Last Call For The Drums Of War

It's going off the rails now, guys.  Trump and Bolton, along with Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, are cooking up plans for sending 120,000 troops into US bases in the Middle East and naval vessels to surround Iran.

At a meeting of President Trump’s top national security aides last Thursday, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons, administration officials said.

The revisions were ordered by hard-liners led by John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser. They do not call for a land invasion of Iran, which would require vastly more troops, officials said.

The development reflects the influence of Mr. Bolton, one of the administration’s most virulent Iran hawks, whose push for confrontation with Tehran was ignored more than a decade ago by President George W. Bush.

It is highly uncertain whether Mr. Trump, who has sought to disentangle the United States from Afghanistan and Syria, ultimately would send so many American forces back to the Middle East.

It is also unclear whether the president has been briefed on the number of troops or other details in the plans. On Monday, asked about if he was seeking regime change in Iran, Mr. Trump said: “We’ll see what happens with Iran. If they do anything, it would be a very bad mistake.”

There are sharp divisions in the administration over how to respond to Iran at a time when tensions are rising about Iran’s nuclear policy and its intentions in the Middle East.

Some senior American officials said the plans, even at a very preliminary stage, show how dangerous the threat from Iran has become. Others, who are urging a diplomatic resolution to the current tensions, said it amounts to a scare tactic to warn Iran against new aggressions.

European allies who met with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday said that they worry that tensions between Washington and Tehran could boil over, possibly inadvertently.
More than a half-dozen American national security officials who have been briefed on details of the updated plans agreed to discuss them with The New York Times on the condition of anonymity. Spokesmen for Mr. Shanahan and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declined to comment.

The size of the force involved has shocked some who have been briefed on them. The 120,000 troops would approach the size of the American force that invaded Iraq in 2003.

Again, with this incompetent bunch of idiots running the show and Trump easily manipulated by foreign leaders from Netanyahu in Israel to Putin in Russia to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan in Saudi Arabia, the odds of a miscalculation or worse, a deliberate act to pull the US into a shooting war with Iran is looking more and more possible.

Eventually all this saber-rattling is going to rattle loose something bad, and it's going to mean another decade-long war that will cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.

Stay tuned.  It will only get worse.

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Attorney General Bill Barr is no longer trying to hide his abuse of office.  With two existing Justice Department investigations into the FBI's opening of candidate Donald Trump's campaign and its ties to Russia, Barr is now opening a third investigation with a hand-picked hatchet man.

Attorney General William P. Barr has assigned the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut to examine the origins of the Russia investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter, a move that President Trump has long called for but that could anger law enforcement officials who insist that scrutiny of the Trump campaign was lawful.

John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, has a history of serving as a special prosecutor investigating potential wrongdoing among national security officials, including the F.B.I.’s ties to a crime boss in Boston and accusations of C.I.A. abuses of detainees.

His inquiry is the third known investigation focused on the opening of an F.B.I. counterintelligence investigation during the 2016 presidential campaign into possible ties between Russia’s election interference and Trump associates.

The department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, is separately examining investigators’ use of wiretap applications and informants and whether any political bias against Mr. Trump influenced investigative decisions. And John W. Huber, the United States attorney in Utah, has been reviewing aspects of the Russia investigation. His findings have not been announced.

Additionally on Capitol Hill, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said he, too, intends to review aspects of law enforcement’s work in the coming months. And Republicans conducted their own inquiries when they controlled the House, including publicizing details of the F.B.I.’s wiretap use.

Thomas Carson, a spokesman for Mr. Durham’s office, declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for the Justice Department. “I do have people in the department helping me review the activities over the summer of 2016,” Mr. Barr said in congressional testimony on May 1, without elaborating.

Mr. Durham, who was nominated by Mr. Trump in 2017 and has been a Justice Department lawyer since 1982, has conducted special investigations under administrations of both parties. Attorney General Janet Reno asked Mr. Durham in 1999 to investigate the F.B.I.’s handling of a notorious informant: the organized crime leader James (Whitey) Bulger.

In 2008, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey assigned Mr. Durham to investigate the C.I.A.’s destruction of videotapes in 2005 showing the torture of terrorism suspects. A year later, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. expanded Mr. Durham’s mandate to also examine whether the agency broke any laws in its abuses of detainees in its custody.

Mr. Barr has signaled his concerns about the Russia investigation during congressional testimony, particularly the surveillance of Trump associates. “I think spying did occur,” he said. “The question is whether it was adequately predicated. And I’m not suggesting that it wasn’t adequately predicated. But I need to explore that.”

Durham may seem like a good guy, but let's remember Trump purged nearly every single US Attorney from the Obama era and installed his own, including Durham, and every one of them is loyal to Trump and Barr.

There is just no way given the existing investigations and the history of Trump and Barr that this is anything other than a bold attempt to put Obama-era officials in jail, and tie them to Joe Biden should he remain the Democratic front-runner.

It's going to be an ugly summer.

Deportation Nation, Con't

And now we know the real reason why Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Niesen and ICE head Ronald Vitello were run out of town: they weren't on board with Stephen Miller's plan for ICE mass deportation arrests in major cities across the country.

In the weeks before they were ousted last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and top immigration enforcement official Ronald Vitiello challenged a secret White House plan to arrest thousands of parents and children in a blitz operation against migrants in 10 major U.S. cities.

According to seven current and former Department of Homeland Security officials, the administration wanted to target the crush of families that had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border after the president’s failed “zero tolerance” prosecution push in early 2018. The ultimate purpose, the officials said, was a show of force to send the message that the United States was going to get tough by swiftly moving to detain and deport recent immigrants — including families with children.

The sprawling operation included an effort to fast-track immigration court cases, allowing the government to obtain deportation orders against those who did not show for their hearings — officials said 90 percent of those targeted were found deportable in their absence. The subsequent arrests would have required coordinated raids against parents with children in their homes and neighborhoods.

But Vitiello and Nielsen halted it, concerned about a lack of preparation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, the risk of public outrage and worries that it would divert resources away from the border.

Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller and ICE deputy director Matthew Albence were especially supportive of the plan, officials said, eager to execute dramatic, highly visible mass arrests that they argued would help deter the soaring influx of families.

The arrests were planned for New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and the other largest U.S. destinations for Central American migrants. Though some of the cities are considered “sanctuary” jurisdictions with police departments that do not cooperate with ICE, the plan did not single out those locations, officials said.

ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations branch had an initial target list of 2,500 adults and children, but the plan, which remains under consideration, was viewed as a first step toward arresting as many as 10,000 migrants. The vast majority of families who have crossed the border in the past 18 months seeking asylum remain in the country, awaiting a court date or in defiance of deportation orders. 

I have been warning about this for months now, guys.  This was always the plan.  And now the people who have objected to it are gone.

Mass arrests are coming.  They will be regular and they will be in the news constantly between now and November 2020.  It will break the system, and become impetus for emergency measures that will remain in place for years, maybe decades.  It will be a reign of fear like we've never seen, guys.

And it's almost here.

StupidiNews!

• A California civil jury has returned a $2 billion verdict against agriculture giant Monsanto for causing cancer in in a couple with their popular weed killer product, Round-Up.
• Donald Trump says he will veto a House Democratic bill to add protections for LGBTQ Americans to civil rights and housing laws, the White House says the bill is "filled with poison pills".
• The White House says Donald Trump will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in June as trade war between the two countries threatens to damage the global economy.
• Upcoming midterm elections in the Philippines appear to be setting the stage for President Rodrigo Duterte to pass leadership to his eldest daughter Sara, currently Mayor of Davao City.
• BitCoin is back up to $8,000, a new 2019 high, as the price of the cryptocurrency has again skyrocketed in just a few short weeks.