The problem was in the past – the city officials and the Democrats in power in the capital did not care and still don’t care about the safety of the people. All they care about is filling their pockets. My opinion is that any capital city of any state should be enshrined and controlled by the State government and housing should be built outside of the capital grounds. D.C. capital grounds should be run by the Federal/Capital Police and should not include any housing within that compound for security reasons on both counts.
President Donald Trump by The White House / Flickr (Left), Igor / stock.adobe.com (Right)
Trump deploys federal officers to patrol Washington, DC, amid high crime rates
President Donald Trump has ordered federal law enforcement to assist in policing Washington, DC, in what the White House calls a response to violent crime in the nation’s capital.
“President Trump has directed an increased presence of federal law enforcement to protect innocent citizens,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in an Aug. 7 statement, according to POLITICO. “Starting tonight, there will be no safe harbor for violent criminals in D.C.”
The operation began at midnight Aug. 7 and will run for at least seven days. The U.S. Park Police is leading the effort, joined by Homeland Security Investigations, the FBI, and other agencies, POLITICO reported. The crackdown will focus on high-traffic tourist areas.
In March, Trump issued an executive order to create the “Making DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force.” The task force is designed to boost public safety in the city using federal law enforcement.
The deployment follows a brutal attack on 19-year-old Edward Coristine, a former DOGE employee. According to FOX 5 DC, Coristine was beaten by a group of teenagers in northwest DC earlier this week.
In an Aug. 5 Truth Social post, Trump called crime in the city “totally out of control,” blaming local gangs and youths as young as 14 for assaults, robberies, and shootings. He said offenders are “almost immediately released.”
“If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City,” he added, “and run this City how it should be run, and put criminals on notice that they’re not going to get away with it anymore.”
Leavitt also posted homicide statistics on X showing D.C.’s murder rate at 41 per 100,000 residents — higher than any other global capital.
Hillary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, speaks at a press conference in Switzerland on March 6, 2009. Courtesy: U.S. Department of State Flickr.
(The Center Square) – Newly declassified intelligence documents indicate that Hillary Clinton, her 2016 presidential campaign managers, and a top member of a George Soros group plotted to fabricate the Trump-Russia collusion campaign to distract the public from Clinton’s email scandal.
Declassified by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, the 29-page “Durham annex” from 2023 chronicles the Office of Special Counsel’s (OSC) investigation into purported efforts by the Clinton campaign and its allies to falsely tie Russia’s cyber interference attempts during election season to Trump.
In its investigation, OSC uncovered emails that appeared to be sent by Leonard Benardo, senior vice president of Soros’ Open Society Foundations, to people involved in Clinton’s campaign. Soros is a billionaire funder of Democratic campaigns.
The emails appear to show that Benardo engaged in discussions with Julianne Smith, one of Clinton’s foreign policy advisors, about how to use reports of Russian interference in the election to Clinton’s advantage and Trump’s detriment. Benardo later told OSC he had no recollection of writing the emails.
In an email dated July 25, 2016, Benardo told an undisclosed person that “politicization is on the table” and that he and Smith had been discussing ways to create a story casting Trump as “an agent of influence” in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to undermine the election “in the interest of Donald Trump.”
“Julie [Smith] says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil on the fire,” Benardo wrote, indicating that Clinton’s campaign planned to use the FBI to push the story.
While the FBI established early on that Putin ordered “cyber influence operations” to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process, it found no evidence that Putin interfered on behalf of Trump.
The Clinton campaign’s goal, it appeared, was to divert Americans’ attention away from her email scandal, since “Hillary is hardly good-looking as far as credibility is concerned,” Benardo added.
Clinton served as Secretary of State under the Obama administration from 2009 to 2013, where she used a private email server for official agency communications, putting thousands of emails with sensitive or classified information at risk.
According to a follow-up email by Benardo dated two days later, Clinton personally approved of the plan to fabricate the Trump-Russia collusion.
“HRC approved Julia’s idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections. That should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level,” Benardo wrote.
“The point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue. Say something like a critical infrastructure threat for the election to feel menace since both POTUS and VPOTUS have acknowledged the fact IC would speed up searching for evidence that is regrettably still unavailable,” he clarified.
Upon finding the emails, the Office of Special Council questioned Benardo, who told them he did not know who “Julie” referred to and he did not draft the emails “to the best of his recollection.”
Clinton, when questioned by OSC, said the plan she apparently approved “looked like Russian disinformation.” Campaign Chair John Podesta and other advisors each denied the validity of the emails and each called the emails “ridiculous.”
Smith was also interviewed and said she recalled neither drafting or receiving the emails nor proposing a plan to Clinton or other campaign leadership to try tying Putin to Trump. She also denied enlisting the FBI to further such efforts.
But OSC found that the verified communications between Smith and campaign advisors implied otherwise. The same day Benardo purportedly sent the email about how the FBI “will put oil on the fire,” Smith texted a Clinton campaign advisor and asked them to “see if [Special Assistant to the President and National Security Council member] will tell you if there is a formal fbi or other investigation into the hack?”
The Clinton campaign advisor, whose name is redacted, replied that the person in question “won’t say anything more to me. Sorry. Told me she went as far as she could.”
Ultimately, OSC determined that “it is a logical deduction that [redacted] Smith was, at a minimum, playing a role in the Clinton campaign’s efforts to tie Trump to Russia,” and that available evidence “supports the notion that the campaign might have wanted or expected the FBI or other agencies to aid the effort” via a formal investigation.
“In short, neither the Office nor [redacted] have been able to determine definitively whether the purported Clinton campaign plan [redacted] was entirely genuine, partially true, a composite pulled from multiple sources, exaggerated in certain respects, or fabricated in its entirety,” OSC concluded, adding that regardless, the entire affair was “concerning.”
“Based on the Durham annex, the Obama FBI failed to adequately review and investigate intelligence reports showing the Clinton campaign may have been ginning up the fake Trump-Russia narrative for Clinton’s political gain, which was ultimately done through the Steele Dossier and other means,” U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said Thursday.
“History will show that the Obama and Biden administration’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were weaponized against President Trump,” he added. “This political weaponization has caused critical damage to our institutions and is one of the biggest political scandals and cover-ups in American history.”
When intelligence czar Tulsi Gabbard released her report last month accusing major players in the Obama administration of fabricating the Russia collusion hoax used to tarnish Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond, some of us were not surprised.
Nor were we surprised that the news media has either ignored the story or tried to discredit it. We are very familiar with that playbook, having seen major media outlets use it to perfection when 51 intelligence officials signed a letter falsely claiming that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” That letter, signed by former CIA director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper, probably cost Donald Trump the 2020 election, just as the Russiagate hoax was intended to derail Trump in 2016.
The New York Times, ferociously guarding its fake Pulitzer Prize from 2018, has led the way in trying to convince Americans that the evidence released by Gabbard was manufactured by Russia. But isn’t that the same tune whistled by Clapper and Brennan five years ago regarding the laptop? Anyone who believes either the CIA or the New York Times at this point either hasn’t been paying attention or is impervious to new information. I won’t try to cover all the obvious ways in which the evidence points to a massive conspiracy to defame Trump and defraud the public. You can learn about it in the reporting by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi among others – including several reporters who write for RealClearInvestigations.
And with any luck, the originators of the Russia hoax will be brought to justice. We learned last week that Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered a grand jury probe to investigate the culpability of Brennan, Clapper, former FBI director James Comey, and possibly even Hillary Clinton for their roles in what Gabbard called a “treasonous conspiracy” to interfere with the 2016 election and subsequently to undermine the first Trump administratio
That could take care of half the problem, but what about the other half of the conspiracy: the media allies who promoted the Russia Collusion Hoax without doing any reporting of their own other than swallowing hook, line, and sinker the fake news promoted by Clinton and the intelligence community because of their own hatred of Donald Trump? That part of the conspiracy is still alive and well.
Witness the NBC report I linked above on the grand jury probe. While it purports to be a straight news story about the possibility of charges against the purveyors of the Russia hoax, it reads more like a defense brief to clear them of criminal wrongdoing, starting with a subhead that says, “Past probes, including two conducted by Republicans, found no such crimes.”
After announcing the probe in the first two paragraphs, most of the rest of the story throws shade on it
— “A former senior national security official pointed out that multiple past reviews, including ones conducted by Republicans, found no such crimes.”
— “Democratic lawmakers have accused the administration of seeking to distract attention from the Jeffrey Epstein case.”
— “Democrats contend that Gabbard’s talk of a treasonous Obama-era plot is patently false and a diversion.”
— “A 2020 bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee review contradicted the idea that there was a conspiracy by Obama administration officials against Trump, finding significant evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election.”
You get the idea. The media wants to dismiss Gabbard’s revelations about the origins of the Russia collusion hoax because most White House reporters were complicit in the hoax from the beginning.
Thanks to the First Amendment, neither NBC, nor CNN, nor MSNBC, nor the New York Times will ever be held accountable in a court of law for their part in propagating the fake collusion story. And so far, it appears that the Times and the Washington Post will never even have to return the Pulitzers they won in 2018 for whitewashing the phony evidence of collusion.
Nor will journalists like me ever be awarded any prizes for being right from the start. On Aug. 7, 2016, I published a column at the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana, just days after the conspiracy is alleged to have started, wherein I cited “a political scandal … which exceeds in scope anything seen previously in our country’s 240-year history.” But it wasn’t about Trump colluding with Russians; it was about the media colluding with Democrats and the intelligence community to try to cripple the ascendant candidacy of Donald Trump.
I called it “Mediagate.”
The context was that Wikileaks had released emails on July 22, 2016, showing the Democratic National Committee had colluded with the Clinton campaign to sabotage the competing campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders. This story should have crippled the Clinton campaign. Instead, the legacy media unleashed a barrage of anti-Trump stories that took the spotlight off Clinton.
“This was no coincidence,” I wrote, “but rather was the beginning of a concerted effort by the media to rehabilitate Hillary Clinton as the historic first woman presidential nominee in U.S. history.” As I explained at the time:
People were actually starting to ask questions about Clinton’s dubious moral character and her role in the [DNC email] scandal, but since Clinton didn’t have any answers, she did what she does best and deflected the story. Instead of explaining why she had lied for months about collaborating with the DNC to steal the election, she and her surrogates led the lapdog media to instead question whether or not the supposed Russian hackers had leaked the damaging evidence against Hillary in order to boost Trump’s chances in the election.
It was in this context that candidate Donald Trump held his famous press conference at the Trump National Doral Golf Club on July 27, 2016, to respond to the DNC email breach and to discount the notion that he was working with Putin.
In my column, I explained that Trump had launched into a humorous stream-of-consciousness riff about how the Russians, who supposedly had hacked into the DNC server, might also have “hacked into the soft target of Hillary’s private server when she was secretary of state and therefore might have copies of the thousands of ‘private’ emails which she and her lawyers had deleted.”
Trump followed up with a joke that used the Russian hacking theory about the DNC emails to take a bank shot at Hillary for her illegal email server that she used for official business as secretary of state:
“I will tell you this: Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be next.”
The press went wild, claiming that Trump’s quip was proof that he had a direct line to the Kremlin and that he was ordering Putin to hack Clinton’s server. This was absurd on so many levels that it seemed more like a “Saturday Night Live” skit. Suffice it to say, no one ever explained why “Russian agent” Trump didn’t just tell Putin what to do privately instead of announcing it during a press conference.
What we didn’t know at the time was that a Clinton ally named Leonard Benardo had written an email on the same day – July 27, 2016 – that claimed “HRC approved Julia’s idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections,” – HRC being Hillary Rodham Clinton. That email and others were concealed from the public until Gabbard declassified them last month. Of course, the New York Times and other Democrat lapdog media outlets immediately fell back on the “Russia did it” narrative to claim that the incriminating emails (like Hunter Biden’s laptop) were manufactured by Vladimir Putin and his henchmen. Fat chance.
What we now know is that Trump was right all along when he called the New York Times and the Washington Post “fake news.” And I was right when I called “Mediagate” the scandal you won’t hear about on cable news. Less than two weeks after the Russian collusion hoax started, I had already exposed it as a fraud.
So where do I go to get my Pulitzer?
Frank Miele, retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His book “The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA and on X/Gettr @HeartlandDiary.
Federal Court SHOCKS With Texas Election Bombshell
In a decisive win for election integrity, a federal court has upheld Texas’s voter ID requirement for mail-in ballots, sending shockwaves through advocates of lax voting laws.
Story Snapshot
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld Texas’s law requiring ID numbers on mail-in ballots.
This ruling reverses a lower court’s block and ensures stricter election security measures for upcoming elections.
Supporters, including President Trump, celebrate the decision as a victory for fair and transparent elections.
Opponents argue the law could disenfranchise some voters, but the court found the requirement lawful and material to eligibility.
Federal Court Affirms Texas’s Authority to Secure Elections
On August 5, 2025, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous opinion upholding Texas’s law mandating that voters include a state identification number or partial Social Security number on mail-in ballots. This decision reversed a previous block by a district court, which had argued the requirement violated the Civil Rights Act. The appellate judges ruled that the ID requirement is both lawful and “material” to verifying voter eligibility, giving Texas officials the green light to enforce the law in all upcoming elections.
The ruling comes after years of contentious legal and political debate. Texas’s Election Integrity Protection Act (S.B. 1), passed in 2021, was part of a broader Republican-led movement to safeguard elections following the controversies of 2020. Opponents, including left-leaning advocacy groups and the previous Biden administration, challenged the law in court, claiming it would disenfranchise voters—especially the elderly and disabled—by creating bureaucratic hurdles. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, however, maintained that voter ID is one of the most crucial tools in the battle against election fraud, arguing that the law is necessary to prevent abuse of mail-in ballots.
Legal Reasoning and National Significance
The Fifth Circuit’s opinion aligns with previous decisions in both Texas and other federal circuits. Judges cited the Veasey v. Abbott precedent, which upheld ID requirements for in-person voting, and referenced similar rulings concerning the materiality provision of the Civil Rights Act. The court concluded that requiring an ID number is a common-sense safeguard and does not constitute an illegal barrier to voting. This ruling sets a precedent that could influence how other states shape their own mail-in ballot regulations, reinforcing judicial trends that favor robust identification standards for absentee voting.
Supporters of the law, including President Trump and many Texas officials, see the decision as a victory for transparency and constitutional order. They argue that Americans deserve confidence in their elections and that requiring voters to verify their identity is a minimal, reasonable step. Detractors warn of a chilling effect on participation, but the court’s logic is clear: verifying eligibility is not suppression, it’s protection.
Impact on Voters and Future Elections
With the law now in effect, Texas voters casting mail-in ballots will need to comply with the new identification requirements. Election officials are preparing for increased scrutiny on absentee ballots, and compliance measures are being put in place statewide. While some critics point to potential reductions in mail-in ballot acceptance rates due to missing or incorrect ID numbers, the law’s supporters argue this is a necessary tradeoff to prevent fraud. The Fifth Circuit’s decision may encourage other states to adopt similar rules, potentially shaping national trends in election law.
Short-term, the immediate impact will be felt in Texas’s upcoming elections, where all mail-in ballots must now include proper identification. Long-term, this ruling signals a judicial willingness to uphold robust state-level election integrity measures, possibly inviting further legislative action or additional court challenges. Plaintiffs may seek Supreme Court review, but for now, the Fifth Circuit’s decision stands as the law of the land in Texas.
Broader Debate and Stakeholder Perspectives
Election security advocates, constitutional conservatives, and many everyday Texans have long demanded stronger safeguards against fraud—especially after the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 cycle. This ruling represents a judicial affirmation of those concerns. By contrast, left-wing groups and some legal scholars continue to argue that such measures risk disenfranchising vulnerable populations. However, the Fifth Circuit’s reasoning is grounded in legal precedent and the plain text of the Civil Rights Act, giving states clear authority to require what is material to voter eligibility. This legal clarity will shape election security debates well beyond Texas.
With the nation watching, Texas has become the proving ground for the defense of election integrity. As states face ongoing challenges from those who seek to erode safeguards and sow doubt in the democratic process, this ruling is a reminder that the Constitution and the rule of law remain the ultimate backstop for protecting Americans’ trust in their elections.
kommonsentsjane 