MNUCHIN: GOP Set to Approve New Round of $1,200 COVID-Relief Checks

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MNUCHIN: GOP Set to Approve New Round of $1,200 COVID-Relief Checks

(Headline USA) Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Saturday that Republicans were set to roll out the next COVID-19 aid package Monday.

He assured that there was backing from the White House after he and President Donald Trump’s top aide met to salvage the $1 trillion proposal that had floundered just days before.

Mnuchin told reporters at the Capitol that extending an expiring unemployment benefit — but reducing it substantially — was a top priority for Trump.

The secretary called the $600 weekly aid “ridiculous” and a disincentive for people to go back to work. He also promised a fresh round of $1,200 stimulus checks would be coming in August.

“We’re prepared to move quickly,” Mnuchin said after he and Mark Meadows, the president’s acting chief of staff, spent several hours with GOP staff at the Capitol. He said the president would “absolutely” support the emerging Republican package.

Mnuchin’s optimistic assessment came before Democrats weighed in publicly on the updated proposal, which remained only a starting point in negotiations with House and Senate leaders in the other party.

He said he recently called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ahead of shuttle negotiations next week on the broader deal.

The White House and Senate Republicans were racing to regroup after plans to introduce a $1 trillion virus rescue bill collapsed Thursday amid GOP infighting over its size, scope and details.

It was expected to bring $105 billion to help schools reopen, new money for virus testing and benefits for businesses, including a fresh round of loans, tax breaks and a sweeping liability shield from COVID-related lawsuits.

As Republicans struggled, the White House team downplayed the differences with the GOP senators as overblown and said Trump was focused on providing relief.

“The president has been very clear. He wants to make sure that the American people have what they need during this unprecedented time,” Meadows said, “to make sure not only the money is there but the programs.”

The expiration of the $600 weekly jobless benefits boost had been propelling the Republicans to act.

Democrats already approved their sweeping $3 trillion plan from Pelosi two months ago.

But with millions of Americans about to be suddenly cut off from the aid starting Saturday, they were bracing to prevent social and economic fallout.

The White House floated plans to cut the additional aid back to $100 a week, while Senate Republicans preferred $200, with general agreement about phasing out the flat boost in favor of one that ensures no more than 70% of an employee’s previous pay.

Mnuchin also said the $1,200 direct payments would be based on the same formula from the earlier aid bill.

Individuals making $75,000 or less, for example, received the full amount and those making more than $75,000 received less than $1,200 depending on their income. Individuals earning above $100,000 did not qualify for the payment.

“We’ll get the majority of them out in August and those will help people,” Mnuchin said.

The administration officials said the overall package remained at $1 trillion, apparently on par with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s original draft.

Democrats had warned time was running out, saying Republicans were in disarray.

The jobless benefit officially expires July 31, but due to the way states process unemployment payments, the cutoff was effectively Saturday. Other aid, including a federal eviction moratorium on millions of rental units, also expires at month’s end.

The GOP plan was not expected to come to a vote but serve as a counter-offer to Democrats.

The path ahead remained uncertain, but both sides were scrambling to reach a deal.

McConnell, who spent time over the weekend in his home state of the Kentucky, said Friday he hoped a package could be agreed on “in the next few weeks.”

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.

Trump Signs Four Executive Orders to Lower Prescription Drug Costs

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Trump Signs Four Executive Orders to Lower Prescription Drug Costs

(Headline USA) At a White House ceremony Friday, Presidnet Donald Trump signed four executive orders to to reduce the drug prices.

The four orders would:

— Allow states, wholesalers and pharmacies to import FDA-approved drugs from foreign countries and sell them in the U.S.

Trump has long complained that countries where the government sets the price of drugs are taking advantage of American consumers. The order includes a special provision to allow wholesalers and pharmacies to re-import insulin and biological drugs.

— Use the lowest price among other economically advanced countries to set what Medicare pays for certain drugs administered in a doctor’s office, including many cancer medications.

This would apply to the most expensive medications covered by Medicare’s “Part B,” which pays for outpatient care. Drugmakers are particularly leery of the approach, since Democrats want to use it more broadly to allow Medicare to directly negotiate prices.

— Direct federally funded community health centers to pass discounts they now get for insulin and EpiPens directly to low-income patients.

— Ensure that rebates drugmakers now pay to benefit managers and insurers get passed directly to patients when they buy a medication.

“I’m unrigging the system that is many decades old,” Trump declared, promising “massive” savings.

Consumers may not notice immediate changes, since the orders must be carried out by the federal bureaucracy and could face court challenges.

Trump came into office complaining that pharmaceutical companies were “getting away with murder” and promising to bring them under control.

Trump pulled his punches, Pelosi said in a statement. “After promising that he would ‘negotiate like crazy’ for lower prescription drug prices, it is clear that President Trump meant not negotiate at all.”

A drive to enact major legislation this year stalled in Congress. AlthougTrump told Republican senators that lowering prescription prices is “something you have to do,” many remain reluctant.

Last year the House did pass Pelosi’s Medicare negotiations bill, which would have capped out-of-pocket drug costs for older people and expanded program benefits as well. It had no path forward in the Republican Senate, and the White House calls it unworkable.

But there was an alternative. A bipartisan Senate bill backed by Trump stopped short of giving Medicare bargaining power, but would have limited annual price increases and capped costs for older people. The bill passed out of a Senate committee but was never brought to the full body.

“It’s not clear why the administration hasn’t made a bigger push to line up votes to get a bill through the Senate and a deal with Congress, given strong public support to lower drug costs,” said Tricia Neuman, a Medicare expert with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

Americans remain worried about drug costs, with nearly 9 in 10 saying in a recent Gallup-West Health poll that they’re concerned the pharmaceutical industry will take advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to raise prices.

It’s a particularly important issue for older people.

Drugmakers remain adamantly opposed to government efforts to curb prices.

Trump’s administration “has decided to pursue a radical and dangerous policy to set prices based on rates paid in countries that he has labeled as socialist, which will harm patients today and into the future,” Stephen Ubl, head of the pharmaceutical lobby, said in a statement.

Trump delayed the effective date of the international pricing order for a month, to see if he can get a deal with industry.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.

Chinese Researcher at UC Davis Arrested for Lying About Ties to People’s Liberation Army

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Chinese Researcher at UC Davis Arrested for Lying About Ties to People’s Liberation Army

(Associated Press) A Chinese researcher accused of concealing her ties to the Chinese military on a visa application she submitted so she could work in the U.S. was booked Friday into a Northern California jail and was expected to appear in federal court Monday.

Sacramento County jail records show Juan Tang, 37, was being held on behalf of federal authorities after she was arrested by the U.S. Marshals Service.

It was unclear if she had an attorney who could comment on her behalf.

The Justice Department on Thursday announced charges against Tang and three other scientists living in the U.S., saying they lied about their status as members of China’s People’s Liberation Army. All were charged with visa fraud.

Tang was the last of the four to be arrested, after the justice department accused the Chinese consulate in San Francisco of harboring a known fugitive.

The consulate did not immediately respond to email and Facebook messages seeking comment and it was not possible to leave a telephone message.

The Justice Department said Tang lied about her military ties in a visa application last October as she made plans to work at the University of California, Davis and again during an FBI interview months later.

Agents found photos of Tang dressed in military uniform and reviewed articles in China identifying her military affiliation.

UC Davis said Tang left her job as a visiting researcher in the Department of Radiation Oncology in June. Her work was funded by a study-based exchange program affiliated with China’s Ministry of Education, the university said in a statement.

Agents have said they believe Tang sought refuge at the consulate after they interviewed her at her home in Davis on June 20.

The FBI has been interviewing visa holders in more than 25 American cities suspected of hiding their ties to the Chinese military.

The allegations came as U.S.-China relations continued to deteriorate, particularly over allegations of Chinese theft of U.S. intellectual property.

China’s consulate in Houston was scheduled to shut down Friday on order of U.S. authorities after Washington accused Chinese agents of trying to steal medical and other research in Texas.

“We can confirm that the PRC Consulate General in Houston is closed,” a State Department spokesperson confirmed late Friday. The spokesperson spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to comment publicly.

In response, China on Friday ordered the U.S. to close its consulate in the city of Chengdu.

MURDOCK: NYTimes Falls Seriously Short of Being Moral Authority on Racism

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MURDOCK: NYTimes Falls Seriously Short of Being Moral Authority on Racism

(Deroy Murdock, Headline USA) From high above the sidewalks of New York, America’s so-called “Paper of Record” peers down its nose with condescension at the nation whose news it deems “fit to print.”

Deroy Murdock
Deroy Murdock

It sees this country as a giant slave-ship-turned-superpower that surges racism into every conceivable crevice in Earth’s crust.

It slams America’s Founding Fathers who owned slaves; hammers New York Life Insurance, SUNY New Paltz, Georgetown University (my alma mater), and other institutions for their historical slave holdings, and even whacks President Abraham Lincoln for his “reluctant and late” signature on the Emancipation Proclamation.

As the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin observed, “The chief media cheerleader for the chaos unfolding across the nation…routinely eviscerates America’s heroes, its culture and, through the paper’s 1619 Project, its founding.”

In a pair of jaw-dropping articles, Goodwin recently exposed the invisibility of the slave-shaming robes in which the Old Gray Lady attempts to cloak herself.

This media outlet’s family history is rife with slavery, Confederate boosterism, and enforcement of Jim Crow segregation.

Regarding race, the Old Gray Lady should sit quietly in her rocking chair. She is in no position to wag her wrinkled finger at anyone.

As Goodwin explains, the extended Ochs–Sulzberger clan have owned this Leftist tip sheet since 1896. They are tainted by myriad racial horrors.

Abraham Mendes Seixas, an early Sulzberger relative, lived in Charleston, South Carolina.

A local newspaper published a poem in 1784 as a sort of grotesque commercial jingle to market slaves. An excerpt:

Abraham Seixas…He has for sale, Some Negroes, male…
He has likewise Some of their wives…
For planting, too, He has a few
To sell, all for cash…or bring them to the lash.

“Seixas was also the master or superintendent of the Charleston workhouse,” explains Robert Rosen, author of The Jewish Confederates.

“This was a city-run facility in which slaves were beaten for violating laws or rules or running away,” Rosen adds. “It’s pretty bad. So he not only owned and sold slaves but he was paid to inflict physical punishment on them, which I’m sure could be described as torture.”

Ochs-Sulzberger slave ledger
Ochs-Sulzberger ancestor John Mayer’s five slaves were counted in the 1860 U.S. Census, excerpted here at lower left.

According to a family history that Goodwin cites, an Ochs relative named John Mayer lived in Natchez, Mississippi.

 

He owned at least five unnamed slaves in 1860: two males (70 and 26) and three females (65, 45, and 23).

Mayer’s niece, Bertha Levy Ochs, was a gung-ho Confederate. Her brother, Oscar, and two cousins in Mississippi fought under General Robert E. Lee, whom she idolized.

Levy “embraced a contemptuous antebellum view of blacks,” biographers Susan Tifft and Alex Jones report.

Levy was caught smuggling medical-grade quinine, inside her son George’s baby carriage, from Ohio to Confederate agents in Kentucky.

Nicknamed “that Confederate lady,” Levy was buried in 1908 with the secessionist flag draping her casket.

Levy’s son, Adolph Simon Ochs, purchased The Chattanooga Times in 1879.

Under his leadership, the paper commented on 1931’s Scottsboro Boys case, which involved two white women’s false-rape charges against multiple black males.

“Death Penalty Properly Demanded in Fiendish Crime of Nine Burly Negroes,” the paper editorialized. Its trial correspondent called the accused “beasts unfit to be called human.”

Ochs bought the “Paper of Record” in 1896.

In 1906, it toasted the impending centennial of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s birth and cheered him as “the great Southern leader.”

Ochs died suddenly in 1935. According to Civil War Times, the United Daughters of the Confederacy “sent a pillow embroidered with the Confederate flag to be placed in his coffin.”

Meanwhile, Ochs’s brother George (the infant conspirator in his mother’s clandestine quinine deliveries), excelled as a Democrat politician.

He was Chattanooga’s police commissioner, two-term mayor, and school-board president. That made him a top enforcer of local and state Jim Crow segregation statutes.

The historical race hatred of this paper’s controlling family, thus, is beyond dispute.

The Ochs-Sulzbergers will need buckets of Purell to clean their hands, now filthy from this problematic ancestry.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research.

WATCH: Portland Rioters Light Courthouse on Fire w/ Officers Barricaded Inside

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WATCH: Portland Rioters Light Courthouse on Fire w/ Officers Barricaded Inside

Rioters in Portland barricaded Department of Homeland Security officers inside a federal courthouse and attempted to light the building on fire, according to officials.

Portland city officials and Democratic lawmakers have insisted that the protests happening in Portland are peaceful and that there is no need for federal law enforcement.

But a senior DHS official said on Thursday that the rioters continue to get more and more aggressive, and that they would have already burnt down the courthouse were it not for DHS officers at the scene.

“Last night’s violence was even more aggressive than previous nights as rioters once again tried to set fire to the federal courthouse and actively tried to breach the entrance of the courthouse,” the official said in an emailed statement, according to the Washington Examiner.

“Rioters are also employing tactics that force federal officers to leave the Hatfield Federal Courthouse, setting them up to be attacked with lasers and projectiles,” the official said.

More than 1,000 rioters gathered outside of the Hatfield Federal Courthouse on Thursday night.

Many attempted to block the entrances to the courthouse in order to force DHS forces from leaving the building.

The officers that tried to escape were beamed in the eyes with lasers, which could cause permanent eye damage, according to officials.

Rioters also set up barricades outside of the courthouse entrances to trap the rest of the DHS officers inside, while others tried to break through the fencing and windows to set fires within the building.

DHS officials on scene said a shopping cart full of bricks and baseball bats was left outside of the building for protesters to use against law enforcement.

At least five protesters were arrested on Thursday night, according to DHS officials, and one DHS Federal Protective Service officer was injured after being struck by fireworks.

Wash. Post Settles w/ Covington Catholic Student over $250M Libel Lawsuit

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Wash. Post Settles w/ Covington Catholic Student over $250M Libel Lawsuit

The Washington Post is the latest news organization to settle a defamation lawsuit with Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann, who took the Post to court for falsely portraying him as the aggressor in a viral confrontation with a Native American elder.

Sandmann filed suit against other news outlets as well, including ABC News, CBS News, The Guardian, the Huffington Post, NPR, Slate, The Hill and Gannett (which owns the Cincinnati Enquirer), along with other local publications.

In total, Sandmann was seeking $800 million from the publications because of their false reporting.

The Post claimed that Sandmann had confronted a Native American elder, Nathan Phillips, who was beating a drum and singing a chant.

Because Sandmann was wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, it was easy to portray him as the villain.

But video evidence proved that a group of Black Hebrew Israelites had provoked the confrontation. Moreover, Phillips—a prominent activist for left-wing causes—had walked directly toward Sandmann, beating the drum in his face.

CNN also settled with Sandmann earlier this year. Sandmann’s lawsuit alleged that CNN’s reporters “without any reasonable investigation … took something straight off Twitter that had been in essence manipulated so that it told one story and they reported it as the truth.”

Sandmann’s lawyers said CNN and the Washington Post “elevated false, heinous accusations of racist conduct” against Sandmann and disregarded “well-established journalistic standards and ethics” in its reporting.

Because of the false accusations, they said, Sandmann’s “character has now been determined by the lies” these outlets reported as fact.

Compromise Candidate Biden Increasingly Pimps Himself to Radical Left

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Compromise Candidate Biden Increasingly Pimps Himself to Radical Left

Presidential candidates historically tack toward the political center after winning their party’s primary elections. But presumptive Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden is bowing to the radical left.

Biden’s campaign was nearly dead until resuscitated by backroom deals ahead Super Tuesday elections in March.

He then became the emergency candidate that Democratic elites chose to derail socialist frontrunner Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

More recently, though, he has formed a strategic partnership with Sanders and giving him surprising pull over the campaign platform.

Other extreme-left progressives including Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez of New York have also been promised places of importance in the 77-year-old Biden’s inner circle of advisers.

According to the media, a Biden presidency would restore America to pre-President Trump normalcy. At least, that’s the message to middle America and battleground swing voters.

In reality, Biden is making one concession after another to the extreme left—assuming he’s cognizant of what he’s even saying.

“We’re going to have a breathtaking opportunity to rewrite our economy so that prosperity flows not just to CEOs, but to workers who actually build the country,” Biden said earlier this month while citing his new economic agenda.

The message may sound like boilerplate liberal Democrat schtick, but his proposal contains an incredible $10 trillion in new spending—and that’s just for starters.

Biden’s plan is more than three times Hillary Clinton’s 2016 economic proposal and involves $775 billion for government-run childcare, $2 trillion for “environmental justice,” and $7 trillion of additional spending.

The plan also involves expanding Social Security even though the program is nearly insolvent, a pledge to raise the minimum wage and the elimination of cash bail across the country so that criminals can be released after being arrested.

On Tuesday, President Trump retweeted comments Biden made about introducing Islam into public schools. The former vice president has also been referring to nationwide riots and Antifa attempts to burn down a federal court in Portland, Oregon as “peaceful protests.”

Further debunking the idea that Biden would stand up to the violent, extremist left-wing of the Democrat Party is the fact that he embraced Sanders earlier this month.

Sanders, the socialist threat that Biden was said to extinguish, penned a compromise agenda that was released earlier this month.

The 110-page “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations” promises free college, tripling previously attempted tax hikes, and threatens polices officers, border patrol agents and immigration enforcement authorities.

“The goals of the task force were to move the Biden campaign into as progressive a direction as possible, and I think we did that,” Sanders told NPR.

“On issue after issue, whether it was education, the economy, health care, climate, immigration, criminal justice, I think there was significant movement on the part of the Biden campaign,” Sanders added.

Biden’s cognitive decline has been on public display since he first announced his presidential bid last year.

Expecting him to moderate or serve as a check on the worst excesses of the Democrat far-left may not only be outside his mental wherewithal, it may be outside his original intentions.

Five months before the Iowa caucuses, or first Democrat primary, Biden had already proposed a far more liberal agenda than Hillary Clinton failed 2016 campaign.

“Biden’s current set of policy prescriptions would likely be considered radical if they had been proposed in any previous Democratic presidential primary,” reported McClatchy.

Conservative Professor Found Dead Just One Week Prior to $500K Settlement

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Conservative Professor Found Dead Just One Week Prior to $500K Settlement

Professor Mike Adams, an outspoken activist for conservative causes including free speech protections and opposition to abortion, was found dead at his North Carolina home on Thursday.

The New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office conducted a wellness check after concerned family members didn’t hear from the longtime University of North Carolina-Wilmington sociologist.

Authorities haven’t released any details regarding Adams’ cause of death, but his passing notably occurred just one week before his forced retirement—and a $500,000 settlement from the UNCW for violating his First Amendment rights.

Adams was an open conservative who relied on his tenured professorship to speak about taboo social and criminal justice issues.

He also refused to bow to politically correct mobs and campus speech-policing efforts.

That made him a target, and at times Adams seemed to enjoy testing intolerant campus liberals.

In one Twitter post, Adams blasted Democratic North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper for his draconian executive orders that shut down businesses and social gatherings while making allowances for violent statue-toppling mobs and Black Lives Matter protests.

“This evening, I ate pizza and drank beer with six guys at a six seat table top. I almost felt like a free man who was not living in the slave state of North Carolina. Massa Cooper, let my people go!” he tweeted on May 29.

The message prompted petitions and demonstrations calling for his immediate firing.

Adams, who was also a columnist for the conservative websites The Daily Wire and Town Hall, was once again branded a “racist,” “misogynist” and “homophobe.”

The criticism grew to an untenable level that UNCW Chancellor Jose V. Sartarelli succeeded in pushing Adams out of his professorship, but not before agreeing to a roughly $700,000 total settlement.

Adams had many supporters who respected his courage to pushback against left-wing abuses on campus. Many viewed him as a champion of free speech and free thought, even if they didn’t agree with his politics.

Despite a vocal minority of progressive student- and faculty-activists, Adams’ classes were popular with most of his students.

He earned mostly positive student evaluations and received multiple teaching awards, according to his UNCW curriculum vitae.

The Office of University Relations at UNCW released a statement about his death on Thursday night.

“It is with sadness that we share the news that the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office is conducting a death investigation involving Dr. Mike Adams, professor of criminology. Please keep his friends and loved ones in your thoughts.”

Traumatized Minnesota Police See Mass Exodus as Gov. Bans Restraints

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Traumatized Minnesota Police See Mass Exodus as Gov. Bans Restraints

Already, more than 200 Minnesota police officers have filed paperwork to leave the force because of what they claim is post-traumatic stress disorder.

But on Thursday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed a bill that would further restrict law enforcement, banning them from using certain choke-holds such as neck restraints, and prohibiting “warrior-style” training.

“It’s almost like a nuclear bomb hit the city, and the people who didn’t perish are standing around,” Officer Rich Walker Sr., a 16-year Minneapolis police veteran and union official, said of the mood within the department.

“I’m still surprised that we’ve got cops showing up to work, to be honest,” he added.

The death of George Floyd while in custody of Minneapolis police shocked the nation and sent ripple effects that have continued to build, including violent race-riots.

Since then, the Gopher State—which is led predominantly by Democrats at every level—has scrambled to react accordingly in an effort to rehabilitate its tarnished image.

The new bill, supported by both Minnesota Democrats and Republicans, is a “critical step towards criminal justice reform,” according to Walz.

“They are meant to strengthen transparency and community oversight,” he added during a press conference on Thursday.

The legislation also would require officers to intercede if another officer is using excessive force or endangering the life of a citizen.

Additionally, it creates a new advisory council for the state board that licenses officers, making it even more difficult to become an officer in the city. And officers will be required to undergo mental health training.

Still, this wasn’t enough for radical leftists who argued that the bill’s reforms were “low hanging fruit” that don’t address the real problems within law enforcement.

“The autism training we thought was an important thing to have … and we also like the fact that it bans fear-based training [which] is something we’ve been working on for quite a long time now,” Michelle Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality, told CBS News. “But so much of what we wanted was not even given a second glance.”

These regulations will likely accelerate the exodus occurring within the Minneapolis Police Department, said Ronald Meuser Jr., a lawyer representing the officers.

Meuser said that around 20% of the department, which employs around 850 people, could soon be gone, according to the New York Times.

Crooked FBI Agents Used Routine Intel Briefing to Spy on Trump

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Crooked FBI Agents Used Routine Intel Briefing to Spy on Trump

Leading presidential candidates routinely receive intelligence briefings for national security reasons—and as a precaution against nefarious foreign actors.

But in a reverse spying scheme, nefarious FBI officials used an August 2016 intelligence briefing to spy on then-candidate Donald Trump.

According to newly declassified documents, federal agents, led by former FBI special agent Peter Strzok, hijacked the briefing to secretly gather information on Trump.

The documents, declassified by newly-appointed Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, included an outline used by senior FBI agents to conduct the briefing, as well as emails about the ambush.

One of the emails from Strzok indicated that he planned to use future briefings with the Trump campaign to secretly increase intelligence-gathering efforts.

The August 2016 briefing was presented as a normal event, but it was part of the FBI’s notorious Crossfire Hurricane spying operation.

The corrupt investigators also sought dirt on former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, both of whom were top Trump advisers.

They later opened their own investigation on Flynn and ensnared him in a perjury trap by claiming he lied about potential violations of the antiquated Logan Act.

The documents were released Thursday by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and  Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc. The two, respectively, chair the Senate Finance Committee, and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The GOP committee chairs had inquired about the security briefing abuse in April 2019, as well as “a number of unauthorized leaks of highly sensitive information regarding intelligence efforts related to President Trump’s election and administration.”

Strzok worked for former FBI Director Robert Mueller during his eighteen-month special counsel probe beginning in May 2017, but he was fired for anti-Trump texts with his married lover Lisa Page, an FBI senior attorney.

FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith also was involved in the corrupt security briefing.

Clinesmith—later revealed to have posted shocking anti-Trump messages on his social media accounts—was ultimately fired for falsifying an email that was used to help secure a FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign advisor Carter Page.

The document further implicates FBI Special Agent Joe Pientka, who spun his observations of Trump and Trump’s staff when he proposed issues involving Russia.

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