On December 29, 2016, the Obama Administration – with three weeks remaining in its term – issued harsh sanctions against Russia over supposed election interference.  Two compounds in the United States were closed and 35 Russian diplomats were ordered to leave the country.

Russia responded by calling the actions “Cold War déjà vu.”

In the two years that have elapsed since, it has been learned that the “intelligence” that formed the basis for the sanctions was beyond dubious.

As a dog that chases its tail, the fake “intelligence” was being used to cause the investigation which itself lent credibility to the notion of Russian interference.

James Comey’s FBI and John Brennan’s CIA thumbed the eye of an armed nuclear state based on false intelligence.  Why?

Many liberals and critics are under the mistaken belief that President Trump is violating the rule of law and civil liberties by criticizing the Robert Mueller investigation and by ordering the Justice Department’s Inspector General to investigate whether or not the FBI spied on his 2016 presidential campaign.

In fact, the president is behaving totally lawfully, and it is Robert Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein who are acting unconstitutionally and who are violating Trump’s civil liberties.

As I explained in the Wall Street Journal last week (5/13), Robert Mueller’s appointment is unconstitutional under Chief Justice Rehnquist’s majority opinion in Morrison v. Olson. In this investigation, Mueller is acting like a U.S. attorney, who is a principal officer and who must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The unconstitutionality of Mueller’s appointment renders everything he has done since May 17, 2017, unconstitutional as well.

[Note by JW – When even Karl Rove denounces Trump Derangement Syndrome, of which he was once afflicted, you know the Trump Takeover of the GOP is nearing completion.]

State Rep. Stacey Abrams’s victory in Tuesday’s (5/22) Georgia Democrat primary is historic: She’s the first black woman to win a major party’s nomination for governor in any state.

But it’s also an example of the gamble Democrats are taking this midterm season.

Unlike most Democrat candidates for statewide office in the South, Ms. Abrams shows little interest in appealing to independents or disaffected Republicans. She blames the Georgia Democrats’ poor showing in 2014 on efforts to appeal to what she calls the “very middle of the road.”

Is support from the Democrats’ “Resistance” base enough to carry her to the governor’s mansion?  In a state that has a GOP Governor, both Senators, 10 out of 14 Members of Congress, and which Trump won by 211,000 votes in 2016?

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech Monday (5/21) at the Heritage Foundation marked a pivotal moment in U.S. foreign policy.

Pompeo made several important arguments in the course of his half hour address, in which he set out President Donald Trump’s policy regarding Iran in the wake of his May 8 announcement that he is abandoning Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

The key line in his speech was, inarguably, “As President Trump said two weeks ago, he is ready, willing and able to negotiate a new deal [with Iran]. But the deal is not the objective. Our goal is to protect the American people.”

The basic insight that there is no intrinsic value to any agreement – or foreign policy initiative of any sort – that does not advance the interests of the United States or protect the American people is striking, because it has been absent from American foreign policy in relation to rogue regimes and entities for better part of the last generation.

Welcome to the Trump Doctrine.  It is brilliant in its simplicity and straightforwardness.

From its start, the Trump administration has been plagued by charges of “chaos.”

From the revolving door of senior staffers — including two secretaries of state, three national security advisers and two chiefs of staff — to the president’s brash and sometimes boorish personal style, to his politically incorrect taunt-tweeting, Donald Trump has refused to conform to his political opponents’ conventional notions of what constitutes an effective White House operation.

Yet, because Trump is such a Black Swan, his has been the most effective administration since FDR’s first term.

And it’s being accomplished in the teeth of the so-called “Resistance,” which includes the overt hostility of nearly all the mainstream media, the embedded civil service, the Democrats, the never-Trump Republicans, rogue elements of the intelligence and investigative agencies, and Robert Mueller’s witch hunt regarding charges of “collusion” with the Russians.

If you want to understand why Donald Trump is President today (and why he could very well win a second term), look to the Democrats' hysterical response to two of Trump's major foreign policy achievements over the past week.

Last Thursday (5/10), the President traveled to Joint Base Andrews to greet three American hostages whose release he had secured from North Korea. Unlike his predecessor, Trump did it without sending the offending regime an unmarked plane loaded with hundreds of millions in hard currency.

The return of these American captives should have been a moment of celebration and bipartisan unity. So how did Democrats respond? By blasting Trump for the way he welcomed the U.S. hostages home.

Seriously? How do Democrats take a positive event such as the release of American hostages and turn it into an excuse to attack Trump?  Are they so deranged with hate they can’t see their behavior helps Trump, not hurts him?

Whatever uproar is occurring from and at Monday's (5/14) opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, that change of venue -- promised by several presidents of both parties and mandated by Congress in 1995 but accomplished only by Donald Trump -- constitutes an extraordinary development in the seemingly endless history of the Middle East.

And the suspicion is that, after not too long, it will be seen as a hugely positive one.

This isn't happening because of Trump alone, obviously.  But the man, possibly because of his lack of foreign policy preconceptions, has a unique knack for seizing the moment and moving forward as he is doing in Korea.

He allows his gut to prevail over the advice of a legion of experts.  Thanks to that, and believe it or not, Donald Trump may actually bring peace to the Middle East.

[We all know how desperate Democrats are to rig elections with voter fraud.  Often, it’s the only way they can win.  It’s why they hysterically oppose Voter ID.  Yet as Joseph Stalin said, “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.”  Today, the “who” is computers.  Here, computer security expert Bruce Schneier explains what to do about this. –JW]

Today, we conduct our elections on computers. Our registration lists are in computer databases. We vote on computerized voting machines. And our tabulation and reporting is done on computers.

We do this for a lot of good reasons, but a side effect is that elections now have all the insecurities inherent in computers. The only way to reliably protect elections from both malice and accident is to use something that is not hackable or unreliable at scale.

Recently, there have been two graphic demonstrations of how bad our computerized voting system is.