coma.
Sandy Phan-Gillis: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) credited President Trump for providing “leadership” in communist China’s decision to “deport” the Houston businesswoman in April 2017. The Chinese judicial system had sentenced her to three and a half years in prison on espionage charges.
As of October 2017, there reportedly were about 20 Americans held captive by militant groups around the world or foreign governments. The Trump administration has liberated about eight since.
John Kasich & Jeff Flake Are 2 Of The Biggest Frauds Ever. They Pretend To Have Precipices But Will Sell Their Children For Money And Power.
Remember how during the 2016 presidential primary those oh-so principled Never Trumpers kept warning us that Donald Trump was a con man, a faux conservative, a secret Democrat making promises (including about exiting the Iran deal) he had no intention of keeping? Remember how those oh-so principled Never Trumpers told us that anyone who believed Trump’s promises was a bumpkin, a hillbilly, a yokel, a jake, a hick, a clodhopper, a Grade A hayseed?
Well, here we sit 15 months into Trump’s presidency, a presidency where he has proved to be the most promising-keeping-sumbitch-of-a-president in my lifetime. And here is Never Trump once again proving themselves to be the true soy boy swindlers.
Yes, while Trump kept his promise to exit the disastrous Iran deal, a promise he made countless times on the campaign trail, look who was actually lying to us — no less than oh-so principled Never Trump Resistance Leaders Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Gov. John Kasich (R-OH), who were both against the Iran deal before they were for it.
With an 18 percent approval rating in his home state, and to avoid a humiliating primary loss, Flake has wisely chosen not to run for re-election. But when he still thought he would have to face voters, Flake strongly and publicly opposed the Iran deal.
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“While Congress has received assurances from the administration that it does not forfeit its ability to impose sanctions on Iran for behavior on the non-nuclear side, these assurances do not square with the text of the [agreement],” Flake said (quite correctly) at the time.
But now, we know that this Never Trumper was hustling us because now, Flake is magically in favor of the Iran deal and is even slamming Trump (on far-left CNN, naturally) for keeping his promise to withdraw:
Ryan Saavedra ✔@RealSaavedra
Jeff Flake in 2015: I strongly oppose Obama’s Iran deal.
Jeff Flake in 2018: We should have stayed in the Iran deal.
Kasich is even worse. If you recall (and it is certainly understandable if you don’t), Kasich ran for president in 2016, and while running for president, Kasich told us over and over again that he was so gosh-darned opposed to the Iran deal, he wanted the Senate to go “nuclear” to stop it.
Per NBC News, the “Ohio governor regularly slams the Iran deal on the campaign trail, and he told the crowd on Tuesday ‘it’s a bad agreement. There are so many very poor parts of this thing.’”
Opposing the Iran deal was a major talking point for this son-of-a-mailman during his humiliating presidential run.
Kasich did say he would not tear the deal up on day one, that he would only withdraw if Iran violated the agreement. But today, and even though Iran has repeatedly violated the agreement, oh-so principled Kasich is all but admitting his prior opposition to the deal was a shell game.
“President Trump’s decision to withdraw … was a mistake. It has gotten us nothing other than to remove constraints on Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons,” Kasich now says:
So it was not Trump who was swindling us with red meat on the campaign trail. It was not Trump who was conning us with rhetoric about being opposed to the deal. It was oh-soprincipled Never Trump.
In other words, voting for an establishment hack like Kasich would have been the true sucker move.
President Donald Trump’s announcement Tuesday that the U.S. is leaving the Iran deal marks the end of what his predecessor, Barack Obama, considered his main foreign policy legacy.
Trump will earn credit from his supporters for keeping his promise. But in truth, the Iran deal was undone by its own terms. It did not stop Iran from enriching uranium; it did not stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon, eventually; and it did not stop Iran’s global aggression.
In fact, the Iran deal was not even a deal at all.
It was never signed by any of the parties (the U.S., Iran, France, the UK, Germany, China, and Russia). It was unclear about crucial subjects like ballistic missiles, because the “deal” was described differently by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and by the UN Security Council Resolutions that were meant to implement it. And, crucially, it was never sent to the U.S. Senate for ratification.
Obama’s disregard for the Treaty Clause of the U.S. Constitution was of a piece with his general disregard for the constitutional constraints on the power of the federal government and the presidency. His refusal to submit the agreement to Senate scrutiny, and his party’s abuse of the filibuster to prevent even a weak Senate vote, deepened the damage that Obamacare — his other struggling “legacy,” in domestic policy — did to American civic culture.
More than Obama’s autocratic style, what Trump ended is Obama’s legacy of appeasement.
Barack Obama came to power convinced that the United States was at best a negative force in world affairs, and at worst the cause of the world’s problems. He believed that America could be a force for good, but only if it renounced its traditional allies, abandoned its principles of freedom, and gave up its national interests in favor of rising regional powers elsewhere.
In his first year in office, Obama backed away from agreements that his predecessor had made to provide missile defense in Europe. He also reached out to the Muslim world, beginning with obsequious speeches in Cairo and in Ankara, and deep genuflection to the Saudi king. When the Green Revolution took to the streets of Iran, Obama allowed the regime to consolidate power. He criticized Israel openly while cozying up to the Cuban dictatorship.
Trump has reversed most of that. He launched attacks on Syria for using chemical weapons — policing the “red line” Obama drew but would not enforce. He withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords and exposed it as a fraud. Later this week, he will move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
“The United States no longer issues empty threats. When I make promises, I keep them,” he said. Thus ended Obama’s experiment with appeasement and autocracy.
A new CNN poll reveals more Americans now think the country is doing well than at any point during President Barack Obama’s entire eight years in office.
The poll, conducted by SSRS, found that 57 percent of Americans believe that the country is doing well under President Donald Trump, which is higher than any point throughout Obama’s presidency.
The percentage who think things are going well is up from 49 percent in February and is higher than at any point since January of 2007, two years before Obama took office.
CNN mentioned that “almost 6 in 10 say things in the country are going well” in the opening paragraph of the poll writeup, but waited until the fourth paragraph to share that the number was higher than any of the times recorded during Obama’s tenure. Instead, CNN first noted that Trump’s approval rating is holding steady at 41 percent but that support for Trump on the issues is slowly climbing.
The vast improvement in the percentage of Americans who think the country is doing well is largely attributed to Democrats. Only 25 percent of Democrats said things were going well in February, while 40 percent said the same in March.
This Means Barack Obama And John Kerry Should Be In Prison Right?
TEL AVIV — In a dramatic press conference in Jerusalem aimed at the international community, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday unveiled a cache of secret files he says were obtained from inside a hidden Iranian site and clearly demonstrate that Tehran maintained a secret nuclear weapons program despite declarations to the contrary.
Netanyahu explained that the structure of the U.S.-led international nuclear agreement was in part based on deceptive Iranian descriptions of its previous nuclear work. He said Iran’s failure to disclose its secret program while misleading the world shows the nuclear deal is “based on lies based on Iranian deception.”
The Israeli leader presented evidence that Iran continued research for a nuclear weapons program even after signing the 2015 nuclear deal.
“Iran’s leaders repeatedly deny ever pursuing nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu began. “Tonight I’m here to tell you one thing: Iran lied.”
“After signing the nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret files,” he said. “In 2017 Iran moved its nuclear weapons files to a highly secret location in Tehran.”
Netanyahu said the secret nuclear files prove the following:
Iran lied about never having a secret nuclear program. Second, even after the deal it continued to expand its nuclear program for future use. Third, Iran lied by not coming clean to the IAEA. Finally, the nuclear deal is based on lies based on Iranian deception.
The prime minister’s speech was based on 55,000 pages of documents and 183 CDs that Netanyahu said were smuggled out of an “atomic archive” painstakingly preserving Iran’s secretive nuclear program so that the country would have the option of restarting its nuclear weapons activities after the nuclear deal expires or in the case of Tehran prematurely bolting the agreement. Israel’s ability to acquire the archive marks a massive intelligence coup for the Jewish state.
“Iran lied. Big time,” Netanyahu said of the half-ton of material obtained by Israel.
The trove, Netanyahu added, contains “incriminating documents, incriminating charts, incriminating presentations, incriminating blueprints, incriminating photos, incriminating videos and more.”
He said Israel shared the material with the U.S., and that “the United States can vouch for its authenticity.”
The “atomic archive” was compiled by Iran with the express purpose of preserving its secretive nuclear weapons plan known as Project Amad, which aimed to “design, produce and test… five warheads, each with a 10 kiloton TNT yield, for integration on a missile.”
“That is like five Hiroshima bombs to be put on ballistic missiles,” asserted Netanyahu.
Netanyahu outlined Project Amad as containing five key elements described by the Times of Israel thusly: “Designing nuclear weapons, developing nuclear cores, building nuclear implosion systems, preparing nuclear tests and integrating nuclear warheads on missiles.”
Netanyahu said that in 2003, Iran shut down the version of Project Amad that existed at the time and instead divided its nuclear program into both covert and overt components. Besides archiving the material for future use, Netanyahu said Iran continued to research nuclear weapons.
Netanyahu called on President Donald Trump to “do the right thing” as the May 12 deadline to recertify the nuclear agreement approaches.
“The right thing for the United States. The right thing for Israel. And the right thing for the peace of the world,” he concluded.
Rap megastar Kanye West released a new song on Saturday sending what could be considered one of the boldest political statement’s in rap history — questioning black Americans’ near-monolithic support of the Democratic Party.
The fiery track, “Ye vs the People,” sees the Chicago crooner in a back-in-forth lyrical debate about the merits of thinking freely and the political and economic state of black Americans, as well as addressing the fallout from West’s seeming embrace of President Donald Trump, with actor-rapper T.I.
“Bruh, I never ever stopped fightin’ for the people. Actually wearin’ the hat’ll show people that we equal,” West says of posting a picture online this week of him wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat — a hat which the rapper says “stayed in my closet like ’bout a year and a half.”
“Then one day I was like, ‘Fuck it, I’ma do me, I was in the sunken place and then I found the new me,” West says to a defensive T.I. “Not worried about some image that I gotta keep up. Lot of people agree with me, but they too scared to speak up.”
“See that’s the problem with this damn nation. All blacks gotta be Democrats, man, we ain’t made it off the plantation,” West argues.
T.I.’s verses confront West’s willingness to align himself with President Trump, questioning is West’s “selfish agenda” will “stop police from murderin’ niggas.”
“This shit is stubborn, selfish, bullheaded, even for you. You wore a dusty ass hat to represent the same views as white supremacy, man, we expect better from you,” says T.I., who last year called President Trump a “poster child for white supremacy.”
“Have you considered all the damage and the people you hurt?” T.I.’s rhyme continues. “You had a bad idea, and you’re makin’ it worse. This shit’s just as bad as Catholic preachers rapin’ in church.”
“Ye vs the People” comes after Kanye West’s wild week in which he received criticism for calling President Trump his brother.
The fashion mogul is reportedly gearing up to launch an initiative to help revitalize the lives of hundreds of thousands of Chicago, Illinois, residents.
Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump
