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For this week's Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten podcast, my guest was Rich Higgins. Higgins, an expert in unconventional warfare and combatting terrorism with over 20 years experience at senior levels of the Defense Department, and early supporter of President Trump, served as director for strategic planning in President Trump's National Security Council (NSC). That all changed when a memo that he produced for President Trump warning of the political warfare he was to face internally from the Deep State, and externally from the media and like-minded interest groups in collusion with the administrative state, leaked out to the public....

Congressional investigators have confirmed that a top FBI official met with Democratic Party lawyers to talk about allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion weeks before the 2016 election, and before the bureau secured a search warrant targeting Trump’s campaign. Former FBI general counsel James Baker met during the 2016 season with at least one attorney from Perkins Coie, the Democratic National Committee’s private law firm. That’s the firm used by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to secretly pay research firm Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence operative, to compile a dossier of uncorroborated raw intelligence alleging Trump...

The co-founder of Fusion GPS - the firm behind the now-infamous Trump/Russia dossier - is likely to be subpoenaed after he rejected a request for an interview before Congress.

ABC late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel took the stage on Tuesday and jokingly suggested that his “compromise” to the battle of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination is to chop off the judge’s “pesky penis,” should he be confirmed...“Hear me out on this,” Kimmel began “So Kavanaugh gets confirmed to the Supreme Court, OK? Well, in return we get to cut that pesky penis of his off in front of everyone.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., alleged Sunday that there is a “bureaucratic coup” being uncovered following reporting last week that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein discussed trying to oust President Trump. The New York Times reported Friday that Rosenstein considered rallying Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to the Constitution and offered to wear a wire to record his conversations with the president. Rosenstein has denied he considered such actions and follow-up reports have indicated that he was being sarcastic when bringing up the secret recording. Graham told “Fox News Sunday” that Trump should not fire the top Justice Department...

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the House Judiciary Committee chairman, said Sunday that Nellie Ohr, the wife of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, is cooperating with the committee and will testify in October. “Nellie Ohr is cooperating. We have a date for her appearance before the committee for an interview on Oct. 19," Goodlatte said on Fox News's "Sunday Morning Futures." Goodlatte's comments come after Republicans last week threatened to subpoena Nellie Ohr after a deal fell apart that would have led to her testimony last week. The Ohrs have come under GOP scrutiny for their ties to a controversial dossier...

Republicans on Sunday seized on reports that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein last year proposed secretly recording President Trump, in order to renew calls for a special counsel investigation of alleged bias within the Department of Justice (DOJ). “[Trump] shouldn’t fire Rosenstein unless you believe Rosenstein’s lying. He said he did not do the things alleged, but there’s a bureaucratic coup against President Trump being discovered here,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Before the election, the people in question tried to taint the election, tip it in [Hillary] Clinton’s favor; after the election they’re trying to...

Two sources told The Daily Beast that FBI lawyer Lisa Page was present for Rod Rosenstein's comments on secret recordings and did not believe he was joking or being sarcastic. A debate with major implications has broken out over whether Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was being sarcastic when, in the spring of 2017, he reportedly talked about covertly recording President Donald Trump. A former career Justice Department official who was in the room when the topic arose told The Daily Beast he believes the deputy attorney general was being sarcastic. But another person in the room at the time...

“How did they [Britain, Australia] get access to the FISA documents that Congress and the American people have not been given?” Back on February 23, 2018, the CFP posted an article entitled “Christopher Steele, MI6, and the Trump Dossier.” The post closed as follows: “Today, the public narrative of Christopher Steele’s association with the Trump Dossier reads like this:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Thursday that she is confused why Americans aren’t “uprising” against the Trump administration over conditions on the border with Mexico. The California Democrat’s weekly press briefing veered into explosive territory when the subject of illegal immigration came up. Mrs. Pelosi said there may be “uprisings” over children who are separated at the U.S. southern border when asylum seekers decide not to arrive at a proper checkpoint.

President Donald Trump claimed Thursday and Friday that foreign allies have asked him not to declassify documents from the Russia probe the unnamed foreign countries Trump said that he is honoring the allies’ wishes, as well as the DOJ’s, by backing off of his declassification request

Memos written by Andrew McCabe, then the acting FBI director, say deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein suggested he secretly record his talks with President Trump, and that Rosenstein discussed possibly trying to remove him from office, according to people familiar with the matter. The account, first reported by the New York Times, paints Rosenstein as so concerned in May 2017 in the wake of Trump’s firing of then-FBI director James B. Comey that he contemplated secretly recording conversations with the president. He also initiated discussions about invoking the 25th amendment, which details how the Cabinet can decide whether a...

Wallace said he views the statement from Rosenstein as "very weak," and written in a "lawyerly" fashion. "I think it's very careful," said Wallace, adding that Rosenstein only asserted there is "no basis" currently for the 25th Amendment to be considered. He said Rosenstein did not specifically say anything about whether he discussed wearing a "wire" or brought up the 25th Amendment. Wallace said the story will raise questions about Rosenstein's frame of mind right around the time he appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Jon Scott noted that, according to...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is denying a report in The New York Times that he suggested last year he secretly record President Donald Trump in the White House to expose chaos in the administration. Rosenstein says the story is “inaccurate and factually incorrect.”

George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign volunteer targeted by the Deep State and foreign spies let loose on Twitter this week and claimed he was targeted by US allies and “Obama knew!” Papadopoulos tweeted on September 13th that the Brits met with him often before the 2016 campaign – While I have never met a Russian official in my life knowingly, the British government liked to meet me quite often throughout the campaign. Including Tobias Ellwood, who was right under Boris Johnson, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.— George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) September 14, 2018 Papadopoulos notified the FBI that he thought...

In newly obtained emails, bureau officials noted there was not enough intelligence to support the January 2017 findings by the CIA The FBI had concerns with the intelligence community’s (IC) January 2017 assessment that the Kremlin interfered in the presidential election with the specific intent of electing President Trump over Hillary Clinton. In newly obtained emails, bureau officials noted there was not enough intelligence to support the January 2017 findings by the CIA which concluded Vladimir Putin meddled in the 2016 election to help Trump, according to a numerous documents and text messages obtained by SaraACarter.com.

Showdown? In letter, Pelosi/Schumer/Schiff/Warner order intel agencies to ignore presidential order on declassification until consulting with Congres

It was mid-May, about six weeks after Trump appointee Mari Stull began her new job as senior adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs. As senior adviser at the bureau, Stull was in charge of making sure President Trump’s agenda was represented at the many international organizations the U.S. participates in and mostly funds, such as the United Nations and its various agencies. Stull and her boss, Amb. Kevin Moley, had just left for a trip to Geneva for the World Health Assembly. Back at the State Department, Erin Barclay, a senior career diplomat at the IO...

At the request of a number of committees of Congress, and for reasons of transparency, the President has directed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice (including the FBI) to provide for the immediate declassification of the following materials: (1) pages 10-12 and 17-34 of the June 2017 application to the FISA court in the matter of Carter W. Page; (2) all FBI reports of interviews with Bruce G. Ohr prepared in connection with the Russia investigation; and (3) all FBI reports of interviews prepared in connection with all Carter Page FISA applications. In...

Lisa Page bombshell testimony: Collusion between Trump and Russia unproven by time of Mueller's special counsel appointment. Former FBI attorney Lisa Page, in a bombshell revelation, says the agency could not prove collusion between Russia and Donald Trump's presidential campaign before Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed. Page told a closed-door joint session of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees in mid-July that investigators could not make the charge, according to a transcript of her deposition reviewed by Fox News. 'I think this represents that even as far as May 2017, we still couldn't answer the question,' Page said. In...