This is my weekly summary of news that the legacy media and Democrats have obfuscated for partisan political reasons. Once again, I am doing longer quotes of fewer articles this week, as I am still overseas. Here we go.

1. We’ve talked about this one before: corruption in US foreign aid. Foggy Bottom needs to be shut down, and all US foreign aid stopped because it is nothing but a piggy bank for the political class.

A senior Guatemalan official said his nation was aware President Donald Trump was going to cut funding to his nation, saying he understands the decision as the majority of funds designated to aid his nation’s poorest through development projects and other charities rarely reaches those who need it most. “To be honest with you, I don’t think most of that money is actually being properly used in our country, mainly in Guatemala,” Duarte told me. “A lot of that money goes to NGOs who spend it on mostly doing analysis and white papers sent studies. The money’s not really going towards the people. There’s no significant projects that really help us along those lines.”

Duarte noted that last week he had “a conversation with a couple of project managers from USAID that have worked here in Guatemala, they have worked in Haiti, they have worked in Africa, they have worked in Afghanistan and the issue here is that the projects are almost like pet projects for some political ideal.”

Read the rest here. If you think that’s the only country in which USAID dollars are wasted, then you’ve got another think coming! We need to shut down all US foreign aid and pour it in to rebuilding inner city slums in the United States, as well as to complete the Wall.

2. More great economic news in the Age of Trump that will never be discussed in the legacy media:

Latino-owned businesses are experiencing significant growth thanks to a strong economy, a Biz2Credit study found. Rohit Arora, Biz2Credit’s CEO, said Latino business owners are enjoying a 46 percent jump in revenue this year, which will bolster the nation’s thriving economy. [O]ur research finds that revenues of Latino-owned companies jumped 23% from 2017-18.

The fact is that Hispanics are flourishing in the Trump economy. Democrats asserting the contrary is a mere partisan talking point to try to deny Trump the Hispanic support he has earned and which may decide the presidential election outcome next year. Expect Democrats to increase their identity politics attacks in an effort to skew Latinos against Republicans over the next year and a half.

Read the rest here. This is more excellent evidence that the Trump economy is color-blind. His economic policies are working great! Tax and regulation cuts work every time they’re tried.

3. The “muh Russia” house of cards continues to fall apart. Here is the latest news courtesy of the British.

British intelligence told the FBI that dossier author Christopher Steele sometimes showed questionable judgment regarding investigative targets, according to a report that could preview some of the findings in a highly anticipated Justice Department watchdog report of FBI surveillance against the Trump campaign. Investigators with the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) have asked witnesses about an assessment that MI6 officials provided the FBI regarding Steele, a former MI6 officer based in London.

The FBI’s handling of information from Steele is central to the OIG investigation into whether the bureau complied with laws and regulations in applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide.  The OIG has also raised concerns, according to The Times, that the FBI overhyped Steele’s value as a confidential source in the applications to obtain the Page FISAs. The FBI relied heavily on information from Steele in the FISA applications, the first of which was granted on Oct. 21, 2016.

Read the rest here. Despite the Brits’ concerns, the tainted Obama FBI pressed ahead with the so-called Steele dossier. Little by little, the onion is getting peeled back.

4. Too bad, Obama and George Soros!

The Supreme Court, in another defeat for gerrymandering reformers, overturned a lower court’s ruling that Michigan’s electoral districts are overly partisan and need to be redrawn. Monday’s order follows a June decision from the nation’s top court that found that questions related to partisan gerrymandering are not under the jurisdiction of federal courts. The new order returns the case to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. A three-judge panel in that court had ruled that 34 state legislative and congressional districts needed to be redrawn because they were designed to favor Republicans.

The Supreme Court’s ruling that federal courts cannot weigh in on partisan gerrymandering cases was blasted by activists, who have sought to advance their fight against politically-drawn maps in the courts. Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, at the time called the decision one which “tears at the fabric of our democracy.”

Read the rest here. I’m liking it. Any time Obama and Eric Holder are thwarted by the USSC is a day to celebrate.

5. Judicial Watch continues to do the people’s business. This time it’s on Benghazi (plus more).

Judicial Watch today released new Clinton emails on the Benghazi controversy that had been covered up for years and would have exposed Hillary Clinton’s email account if they had been released when the State Department first uncovered them in 2014. The long-withheld email, clearly responsive to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit seeking records concerning “talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack,” contains Clinton’s private email address and a conversation about the YouTube video that sparked the Benghazi talking points scandal. “This email is a twofer – it shows Hillary Clinton misled the U.S. Senate on Benghazi and that the State Department wanted to hide the Benghazi connection to the Clinton email scheme,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Rather than defending her email misconduct, the Justice Department has more than enough evidence to reopen its investigations into Hillary Clinton.”

Judicial Watch’s discovery over the last several months found many more details about the scope of the Clinton email scandal and cover-up:

• John Hackett, former Director of Information Programs and Services (IPS) testifiedunder oath that he had raised concerns that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s staff may have “culled out 30,000” of the secretary’s “personal” emails without following strict National Archives standards. He also revealed that he believed there was interference with the formal FOIA review process related to the classification of Clinton’s Benghazi-related emails.
• Heather Samuelson, Clinton’s White House liaison at the State Department, and later Clinton’s personal lawyer, admittedunder oath that she was granted immunity by the Department of Justice in June 2016.
• Justin Cooper, former aide to President Bill Clinton and Clinton Foundation employee who registered the domain name of the unsecure clintonemail.com server that Clinton used while serving as Secretary of State, testifiedhe worked with Huma Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, to create the non-government email system.
• In the interrogatory responsesof E.W. (Bill) Priestap, assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, he stated that the agency found Clinton email records in the Obama White House, specifically, the Executive Office of the President.
• Jacob “Jake” Sullivan, Clinton’s senior advisor and deputy chief of staff when she was secretary of state, testifiedthat both he and Clinton used her unsecure non-government email system to conduct official State Department business.
• Eric Boswell, former assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, testifiedthat Clinton was warned twice against using unsecure BlackBerry’s and personal emails to transmit classified material.

Read the rest here. Time to reopen EVERY investigation of Shrillary: U-1, Benghazi, Clinton Foundation, email server, etc.

6. This is an incredible opinion piece by Victor Davis Hanson that needs to be read from stem to stern. Here are just a few excerpts:

[W]hy the unadulterated hatred? For the small number of NeverTrumpers, of course, Trump’s crudity in speech and crassness in manner nullify his accomplishments: the unattractive messenger has fouled an otherwise tolerable message. While they recognize in the abstract that the randy JFK, the repugnant LBJ, and the horny Bill Clinton during their White House tenures were far grosser in conduct than has been Donald Trump, they either assume presidential ethics should have evolved or they were not always around to know of past bad behavior first hand, or believe Trump’s crude language is worse than prior presidents’ crude behavior in office. But the NeverTrumpers are and remain a tiny segment of the electorate who have had zero effect in swaying Republicans and only marginal influence in persuading swing voters, in their new roles as occasionally useful naïfs of the hard Left.

Far more importantly, why do the media, academia, the entertainment and professional sports industries, the progressive Left, the administrative state, and most Democratic officeholders despise him so? His brashness bothers them of course. His quirky tweets and name-calling certainly. His loud rallies, his public put-downs, and his feuding are certainly not matched by those of past presidents. But the real source of their antipathy is his agenda.

Had Donald Trump in his first month as president declared that he was a centrist Republican —as many suspicious Never Trumpers predicted that he would, true to past form—and promoted cap-and-trade and solar and wind federal subsidies, tabled pipeline construction and abated federal leasing for gas and oil production, stayed in the Iran nuclear deal and Paris Climate Accord, appointed judges in the tradition of John Paul Stevens and David Souter, praised the “responsible” Palestinian leaders, “comprehensive immigration reform” as a euphemism for blanket amnesties, then Trump would be treated largely as a George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush: hated, of course, but not obsessively so.

More importantly, had Trump just collapsed or stagnated the economy, as predicted by the likes of Paul Krugman and Larry Summers, he would now be roundly denounced, but again not so vilified, given his political utility for the Left in 2020 as a perceived Herbert Hoover-esque scapegoat. Had Trump kept within the media and cultural sidelines by giving interviews to “60 Minutes,” speaking at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, bringing in a few old Republican hands to run the staff or handle media relations like a David Gergen or Andrew Card, Trump would have been written off as a nice enough dunce.

But Trump did none of that. So, the hatred of the media, the Left, the swamp, and the celebrity industry is predicated more on the successful Trump agenda. He is systematically undoing what Barack Obama wrought, in the manner Obama sought to undo with his eight years the prior eight years of George W. Bush. But whereas the Obama economy stagnated and his foreign policy was seen by adversaries and rivals as a rare occasion to recalibrate the world order at American’s expense, Trump mostly did not fail—at least not yet.

We are currently in an economic boom while most of the world economy abroad is inert. Had the economy just crashed as predicted, the Trump agenda would have been discredited and he would be written off a pitiful fool rather than an existential monster. Again, hatred arises at what Trump did even more than what he says or how he says it.

Read the rest of this great article here. VDH nails it yet again! They hate POTUS because he is rolling back their decades-long march toward globalism, as well as exposing them all for the grifters and globalists they are.

7. Next up, it’s about time that Brennan et all started feeling the heat!

The secretive Justice Department inquiry into the Trump-Russia investigation’s origins now includes former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI special agent Peter Strzok, and British ex-spy Christopher Steele. U.S. Attorney John Durham, whose investigative portfolio recently expanded to include events from the launch of the inquiry in 2016 through the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller in 2017, has taken overseas fact-finding trips. But Durham’s focus on the actions taken by specific individuals makes his mission look like it could transform into a criminal investigation. And the line of questioning Durham has taken with potential witnesses — some in line with claims made by President Trump and other Republicans — puts his efforts into sharper focus. Durham has not yet interviewed Strzok, McCabe, former FBI Director James Comey, or former FBI general counsel James Baker.

Durham is speaking to witnesses about Steele, the former MI6 agent whose dossier was used to obtain secret surveillance warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page, and Durham wants to know why the FBI used unverified information in its filings with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Durham also intends to interview CIA analysts and officials involved in the Russia investigation, prompting some to seek legal representation, and NBC News reported tension between the CIA and the DOJ over what classified information he should have access to.

Durham has already talked to two dozen current and former FBI agents as part of his effort. DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said the department was exploring the extent to which “a number of countries” played a role in the Trump-Russia investigation, and Barr and Durham reached out to the United Kingdom, Italy, and Australia.

Read the rest here. One could argue that this is all taking too long, but it’s also true that the little fish need to be rolled up before questioning the big fish, too. The fact that Brennan and other cabal members are squawking bigly in public these days is GOOD sign.

8. Here’s a story which spells political death for Democrats pursuing their fake impeachment on bogus charges. And watch what happens when AG Barr/USA Durham start the indictments!

A memo by the Republican National Committee (RNC) that contains internal GOP polling data shows the American public, even Democrat voters, are turning against the Democrat Party’s “impeachment inquiry” into President Donald Trump. The memo, obtained exclusively by Breitbart News, shows independent voters nationwide en masse oppose impeachment—with 54 percent opposed and only 34 percent in favor. “We have seen public polling drastically under sample Independent voters, which is one of the many reasons for so much incorrect public data over the past month,” the memo explains regarding the disparity between internal GOP numbers and public polling from news organizations and polling institutions.

What’s more, internal RNC polling data, according to this memo, shows Democrats have lost support among their own base significantly in just the past week. “Support among Democrats for the ridiculous attempt to remove the President from office is down 10 points over the past week,” the memo says. Among all voters, the memo says support for impeachment has dropped in the past week by five percent—a remarkable shift against the Democrats in just one week, while the president’s support levels have increased across the board, especially among Republicans, with whom he now enjoys a 90 percent approval rating. The memo notes that the RNC is closely tracking impeachment support and opposition with its own sophisticated polling method, which is more accurate than the public polling.

Read the rest here. I’ve been saying for years that the media polls are nothing but push polls that attempt to INFLUENCE public opinion in the favor of Democrat positions on the issues, not accurately REFLECT it!

9. Speaking of which (indictments), this news is already causing apoplexy among the culpable in the cabal (Clapper comes immediately to mind):

U.S. Attorney John Durham’s ongoing probe into potential FBI and Justice Department misconduct in the run-up to the 2016 election through the spring of 2017 has transitioned into a full-fledged criminal investigation. One source added that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s upcoming report on alleged FBI surveillance abuses against the Trump campaign will shed light on why Durham’s probe has become a criminal inquiry. Horowitz announced … his report would be available to the public soon, with “few” redactions. The investigation’s new status means Durham can subpoena witnesses, file charges, and impanel fact-finding grand juries.

Read the rest here. Could this be the drizzle that precedes the deluge? Could very well be!

Here are the honorable mentions this week:

• Nolte: Mitt Romney Caught with Secret Pierre Delecto Twitter Account to Champion Himself [He still thinks he’s going to be president in 2024. No way in hell!]
• 2020 Dems dismiss Hillary Clinton’s attacks, rally to Tulsi Gabbard’s defense over Russia accusation [This is all a distraction to split Republican votes and keep Shrillary in the news. She’s running in 2020; it’s just a matter of time until she declares.]
• Trump: Impeachment Began ‘The Day Of The Inauguration’ [… and it’s been ongoing ever since! A LOT of heads need to roll.]
• Seattle Public Schools Considering Social Justice Math Curriculum [The insanity of leftist-controlled public education continues to spread.]
• More Voters Believe Officials Broke Law Trying to Prevent Trump Presidency: Poll [Intuitively obvious to even casual observers at this point!]
• Poll: Only 6% of Iowa Voters Say Impeachment is Most Important Issue […to the consternation of the Democrats and legacy media who’ve been trying to sell Americans on it non-stop for 2 years!]
• Who the Hell Do They Think They Are? [Recall them to active duty and bring them up on insubordination charges under the UCMJ.]

And here’s the short summary of this week’s “feature articles”:

• A senior Guatemalan official confirms rampant corruption in foreign aid to his country.
• Latino-owned businesses are prospering BIGLY in the Age of Trump.
• British intelligence is covering their tracks on the Steele front by stating to the FBI that he was often a source of “questionable intelligence.” (Duh!)
• In a blow to Obama and Soros, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s ruling that Michigan’s electoral districts are overly partisan and need to be redrawn
• Judicial Watch continues to break ground on Hillary Clinton’s private email account – which was known by many even back in the Benghazi days (2012)!
• Victor Davis Hanson explained why the Uniparty types are so virulently anti-Trump (it’s because he’s been so successful in rolling back Obama’s – and their – globalist agenda).
• USA Durham’s investigation into Trump-Russia origins now includes former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI special agent Peter Strzok, and British ex-spy Christopher Steele.
• An RNC memo containing internal GOP polling data shows the American public (and even Democrat voters!) are turning against the Democrat Party’s “impeachment inquiry” into President Trump.
• And the best news of all: the Durham probe has transitioned into a full-fledged criminal investigation.

I have to admit that I’m starting to feel a little bit giddy about all the good news that keeps coming out: the Ukraine star chamber is being discredited daily, some Republicans are finding their gonads (even if tiny), the media’s push-polls are failing to move the needle in the Democrats’ direction, Durham’s got a criminal investigation going now, the cabal are getting more unhinged by the day, the lefties on social media are apoplectic in defense of the cabal and Democrats, etc.

Life is pretty good – and it’s going to get even better as Horowitz’s FISA abuse report comes out in the days ahead! Stay tuned…

The end.