Special counsel witness says he expects to be charged in Mueller probe

By ALI DUKAKIS

The former Infowars Washington bureau chief, who recently testified before a federal grand jury in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, tells ABC News that after two months of closed-door talks with investigators, the special counsel has now indicated he will be charged within a matter of days.

Corsi is one of more than a dozen individuals associated with political operative Roger Stone -- a longtime and close ally of President Donald Trump -- who have been contacted by the special counsel. The witnesses, many of whom have appeared before the grand jury impaneled by Mueller’s team, have told ABC News they were asked about Stone’s dealings during the 2016 election and what if any contact he may have had with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange through an intermediary, which Stone denies.“I don’t know what they’re going to charge me with,” said Jerome Corsi in an interview with ABC News on Monday. “I think my only crime was that I support Donald Trump. That's my crime, and now I'm going to go to prison for the rest of my life for cooperating with them,” he later added.

Much remains unknown about Mueller’s interest in Stone. But Corsi has emerged as a central figure of interest to Mueller as he builds his case, sources confirm to ABC News. Corsi, who Stone told ABC News he has known for years, has frequently appeared with Stone on-air for Infowars, where Stone currently serves as a contributor.

Corsi described his experience with the investigation as “a horror show” and “a nightmare,” telling ABC News the special counsel’s probe, “Is an inquisition worthy of the KGB or the Gestapo. I feel like I've been through an interrogation session in North Korea in the Korean war.”

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Roger Stone, a longtime political adviser and friend to President Donald Trump, speaks during a visit to the Women's Republican Club of Miami, May 22, 2017, in Coral Gables, Florida.more +

The special counsel’s office declined to comment on Corsi’s remarks to ABC News.

In recent weeks, ABC News reported that Corsi returned to Washington, D.C., again for more closed-door meetings with special counsel investigators, and was scheduled to make a second appearance before the federal grand jury in the probe. However, Corsi’s second grand jury testimony was ultimately canceled, and Corsi says prosecutors with the special counsel’s office told his attorney to expect forthcoming charges.

Reached by ABC News on Monday, Corsi's lawyer, David Gray, declined to comment on the matter.

Shortly after his interview with ABC News, Corsi hosted a live stream on his YouTube page in which he reiterated his expectation to be indicted, telling supporters; “I fully anticipate in the next few days to be indicted by Mueller.”

Mueller’s interest in Corsi is believed to stem from his alleged early discussions about efforts to unearth then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails. The special counsel has evidence that suggests Corsi may have had advance knowledge that the email account of Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, had been hacked and that WikiLeaks had obtained a trove of damning emails from it, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told ABC News.

Corsi’s account to ABC News of his time spent with investigators also identifies Wikileaks’ release of Podesta’s hacked emails as key to the special counsel’s inquiry of him.

In response to ABC News’ interview with Corsi, Stone defended Corsi as “a man who has been squeezed hard but refuses to do anything but tell the truth,” and called into question both his and Corsi’s alleged connections to Wikileaks.

“They seem to think you know that I knew in advance what Assange was going to do; I'm not going to go into details at this point, but that was the basis of it,” said Corsi. “And as far as I can recall, I had no contact with Assange. And that didn't seem to satisfy them.”

Corsi said he was first approached in late August by FBI agents at his home in New Jersey, who presented him with a subpoena to testify before Mueller’s grand jury. Corsi added that over the last two months, he’s spent 40 hours with investigators over the course of six meetings, which he says have included special counsel prosecutors and an FBI agent.

After the subpoena was served, Corsi said that he decided to cooperate with the special counsel’s office.

“I had two computers that I used, I handed them both over, a time machine that recorded all the emails in my computer in a contemporaneous state 2016 -- completely unaltered,” he said. “I worked with the FBI at Quantico so that they could easily recover all my tweets and my Google account. My Google account they could see every place I've been, every click I've made, everything Google records.”

After the FBI’s visit, Corsi said, he and his attorney agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s office and proffered to meet with special counsel investigators to answer their questions. “They have everything: Electronic surveillance -- everything electronic probably that I ever did in my life if they wanted -- every credit card, every phone call, every email, and I turned it all over to them as well,” he added.

Declining to give specific details on the matter until Corsi learns what he’s potentially charged with, he said the special counsel initially wanted him as a witness and told him he had not committed any crimes.

“And then it blows apart...at the end of two months...this deteriorates, and after a while, my mind became mush,” he said. “And every time I'm scared to death.”

Corsi said that from there, after two months of questioning, things deteriorated between him and investigators.

“They make it sound like it all fell apart and they were constantly pressing me on did I have a contact with Assange, and -- to the best of my knowledge -- I never had a contact with Assange,” Corsi said to ABC News. “And they just couldn't believe that because they said I seemed to know too much about what Assange was going to do. And I said you know that's what I do in my business: I try to connect the dots.”

While Corsi is not a widely-recognized figure, his handiwork in the political arena has at times become very well known. He has served as the pioneer of several enduring political smear campaigns during national campaigns throughout the 2000s.

Corsi’s most penetrating smear campaign is the same one that helped forge his bond with Trump. He is widely considered one of the early promoters of the so-called “birther” movement, which pursued the idea that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, not in America. The theory was debunked and widely denounced as baseless, racist vitriol. Corsi and Trump have long been blasted for not walking back their claims even after Obama produced his long-form birth certificate. In fact, it was only in the final stretch of his successful 2016 presidential bid that Trump finally acknowledged that Obama was born in the U.S.

Corsi has also been cited as one of the architects of a 2004 effort to bring then-Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry’s war record into question through a 527 political organization called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The group attempted to cast doubt on Kerry’s Vietnam War record and question the injuries he sustained when he earned decorations that include a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, and three Purple Hearts.

Corsi claims that his work is part of the reason he believes investigators are probing him.

“My conclusion was as much as they say they want only the truth, I believe that they have a narrative and they’re looking for fast facts to fit their narrative,” he said. “I've written 20 books since 2004 and I have reason to believe...that this is payback for those books.”

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, when Corsi joined the controversial conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ right-wing outlet, Infowars, Jones reportedly boasted that Corsi “had a history” with Trump, and that the two had been acquainted for “40-plus years.”

When ABC News asked if he would be open to making a plea deal with the special counsel’s office should they charge him in coming days, Corsi replied, “What’s there to be a plea deal with?” and expressed his suspicions about the possible charges investigators may claim against him.

“They said I didn't commit any crimes. I can't remember all my emails I can't remember all my phone calls, [and] I tell them that. It's impossible; it's a perjury trap from the moment you get going,” Corsi said.

“My crime is that I didn't tell them what they wanted to hear. They won't believe it, but this is the most frightening experience of my lifetime. I'm being punished for trying to cooperate with them in a game that I was set to lose,” he added. “I couldn't win this game...it wasn't a game; I was trying to tell them the truth. But you forget that somebody was in a meeting and you lied to them.”

With Ice Growing At Both Poles, Global Warming Theories Implode

Published on October 1, 2016

Written by Alex Newman

In the Southern Hemisphere, sea-ice levels just smashed through the previous record highs across Antarctica, where there is now more ice than at any point since records began. In the Arctic, where global-warming theorists preferred to keep the public focused due to some decreases in ice levels over recent years, scientists said sea-ice melt in 2014 fell below the long-term mean. Global temperatures, meanwhile, have remained steady for some 18 years and counting, contrary to United Nations models predicting more warming as carbon dioxide levels increased.

Of course, all of that is great news for humanity — call off the carbon taxes and doomsday bunkers! However, as global-warming theories continue to implode on the world stage, the latest developments will pose a major challenge for the UN and its member governments. Later this month, climate “dignitaries” will be meeting in New York to forge an international agreement in the face of no global warming for nearly two decades, record ice levels, and growing public skepticism about the alleged “science” underpinning “climate change” alarmism.

As The New American reported last month, virtually every falsifiable prediction made by climate theorists — both the global-cooling mongers of a few decades ago and the warming alarmists more recently — has proven to be spectacularly wrong. In many cases, the opposite of what they forecasted took place. But perhaps nowhere have the failed global-warming doom and gloom predictions been more pronounced than in the Antarctic, where sea-ice levels have continued smashing through previous records. For each of the last three years, ice cover has hit a new record high.

The most recent data show that the Antarctic is currently surrounded by more sea ice than at any other point since records began. In all, there are right now about 20 million square kilometers of frozen sea area surrounding the Antarctic continent. That is 170,000 square kilometers more than last year’s previous all-time record, and more than 1.2 million square kilometers above the 1981-to-2010 mean, according to researchers.

“This is an area covered by sea ice which we’ve never seen from space before,” meteorologist and sea ice scientist Jan Lieser with the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) told Australia’s ABC. “Thirty-five years ago the first satellites went up which were reliably telling us what area, two dimensional area, of sea ice was covered and we’ve never seen that before, that much area. That is roughly double the size of the Antarctic continent and about three times the size of Australia.”

Despite having predicted less ice — not more — as a result of alleged man-made global warming, some alarmists have comically tried to blame the record ice on “global warming.” Indeed, in a bizarre attempt to explain away the latest findings, Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC boss Tony Worby tried to blame “the depletion of ozone” and the “warming atmosphere” for the phenomenal growth in sea ice — contradicting previous forecasts by warming alarmists, who warned that ice would decrease as temperatures rose along with CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

The biggest problem with Worby’s claim, however, is the fact that the undisputed global temperature record shows there has been no warming for about 18 years and counting — contradicting every “climate model” cited by the UN to justify planetary alarmism, carbon taxes, energy rationing, massive wealth transfers, and more. Dozens of excuses have been concocted for what alarmists refer to as the “pause” in warming, as many as 50 by some estimates. The Obama administration’s preferred explanation, for which there is no observable evidence, is often ridiculed by critics as the “Theory of the Ocean Ate My Global Warming.”

However, scientists and experts not funded by governments to promote the alarmist narrative say the observable evidence simply shows the man-made CO2 theories and “climate models” pushed by the “climate” industry are incorrect. More than a few climate experts and scientists have even warned that a prolonged period of global cooling is approaching quickly. The consequences could potentially be devastating — especially if warming alarmists succeed in quashing energy and food production under the guise of stopping non-existent “warming.”

Also in response to the fast-expanding ice, some die-hard alarmists and warming propagandists styling themselves “journalists”have recently been hyping a relatively tiny part of the Antarctic ice sheet that may — centuries or even millennia from now — go into the sea. Numerous independent scientists and experts quickly debunked the fear-mongering, however, pointing out that it was almost certainly due to natural causes and was nothing to worry about.

In an ironic incident that sparked laughter around the world, a team of “climate scientists” who set out to show how Antarctic ice was supposedly melting ended up getting their ship trapped in record-setting ice — in the summer!Millions of taxpayer dollars and massive quantities of fossil fuels and CO2 emissions were required to rescue the stranded and embarrassed warming alarmists after their misguided adventure.

Another key tactic of the warmists to deflect attention from the expanding polar ice in the Southern Hemisphere has been to hype changes occurring in the Arctic instead. Unfortunately for the alarmists, however — critics often ridicule the movement as a “cult” for desperately clinging to its beliefs despite the evidence, not to mention the “Climategate” scandal — that will now be much harder to do with a straight face.

“After the very high melt rates of the 2007-2012 period, the trend reversed in 2013 and especially in 2014 when the melt fell below the long-term average,” explained German professor and environment expert Fritz Vahrenholt, adding that the heat content of the North Atlantic was also plummeting. “In other words: The 21st century climate catastrophe is not taking place.”

Decades ago, of course, Newsweek reported that Arctic ice was growing so quickly due to man-made “global cooling” that “scientists” were proposing to melt the polar ice cap using black soot. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. More recently, “climate” guru Al Gore had been regularly predicting that the entire polar ice cap would be gone by now. Instead, it is now far more extensive than when he made his now-discredited predictions.

Of course, UN bureaucrats, many of whom depend on sustainable alarmism for their livelihood, still have their heads in the sand about the implosion of their theory. On a call with reporters last week, for example, UN “climate team director” Selwin Hart, who serves under Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, claimed an upcoming global-warming summit in New York “will be a major turning point in the way the world is approaching climate change.” He may be right, though probably not in the way he intended. The conference, which will be skipped by key world leaders, is meant to put climate alarmism “back on top of the international agenda,” Hart added.

In the United States, meanwhile, as the evidence continues to contradict the alarmist predictions, polls consistently show that a solid majority of Americans reject the UN’s man-made global-warming theories. Like the UN, however, Obama continues to act as if the discredited theories were gospel, promising to save humanity from their carbon sins by lawlessly bypassing the U.S. Senate and the Constitution to foist a planetary “climate” regime on the American people. Lawmakers have vowed to prevent any such schemes, but it remains unclear how far the White House is willing to push the issue. After failing even with a Democrat-controlled Congress, the EPA is already working to impose Obama’s anti-CO2 schemes on America by executive decree.

With the evidence discrediting UN global-warming theories literally piling up on both ends of the Earth and everywhere in between, alarmists face an increasingly Herculean task in their bid to shackle humanity to a “climate” regime at next year’s UN summit in Paris. However, to protect the public — and especially the poor — from the devastation such a planetary scheme would entail, Americans must continue to expose the baseless alarmism underpinning what countless scientists now refer to as the “climate scam.”

 Photo of typical Antarctic landscape

Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at anewman@thenewamerican.com. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU.

Related articles:

Embarrassing Predictions Haunt the Global-Warming Industry

Obama Plotting to Bypass Congress on UN Climate Regime

Media Ridiculed for Hyping “Antarctic Collapse” Amid Record Ice

Global Warming Alarmists Stuck In Antarctic Sea Ice

Record Antarctic Sea Ice Chills Climate-change Projections

Desperate Dash of Global Warming

UN Carbon Regime Would Devastate Humanity

Climate Alarmists Push Chinese Communism, Population Control

In Historic Blow to Climate Hysteria, Australia Kills Carbon Tax

Carbon Scam by UN and World Bank Behind “Genocidal” Land Grabs

Desperate Dash of Global Warming

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If Trump Ended Birthright Citizenship by Executive Order, He’d Be Enforcing Existing Law

Ed Feulner



 President Donald Trump’s critics have found something else to rend their garments over: his determination to end so-called “birthright citizenship.” Why, they thunder, it’s unconstitutional. And even if it could be changed, it can’t be by executive order.

They’re wrong on both counts.

That probably comes as a surprise to many Americans, including some who consider themselves Trump supporters. Haven’t we all been told for years that if you’re born here, you’re automatically a U.S. citizen? It’s all right there in the 14th Amendment. No matter who your parents are or what their status is, you’re an American. Simple as that.

Or is it? Consider the actual wording: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside.”

Seems pretty cut and dry, but check out that crucial clause: “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” It’s easy to mumble over it, but we shouldn’t. The Senate included it there for a reason when it passed the amendment in 1868: to make it clear that not everyone born here is automatically a citizen.

Being born here is only half the equation. You also must be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The original proposed wording of the amendment did not include that phrase. It was inserted specifically to make it clear that the law did not, in fact, confer citizenship on everyone born here.

Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, a member of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction and a strong supporter of the Citizenship Clause, noted that Congress intended to exclude “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, [or] who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States.” Supreme Court cases decided in the years soon after the amendment’s passage confirm this view.

Moreover, says constitutional scholar Edward Erler: “It is hard to conclude that the framers of the 14th Amendment intended to confer citizenship on the children of aliens illegally present when they explicitly denied that boon to Native Americans legally present but subject to a foreign jurisdiction.”

Notes Hillsdale College’s Matthew Spalding: “Few developed nations practice the rule of jus soli, or ‘right of the soil.’ More common is jus sanguinis, ‘right of blood,’ by which a child’s citizenship is determined by parental citizenship, not place of birth.”

In short, it was wise of Congress to limit the scope of the amendment. And those who misinterpret it are wrong. Trump should be commended for trying to bring current understanding back in line with the original intent of the framers.

That leaves us with the question of whether he would be right to set this issue straight via an executive order. Some people who agree with him on birthright citizenship, such as National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy, believe that he shouldn’t. They argue that it should be done by the same body that issued the amendment in the first place: Congress.

In other words, this is a job for Congress, the branch of government that creates our laws, not the executive, which enforces them.

According to McCarthy, a president cannot “unilaterally change an understanding of the law that has been in effect for decades under a duly enacted federal law.”

Granted, but as constitutional scholar Hans von Spakovsky points out, “that assumes the ‘understanding’ is the correct one. If that understanding actually violates the plain text and intent of the law, the president as the chief law-enforcement officer can, and indeed has an obligation, to direct the federal government to begin applying and enforcing it correctly.”

To put it another way, the president here would not be attempting to make a new law, but to enforce the correct view of an existing law.

Sure, his order would be immediately challenged. Perhaps we’d even wind up with Congress clarifying the original intent of the law.

All the more reason to do it. Fairness demands that we get this issue settled—and soon.

Originally published in The Washington Times

Regulations Threaten to Limit Best Schooling Options for Children

Lindsey Burke  The Daily Signal

 

What is the measure of a good school? And who is best positioned to decide what works?

For decades, policymakers and education officials have attempted to bolster school “accountability” by increasing regulations on schools across the board—public, charter, and private. They have tried to do so at the federal level for half a century, with federal intervention in K-12 education hitting a high-water mark under the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind policy and the Obama administration’s attempts to pressure states into adopting Common Core.

Yet ever-increasing government intervention in schooling has had little positive impact on education outcomes writ large. Math and reading achievement outcomes have been largely stagnant since the 1970s for high school seniors, while graduation rates have seen only modest improvements (and even those figures may be artificially inflated).

About one-third of high school graduates have to take remedial courses in college, one-third of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, and 20 percent of high school graduates who want to join the Army cannot do so because they cannot pass the Armed Forces Qualification Test.

It’s no surprise, then, that families have been looking for alternatives to geographically-assigned district schools. Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have begun to offer alternatives, enacting private school choice options such as vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and education savings accounts.

Although the education choice landscape is growing, government officials who take a heavy-handed approach to regulation threaten its long-term success. Instead of freeing traditional public schools from bureaucratic red tape that has tied the hands of educators and stifled innovation, some policymakers want to expand that top-down regulatory approach to the growing private school choice sector.

Take, for example, the Louisiana Scholarship Program, which provides vouchers to eligible families to enroll their child in a private school of their choice. In order for private schools to participate, they must adhere to a host of government regulations, including the requirement that all students on a scholarship take the same standardized test administered to public schools in the state.

Some private school principals have been concerned that regulations like this would drive school curriculum, thereby discouraging schools from participating. Indeed, just one-third of private schools in Louisiana participate in the program, and an experimental evaluation found that participation in the program had a negative effect on student academic achievement.

We are now beginning to better understand the way regulations affect private schools’ willingness to participate in private school choice programs. We are also seeing that Louisiana’s “accountability” measures had unintended consequences, and that could happen elsewhere.

Along with Corey DeAngelis of the Cato Institute and Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas, we recently released the first experimental evaluation of the effects of various regulations on the willingness of private school principals to have their school participate in a hypothetical voucher program. We randomly assigned one of three different regulations—or no government regulation—as part of school participation in a hypothetical voucher program.

We found that an open enrollment requirement (mandating that private schools take all students who apply as a condition for participating in a voucher program) decreased the likelihood that private school leaders in Florida were “certain to participate” in the voucher program by around 17 percentage points.

At the same time, requiring participating private schools to administer a standardized test to their students decreased the likelihood that private school leaders were “certain to participate” by around 11 percentage points.

Standardized testing requirements appear to depress private school participation in school choice programs, which could partly explain what has transpired in the Louisiana Scholarship Program. High-quality private schools, as measured by tuition and enrollment growth, may have decided that the regulatory burden exceeded the benefits of participating in the program, and as a result, remained on the sidelines of the Louisiana Scholarship Program.

Although a growing body of literature is demonstrating that regulations on school choice programs generally correlate with lower rates of program participation, testing mandates—which in the hypothetical Florida experiment reduced school participation by 44 percent—are particularly notable for what little value parents place in them.

EdChoice recently released the results of the largest survey ever conducted of participants in a private school choice program. Parents participating in Florida’s tax credit scholarship program were asked to list the top three factors that influenced their decision to have their child attend their chosen private school. Only two factors—religious environment and instruction (66 percent) and morals/character/values-based instruction (52 percent)—were selected by a majority of scholarship parents.

Thirty-six percent of respondents listed a safe environment among their top three priorities when selecting a school for their child. The least important factor was standardized test scores. Just 4 percent of respondents listed standardized test scores as one of their top three factors.

Not only were families overwhelmingly satisfied with the tax credit scholarship program—92 percent of scholarship families reported being satisfied—but it is clear that Florida parents are choosing their child’s private school because those schools offered what their public schools either could not or would not.

So what do all of these findings mean?

At the very least, they suggest policymakers must be humble in their assumptions about what parents want in their children’s schools, and about their ability to drive quality through regulations.

A growing body of evidence suggests regulations, including standardized testing mandates, can depress school participation in private school choice programs. At the same time, while such regulations can discourage school participation (limiting the options available to families), they do not rise anywhere near the top of the factors parents value when choosing a school.

Parents are much more interested in those intangibles that standardized tests cannot capture, but that are more important to the long-term flourishing of their children, such as religious and values-based instruction. And for good reason: As Jay Greene has identified, we do not regularly see a relationship between changing test scores and later life outcomes.

Indeed, what parents are looking for is something apart from what their child’s traditional district school offered. To condition private school participation in a school choice program on adherence to the public school formula—as the Louisiana Scholarship Program does—renders school choice less meaningful by reducing the number of substantially different options available to families.

Policymakers should avoid being like the proverbial drunk looking for his lost keys under the lamppost because “that’s where the light is.” Standardized tests shine a light on an important aspect of school performance, but sometimes the keys are not under the light.

Families prioritize aspects of schooling that are less measurable, but equally or more important. Families want schools that will form children of good moral character. They want schools that will prepare their children to pursue their life and career goals. They want meaningful instruction in a safe school setting.

Choice is providing them access to just that.

The Space Force Is Coming. Here’s Why the US Needs It.

Dean Cheng  The Daily Signal

 

One of the issues that will face the new Congress is the creation of a new military service: the U.S. Space Force.

Recently, Vice President Mike Pence chaired the fourth meeting of the National Space Council. The council is comprised of key elements of the U.S. government that are involved with space, and includes not only the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretaries of state and defense, but also the secretaries of commerce, transportation, and homeland security, as well as the director of national intelligence, the director of the Office of Budget and Management, the head of NASA, and the national security and homeland security advisers.

The venue was significant—Roosevelt Hall at the National War College. Established in 1946, the National War College seeks to train the next generation of senior officers and national security civilians in the ways of grand strategy, including how to balance resources available against requirements. Thus, the announcement that the National Space Council would unanimously endorse the creation of the new Space Force was intended to send a strategic signal.

To this end, the vice president in his remarks specifically noted the six recommendations that would be made to President Donald Trump:

1. Creation of a new unified combatant command: the United States Space Command. This would elevate command of space operations to the level of U.S. Special Operations Command.
2. Creation of a new organization, the Space Development Agency. This new agency will accelerate the development of new space capabilities.
3. Reorganizing the resulting bureaucracy, and laying out a path for rapid fielding of that new space technology.
4. Altering the current rules of engagement for space to allow more effective responses to potential space threats.
5. Reviewing and revising the legal authorities associated with the employment of space forces. While this appears to simply be more legalese, in reality, establishing which organizations have what legal authorities is a massive part of how the U.S. military operates. Because of the need for U.S. forces to operate within the law—international laws and treaties as well as domestic laws and regulations—laying out the authorities is vital to ensure that military responses are smooth and unencumbered by legal challenges.
6. All this is to lay the foundations for the creation of a new service, the United States Space Force, which the vice president made clear would be proposed in the next National Defense Authorization Act.

While late-night comedians found the whole idea of the Space Force hilarious, the reality is that the United States faces growing threats from space. These include not only anti-satellite missiles that can shatter satellites into thousands of pieces of debris, but lasers capable of “dazzling” and blinding satellite systems, as well as cyber and jammer threats. The range of potential space adversaries includes not only Russia and China, but, as the vice president noted, also Iran and North Korea.

Nor is the U.S. the first nation to create a service dedicated to space operations. In 2015, the Russians established the Russian Aerospace Forces, merging the Russian air force and the Russian Aerospace Defense Forces. This entity has control over Russia’s air force, Russian missile defense forces, and key parts of the Russian space infrastructure, such as the Plesetsk Cosmodrome (launch facility).

Meanwhile, at the end of 2015, the People’s Republic of China established the People’s Liberation Army Strategic Support Force. This new force marks a very different path than the Russian Aerospace Forces.

Under the People’s Liberation Army Strategic Support Force, the Chinese have brought together their electronic warfare, network (cyber) warfare, and space warfare forces. Thus, where the Russians see space as an extension of the air, the Chinese see space as an extension of information space. This difference explains why the Russians created a single aerospace force, while the Chinese created a single information warfare force.

Since such massive reorganizations take time, this means that both China and Russia were undertaking significant analyses and preparations long before the announcement in 2015. Thus, the United States, far from militarizing space, is in fact likely to be years behind our Russian and Chinese counterparts.

President Trump Beats the Green Wave and the Liberal Media

Originally published at Fox News  Newt Gingrich

The big story of the 2018 election is how totally the news media missed the issue of what waves were building.

There was no red wave. If there had been, Republicans would have kept the House and had even more pickups in the Senate.

There was no blue wave. If there had been, Democrats would have gained control of the Senate.

There was an underreported green wave, which attempted to drown Republicans in left-wing money.

There was the usual anti-Republican liberal media wave, which tried to prop up Democrats.

This was a fascinatingly complex election in which unique Republican personalities won re-election as governors in New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maryland — three clearly blue and one purple state in the Northeast.

The biggest change in this election was the sheer volume of money generated by left-wing billionaires and activist groups who hated Trump.

In congressional race after congressional race, Republicans suddenly found millions poured in against them on a scale that resembled Senate races in the past.

House Republicans had hurt themselves by allowing the number of House incumbent retirees to become larger than any time since 1930, when the Brookings Institutionstarted tracking it. Breaking an 88-year record for retirees is a tough way to start an off-year election for the incumbent president’s party.

Despite this institutional disadvantage, President Trump’s House losses were far less than either the 54 seats President Clinton lost in 1994 or the 63 seats President Obama lost in 2010.

Measured against the Clinton-Obama standard, you would have to give President Trump an A+ for keeping Republican House losses to a minimum – and setting the stage for a Republican majority comeback in the 2020 presidential election.

In the Senate, the President, working with Leader Mitch McConnell, put together a great, focused campaign that has reversed historic norms and gained seats. In fact, as I am writing this, it appears that enough Republicans will have won senate seats that it will be far more difficult for Democrats to have a shot at winning a Senate majority in 2020 than anyone might have expected.

The best example of the green wave’s failure is Congressman Beto O’Rourke. He became the darling of the media – the Left’s political rock star to battle Senator Ted Cruz (who the media despises). O’Rourke raised more than $70 million, a record for U.S. Senate races – and an amount we used to associate with presidential campaigns. After all the liberal media hype, and the sheer volume of money from the green wave, O’Rourke lost. Once again, the voters of Texas disappointed the liberal media by refusing to elect their darling.

Republicans gained Senate seats to an unprecedented degree, because President Trump personally crisscrossed the county holding massive rallies (which dwarfed the size of Obama’s rallies).

This was President Trump’s victory, and he and Senate Leader McConnell will use it well to continue getting judges and other nominees confirmed, to block left-wing actions by the Pelosi Democrats, and to set the stage for key legislative achievements the American people want (probably starting with infrastructure investments and reforms).

I will write in more detail in a few days on the green wave and the scale of the Left’s commitment to defeat President Trump.

For the moment, suffice it to say that the President defeated both the money wave and the liberal media – and had a very successful midterm election for a first-term president.