The President Visits Phoenix:

You saw last night the support for President Trump inside the building and the anger at him outside. When on script, he was clear defending and presenting his accomplishments for the eight months in office. When he went off script he attacked the media hard and went through a long defense of his Charlottesville statements, comments and actions. The off script stuff will no doubt provide the morning shows and MSM enough fodder to blast him all day. As he spoke (off script) I just imagined his staff backstage cringing. I wondered who was going to volunteer to go on GMA and CNN today, the two shows he really blasted. Those stations will be angry and ready to call him out — all day. You see they are allowed to blast the administration all day, but get very indignant if you attack them. They can dish it out, but consider it unfair to take incoming.

This is where we are today, and as we have long thought the President is to going to run against Democrats and Congress. It started with the Arizona Senate race last night. Trump was clear that John McCain cost “us” healthcare reform and their other senator Jeff Flake is weak. He all but endorsed his opponent in primary race. Kelli Ward, a staunch conservative and pro Trump person, ran against John McCain last year and this year is going against the other Republican Senator, Jeff Flake. She was in the building and Flake wasn’t.
The WSJ said this about the race: “Jeff Flake, the outspoken junior U.S. senator from Arizona, faces a tough road to re-election in 2018”. Mr. Flake opposes Mr. Trump’s trade and border-wall plans, and with the president calling the senator “toxic” and “weak on borders,” cracks are starting to show in Mr. Flake’s support from Trump voters.
We don’t think Flake will lose to her but it is an example of the divide in the party these days. If she does win the primary then the Republicans will likely lose the seat in the general election. So this is a slippery slope for Trump and team.

On that topic, the NYT this AM reports:

“The relationship between President Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, has disintegrated to the point that they have not spoken to each other in weeks, and Mr. McConnell has privately expressed uncertainty that Mr. Trump will be able to salvage his administration after a series of summer crises.

More News (Some) You May Not Have Heard:

Imagine if this were about a Trump or Bush. Did you hear that two members of the Kennedy family were arrested in Massachusetts after complaints about a party and fireworks? Police say officers responded to a home near the family compound in Hyannis Port on noise complaints. Arrested were Matthew (son of Robert) Kennedy and his daughter, 22-year-old Caroline Kennedy and charged with disorderly conduct.
I’m guessing you didn’t hear this on the MSM. But then again if Teddy can drive a car off a bridge, and a passenger dies while he goes home to sleep, why report this?

Wouldn’t you love to know what is going on behind the scenes with this whole North Korea situation? Funny he stopped firing missiles for awhile. We just think there is a lot we don’t know. The WSJ has this story:
“The U.S. is stepping up its efforts to cut off North Korea from the financial world. The Washington U.S. attorney’s office in May obtained warrants to freeze funds of Chinese firms that were processed through U.S. banks, alleging these firms help finance North Korea’s weapons program, which the country has accelerated in recent months”. 

Some stories and their headlines in the NYT:

Trump Administration Moves to Expand Deportation Dragnet to Jails
Federal officials are working with sheriffs on a legal maneuver to gain access to undocumented immigrants in local jails, a practice now limited by the courts.

COMMENT:  And the problem is?

Even Business Leaders Who Abandoned Trump’s Councils May Not Stray Far
Despite their symbolic moves, many C.E.Os will continue to advocate positions in person and through lobbyists, while people in Mr. Trump’s inner circle face a harder decision.

COMMENT:  This just supports our thoughts they are feckless and resigned because of boycott threats.

Angry Trump Grilled His Generals About Troop Increase, Then Gave In

THE WASHINGTON TIMES STORY:

DNC hack theories considered extreme and fringe now entering mainstream

Some claim party insider leaked data

By

The conventional wisdom that last year’s Democratic National Committee computer hack, which triggered WikiLeaks to release thousands of emails revealing Democratic Party favoritism of Hillary Clinton over Bernard Sanders, was conducted by Russian operatives is facing increasing scrutiny.

Theories once considered fringe and extreme have begun entering the mainstream, with a prominent group of former NSA and CIA officials claiming the hack that rocked the 2016 presidential election was not actually a hack at all but rather a leak by an insider with physical access to the DNC computer network.

Speculation around the claim by the group, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), is also being fueled by investigators re-examining statements by key players in the drama, including former President Barack Obama and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose carefully chosen words on the hack have drawn fresh attention.

A research memo compiled by VIPS last month directly conflicts with the U.S. intelligence community’s January claim that it was Russian operatives who orchestrated the cyberattack on the DNC network.

The memo, which the group sent to President Trump last month under the title “Was the ‘Russian Hack’ an Inside Job?” — investigates metadata and data transfer speeds found in the records of the alleged Russian cyberintrusion into DNC computers.

The memo also raises issues with assertions that the U.S. intelligence community has made over the existence of “Guccifer 2.0,” a shadowy Romanian hacker alleged to have carried out the cyberintrusion.

A January assessment publicized by the intelligence community claimed that Guccifer had hacked the DNC network on behalf of Russian intelligence and had then passed documents obtained through the hack to WikiLeaks.

VIPS argues that Guccifer was made up.

The intelligence community’s “assessment and its conclusions are a disgrace to the intelligence profession,” VIPS co-founder Ray McGovern, a retired 27-year CIA veteran, told The Washington Times in an interview.

VIPS claims the FBI, CIA and NSA never actually performed any cyberforensic analysis of the documents that the agencies claim were hacked by Guccifer and provided to WikiLeaks.

According to Mr. McGovern, there is clear evidence that some of the DNC emails given to WikiLeaks contained superimposed Russian language formatting. “Essentially, they were synthetically tainted with Russian fingerprints,” he said, adding that such tainting was done to make it appear as if Russian operatives had been involved in the hack.

Such assertions, which directly counter the widely accepted “blame the Russians” narrative, have emerged as the source of much handwringing among analysts and journalists at several news organizations.

Last week saw the left-leaning magazine The Nation — one of America’s oldest publications — consider retracting a 4,500-word investigative article that had prominently featured VIPS’ findings.

VIPS is not a new organization, nor is it an unseasoned player to controversy that sometimes accompanies heated debates over national security matters at the highest level.

The group, which has no official ties to the U.S. government, gained notoriety in 2003 by protesting the Bush administration’s use of faulty intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq.

VIPS’ current hack/leak memo offers a timeline suggesting that the whole existence of Guccifer was actually made up to distract American voters and journalists.

The first mentions of the alleged hacker in news reports occurred just after WikiLeaks had released the emails showing embarrassing information about Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign and its battles with Mr. Sanders just before the Democratic National Convention.

But on the opening day of the convention in Philadelphia last summer, Mr. Assange made no mention of Guccifer when discussing how WikiLeaks had come to be in possession of the emails.

To the contrary, Mr. Assange suggested that the hack of the DNC system could have been an inside job.

“We never reveal our sources, obviously. That’s what we pride ourselves on,” Mr. Assange said at the time from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. “But if we’re talking about the DNC, there’s lots of consultants that have access, lots of programmers. And the DNC has been hacked dozens and dozens of times.”

Mr. Obama, meanwhile, addressed the issue roughly six months later, after Russia’s alleged role in the hack had mushroomed into a much wider media frenzy around accusations that the Kremlin had meddled aggressively in the 2016 election.

“The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC emails that were leaked,” Mr. Obama said during his final press conference in January, just two days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

On a separate front, recent weeks have brought new questions about the role played by a company known as Crowdstrike — a DNC-connected cybersecurity firm that was tasked with investigating the DNC sever that was hacked.

While Crowdstrike created a “cyberforensic” report on the alleged hack, federal investigators, including the FBI, have thus far not been able to get their hands on the DNC’s computer network.

The January intelligence community assessment made no mention of Crowdstrike.

But Mr. McGovern told The Times that the Irvine, California-based firm could be connected to a subsequent dump of documents to WikiLeaks, which occurred last March, and which the anti-secrecy organization claimed contained classified details about the CIA’s latest hacking capabilities.

Those capabilities, refined by the CIA’s Directorate of Digital Innovation, which then-director John O. Brennan had launched in 2015, allegedly included programs to listen in on smartphones and smart TVs, in addition to establishing tools to create false-flag hacks in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi.

Mr. McGovern maintains that only the CIA has the capability to make a hack look like it came from a different language. As a result, he said, current CIA Director Mike Pompeo made a rare public appearance to blast WikiLeaks just weeks after it had published the documents alleging CIA hacking capabilities.

“It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is,” Mr. Pompeo told a crowd at a Washington think tank in early-April. “[It’s] a nonstate hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia.”

Mr. McGovern speculates that Crowdstrike, which the DNC paid more than $400,000 during the 2016 election cycle, could have been complicit in generating the narrative of Russian involvement in the DNC hack.

He argues that such complicity would explain why neither the FBI, CIA, NSA nor any other major U.S. intelligence or law enforcement outfit has ever fully examined the DNC hack. “[Fired FBI Director] Jim Comey could have gotten authority to access the DNC server, but he never wanted to,” Mr. McGovern said.