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President Trump had a busy schedule at the end of May 2019, which included a return trip to Japan.
This time it was a State Visit.
As he and First Lady Melania would be out of the country on Memorial Day weekend, they visited Arlington Cemetery before their departure:
On May 25, the first day of the State Visit to Japan, Trump met with that nation’s business leaders, too many to list here:
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife Akie hosted the Trumps for dinner that night. Abe had not forgotten his guest’s favourite dessert:
Abe was delighted to welcome back his friend:
The next day, the two world leaders played golf:
Their wives toured the Mori Building Digital Art Museum:
The QTree explained the significance of the following day’s welcome by the new Emperor and Empress of Japan — a first for both couples:
… our President and FLOTUS become the first guests of Japanese Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako at the Imperial Palace.
There are three components to the state visit: (1) The guest arrival and formal greeting by the Emperor and Empress. (2) The ceremonial anthems of both nations and the presentation of the imperial guard. (3) A “state call” or discussion of diplomatic matters between the Emperor, Empress and their honored guests.
During the official state call component there is an exchange of gifts.
1) Formal greeting by the Emperor and Empress …
2) The ceremonial anthems of both nations and the presentation of the imperial guard.
The ‘inside palace’ greeting and introduction was not covered by international media. However, due to the significance of the visit (first of imperial era of Reiwa) it was broadcast on local Japanese media (below).
Body language and facial expressions can’t be faked. They are all VERY PLEASED AND HONORED to meet one another. Such a proud moment for both nations.
(3) A “state call” or discussion of diplomatic matters between the Emperor, Empress and their honored guests in video below.
Then, there was the customary exchange of gifts. The Japanese emperor is an accomplished violin and viola player, as evidenced below in this video from 2007:
The accompanying press pool report states (emphases mine):
The President presented the Emperor an American-made viola in a custom case and a signed photo of American composer Aaron Copland. This vintage 1938 viola was handmade in Charleston, West Virginia. The President also presented the Emperor with a signed and framed photo of the President.
The First Lady presented the Empress with a custom White House desk set featuring a pen made of Harvard tree wood. The Empress herself studied Economics at Harvard. This fountain pen was handcrafted from a red oak tree that still stands in Old Harvard Yard. The First Lady also presented the Empress with a signed and framed photo of the First Lady.
The Emperor presented the President with a traditional Japanese pottery and porcelain bowl as well as a signed and framed photo of His Majesty the Emperor.
The Empress presented the First Lady with an ornamental Japanese lacquer box with traditional design as well as a framed and signed photo of Her Majesty the Empress.
Note: It is long-standing custom of the Imperial Palace that their Majesties the Emperor and Empress exchange signed, framed photographs with their guests on the occasion of a State Visit.
Afterwards, Trump and Abe held discussions on trade and security:
Their wives attended a cultural presentation:
Upon his return, Trump tweeted:
While the Trumps were in Japan, on May 25, actor Jon Voight tweeted:
The president faces the same threats as Lincoln did. He is in danger every day from people who desperately want to remove him from office, either by death or by impeachment. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says Trump belongs in prison.
The Mueller Report left the door open to more scheming by Democrats.
The coup is not yet over.
Therefore, on May 30, the Revd Franklin Graham issued a national appeal for prayer for the president on Sunday, June 2:
That day, another friend of the president’s explained to Fox News that this appeal had nothing to do with politics but the real fight of good versus evil:
Other pastors on social media had to remind their detractors that they had prayed for past presidents, too:
On Friday, May 31, a mass shooting took place in Virginia Beach. After golfing on Sunday, June 2, the president visited the Revd David Platt’s McLean Bible Church in Virginia, where he joined congregants in praying silently for the victims of the shooting.
The New York Post reported:
While he did not talk during the service, Trump stood behind pastor David Platt as he offered a prayer for the 12 killed in Friday’s mass shooting.
The president was there to “visit with the Pastor and pray for the victims and community of Virginia Beach,” said Judd Deere, the White House’s deputy press secretary.
Trump arrived at about 2:20 p.m. and his motorcade left a little over 15 minutes later.
DeWayne Craddock, 40, slaughtered 12 at Virginia Beach’s municipal building Friday — just hours after quitting his job as a civil engineer.
In turn, Platt prayed for the president:
I do not know where Platt stands on his stance of private redistribution of wealth he was promoting back in 2012, but I am grateful that he prayed for President Trump.
Considering the prayers, the threats that the president endures daily and Jon Voight’s comparison of him with Lincoln, it was amazing that he and the first lady went to Ford’s Theatre that night for an awards presentation. Ford’s Theatre was the site of Lincoln’s assassination:
I am very glad I was out of the country at the time. Otherwise I would have been worried about his safety.
Yet, thankfully, God continues to watch over President Trump, who flew to London that night with the first lady and his family (apart from Barron).
More on that trip tomorrow.
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Last week, I wrote ‘Senate Intelligence Committee: “no direct evidence of conspiracy between Trump campaign and Russia”‘.
On Sunday, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe appeared for a half-hour on CBS’s 60 Minutes in an interview with Scott Pelley.
McCabe is currently doing a book tour to promote The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump.
On March 16, 2018, President Trump tweeted:
Two weeks earlier, Fox News reported that the Department of Justice’s Inspector General (IG), Michael Horowitz, was expected to (emphases mine):
criticize former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for approving a leak of information about the Hillary Clinton investigation to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times reported late Thursday.
According to the Times, which cited four people familiar with the investigation into the department’s handling of the Clinton probe, McCabe will be censured for disclosing the investigation’s existence to the Journal.
The Journal report in question, which was published Oct. 30, 2016, recounts a conversation in which McCabe sparred with a senior Justice Department official over an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The Journal — which cited sources including “one person close to Mr. McCabe” — said McCabe insisted that the FBI should move forward with its investigation, while the Justice Department official expressed concern about its potential effect on the presidential election.
McCabe, a frequent target of President Donald Trump’s ire, left his position as FBI deputy director in January and is scheduled to retire later this month. He had served for several months as acting director following Trump’s firing last May of FBI Director James Comey.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department, the FBI and the inspector general had no immediate comment on the report Thursday evening …
Trump verbally attacked McCabe during the campaign and again as president because McCabe’s wife, during a failed state Senate run, had accepted campaign contributions from the political action committee of then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a close Clinton ally.
David J Harris Jr and Real Clear Politics have more detail, dating from January 2018.
On March 14, a Fox producer for DoJ news tweeted:
On March 15, the Washington Examiner reported that McCabe was ‘still holding on to his retirement’:
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is holding onto his pension just days before he is set to officially retire.
McCabe was at the Justice Department to meet with Scott Schools, the most senior career attorney in the department, as well as other officials, for a majority of the afternoon Thursday, to make a case why he should be allowed to retire and not be fired.
Schools reports to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who in turn reports to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The decision to fire McCabe before Sunday, and thus strip McCabe of his full pension and benefits, is in Sessions’ hands.
The_Donald featured a fiery thread in response:
Then, the next day:
CBS News, in reporting McCabe’s meeting the previous Friday pointed out:
If McCabe is fired, it is believed his only avenue of appeal would be to file a lawsuit to try to reclaim his pension.
Twitter exploded.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) was indignant:
So was the former CIA director, directing his ire at President Trump:
Later that day, McCabe issued a lengthy statement (click on image to see it in full, also available at CNN):
His statement elicited this response:
.@JakeBGibson McCabe, you disgraced the oath you swore. You harmed the nation by your deceit. You took 1/2 million dollars for your wife’s campaign from Hillary’s guy, McAuliffe, the #FBI said you should be FIRED. You deserve it. #Cockroach
McCabe’s lawyer also issued a statement. (Apparently, his lawyer — a former Inspector General for the DoJ — supported the current Inspector General’s report until McCabe was implicated by it.)
The DoJ disagreed with McCabe and his lawyer:
I hope that FBI Director Christopher Wray received all of McCabe’s documentation about the 2016 election.
There were also newsy snippets:
On March 17, The Hill, among other media outlets, noted that McCabe’s weekend statement seemed to contradict James Comey’s testimony from May 2017 about relaying sensitive information to the media.
News emerged that McCabe wrote memoranda of his conversations with President Trump and gave those to Robert Mueller. CBS reported that details of James Comey’s firing were included.
Fox News correspondent Adam Housely said that McCabe’s dismissal was a morale boost to FBI agents.
On March 18, TownHall posted an editorial, ‘The Coming Collusion Bloodbath’. Nearly one year on, we could be at that point:
That Comey, McCabe, and others have practiced an obvious double standard in the email case of Hillary Clinton where ample evidence caused 106 of the case agents and attorneys working on the case to believe indictment would occur, and simultaneously going to such extraordinary measures through the assistance of essentially Hillary’s campaign operation to attempt to thwart the outcome of the election is more than enough reason to go after them on a criminal basis alone.
That McCabe reportedly lied to the low key Inspector General, while attempting to send General Michael Flynn to prison for lying to the same FBI is of highest hypocrisy.
Before McCabe was fired, Reddit had censored discussions about his ‘corruption issues’. Now that he was gone, they could be discussed freely once more.
Attention then turned to the McCabe’s connections with Hillary Clinton. A New York radio host tweeted:
The following 2017 video resurfaced. It shows that McCabe had (still has?) a home in Chappaqua, New York, where the Clintons live (start at 5:00 in):
On April 13, Inspector General Horowitz issued his report:
Fox News explained:
The report, handed over to Congress on Friday and obtained by Fox News, looked at a leak to The Wall Street Journal about an FBI probe of the Clinton Foundation.
The report says that McCabe authorized the leak and then misled investigators about it, leaking in a way that did not fall under a “public interest” exception.
“[W]e concluded that McCabe’s decision to confirm the existence of the CF investigation through an anonymously sourced quote, recounting the content of a phone call with a senior department official in a manner designed to advance his personal interests at the expense of department leadership, was clearly not within the public interest exception,” the report says …
Sessions said that McCabe “made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor − including under oath − on multiple occasions.”
James Gagliano, a retired FBI supervisory special agent said that, according to the IG’s report, firing McCabe was the right thing to do. He says that whether you are a Marine or a special agent of the FBI, the same rules apply:
In May, FBI agents wanted to be subpoenaed in order to testify against Comey and McCabe:
Questions arose in Congress. The Gateway Pundit reported that Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wanted answers about the FBI’s treatment of General Flynn.
Early in June:
Allegations arose about McCabe’s involvement in the 302s (FBI reports) regarding General Flynn:
On September 6, the Washington Post reported that a grand jury had been investigating McCabe ‘for months’:
… an indication the probe into whether he misled officials exploring his role in a controversial media disclosure has intensified, two people familiar with the matter said.
The grand jury has summoned more than one witness, the people said, and the case is ongoing. The people declined to identify those who had been called to testify.
The presence of the grand jury shows prosecutors are treating the matter seriously, locking in the accounts of witnesses who might later have to testify at a trial. But such panels are sometimes used only as investigative tools, and it remains unclear if McCabe will ultimately be charged.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C., which has been handling the probe, declined to comment.
Michael Bromwich, a lawyer for McCabe, said in a statement after this report was published online that he had been confident McCabe would not be charged, absent “inappropriate pressure from high levels of the Administration.”
“Unfortunately, such pressure has continued, with the President targeting Mr. McCabe in numerous additional tweets,” Bromwich said. The lawyer also raised questions about the timing of the news report on the grand jury.
ZeroHedge had more (emphases in the original):
Specifically, McCabe was fired for lying about authorizing an F.B.I. spokesman and attorney to tell Devlin Barrett of the Wall St. Journal – just days before the 2016 election, that the FBI had not put the brakes on a separate investigation into the Clinton Foundation, at a time in which McCabe was coming under fire for his wife taking a $467,500 campaign contribution from Clinton proxy pal, Terry McAuliffe.
In order to deal with his legal woes, McCabe set up a GoFundMe “legal defense fund” which stopped accepting donations, after support for the fired bureaucrat took in over half a million dollars – roughly $100,000 more than his wife’s campaign took from McAuliffe as McCabe’s office was investigating Clinton and her infamous charities.
On September 17, Trump tweeted about the two FBI employees who were part of the group working against his presidency:
On September 18, the Gateway Pundit reported on the press release for McCabe’s upcoming book, The Threat, mentioned above. The press release quoted McCabe as saying (emphases mine):
I wrote this book because the president’s attacks on me symbolize his destructive effect on the country as a whole. He is undermining America’s safety and security, and eroding public confidence in its institutions. His attacks on the most crucial institutions of government, and on the professionals who serve within them, should make every American stand up and take notice.
On September 21 came the first mention of reports that Rod Rosenstein offered to wear or joked about ‘wearing a wire’ for a meeting with Trump:
A few weeks earlier, President Trump had intended to declassify various unredacted documents. By September 22, he had backtracked. The DoJ advised him that declassification could harm the Mueller probe. In addition, US allies warned against declassification for security reasons. Trump instructed IG Horowitz to review them instead. Had Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein any influence on Trump on this subject? Declassification would have been a huge risk for Rosenstein — and McCabe.
On September 27, the then-House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSPCI) Chairman Devin Nunes (R-California) said that he planned to release testimony from 70 or more witnesses who were interviewed in the HSPCI’s own Trump-Russia probe. The Daily Caller reported:
Nunes said that between 70 and 80 percent of the transcripts do not contain classified information. The remaining transcripts would have to be reviewed by the office of the director of national intelligence. Nunes said that review process “would only take a matter of days.”
Nunes and other House Republicans have also led a push to get President Donald Trump to declassify and release documents related to the FBI and Justice Department’s collusion investigation.
It also transpired that McCabe and Rosenstein were feuding via the media. McCabe represented the faction that wanted to end Trump’s presidency. Rosenstein represented the people currently at the DoJ and FBI.
Rosenstein was using the Washington Post to get his story out. McCabe was using the New York Times.
One example of this was when the Rosenstein-wear-a-wire story appeared in The New York Times:
On October 9, The Hill‘s John Solomon reported that Rosenstein was desperate to downplay the story. However, released testimony from former FBI lawyer James Baker indicated that this was no joke:
Baker’s story lays bare an extraordinary conversation in which at least some senior FBI officials thought it within their purview to try to capture the president on tape and then go to the president’s own Cabinet secretaries, hoping to persuade the senior leaders of the administration to remove the president from power.
Even more extraordinary is the timing of such discussions: They occurred, according to Baker’s account, in the window around the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Could it be that the leaders of a wounded, stunned FBI were seeking retribution for their boss’s firing with a secret recording operation?
I doubt this is the power that Congress intended to be exercised when it created the FBI a century ago, or the circumstances in which the authors of the 25th Amendment imagined a president’s removal could be engineered.
This wasn’t a president who was incapacitated at the time. He was fully exercising his powers — but in a way the FBI leadership did not like.
And that makes the FBI’s involvement in the tape-record-then-dump-Trump conversations overtly political — even if Rosenstein believed the whole idea was farcical.
Also:
Keep in mind, this is the same FBI that, a few months earlier during the 2016 election, had its top counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok talking to Page — his lover and the top lawyer to McCabe — about using their official powers to “stop” Trump in the election and having an “insurance policy” against the GOP nominee. That insurance policy increasingly looks like an unverified dossier created by British intelligence operative Christopher Steele — a Trump hater himself — that was bought and paid for by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign through their mutual law firm.
“You walk away from the Baker interview with little doubt that the FBI leadership in that 2016-17 time frame saw itself as far more than a neutral investigative agency but actually as a force to stop Trump’s election before it happened and then maybe reversing it after the election was over,” said a source directly familiar with the congressional investigation.
The following day, the Washington Post published an article outlining the tension between McCabe and Rosenstein. The FBI higher-ups did not like that Rosenstein had recommended in writing that President Trump fire James Comey. DoJ officials did not like that the FBI, McCabe in particular, opened an investigation on Trump immediately after Comey’s departure. WaPo reported that the two quarrelled shortly after Robert Mueller was appointed — in front of him.
Rosenstein, incidentally, had allegedly already made his ‘wear a wire’ comment.
The subject of the meeting in question was whether Rosenstein or McCabe should recuse themselves from involvement in the Mueller probe:
Rosenstein wanted McCabe out of the Russia probe, and McCabe felt differently, arguing that it was the deputy attorney general, not the head of the FBI, who should step away from the case.
Although neither recused himself:
The McCabe-Rosenstein relationship has only worsened with time …
The Rosenstein-McCabe relationship has come under renewed scrutiny as lawmakers have demanded answers about memos written by McCabe and his then-senior counsel, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, about the discussions on May 16, 2017, in which McCabe wrote that Rosenstein suggested recording the president and discussed the 25th Amendment.
Rosenstein was due to meet that week with The House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform committees about the DoJ, but the meeting never happened.
On October 11, the Washington Examiner reported that the FBI was delaying publication of McCabe’s book, The Threat. It would not appear until February 2019:
McCabe was fired by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in March, less than 48 hours before his retirement day because of “allegations of misconduct” found by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. McCabe, has disputed the IG report, and is now the subject of a grand jury inquiry.
According to the FBI’s employment agreement, all disclosure of information must be reviewed and adhere to the FBI’s “Prepublication Review Policy Guide,” made official in 2015.
Although there is more to cover on McCabe, this is a good point at which to bring us to the present day.
On Monday, February 18, 2019, President Trump pulled no punches:
Is this the first time President Trump has tweeted the letters ‘t-r-e-a-s-o-n’?
Here’s ‘treason’ again:
Trump was on fire:
We can only hope that the tables start turning soon.
Perhaps the new attorney general, Bill Barr, will set things in motion.
Bob Woodward, who, with his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein, exposed Watergate in the 1970s, recently completed a book on the Trump presidency.
The book is called Fear. Some of its content is dubious.
However, on Friday, September 14, 2018, Woodward gave an interview to Hugh Hewitt in which he said he spent two years looking for Trump-Russia collusion — and came up empty handed.
Real Clear Politics has the transcript of Woodward’s exchange with Hewitt about President Trump’s former White House attorney John Dowd, who, for better or worse, played it straight with special counsel Robert Mueller and his team (emphases mine):
HUGH HEWITT, HOST: Yeah, but I just think people who have been critical of you in the public, all they have to do is say hey, release my tapes, Bob, and we’ll find out whether Gary Cohn said what he said, and John Dowd said what he said, and Rob Porter said what they said. Now let’s get to the substance. I believe that if the president had actually read this book, and their team had read this book, they would not have attacked the book. They would have spun it differently, because there’s a lot complimentary in this book, the most important of which is John Dowd firmly believes, the president’s former lawyer, that the special counsel, Bob Mueller, has nothing. There’s no collusion, there’s nothing. It’s all a play to get an 18 USC 1001 perjury trap, and that POTUS should never sit down. Is that a fair assessment of what John Dowd believes?
BOB WOODWARD, ‘FEAR’ AUTHOR: Oh, well, yeah, until we end. And finally, it, the point where Dowd resigns because he is convinced the president should not testify, Dowd concludes that Mueller had played him for a sucker, got all of the cooperation of 37 witnesses, a million pages-plus of campaign documents, 20,000 pages of White House documents. So in the end, as he says to the president, he said you were right. We can’t trust Mueller.
HH: And I tell you, Bob Woodward, I read this book as a lawyer. I’m not a defense lawyer, although I was at Justice. Dowd got played badly. Do you agree?
BW: Well, but he is the one who decided on the strategy – total cooperation. We’re going to let you, we’re opening the door completely. And some of the most sensitive material was given to Mueller. He was delighted to have it. It is quite true that Dowd concluded from his own work, remember, he spent eight months on this intensely, time with Mueller, time with the White House people, time with Trump. And he didn’t see anything there until the end.
HH: So let’s set aside the Comey firing, which as a Constitutional law professor, no one will ever persuade me can be obstruction. And Rod Rosenstein has laid out reasons why even if those weren’t the president’s reasons. Set aside the Comey firing. Did you, Bob Woodward, hear anything in your research in your interviews that sounded like espionage or collusion?
BW: I did not, and of course, I looked for it, looked for it hard. And so you know, there we are. We’re going to see what Mueller has, and Dowd may be right. He has something that Dowd and the president don’t know about, a secret witness or somebody who has changed their testimony. As you know, that often happens, and that can break open or turn a case.
HH: But you’ve seen no collusion?
BW: I have not.
There’s a coup going on.
Mueller will have to find something to pin on President Trump to justify his waste of taxpayers’ money, which is probably by now into the double digits of millions of dollars right now. By last November, it was rumoured to have cost $5m already.
Mueller is all about saving his own reputation and destroying others’, which he has done throughout his career. But, that’s another topic for another day.
President Trump’s administration — including the White House — has been the most transparent in living memory:
That’s the beauty of Trump’s presidency.
However, as we know, the US president has many enemies. A soft coup has been in operation since 2016:
President Trump’s former strategist discussed the recent anonymous editorial published in the New York Times. What follows is from a September 9, 2018 ZeroHedge article (emphases in the original):
Responding to an anonymous Op-Ed in the New York Times detailing an active resistance within the Trump White House, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told Reuters that President Trump is facing a “coup” the likes of which haven’t been seen since the American Civil War.
“What you saw the other day was as serious as it can get. This is a direct attack on the institutions,” Bannon said while flying to Italy. “This is a coup, okay”.
The Wednesday column in the New York Times slams Trump’s “amorality” and claims that “Many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”
Bannon told Reuters that the last time a sitting US president had been challenged like this was during the American Civil War when Democratic General George B. McClellan went after Republican President Abraham Lincoln.
“This is a crisis. The country has only ever had such a crisis in the summer of 1862 when General McClellan and the senior generals, all Democrats in the Union Army, deemed that Abraham Lincoln was not fit and not competent to be commander in chief,” said Bannon – whose departure from the White House was in large part over a fallout with Trump’s “establishment” advisers. Bannon said at the time that the “Republican establishment” sought to nullify the results of the 2016 election and effectively neuter Trump.
“There is a cabal of Republic establishment figures who believe Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. This is a crisis,” Bannon said in Rome.
This is but one of President Trump’s many enemies in the international establishment. See what he has to say:
He has said before that he makes money out of chaos. Pardon the language below, but this expresses the ugliness of at least one of Trump’s enemies:
This is why it is essential for sensible Americans to make sure they get out and VOTE in the November mid-terms. Some states are still in primary season. Vote then, too, if at all possible:
Yes, America is at a critical juncture right now.
I hope all eligible American voters mark their calendars for Tuesday, November 6th, 2018. The world’s future depends on them.
