Former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway assesses Vice President Harris’s role in the “lackluster” Biden administration.

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Her departure comes at an inopportune time for Trump, who faces a deficit in the polls as the Republican National Convention begins on Monday.

By Associated Press

Kellyanne Conway, one of President Donald Trump’s most influential and longest serving advisers, announced Sunday that she would be leaving the White House at the end of the month.

Conway, Trump’s campaign manager during the stretch run of the 2016 race, was the first woman to successfully steer a White House bid, then became a senior counselor to the president. She informed Trump of her decision in the Oval Office.

Conway cited a need to spend time with her four children in a resignation letter she posted Sunday night. Her husband, George, had become an outspoken Trump critic and her family a subject of Washington’s rumor mill.

“We disagree about plenty but we are united on what matters most: the kids,” she wrote. “For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama.”

She is still slated to speak at the Republican National Convention this week. Her husband, an attorney who renounced Trump after the 2016 campaign, had become a member of the Lincoln Project, an outside group of Republicans devoted to defeating Trump.

The politically adversarial marriage generated much speculation in the Beltway and online. George Conway also announced Sunday that he was taking a leave of absence from both Twitter and the Lincoln Project.

Kellyanne Conway worked for years as a Republican pollster and operative and originally supported Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primary. She moved over to the Trump campaign and that August became campaign manager as Stephen Bannon became campaign chairman; Bannon was indicted two days ago for fraud.

Conway cited a need to help her children’s remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic as a need to step away from her position. She had remained a trusted voice within the West Wing and spearheaded several initiatives, including on combating opioid abuse.

She was also known for her robust defense of the president in media appearances, at times delivering dizzying rebuttals while once extolling the virtues of “alternative facts” to support her case. Conway was also an informal adviser to the president’s reelection effort but resisted moving over to the campaign.

Her departure comes at an inopportune time for Trump, who faces a deficit in the polls as the Republican National Convention begins on Monday. Her exit was first reported by The Washington Post.

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One of Trump’s top advisers tells reporters that the president will make an announcement, expected to be related to Israel’s planned extension of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.

By Paul Shindman, World Israel News

One of President Donald Trump’s close advisors said the president will be making a “big announcement” regarding his Middle East peace plan and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intention of applying Israeli sovereignty to settlements in Judea and Samaria.

Asked about the situation in Israel regarding the annexation, Kellyanne Conway answered by first pointing out how Netanyahu described Trump as “the best friend to Israel” and reiterated Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Trump “also has tried to bring peace to the Middle East in many different ways,” Conway told reporters in a video posted by the Washington news website The Hill.

“There are conversations being had. Obviously the president will have an announcement. He’s talked about this in the past and I’ll leave it to him to give you a big announcement,” Conway said.

Trump was expected to meet with top advisors this week to stake out Washington’s position on Israel’s current plan to extend sovereignty over Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

Netanyahu has set July 1 as the deadline to move forward with the sovereignty plan, but he is facing resistance within the government from members of the Blue and White party, including Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi, in addition to potential challenges from allies in the the U.S., such as Trump.

The wildcard with regard to whether the U.S. will support Israel’s sovereignty plan remains the extent to which it hues to the Trump Mideast peace plan, an effort that was spearheaded by Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner and former envoy Jason Greenblatt, which was years in the making. To develop the Trump plan, Kushner and Greenblatt sought out significant input from key stakeholders in the Arab world.

Central features of the plan include the creation of an independent Palestinian state, around $50 billion in economic incentives for the Palestinians, and disarming Palestinian terror groups such as Hamas.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and other Republicans urged Trump to give Israel the green light for annexation, The Hill reported.

Cruz and fellow senators Tom Cotton, Kevin Cramer, Thom Tillis, Cindy Hyde-Smith, John Barrasso and Joni Ernst sent a letter to Trump this week supporting his peace plan and asking the president to give administration officials resources to help Israel implement the sovereignty plan.

In the letter, the senators told Trump they “commit to providing your administration with the resources it requires for such implementation.”

They said that while it is the “sovereign decision of our Israeli allies” whether they move forward on annexation, “of course their decision takes place against the backdrop of the [Trump] Vision for Peace and its assurances of American recognition.”

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Not only Trump, but Moscow also dismissed intelligence reports that the Russians have “compromising personal and financial information” about the incoming US president.

Top intelligence officials last week told President-elect Donald Trump about an unsubstantiated report that Russia had compromising personal and financial information about him, a US official says.

The briefing about the document was first reported by CNN. A summary of the allegations was separate from a classified assessment of Russia’s suspected attempts to meddle in the US presidential election. Trump and President Barack Obama were briefed on the intelligence community’s findings last week.

Shortly after news reports were published about the briefing, Trump tweeted: “FAKE NEWS – A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!”

In Moscow, a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin denied the report. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday dismissed it as a “complete fabrication and utter nonsense.” He insisted that the Kremlin “does not engage in collecting compromising material.”

A Spiraling Investigation

The unsubstantiated dossier on Trump was compiled by a former Western intelligence operative as part of an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client who opposed Trump, and was later funded by Democrats, according to MotherJones.com, which published an article about the report in October and said the operative had turned over the report to the FBI. The New York Times reported the operative had previously worked for British intelligence. The Associated Press has not been able to substantiate the information in the dossier, which misspelled the name of Russia’s largest bank.

It’s unclear why the intelligence officials decided to brief Obama and Trump on the uncorroborated information at this time, but lawmakers and others have repeatedly noted that Russia collects intelligence on both Democrats and Republicans.

“The Russians also hacked systems associated with the Republicans. They just chose not to release that material yet,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said Tuesday. “There’s nothing that prevents them from doing so at a time of their choosing in the future.”

Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said in an interview Tuesday on NBC‘s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” that “nobody has sourced it. They’re all unnamed, unspoken sources in the story.” She said it may have originated with a Russian investigator or groups that wanted Hillary Clinton to win the White House.

Report Circulating for Months

The report had been circulating in Washington for months. In October, former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wrote the FBI, asking the bureau to publicly disclose what it knew about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Reid was aware of the dossier before he wrote the letter, according to a person knowledgeable about the subject who spoke on condition of anonymity because this person was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

FBI Director James Comey refused earlier Tuesday to say whether the FBI was investigating any possible ties between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign, citing policy not to comment on what the FBI might or might not be doing.

Comey was pressed by Democrats on the committee about whether the FBI was conducting an investigation. There was no mention during the hearing about the summary of the dossier, which was attached to the classified hacking assessment.

“I would never comment on investigations — whether we have one or not — in an open forum like this so I can’t answer one way or another,” Comey told the panel during his first public appearance before Congress since the election.

Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden said the American people have a right to know about whether there is an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia.

An active FBI investigation of the next president for ties between his campaign and a nation accused of meddling in the presidential election could further stoke mistrust in the legitimacy of the democratic process. It could also put Trump’s own FBI in the awkward position of examining the conduct of those closest to the commander-in-chief.

The FBI was among three US intelligence agencies that collaborated on last week’s report on Russia’s election activity. It tied Russian President Vladimir Putin to the hacking of email accounts of the Democratic National Committee and individual Democrats like Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. It said there was no evidence the Russians tampered with vote tallies; the agencies said they couldn’t assess if Russia succeeded in influencing Americans to vote for Trump.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who opposed Trump in the GOP primary, said Russia’s activity wasn’t guided by its support for Trump, but rather “to influence and to potentially manipulate American public opinion for the purpose of discrediting individual political figures, sowing chaos and division in our politics, sowing doubts about the legitimacy of our elections.”

Democrats at the committee hearing focused their toughest questions on Comey, who was widely criticized for breaking FBI policy in his decision to notify Congress about additional information that came up related to Clinton. He is in the fourth year of a 10-year term, meaning he is expected to stay on in the Trump administration.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., said Comey set a new standard by discussing the bureau’s activity related to Clinton’s private email server. That standard, she said, is the FBI discusses ongoing investigations when there is a “unique public interest in the transparency of that issue.”

The intelligence agencies’ findings on Russian hacking fit that standard, she argued.

“I’m not sure I can think of an issue of more serious public interest than this one,” Harris said. “This committee needs to understand what the FBI does and does not know about campaign communications with Russia.”

Sitting beside Comey, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said, “Fair point.”

By: AP

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