Trump: Dems 'Are Getting Very Strange'

President Donald Trump jabbed Democrats, saying they are getting very “strange” for a proposal to eliminate the Electoral College and change the size of the Supreme Court.
Trump’s comments came in a tweet shortly after midnight Wednesday.
He wrote:

“The Democrats are getting very ‘strange.’ They now want to change the voting age to 16, abolish the Electoral College, and Increase significantly the number of Supreme Court Justices. Actually, you’ve got to win it at the Ballot Box!”

His post on Twitter came after Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who is seeking the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, said Monday that she would support abolishing the Electoral College. And some Democrat candidates have also backed lowering the voting age and adding more Supreme Court justices, Newsweek reported.

Trump's middle-of-the-night post followed on the heels of a pair of tweets from late Tuesday that seemed to oppose the idea of eliminating the Electoral College:

“Campaigning for the Popular Vote is much easier & different than campaigning for the Electoral College. It’s like training for the 100 yard dash vs. a marathon. The brilliance of the Electoral College is that you must go to many States to win. With the Popular Vote, you go to....

“....just the large States - the Cities would end up running the Country. Smaller States & the entire Midwest would end up losing all power - & we can’t let that happen. I used to like the idea of the Popular Vote, but now realize the Electoral College is far better for the U.S.A.”

Rep. Cummings: White House 'Stonewalling' House Panel

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D- Md. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., says the White House has “engaged in an unprecedented level of stonewalling, delay and obstruction.”
Cummings, who is chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, made his comments in a column posted by The Washington Post on Tuesday evening.

“In November, the American people voted overwhelmingly to put Democrats in charge of the House of Representatives to start serving as a truly independent check and balance on the executive branch,” he said. “Since then, President (Donald) Trump and his allies have complained of “Presidential Harassment,” decrying Democrats for having the audacity to request documents and witnesses to fulfill our constitutional responsibilities.

“The problem is that the White House is engaged in an unprecedented level of stonewalling, delay and obstruction.”
Cummings claimed he has sent 12 letters to the White House on a half-dozen topics. But the administration has refused to turn over any documents and has not produced any witnesses for interviews.

He said his committee is reviewing White House security clearances, “hush money” payments to silence women alleging affairs with Trump, White House officials’ alleged use of personal email in violation of federal law and other issues.
Cummings maintained the refusal to produce any documents or witnesses “to the primary investigative committee in the House reflects a decision at the highest levels to deny congressional oversight altogether.”

And he added: “If our committee must resort to issuing subpoenas, there should be no doubt about why. This has nothing to do with presidential harassment and everything to do with unprecedented obstruction.”

AP: Trump, Republicans Increasingly Optimistic That Mueller Will Show No Collusion

It's a witch hunt, a vendetta, the worst presidential harassment in history.
That's what President Donald Trump has shouted for two years about the special counsel's Russia probe. Now, barring an eleventh-hour surprise, Trump and his allies are starting to see it as something potentially very different: a political opportunity.
With Robert Mueller's findings expected any day, the president has grown increasingly confident the report will produce what he insisted all along — no clear evidence of a conspiracy between Russia and his 2016 campaign. And Trump and his advisers are considering how to weaponize those possible findings for the 2020 race, according to current and former White House officials and presidential confidants who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
A change is underway as well among congressional Democrats, who have long believed the report would offer damning evidence against the president. The Democrats are busy building new avenues for evidence to come out, opening a broad array of investigations of Trump's White House and businesses that go far beyond Mueller's focus on Russian interference to help Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton.
It's a striking role reversal.
No one knows exactly what Mueller will say, but Trump, his allies and members of Congress are trying to map out the post-probe political dynamics.
One scenario would have seemed downright implausible until recently: The president will take the findings and run on them, rather than against them, by painting the special counsel as an example of failed government overreach and Trump himself as the victim who managed to prove his innocence.
The top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, said on the House floor last week that he had a "news flash" for Democrats who had high hopes that the report would be damaging to Trump.
"What happens when it comes back and says none of this was true, the president did not do anything wrong?" Collins asked. "Then the meltdown will occur."
Trump's tweeted version was even more graphic: The Democrats' House investigative committees were going "stone cold CRAZY."
That was in reaction to Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler's document requests to 81 people, businesses and organizations related to Trump. Nadler said his panel must look at "a much broader question" than Mueller has.
Adam Schiff, chairman of the intelligence committee, also said there's much more to look into. Mueller, he said, "can't be doing much of a money laundering investigation" if he hasn't subpoenaed Deutsche Bank, which has loaned millions of dollars to Trump. Schiff's panel, along with the House Financial Services Committee, is looking into money laundering and Trump's foreign financial entanglements.
"We have a separate and independent and important responsibility," Schiff has said. "And that is to tell the country what happened."
The Russia probe, taken over by Mueller in May 2017, has posed a mortal threat to the presidency since Trump was elected — a possible case for collusion or obstruction of justice that could begin a domino effect ending with impeachment. Those fears still exist, but as the investigation winds down, other feelings have taken hold in the White House, namely a cautious optimism that the worst is over, that no smoking gun has been found.
Even if Mueller's final report does not implicate the president in criminal conduct, the investigation was far from fruitless. His team brought charges against 34 people, including six Trump associates, and three companies. His prosecutors revealed a sweeping criminal effort by Russians to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and showed that people connected to the Trump campaign were eager to exploit emails stolen from Democrats.
Trump, of course, has railed relentlessly against the probe, deeming it a baseless "witch hunt," sometimes in all capital letters, and has said it was based on unfounded allegations perpetrated by his "deep state" enemies in the Department of Justice, as well as his foes in the Democratic Party and the media.
If the report proves anticlimactic, says former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a strong Trump ally, "there would no longer be any justification for what the House Dems want to do. They have their report, they had the guy they wanted writing it, and he had the full power of the federal government behind him and they still didn't get the president.
"Trump can say: Here is the report. I didn't fire Mueller, I didn't interfere with him. If you want to keep investigating me, it just shows that it is purely partisan."
In fact, Trump has told his inner circle that, if the report is underwhelming, he will use Twitter and interviews to gloat over the findings, complain about the probe's cost and depict the entire investigation as an attempt to obstruct his agenda, according to advisers and confidants.
The president's campaign and pro-Trump outside groups will then likely amplify the message, while his advisers expect the conservative media, including Fox News, to act as an echo chamber. A full-throated attack on the investigation, portraying it as a failed coup, could also be the centerpiece of Trump campaign events, including rallies, they say.
While Trump's base has long been suspicious of Mueller, the president's team believes independents and moderate Democrats who backed him in the last election but have since soured may return to the fold if convinced he has been unfairly targeted.
In the meantime, the president and his surrogates will labor to link the report with the mounting investigations launched by House Democrats.
One of Trump's most ardent defenders, North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, tweeted last month that Democrats will "keep investigating if Mueller doesn't find what they want. Amazing."
Meadows wrote in a separate tweet: "Their message is shifting. The 'Russian collusion' narrative is falling apart, and they know it." (The Associated Press.)

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Trump Admin Seeks $86B in Intelligence Agency Spending

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats

The Trump administration is requesting $86 billion in spending for intelligence agencies, including $23 billion for highly classified military intelligence activities (MIP) in fiscal year 2020, The New York Times reports.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said the administration wants $62.8 billion for its intelligence agencies while the Pentagon asked for $22.95 billion for its secretive "black budget."
Overall, the budget includes a 6 percent spending increase and covers the costs of cyberweapons, spy satellites, and the national intelligence program that supports the armed services and tactical units.

Both budgets also propose spending more money on capabilities to compete with Russia and China, according to officials who spoke with the Times.
The MIP supports "defense intelligence activities intended to support tactical military operations and priorities," according to a 2016 Congressional Research Service, while funding for the National Intelligence Program goes to nondefense organizations.

The Pentagon in a statement said the request includes base budget funding as well as the war fund known overseas as the overseas contingency operations account.

"The department determined that releasing this top-line figure does not jeopardize any classified activities within the MIP," the statement noted. "No other MIP budget figures or program details will be released, as they remain classified for national security reasons."

White House Predicts 10-Year Economic Boom

Contrary to the views of most economists, the Trump administration expects the U.S. economy to keep booming over the next decade on the strength of further tax cuts, reduced regulation, and improvements to the nation's infrastructure.
The annual report from President Donald Trump's Council of Economic Advisers forecasts that the economy will expand a brisk 3.2 percent this year and a still-healthy 2.8 percent a decade from now. That is much faster than the Federal Reserve's long-run forecast of 1.9 percent annual economic growth.

The administration's forecast hinges on an expectation that it will manage to implement further tax cuts, incentives for infrastructure improvements, new labor policies and scaled-back regulations — programs that are unlikely to gain favor with the Democratic-led House that would need to approve most of them.

Kevin Hassett, chairman of the White House council, insisted that the president's economic agenda would provide enough fuel to drive robust growth at a time when the majority of economists foresee a slowdown due in part to the aging U.S. population.
He said the biggest risk to growth would be if financial markets anticipate that Trump's existing policies would be reversed. Without getting into specifics, Hassett said the risk would be if markets expect that the winner of the 2020 presidential election would shift away from policies such as the tax overhaul that Trump signed into law in 2017.

"Uncertainty over the policies themselves could slow their positive impact," Hassett said.
The tax cuts added roughly $1.5 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade, not accounting for economic growth. The report suggests that the lower tax rates have increased business investment in ways that will make the economy more productive, while also creating a surge in people coming off the sidelines to search for work.

The administration's optimism comes amid signs of slowing global economic growth, as well as a recent slowdown in manufacturing production and weakness in retail sales in January and December.

127,000 Blacks, Hispanics Incarcerated When Harris Was Calif. AG

At least 127,000 blacks and Hispanics were sent to prison in California during the time Kamala Harris served as the state’s attorney general, The Washington Free Beacon is reporting.

Harris, now serving in the U.S. Senate, is currently running for the Democratic nomination for president.
The Free Beacon, in data obtained from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said at least 44,172 black offenders and 83,370 Hispanic offenders were sent to California prisons between n 2011 and 2016.  By comparison 48,761 whites and 11,182 “other” were incarcerated during that time.

Many of those were prosecuted by her office or that of a state attorney who reported to her, the Free Beacon noted.
The website pointed out that the numbers translate into 23.6 percent of new inmates being black and 44.5 percent being Hispanic. According to the Free Beacon, The U.S. Census Bureau estimated 39.1 percent of Californians were Hispanic/Latino and 6.5 percent were black or African American.

Yet, as a presidential candidate, Harris has touted herself as a progressive on racial justice and has claimed to have reduced racial disparities in the criminal justice system, according to the Free Beacon. At one point, she labeled President Donald Trump a racist during an interview with The Root.

Bill O'Reilly to Newsmax TV: Media Sinks to 'Sad' New Low

The hate-Trump media's attempts to tie the mass shootings in New Zealand to President Donald Trump "is hateful, dishonest, and insulting the American public," Bill O'Reilly said on Newsmax TV.
"As soon as I saw the Trump haters try to tie the president of the United States into mass murder in New Zealand, I turned the channel – I turned it off," O'Reilly said during an appearance on Monday night's "The Wayne Allyn Root Show."

"Because I've had enough. And I think my feeling reflects the majority of Americans: Enough.

"President Trump didn't have anything to do with the New Zealand mass murder, and to try to tie him into it is hateful, dishonest, and insulting the American public."
O'Reilly lamented the American media's weak effort to damage their own president at any opportunity, no matter how remote the attack is, because of a nonstop anti-Trump agenda.

"There's no other story for the media other than Donald Trump," O'Reilly told Root. "If Donald Trump isn't in the news, they don't have anything to report on.
"And that's really sad for this country. Really, really, sad."