Key News : John Bolton Becomes Tump's National Security Advisor, Obama Harvested Facebook Data with Its Okay, DiGenova to the Rescue, and Trump Is Forced to Sign a Terrible Budget

THE REALLY GOOD NEWS TODAY IS ABOUT JOHN BOLTON. President Trump announced Thursday that former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton will replace General H.R. McMaster as his National Security advisor effective April 9 : “I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.” The President’s announcement came after months of speculation over whether McMaster would resign or be fired from his post. As it turns out, General McMaster is retiring this summer after 34 years of active duty. The General said : “After thirty-four years of service to our nation, I am requesting retirement from the US Army effective this summer after which I will leave public service. Throughout my career it has been my greatest privilege top serve alongside extraordinary servicemembers and dedicated civilians. I am thankful to President Donald J. Trump for the opportunity to serve him and our nation as national security advisor. I am grateful for the friendship and support of the members of the National Security Council who worked together to provide the President with the best options to protect and advance our national interests.” McMaster said he was “especially proud” to have served with National Security Council staff, who he said “established a strong foundation for protecting the American people, promoting American prosperity, achieving peace through strength, and advancing American influence : “I know that these patriots will continue to serve our President and our nation with distinction." • White House chief of staff, General John Kelly, said McMaster is “a fine American and Military officer. He has served with distinction and honor throughout his career in the US Army and as the National Security Advisor. He brought and maintained discipline and energy to our vital interagency processes. He helped develop options for the president and ensured that those options were presented fully and fairly. A true solider-scholar, his impact on his country and this government will be felt for years to come.” • John Bolton told Fox News Thursday evening : “I didn't really expect that announcement this afternoon, but it's obviously a great honor. It's always an honor to serve our country and I think particularly in these times internationally, it's a particular honor.” Bolton told Fox News' Martha MacCallum that the process of his hiring “came to a conclusion this afternoon, but...there's still a transition. I look forward to working with H.R. and his team and the other senior members of the President's team on national security and I have no doubt there's a lot of work to do.” Bolton has served as a Fox News contributor. The position of White House national security advisor does not require Senate confirmation, which might have been difficult for Botlen. He was not confirmed as US Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006, serving under President Bush in a recess appointee because the Democrat-majority Senate woudl not confirm him, finding his views on acting aggressively in Iraq not to their liking. John Bolton alsoserved as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security from 2001 to 2005. US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley tweeted : “Thank you to Lieutenant General HR McMaster for your service and loyalty to our country. Your selfless courage and leadership has inspired all of us. Most of all, thank you for your friendship.” • On Thursday evening, a White House official said the President and General McMaster “mutually agreed” that he would resign from his post. The two have been discussing this for some time, the official said, noting that the timeline was expedited as they both felt it was important to have a new team in place, instead of constant speculation. A White House official said the decision was not related to any one moment or incident, but rather the result of ongoing conversations between the two. The official told Fox News that the move has been contemplated for some time, and was just about the “worst-kept secret” in Washington. The President took his time to find a replacement for McMaster because he wanted the "right person." Fox said that while Trump spoke to Bolton many times about the job, the deal was cemented in an Oval Office meeting between the two Thursday afternoon. • A White House official said Bolton is one of the strongest voices and experts on the full range of national security issues and challenges facing the US. • This is one more step in putting in place the White House senior team that President Trump originally was reportedly seeking. With Mike Pompeo at State and John Bolton as National Security Advisor, President Trump has the hard-hitting and assertive foreign relations and security advisors that will match his policies. • • • OBAMA HARVESTED FACEBOOK PROFILES. The Great American Daily wrote on Monday that : "Barack Obama shocked Americans when he claimed his administration was scandal free. That was an obvious lie. And now one insider has stepped forward with the smoking gun that implicates Obama’s 2012 campaign in a real data harvesting scandal. The current media feeding frenzy is focused on Cambridge Analytica, the data firm that Trump hired in 2016, but de-emphasized during the general election. They are accused of misuse of data acquired on Facebook through a third party app in order to target online ads at voters. Cambridge is not accused of doing anything illegal or misusing Facebook, but the media is trying to frame the story as the Trump campaign having used a shady data firm to rig the election. • BUT, Carol Davidsen, who was the director of Obama for America’s Integration and Media Analytics, has declared that the Obama re-election campaign ran a similar program and that Facebook was fine with the initiative because they supported Obama’s campaign. Carol Davidsen tweeted : "Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing....They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side." • That nails it. Facebook allowed Obama to harvest whatever he wanted because Facebook was on Obama's side. Obama’s campaign was harvesting data through Facebook, and the Facebook executives applauded Obama’s program. Later, when Cambridge Analytics used harvested data from Facebook for the Trump campaign, Facebook suspended Cambridge. • As we said yesterday, Facebook has become the world's communication system and it should be treated and controlled and licensed like the public utility that it is. • • • TRUMP HIRES DiGENOVA. This surely means that President Trump has decided to take on a more confrontational posture with special counsel Mueller. The President id still cooperating with the investigation, but he attacked Mueller by name on twitter for the first time recently. • Joseph "Joe" DiGenova is a former US Attorney for the District of Columbia – and a one-time special counsel. DiGenova has been an aggressive critic of Mueller and has asserted that high level officials within the FBI and Justice Department are using the Russia investigation to frame the President. • The Daily Caller reported :“President Donald Trump has reportedly hired Joe DiGenova...to serve on his personal legal team. According to the New York Times, DiGenova will not serve in a 'lead' capacity....DiGenova has frequently stated that the Russia probe was orchestrated by Obama-era FBI and DOJ officials, a line of reasoning which the President himself pushed over the weekend." • Some anti-Trump members of the media took Trump’s tweets about the Mueller probe as evidence the President was laying the groundwork to firing the special counsel. Trump tweeted : That Mueller probe shouldk never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and thae DNC, and was improperly used in FISA court for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT! • President Trump is evidently seeking aggressive lawyers who will fight the special counsel investigation in the court of public opinion. Trump is right to fight back. While his supporters would like him to fire Mueller and end the Fake investigation, setting up a take-no-prisoners legal team is Trump’s next best option. • • • A DEMOCRAT HOUSE MEMBER SUGGESTS USING THE SECOND AMENDMENT AGAINST TRUMP. Congressman Tom Suozzi, a New York Democrat, was at a town hall event in his Long Island district when he was asked how far Democrats should be willing to go to resist the President. Suozzi suggested taking up arms and launching an armed rebellion, according to the New York Post, which wrote : "Representative Tom Suozzi made the remark...saying that folks opposed to Trump might resort to the Second Amendment." Here is what Suozzi said : "It's really a matter of putting public pressure on the President. This is where the Second Amendment comes in, quite frankly, because you know, what if the President was to ignore the courts? What would you do? What would we do?" Suozzi noted that the Second Amendment is "the right to bear arms." • This is an unthinkable suggestion from an elected representative. And when questioned about his remarks, his campaign doubled down on starting a shooting war with the President and his supporters by quoting Thomas Jefferson : "What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms." • It's an even more despicable statement coming from a member of Congress when we consider that Suozzi is a strong supporter of gun control. We can imagine what would happen to a Republican who dared to say such an outrageous thing. • • • THE MONSTROUS BUDGET. And, finally today's news is about the new budget -- it is a joke to even call it a "budget," which is a word that suggests control and self-discipline. Fox News reported on Friday afternoon that President Trump signd the spending bill as a "matter of national security," but he warned Congress that he will never sign such a massive spending bill again, and again called on the Senate to get rid of the filibuster rule, and create line-item veto power. • The President signed the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill Friday despite an earlier threat to veto the legislation due to the lack of border wall funding and a fix for DACA. Trump signed the mammoth legislation reluctantly, saying in a press availability with other members of the administration that, in order to secure a necessary increase in military spending, he had to give money to Democratic projects that he derided as a "wasted sum of money. It's not right and it's very bad for our country." But, President Trump said that military spending is very important, and that this concern overrode his thoughts about vetoing the legislation : “Therefore, as a matter of national security, I've signed this omnibus budget bill. There are a lot of things I’m unhappy about in this bill...But I say to Congress, I will never sign another bill like this again. I'm not going to do it again. To prevent the omnibus situation from ever happening again, I'm calling on Congress to give me a line item veto for all government spending bills. And the Senate must end -- they must end -- the filibuster rule and get down to work.” • President Trump had tweeted earlier Friday that he was considering using the veto, saying that recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program “have been totally abandoned by the Democrats.” He added that the border wall, which he said was "desperately needed for our National Defense" is not fully funded. Trump moved to end the DACA program in September, giving Congress a six-month window to come up with a legislative fix. That deadline has been delayed by court orders, but the fate of the 800,000 enrolled recipients is still uncertain. The President Trump addressed DACA recipients at the press availability : "Republicans are with you," he said, before accusing Democrats of blocking efforts to fix DACA "every step of the way." The White House has tried to use the DACA issue to convince Democrats to support approximately $25 billion in funding for Trump’s central campaign promise. But a congressional GOP source told Fox News talks broke drown after Democrats pushed for a path to citizenship to include also those who are currently eligible -- expanding those covered to 1.8 million. • The spending bill passed by Congress includes only $1.6 billion for border measures -- much of which is for repairs to already existing fencing. It explicitly rules out any new prototypes of the kind President Trump viewed this month in California. But House Speaker Paul Ryan and the White House pushed back against conservative concerns on Thursday, saying it provided for 100 miles of border construction. Democrats had claimed victory on the issue, pointing to the fact that Trump's requests for new deportation agents and detention center beds had gone unanswered, although they had expressed disappointment at the failure to get a DACA fix in the bill. • The deal has also irked more conservative members of Congress, who objected to the size and cost of the bill (which ran in at over 2,000 pages) as well as the failure to remove funding for Planned Parenthood and so-called "sanctuary cities." Other Republicans approved of the deal, pointing to a massive increase in military and infrastructure spending as well as funding to help combat the nation's opioid crisis. • Trump’s veto threat was totally unexpected, according to Fox News, particularly as the White House had signaled Trump would support the bill if passed by Congress. Most lawmakers have already left Washington for a two week recess. Some are on overseas trips already. The House adjourned Friday morning until Monday, meaning that if Trump had vetoed the bill then the government would have shut down. • It is time for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to do whatever it takes to break the death grip Democrats now have over any bill that requires a cloture vote and that can be stopped from reaching the Senate floor by a filibuster. McConnell's worry about the future is trivial compared to the damage to the Republic being inflicted daily by ProgDems who will do anything to stop Trump and advance their radically leftist agenda. • • • DEAR READERS, I will be unable to post a blog on Sunday night. So, our next blog will be posted on Monday, March 25. Have a great weekend, hug a Deplorable and support President Trump.