Pawlenty, who called Trump 'unfit and unhinged,' derailed in comeback attempt in Minnesota; battle lines drawn in Connecticut

Tim Pawlenty, right, had sharply criticized President Trump during the 2016 campaign after the release of the "Access Hollywood" tape.  (AP)

Tim Pawlenty -- who briefly ran for president in 2012 and had derided President Trump as "unhinged" -- was denied in his effort to stage a political comeback and become Minnesota’s governor again in the race to replace Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton.
County Commissioner Jeff Johnson won in Tuesday's Minnesota GOP gubernatorial primary despite Pawlenty's enormous fundraising and name recognition advantages. He also won despite his own history as the party's losing candidate for governor four years ago.
Pawlenty joins several other prominent Republicans -- including Reps. Martha Roby and Mark Sanford, as well as Sens. Jeff Flake and Bob Corker -- who have recently suffered major political consequences, at least in part, for opposing Trump.
Johnson had positioned himself as a more conservative candidate than Pawlenty. He branded the former two-term governor as part of the "status quo" and bashed him for calling Trump "unhinged and unfit for the presidency" in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election -- rhetoric that Pawlenty softened during the campaign.
Pawlenty was hoping to resurrect his political career after flaming out as a presidential candidate in 2011. He spent the intervening years as a Washington lobbyist.
KEITH ELLISON HANGS ON IN MINNESOTA DESPITE DOMESTIC ABUSE ALLEGATIONS

Tim Pawlenty, who had called Trump 'unhinged,' was dened in his bid to retake his old governorship on Tuesday.  (AP)

Democratic Rep. Tim Walz, meanwhile, won the party's three-way primary for the governorship, and will take on Johnson in November.
In all, voters in four states headed to the polls Tuesday to select nominees for critical gubernatorial, House, and Senate races in November, and several of the day's contests were broadly seen as an early indication of voters' views on Trump and the Republican Party.
In Connecticut, Madison businessman and political newcomer Bob Stefanowski won the Republican primary for governor, defeating four fellow GOP contenders and setting the stage for a pivotal battle with businessman Ned Lamont in November.
Connecticut is ground-zero for Republican efforts to continue their gains in progressive New England. Even though Connecticut voted for Hillary Clinton by double-digits in 2016, the state's governor, Dan Malloy, is deeply unpopular, with critics citing high taxes and an ongoing budget crisis. Malloy declined to seek a third term.
And in Wisconsin, Democrats making yet another effort to unseat Republican Scott Walker have nominated state schools chief Tony Evers. Evers emerged from a field of eight candidates in Tuesday's primary. He was the only candidate to have won election statewide before and now faces his biggest challenge against Walker, who has built up a huge financial advantage.
The 66-year-old Evers has been the state's education chief since 2009 and has clashed with Walker in the past on mostly education issues.Walker's campaign and Republicans criticized Evers for not revoking the license of a teacher who was caught viewing pornographic emails on his school computer.
Meanwhile, Christine Hallquist made history in Vermont Tuesday night as the first openly transgender nominee for a governorship from a major party in the nation's history, beating back her Democratic challengers in the state's primary.

Christine Hallquist was vying to be the first transgender gubernatorial nominee in the nation's history Tuesday.  (AP)

Hallquist defeated educator Brenda Siegel, who earlier was considered a frontrunner in the race, and environmentalist James Ehlers.
Hallquist, a former CEO of the Vermont Electric Cooperative, made no bones about the fact she wanted a place in the history books during the campaign.
She's appealed to Vermonters with a progressive message including a livable wage, Medicare for all, free public college education and high-speed broadband access — even to those who live on remote back roads.
"That's how I want to be known in Vermont," Hallquist, 62, told The Associated Press in an interview at her Burlington offices. "Nationally, I want to be known as the first trans candidate."

Gov. Phil Scott, in April, signing gun control legislation that drew fierce protests.  (AP)

Hallquist also defeated another candidate who was trying to make history: a 14-year-old boy, Ethan Sonneborn, who took advantage of the state constitution's lack of an age requirement to seek the governorship.
On the Republican side, first-term Gov. Phil Scott overcame businessman Keith Stern to win the GOP gubernatorial primary, surviving the major political fallout from his decision to sign the state's first major gun control laws earlier this year.
No sitting governor has been defeated in Vermont since 1962, and Scott's victory in November would continue Republicans' surprisingly strong hold on governorships in highly progressive New England. The GOP currently holds the governorships of four out of six states in the region, including Vermont, Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.
However, Scott may have a unique vulnerability. In April, he was heckled by a bevy of protesters calling him a "liar" and "traitor" as he signed sweeping gun regulations into law, citing the dangers posed by mass shootings.
The package of bills raised the age to buy firearms from 18 to 21, banned high-capacity magazines, and made it easier to take guns from people considered a danger to themselves or others and from people arrested or cited for domestic assault.
Scott's approval rating in the state tanked after he signed the measure, plummeting from 65 percent early in the year to 47 percent shortly after the bill took effect. His disapproval rating nearly doubled to 42 percent in that period.

John Brennan Ex-CIA Cartoons

Trump's 'no more apologizing for America' foreign policy helps Republicans in November

One of the all-time best lines in television and politics was delivered by the late Fred Thompson on “Law and Order.” To his assistant district attorney he advised, “Jack, it’s not enough to do good. You have to be seen doing good.”
So too with presidents and national security. It’s not enough to keep America secure. Voters must feel more secure.
One of the key themes of the 2016 GOP convention in Cleveland was, “Make America Safe Again.” Turns out that a huge number of voters did not feel safe under Obama policies, despite his tenure being widely celebrated around the world. Demand for change was fed by talk of open borders, unenforced red lines, flexibility with Russia, ISIS, Benghazi, plus lost opportunities in manufacturing and energy.

Not only has the president and Congress made America safer, most Americans feel safer and better off. Republicans running on this record, together with the strong economic revival at home, stand a very good chance of defying history this election cycle.

Trump famously broke all predictive models in building a new electoral college coalition in 2016. He may be defying history and the “best and brightest” predictive models for the mid-term elections in 2018, with strategic moves on trade and foreign policy playing a major role.
Trump is winning on trade and diplomacy and that will help energize his base in midterms. People are proud after a long era of Democrats apologizing for America. ISIS is gone from the headlines. Finally, we have a president who puts muscle behind rebalancing alliance and trade relationships in our favor. Most “experts” mistake his approach as a revival of nationalism or isolationism, but in reality, Trump represents a new pro-American internationalism, without apology. And mainstream Americans support it.
Turns out it also is popular to keep promises made during a campaign. The U.S. embassy is now in Israel’s capital. The U.S. exited bad deals – the Paris Climate Accord and Iran deal. No more disappearing red lines and no more nation-building. And no more multilateral trade deals that weaken American sovereignty or our economy.  Unconventional tweets and summits resonate with flyover America. Economic revival at home projects strength and opportunity abroad.
Absent a shock between now and election day, most Americans feel safer and more confident in America’s role in the world. Trump themes of sovereignty, security, fair trade, and international realism resonate strongly with mainstream America and are hard for Democrats to oppose.
Not only has the president and Congress made America safer, most Americans feel safer and better off. Republicans running on this record, together with the strong economic revival at home, stand a very good chance of defying history this election cycle. We’re not tired of winning.
Stephen Yates is CEO at DC International Advisory (dciadvisory.com), former chairman of the Idaho Republican Party, and co-chair of the 2016 RNC Platform subcommittee on national security.

Omarosa's revenge: Book trashes 'moblike' Trump, exposes family drama, bashes ex-colleagues

In a twist all-too-familiar for anyone who watched her villain persona on reality TV, Omarosa Manigault-Newman has turned – on her former mentor, her former colleagues and anyone else who crossed her during her brief time in politics.
The famously vindictive TV personality-turned-aide, in her forthcoming book due out Tuesday, aims to settle countless scores. She blasts President Trump as “moblike.” She depicts tensions inside the first family. She mocks her former campaign and White House co-workers.
And that's in addition to her accusations of racism against Trump that have featured heavily in her promotional interviews.
Fox News obtained an advance copy of the sensational tell-all, “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House.” In it, she details her long working relationship with the now-president, from her rise to fame on his show "The Apprentice" to her work on the campaign and later in the White House.
But, months after her firing, she has traded her praise of the administration for payback. And no blow is too low, including swipes at former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, who also served as press secretary for the Trump campaign.
In the book, Manigault-Newman accuses Hicks of lacking “the understanding of politics for the job she was given.”
“She was always Googling terms while we were in meetings, always playing catch-up, always sensitive about what she didn’t know,” Manigault-Newman writes. “She was so painfully aware of her inadequacies, she refused to speak publicly about the campaign or as a surrogate to express the candidate’s views.”
Manigault-Newman also accuses Trump, whom she calls her “mentor” throughout the book, of expecting “moblike” loyalty, likening him to a “cult leader.”
“Loyalty is a loaded topic when it comes to Donald Trump. His moblike loyalty requirements are exacting, imperishable, and sometimes unethical (as in James Comey’s case.),” she writes. “But for the people in Trumpworld, loyalty to him is an absolute and unyielding necessity, akin to followers’ devotion to a cult leader.”
She alleges: “Trumpworld is a cult of personality focused solely on Donald J. Trump.”
At one point, she deploys a Trumpian nickname for the president: "Twitter Fingers."
But Trump has deployed his own for the author, dubbing her "Wacky Omarosa" on Monday as she hits the interview circuit, as his aides come out in force to decry her conduct.
Drawing pointed condemnation from the West Wing was her decision to release tapes of secretly recorded conversations, including with Trump himself.
That recording was released Monday on NBC’s “Today,” purporting to capture a conversation between Manigault-Newman and Trump after she was fired by Chief of Staff John Kelly in December. In the tape, Trump claims he didn’t know about her firing in advance.
Over the weekend, Manigault-Newman released a different recording, of that conversation with Kelly in the Situation Room.
White House officials blasted her for making both recordings.
“The thought of doing something like that to a fellow employee, not to mention the leader of the free world, is completely disgraceful,” Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley told "Fox & Friends."
And on Monday, Trump tweeted that, “People in the White House hated her. She was vicious, but not smart.”
Her firing is a key section of the new book. In it, she goes so far as to claim that Kelly and the White House lawyers present, upon notifying her of her termination, were holding her against her will in the Situation Room, suggesting she was at risk of an asthma attack because she initially couldn't get her inhaler.
“I am an asthma sufferer, and I began to feel a tightness in my chest. I had to calm myself down or I could have had a full-blown asthma attack,” Manigault-Newman writes in the prologue. “I asked if I could go get my purse where I had stashed my inhaler, and they wouldn’t let me leave the room. I asked why I was not allowed to leave, and they said this is how Kelly had set up the meeting.”
Manigault-Newman’s assistant was ultimately allowed to “go get [her] purse” with the inhaler.
“My asthma is triggered by stressful situations, and this was definitely one. I asked again if I was allowed to leave the room or speak to my husband, and they refused,” she wrote. “I was being held against my will in a secure room guarded by men with guns.”
Manigault-Newman also writes in the book that she believed her firing was related to her knowledge of a tape made in the early 2000s, in which Trump supposedly uses “the N-word.”
That claim has been the subject of intense dispute, as she says in the book that the tape exists but she hadn't heard it. Yet on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, she said she has since heard it
Monday evening, Trump tweeted that "The Apprentice" producer Mark Burnett had assured him that no such tape existed of him using "such a terrible and disgusting word."
"I don't have that word in my vocabulary, and never have," Trump wrote. "She made it up."
The president then claimed that "Omarosa had Zero credibility with the Media (they didn’t want interviews) when she worked in the White House. Now that she says bad about me, they will talk to her. Fake News!"
The former White House aide makes a slew of other accusations in her book, sure to be chewed over for days by the president's allies and detractors alike.
In other sections, she gets deeply personal about the first family. She says that daughter Tiffany Trump was “treated like a California castoff,” and that Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, was “desperate to please his father.”
“Don Jr. has been struggling against the negative expectation of his namesake since the moment he was born,” Manigault-Newman writes, going on to state that candidate-Trump did not attend his eldest son’s convention speech, but instead watched Eric’s.
“He beamed with pride at his second son,” she writes. “When Donald sat there to watch Eric, I felt sorry for Don Jr.”
She later quotes Trump as calling Trump Jr. “a f---up” over his comment likening Syrian refugees to “a bowl of Skittles.”
Manigault-Newman lobs a slew of other shots at the first family, including claiming first lady Melania Trump wants a divorce when he's out of office.
Plus she writes that, "Our president is mentally and physically impaired."
The White House on Friday responded to early leaks of the book's contents with a blanket statement decrying it. "Instead of telling the truth about all the good President Trump and his administration are doing to make America safe and prosperous, this book is riddled with lies and false accusations," Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said.
Manigault-Newman also blasts former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, now on trial, as a “liability,” and former Trump campaign chief strategist Steve Bannon as an “alarming” choice, slamming him as a “sexist and racist.”
And as for Russia, Manigault-Newman claims that Trump “lacked basic comprehension about the very complicated relationship” between the U.S. and Russia.
“He was fixated on Vladimir Putin as a feared, respected, and admired leader,” she writes. “I believe he was envious of the control that Putin exerts over his people.”
In another skirmish, Trump tweeted Monday that Manigault-Newman signed a non-disclosure agreement upon her exit from the White House. But the former White House aide writes in her book that she “refused” to sign an NDA.

Suspects tied to 'extremist Muslim' compound released; boy believed dead

The children discovered at an “extremist Muslim” compound in New Mexico earlier this month were both trained to use firearms and taught multiple tactical techniques in order to kill teachers, law enforcement and other institutions they found corrupt, state prosecutors revealed on Monday.
The prosecutors provided more details about the accusations during a court hearing in which they asked that Siraj Ibn Wahhaj and four other defendants be held pending trial on child abuse charges.
But the judge in the case ruled against prosecutors’ request.
Judge Sarah Backus said although she was concerned by "troubling facts," prosecutors failed to articulate any specific threats to the community.
She set a $20,000 bond for each defendant and ordered that they wear ankle monitors and have weekly contact with their attorneys.
It was also announced Monday that 3-year-old Abdul-ghani Wahhaj, who had been missing since December, allegedly died amid a ritualistic religious ceremony intended to “cast out demonic spirits,” Reuters reported.
“It was a religious ritual carried out... a ritual intended to cast out demonic spirits from Abdul-ghani Wahhaj,” Taos County Prosecutor John Lovelace said.
Public defenders argued the boy's father was trying to heal the child by reading passages from the Quran but prosecutors claimed he was denying the boy medication. One of the children taken into custody claimed that the boy had died in February.
The children said they were told the boy would be resurrected as Jesus and guide them on which "corrupt institutions" to attack, NBC reported citing investigators.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the remains of a child found on the grounds of the compound were Abdul-ghani Wahhaj.
The defendants were arrested and 11 children were taken into custody during a raid Aug. 4 on the compound near the Colorado state line.
Wahhaj and the others were seated with their public defenders in a Taos courtroom Monday as prosecutors presented books that were found at the compound, documents related to Wahhaj's trip to Saudi Arabia and a handwritten notebook that appeared to be some kind of teaching manual. They also pointed to evidence that Wahhaj had taken a series of firearms courses while in Georgia.
Defense attorneys, meantime, argued that prosecutors were trying unjustly to paint their clients as armed militants. Public defenders also argued that the rifles and handguns found on the property were common guns that could be bought at retail stores and that their clients made no aggressive efforts to defend their compound.
Wahhaj is the son of a Brooklyn imam, also named Siraj Wahhaj, who was named by prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the New York Post reported. The elder Wahhaj, who heads Masjid At-Taqwa mosque, was a character witness in the trial for Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the notorious “blind sheikh” who was convicted in 1995 of plotting terror attacks in the U.S.

Ex-CIA director John Brennan should face grand jury over Russia probe handling: Giuliani

Rudy Giuliani, a personal attorney for President Trump, on Monday slammed former CIA Director John Brennan and said he should face a grand jury for his role in peddling the salacious Trump dossier that kicked off the “phony” Russia investigation.
Giuliani, who spoke exclusively with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, called Brennan the "quarterback" who took the unverified dossier from ex-British spy Christopher Steele and passed it along to then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
“Unless he’s the biggest idiot intelligence agent that ever existed—although he never really did much intelligence work—it’s false. You could look at it [the dossier] and laugh at it,” Giuliani said.
Giuliani told Fox News that special prosecutor Robert Mueller is a “puppet.”
The precise origins of the Russia probe remain unclear. Officials have previously pointed to comments Trump adviser George Papadopoulos allegedly made about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton as touching off the investigation in July 2016.
Brennan told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in February that the dossier played no role in the intelligence community’s assessment that was presented to both President Obama and Trump. Brennan said there were items in the dossier that raised his suspicions on whether it was accurate.
“I do think it was up to the FBI to see whether or not they could verify any of it,” he said.
Brennan served as the director under President Obama and has been a vocal Trump critic. He recently theorized that Russians may have dirt on Trump during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” He later clarified that he does not have any information to back the theory.
The New York Times reported on a tweet Brennan sent out after Trump’s firing of Andrew McCabe, the former deputy of the FBI.
“When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history,” Brennan wrote.
Kimberly Strassel, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, called Brennan a “ringmaster” in shaping the Russian interference narrative.
“The CIA director couldn’t himself go public with his Clinton spin—he lacked the support of the intelligence community and had to be careful not to be seen interfering in U.S. politics. So what to do? He called Harry Reid,” she wrote.

Mayor de Blasio Cartoons

While everyone obsesses over Russia, China is stealing our data blind

With all the focus on Russian hacking, Russian ambition, and Russian threats to U.S. national economic security, another Red Threat continues seemingly unabated:  China’s ongoing effort to compete as a global economic power equal to, if not exceeding, the United States. China has the population and the economic ability to compete, and has made its ambitions crystal clear with its Made in China 2025 plans.
Part of the strategy is being played out now in the battle over tariffs and trade policy, but far more important to the U.S. innovation economy is the ongoing battle over forced technology transfers and Chinese efforts to steal U.S. intellectual property and control as much data online as possible.
Over the past decade, Chinese hackers have launched cyber-attacks, stealing data from the U.S. Congress, the U.S Department of Defense, and the federal Office of Personnel Management, one of the largest data breaches and thefts of American worker identities in history. The Chinese have run sustained cyber operations against our oil industry, critical infrastructure and utility industries, and the entertainment industry.  With trade tensions running higher, China’s interest in hacking U.S. private businesses for data, trade secrets and intellectual property has only increased.
As noted by Wired magazine, Chinese government-backed hackers are also interested in so-called “command and control” opportunities in the U.S., everything from satellites and main frame computers to in-home laptops and security cameras.  Yes, the Chinese are even interested in that nanny cam you may have in your nursery.
For some hackers, dealing with personal, in-home technology is a game to show what they can accomplish. But for other hackers, it’s an effort to find new ways to access personal information and find security holes that might allow them to launch far greater cyber-attacks from home networks.

If consumers start demanding up-front, full disclosure from retailers prior to purchase, they’d likely find consumers drawn to the devices that use the American based platforms, even if those devices cost a dollar or two more.

American consumers, while alarmed by such data breaches as the Yahoo email hack in which almost 3 billion consumers had personally identifiable information stolen, or the various retail chain hacks such as Target and Neiman Marcus, still tend to be lax about the security measures they use and fewer than 15 percent utilize security measures like password keepers to secure access to their important web sites and data like bank and investment accounts, health care information and access to their cloud storage, where they upload everything from legal documents, financial information and tax returns, to family photos, music and movies.
The cloud and the access the cloud can enable to home networks is increasingly where consumers should be concerned. Most probably aren’t asking where the data from their smart devices is going, or who has access to that data. Nor are they asking what the rules and regulations governing 3rd party access to that data are and where is it actually stored.
But they should be.
Most consumers are completely unaware that the smart devices, on which they’ve come to rely for everyday home convenience, transmit data back to a platform that is then stored on “the cloud.” When you go to Walmart or Target and buy a camera-enabled smart TV or a baby cam monitor, you don’t consider that the digital video feed might be transmitted to and stored in a cloud outside the United States and viewed by a hostile, foreign government like the Chinese.
But that is exactly what is happening.
Those smart, internet of things (IoT) devices, which numbered just over 8 billion in 2017, require platforms to “plug into” and a significant amount of those devices have agreements with platforms controlled by Chinese nationals with obvious ties to the Chinese government.  That’s right, not kidding: the communist Chinese government may have access to your home via those smart devices. 
This entire trend of the internet of things and smart devices is only going to accelerate: there are estimates that by 2020 there will be over 20 billion IoT devices, all plugged in to some platform somewhere. What retailers are not telling you is that those technological wonders likely rely on platforms and cloud storage controlled by Chinese nationals – sure it’s in the fine print on page 36 of the disclosures, but when was the last time you actually read all of the fine print?  But if you did, would you still buy those phones and cameras that plug into certain platforms? 
If consumers start demanding up-front, full disclosure from retailers prior to purchase, they’d likely find consumers drawn to the devices that use the American based platforms, even if those devices cost a dollar or two more. We can be assured that the Chinese are going to wage this cyber war.  That doesn’t mean American consumers have to help them win.
Ned Ryun is the Founder and CEO of American Majority, a national grassroots organization. Learn more at AmericanMajority.org.