Trump scolded Obama for Syria and now he bombs them twice.
I don’t believe that President Trump should have went in and bombed Syria. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told the White House to wait until we had more details but The President and his people listened to France and the UK. See the stories below and check out the new video at https://commonsensenation.net/videos/ .
Check Out My Video On Why Trump Should Not Have Went Into Syria And Why He Is Being A Hypocrite.
Mattis Tries to Put Brakes on Possible Syria Strike, to ‘Keep This From Escalating’
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis sought on Thursday to slow down an imminent strike on Syria, reflecting mounting concerns at the Pentagon that a concerted bombing campaign could escalate into a wider conflict between Russia, Iran and the West.
During a closed-door White House meeting, officials said, Mr. Mattis pushed for more evidence of President Bashar al-Assad’s role in a suspected chemical attack last weekend that would assure the world that military action was necessary.
Despite the caution, two Defense Department officials predicted it would be difficult to pull back from punishing airstrikes, given President Trump’s threat on Twitter a day earlier of American missiles that “will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart.’”
Mr. Mattis publicly raised the warning on Thursday morning, telling the House Armed Services Committee that retaliation must be balanced against the threat of a wider war.
“We are trying to stop the murder of innocent people,” Mr. Mattis said. “But on a strategic level, it’s how do we keep this from escalating out of control — if you get my drift on that.”
Hours later, after Mr. Mattis detailed his concerns at the White House, the president’s top national security advisers ended an afternoon meeting without a decision to attack, said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary.
Diplomatic efforts continued deep into the evening, with Mr. Trump agreeing in a phone call with Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain that “it was vital that the use of chemical weapons did not go unchallenged,” Downing Street said in a statement. The two leaders committed to “keep working closely together on the international response,” the statement said.
Mr. Trump was also expected to speak on Thursday with President Emmanuel Macron of France, the other key ally weighing military action.
Defense Department officials said Mr. Mattis urged consideration of a wider strategy. They said he sought to persuade allies to commit to immediate help after striking Mr. Assad’s government in response to Saturday’s suspected chemical weapons attack on a suburb of Damascus, the capital.
Nikki R. Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, said that “we definitely have enough proof” of a chemical weapons attack.
“But now, we just have to be thoughtful in our action,” Ms. Haley told Andrea Mitchell of NBC News.
In the White House meeting, according to three administration officials, Mr. Mattis said the United States, Britain and France must provide convincing proof that the Syrian government used chemical weapons to attack the rebel-held town of Douma, where more than 40 people died and hundreds were sickened.
It was an acknowledgment of a lesson from the Iraq war about what can go wrong after a military assault without a plan, one senior Defense Department official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive plans. It also sought to ensure that the United States and European allies could justify the strike to the world in the face of withering criticism by Russia — Mr. Assad’s most powerful partner.
“Defense officials are right to worry about escalation,” said Kori Schake, a former national security aide to President George W. Bush and author of a book with Mr. Mattis.
“The Russians are heavily invested in sustaining Bashar Assad in power, have made their case as the essential power in the Middle East, and a U.S. or allied strike would be a reminder of how much stronger the West is than Russia,” Ms. Schake said.
Mr. Mattis also assured House lawmakers that they would be notified before any strikes against Syrian weapons facilities and airfields. The Pentagon alerted lawmakers before an April 2017 cruise missile attack on Shayrat air base after a similar chemical attack on Syrian civilians.
Before the White House meeting, Mr. Trump told reporters he would make a decision “fairly soon” about a strike. Earlier, in a tweet, he insisted that he had never telegraphed the timing of an attack on Syria, which “could be very soon or not so soon at all!”
“We’re looking very, very seriously, very closely at that whole situation and we’ll see what happens, folks, we’ll see what happens,” he told reporters at the White House.
“It’s too bad that the world puts us in a position like that,” he said. “But you know, as I said this morning, we’ve done a great job with ISIS,” Mr. Trump added. “We have just absolutely decimated ISIS. But now we have to make some further decisions. So they’ll be made fairly soon.”
In Paris, Mr. Macron cited unspecified proof that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons in Douma, and said that France was working in close coordination with the Trump administration on the issue.
“We have proof that last week, 10 days ago even, chemical weapons were used — at least chlorine — and that they were used by the regime of Bashar al-Assad,” Mr. Macron said in an interview on TF1, a French television station.
But time may be of the essence in London, where Britain’s Parliament will return from its Easter vacation on Monday. Although Mrs. May is under no legal obligation to consult Parliament before ordering any military action,
Trump Criticized Obama Over Syria And He Does The Same Thing.
President Donald Trump announced that he had ordered precision missile strikes on Syria in reaction to the use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad.
“These are not the actions of a man, but crimes of a monster,” Trump said, condemning Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against his people.
The president made his remarks at the White House on Friday evening.
He described al-Assad’s actions an “evil and despicable attack”
Trump indicated that the United States was teaming up with Britain and France to launch the strikes.
He described their attacks as “righteous power” employed the “barbarism and brutality” of chemical weapons.
The president confirmed that these attacks would be greater than last year, and would last longer than his limited strike in 2017.
“We are prepared to sustain this response until the Syrian regime stops its use of prohibited chemical agents.”
The president called out Russia and Iran for supporting Assad in Syria.
“To Iran and to Russia I ask what kind of a nation wants to be associated with a mass murder of innocent men, women and children?”
Trump specifically called out Russia for their support of Assad, urging them to stop backing the Syrian dictator.
“Russia must decide whether it will continue down this dark path,” Trump
President Donald Trump reacted to the latest inspector general report released by the FBI on fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
“He LIED! LIED! LIED!” Trump wrote on Twitter on Friday, calling the report a “total disaster” for McCabe.
The report detailed that McCabe purposefully misled investigators about leaking details about the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation to a reporter.
The president added that McCabe was “totally controlled” by former FBI Director James Comey.
“McCabe is Comey!!” he wrote. “No collusion, all made up by this den of thieves and lowlifes!”
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders added her own condemnation of McCabe and Comey during the White House press briefing.
“Sounds like two peas in a pod with McCabe and Comey,” she said in reaction to the news. “McCabe was fired in disgrace for misconduct and lying about it.”
Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump
DOJ just issued the McCabe report – which is a total disaster. He LIED! LIED! LIED! McCabe was totally controlled by Comey – McCabe is Comey!! No collusion, all made up by this den of thieves and lowlifes!
President Donald Trump signed Congress’ $1.3 billion omnibus spending bill Friday afternoon, despite threatening to veto the legislation earlier that day.
Trump cited the $26 billion increases in Defense Department spending as the major factor behind his decision, but he also vowed to “never sign another bill like this again.”
“For the last eight years, deep defense cuts have undermined our national security,” POTUS said in a statement from the White House. “My highest duty is to keep America safe. Nothing more important.”
“Therefore, as a matter of national security, I have signed this omnibus budget bill,” he explained. “There are a lot of things that I’m unhappy about in this bill. There are a lot of things that we shouldn’t have had in this bill, but we were, in a sense forced — if we want to build our military — we were forced to have.”
“But I say to Congress, I will never sign another bill like this again. I’m not going to do it again. Nobody read it. It’s only hours old.”
President Donald Trump speaks with Vice President Mike Pence and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis at his side during an event to sign Congress’ $1.3 trillion spending bill in the Diplomatic Room of the White House in Washington, March 23, 2018. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Trump went on to call for the abolition of the filibuster rule in the Senate, which he blamed for the last-minute affirmative votes that sent the bill to his desk.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis reportedly pressured Trump not to veto the bill Friday morning.
Lawyer Adam Waldman said during an appearance before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Nov. 3 that he relayed information about possible links between billionaire activist George Soros and Fusion GPS.
Waldman said he received the information in a March 16.
Waldman said Daniel J. Jones asserted he was working with Fusion GPS and that the research firm was being funded by a “group of Silicon Valley billionaires and George Soros.”
An American lawyer who served as a back channel between dossier author Christopher Steele and Democratic Sen. Mark Warner is opening up about explosive testimony he gave to a Senate committee late last year.
Adam Waldman said that during an appearance before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) on Nov. 3, he relayed information about possible links between billionaire activist George Soros and Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned the dossier.
Waldman said he received the information in a March 16 meeting he had with Daniel J. Jones, a consultant and former staffer to California Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Waldman told The Daily Caller News Foundation that Jones asserted that he was working with Fusion GPS and that the research firm was being funded by a “group of Silicon Valley billionaires and George Soros.” Jones also described Fusion as a “shadow media organization helping the government.”
“He was there as Fusion GPS. He brought up Fusion GPS,” Waldman told TheDCNF of his interaction with Jones.
“It was very, very clear.”
Waldman, 49, also said that Jones mentioned Glenn Simpson, one of Fusion’s co-founders and Steele’s main partner on the dossier project.
Waldman’s testimony about the meeting was first revealed in a Daily Caller op-ed published last week by Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire who is a client of Waldman’s.
In the op-ed, Deripaska, a former business partner of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s, largely criticized the so-called “Deep State,” which he alleges has pushed a false narrative about the Russia investigation. But the piece also broke news about his lawyer’s Senate testimony and the claims about Fusion GPS and Soros funding.
Jones, Fusion GPS, and a representative for Soros did not return repeated requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Senate panel declined to discuss Waldman’s testimony.
Reached by phone, Fusion GPS attorney Josh Levy declined to comment on Waldman’s testimony about Jones and Soros connections to the firm, saying “I’m not commenting for your story.”
Waldman’s link to key players in the Russia investigation is one of the more intriguing wrinkles in the dossier saga. On one side is Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin. On the other are Steele, Jones and Warner, all of who are involved in one way or another in investigating the Kremlin’s meddling in the 2016
election.
How the two sides found a common link in Waldman remains a mystery, one that lawyer said he is presently unable to discuss in full.
Waldman, who runs Endeavor Law Firm and also represents actor Johnny Depp, entered the national spotlight last month after text messages that he exchanged last year with Warner were leaked to Fox News. The messages, which Waldman provided to SSCI in September, showed that he negotiated with Warner on behalf of the London-based Steele to set up an interview with the committee.
Warner sought the meeting in his capacity as the top Democrat on Senate Intel.
Steele, as is now widely known, was hired by Fusion GPS in June 2016 to investigate Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee paid Fusion for the project.
Waldman’s texts to Warner mention Steele, Deripaska, and Jones, who was an SSCI staffer for Feinstein when she chaired the panel.
Encrypted text messages provided to SSCI and obtained by TheDCNF corroborate some of Waldman’s claims, particularly regarding his meeting with Jones and a suggestion from him that he helped with anti-Trump news stories.
A March 15 message shows Jones contacted Waldman and introduced himself as being with an upstart non-profit group called the Democracy Integrity Project.
Signal messages from Daniel Jones to Adam Waldman
“Dan Jones here from the Democracy Integrity Project. Chris wanted us to connect,” reads the intro message, referring to Steele and to a newly formed non-profit group of which little is known.
Corporate registration documents show that a group by that name was formed in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 31, 2017, several weeks before Jones’ outreach to Waldman and several weeks after BuzzFeed News published the dossier.
Waldman’s contact with Warner began in February 2017 and initially centered on Deripaska and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Waldman suggested in his initial texts that he was in communication with Assange, who is living under asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
The lawyer first mentioned Steele to Warner on March 17, a day after he met with Jones, who now runs a consulting firm called the Penn Quarter Group.
“Chris Steele asked me to call you,” Waldman wrote to Warner.
The text messages show that Warner, a Democrat, sought to meet with Steele separately from other members of the Senate committee. But Waldman said that Steele first wanted a letter signed by Warner and North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the committee, formally seeking an interview with Steele.
Warner rebuffed the idea and pressed for a private meeting with Steele, going as far as offering to travel to England.
“We want to do this right private in London don’t want to send letter yet cuz if we can’t get agreement wud rather not have paper trail,” Warner wrote on March 30.
Waldman’s texts to Warner also refer to Jones.
“[Steele] said he will also speak w Dan Jones whom he says is talking to you,” Waldman wrote in an April 25 message. “I encouraged him to engage with you for the sake of the truth and of vindication of the dossier,” the text continued.
Later that day, he wrote that “[Steele] said Dan Jones is coming to see you.”
“I suggest you explain to Dan why a call is the necessary first step rather than a letter from your perspective.”
Waldman had only a few text exchanges with Jones, but the messages provide some insight into Jones’ investigative work on Trump.
“Our team helped with this,” Jones wrote in a March 17 message that included a link to a Reuters article about Russian nationals’ investments in Trump-owned buildings. The article focuses heavily on Russians’ investments in Trump real estate properties in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla.
Jones did not describe who was included on his team, but Glenn Simpson, the Fusion GPS co-founder, testified to two congressional committees last year that his firm conducted research into Trump’s real estate deals in Sunny Isles Beach.
“I spoke w Warner and he did mention you as discussed. He obliquely brought your org up so it was natural,” Waldman wrote on March 19.
Waldman and Warner’s leaked texts show that the two called each other multiple times around that date.
The two sets of text messages, and Waldman’s testimony, raises numerous questions about the dossier.
It remains unclear why Jones reached out to Waldman. Jones and Waldman’s relationships to Steele are also a mystery. Waldman declined to comment on that particular matter, and a request for comment from Steele’s lawyers in London was forwarded to a legal adviser who said they could not speak to the media on Steele’s behalf.
Little else is known about Jones’ work with Fusion GPS or on the dossier. The only reporting on those connections comes from The Federalist which recently reported that Jones was working with Fusion as part of a post-election effort to validate the dossier.
Republican lawmakers remain puzzled by the Warner-Waldman and the possible links between Deripaska and Steele.
Republican Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, recently sent letters to Waldman and Deripaska’s London-based attorney, Paul Hauser, inquiring whether they or Deripaska have ever hired Steele or his private intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence.
Grassley also sent letters in January to members of the Clinton campaign and DNC asking about any communications with more than 20 individuals, including Fusion GPS employees, Waldman and Jones.
Grassley appears interested in exploring what implications any links between Steele and Deripaska would have for the dossier, which BuzzFeed News published on Jan. 10, 2017. Waldman denies one lead that lawmakers appear to be chasing: that Deripaska was a source for the dossier.
Waldman has represented Deripaska since 2009, largely on visa issues. The oligarch has fought the State Department over its decision in 2006 to revoke his visa after the agency became concerned about the industrialist’s alleged ties to Russian organized crime.
The aluminum magnate pays Waldman $40,000 a month for the work, according to documents filed by under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Deripaska has also worked in the past with Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was recently indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on money laundering and bank fraud charges.
While Manafort was on the campaign, he and Deripaska were in a dispute over a failed business venture involving cable TV stations in Ukraine. Deripaska accused the Republican consultant of squandering $19 million from the deal.
“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote to an associate on July 7, 2016, while he was still with the Trump campaign.
And just before joining the campaign in April 2016, Manafort sent a cryptic message to his associate: “How do we use to get whole?”
The emails have fueled speculation that Manafort sought to use his position on the campaign to help settle his debts to Deripaska.
Why has 1 Nut Mitt been so quite about Obama cheating and scandals?
* A new book claims former President Barack Obama hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Romney
* Obama used law firm Perkins Coie to hide payment to Fusion GPS
* The Clinton campaign would later do the same thing to investigate Trump
The Barack Obama presidential campaign hired Fusion GPS in 2012 to dig up dirt on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, according to a book released on Tuesday.
The Obama campaign hid its payments to Fusion GPS through its law firm, Perkins Coie. The arrangement is similar to the one that the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee used to pay Fusion for its investigation of then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016.
That contract led to the creation of the infamous Steele dossier, which was written by former British spy Christopher Steele.
“In 2012, Fusion GPS was hired to do opposition research on Mitt Romney for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign,” reads “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and Donald Trump’s Election.”
The book is written by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, two veteran reporters who met during the 2016 campaign with Steele and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson. (RELATED: New Book Raises Questions About Steele Dossier Source)
“As had become standard practice in the shadowy world of ‘oppo’ research, the Obama campaign’s payments to Fusion GPS were never publicly disclosed; the money paid to the investigative firm was reported on campaign disclosure reports as legal bills to the campaign’s law firm, Perkins Coie,” the book reads.
The Obama for America committee paid Perkins Coie around $3 million during the 2012 election cycle, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission, A vast majority of the payments were earmarked for “Legal Services.”
It is not clear how the law firm paid Fusion GPS for its research on Romney, a former Massachusetts governor.
Perkins Coie received more than $12 million from the Clinton campaign and DNC during the 2016 election cycle. Fusion GPS was paid just over $1 million for its research on Trump. The oppo firm paid Steele just under $178,000 for his work on the dossier.
