MANASSAS, Va. (AP) — The alleged leader of the violent MS-13 street gang on the East Coast has been arrested in Virginia, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Thursday.

Bondi lauded the the early morning arrest of the 24-year-old man from El Salvador, who was described as one of MS-13’s top three leaders in the United States, as a major victory in the Trump administration’s effort to crack down on a gang known for brutal violence and extortion.

[…] “We want to make our streets safer,” Bondi told reporters. “We want to make our schools safer. We want to make your neighborhoods safer. This guy was living in a neighborhood right around you, no longer.”

At the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, citing the arrest, called it “a good day for our country.” (link)

(more…)

The atomic sledgehammer that President Trump just delivered to the German auto industry simply cannot be overemphasized.  A 25% tariff on imported cars and car parts completely negates hundreds of billions in pre-positioned investment dollars by German auto companies in Mexico.  [Executive Order Here]

[Cliff Notes Here]

To give scale to the impact on Germany, consider that German automakers currently have 330 automotive suppliers in Mexico according to information from VDA.  Audi (a subsidiary of Volkswagen) has no U.S. production sites; every Audi sold in America will be subject to a 25% tariff. The Audi brand access to the U.S. market was/is 100% dependent on Mexico, including for manufacturing the Q5 SUV, its top-selling U.S. model.

According to prior reporting from Politico, “Volkswagen’s most popular model for American consumers is the Tiguan, an SUV that is entirely manufactured in Mexico. The German automaker sold over 30,000 of the vehicles in the final quarter of last year, a nearly 50 percent year-over-year increase.”  But wait, it gets worse….

(more…)

Dept of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem goes straight into the heart of the operation where deported criminal gang members are being housed by an agreement with the government of El Salvador.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sends a chilling warning to illegal criminal immigrants entering the United States. On Wednesday, Noem visited the high-security prison in El Salvador that recently received hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members.

Noem was given a tour of the prison by Salvadoran Minister of Justice Héctor Gustavo Villatoro during her visit. The Homeland Security Secretary then met with El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele and is expected to visit Colombia and Mexico next.

“First of all, do not come to our country illegally. You will be removed, and you will be prosecuted. But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people,” she said.

(more…)

Wealthy nations will attempt to maintain exports against President Trump tariffs by subsidizing their industries. Corporations have deeper pockets, and the politicians are used to the bribes, we call it “lobbying.” Therefore, the government responds by subsidizing the corporations [ie. the WEF business model].

Canada will subsidize their export industries, Germany will subsidize their auto industry, the EU will provide subsidies to their manufacturing powerhouses, and China will once again start subsidizing their manufacturing industry. Each of these nations will in turn devalue their currency.

However, poorer nations will be faster to lower import tariffs on USA goods because they have lower lobbying (bribe) income from corporations to govt. That’s what we should expect to see.

VIETNAM – Vietnam said it plans to cut import duties on a range of goods including cars, liquified natural gas and agricultural products.

[…] The announcement on the finance ministry’s website late Tuesday came less than two weeks after Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh said the country was reviewing duties in order to encourage increased imports from the United States.

Vietnam represents the United States’s third-highest trade deficit, behind China and Mexico.

According to the finance ministry statement, import duties on some cars will be cut by half and the tax rate for liquified natural gas will drop from five percent to just two percent. Duties will also be cut for a number of other products including frozen chicken thighs, almonds, sweet cherries, raisins and wood. (more)

During President Trump’s first term, many companies proactively moved manufacturing operations from China to other nations in Southeast Asia.  Vietnam was a big benefactor of the manufacturing shift.  It is smart for them to respond to the reciprocal tariffs coming April 2nd by lowering their tariff rate.

(more…)

During an executive order signing session in the White House today, President Trump announced a major change in tariffs on the auto industry.  [Full Executive Order Here]

The 25% import duty applies on top of any preexisting tariff for cars and light trucks.  The 25% tariff also applies to imported car parts.  The USMCA trade agreement between the U.S. Canada and Mexico still applies.

If the content of a car assembled in Mexico/Canada contains 50 percent component parts from the USA, the 25% tariff only applies to the final value of the imported components. In this example the tariff rate would be 12.5% of the total value.

The tariff applies to all imported cars and light trucks.  Approximately half of all cars sold in the USA are currently American made, the other half are import vehicles from mainly Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Canada and Germany.

This is a very big kick in the teeth to Germany.  Previously in a long-term strategy to avoid U.S. tariffs, German automakers invested billions in auto assembly plants in Mexico.  Ex. the BMW parts were shipped from Germany and the cars assembled in Mexico.  Now that investment is worthless as the vehicle will be taxed at a rate of 25% regardless of whether it is assembled in Germany or Mexico.

Ex.2 High end auto Mercedes currently builds SUVs in the USA in order to avoid the previous 25% tariff; however, they still build cars outside the USA and export them into the USA market.  This will likely change quickly, and Mercedes will begin building all cars and SUVs in the USA.

(more…)

As the negotiations for a Ukraine-Russia ceasefire agreement are being worked out, here are the statements from each of the participants in the technical team discussion following their meeting in Saudi Arabia.

RUSSIA STATEMENT (SOURCE):1. “In line with the agreement reached by the presidents of Russia and the United States, the Russian and American sides agreed to provide for the implementation of the Black Sea Initiative, which includes ensuring safe navigation, eliminating the use of force, and preventing the use of commercial vessels for military purposes in the Black Sea, while adopting appropriate control measures by inspecting such vessels.

2. The United States will help restore Russia’s access to the world market for agricultural and fertiliser exports, lower maritime insurance costs, and enhance access to ports and payment systems for such transactions.

Note:

Clauses 1 & 2 will come into force following:

(more…)

Yesterday President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting: “Immediate Declassification of Materials Related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation.” [ORDER TEXT HERE]

Within the XO President Trump informs the Attorney General (Pam Bondi) the Director of National Intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard), and the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (John Ratcliffe), “I have determined that all of the materials referenced in the Presidential Memorandum of January 19, 2021 (Declassification of Certain Materials Related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation), are no longer classified.”

However, there’s an important set of qualifiers.

“I have further determined that the material proposed for redaction by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a cover letter dated January 17, 2021, remains classified.

My decision to declassify the materials described above does not extend to materials that must be protected from disclosure pursuant to orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and does not require the disclosure of certain personally identifiable information or any other materials that must be protected from disclosure under applicable law.” (link)

Caution is warranted.  Yes, there may be a few new items, perhaps a few redactions removed on previously released items, but essentially this is likely be a rehash of assembled component parts we have already discussed at length.  In essence, this sounds like the Mar-a-Lago ten-inch binder content the FBI was previously trying to get back.

There is also a possibility the FISA Court has ordered some materials related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, sealed by the FISC.  President Trump does not extend his order to these materials.

There is a certain likelihood the CIA holds foreign intelligence equities that tangentially supports the origin of the Crossfire Hurricane targeting.  We already know officials and intelligence operations from the U.K, Australia, Italy and Israel were involved in the 2016 operation against Trump.  President Trump does not extend his order to these materials, because the equity ownership of the classified material rests in the foreign intelligence services.

(more…)

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz appears on Fox News with Laura Ingraham to discuss the exploding controversy around a left-wing journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, being included on a Signal chat with members of President Trump’s cabinet.

According to Mike Waltz the name of a contact was mis-attributed to the telephone number of Jeffrey Goldberg.  Waltz thought someone else (¹he will not say who) was in the chat group, but it was actually Goldberg.  Waltz says his team and Elon Musk’s technical team are working through an investigative process to discover how that happened.

As I repeated earlier, the most likely origination of the mis-attribution is the intelligence community, specifically the CIA.  The entire fiasco originates as an operation targeting the Trump administration.  Mike Waltz says he is not a conspiracy theorist, but indicates he too thinks something like this is quite possible. WATCH:

Let me summarize for those new to these performances: (1) The CIA tech team organized the Signal App operation (directory manipulation). That’s how Goldberg got in. (2) Jeffrey Goldberg held the story until the day before the scheduled SSCI hearing. (3) The SSCI uses the hearing to attack the Trump officials at the top of the critical silos.

Why? The CIA group doesn’t like the Trump Ukraine and Trump Russia policy.

[¹We may discover that somehow the name Marco Rubio was attributed to the phone number of Jeffrey Goldberg.  Rubio was reportedly on the chat, but didn’t say anything.]

(more…)

President Donald Trump answered several questions from the media during a White House meeting with various ambassadors and nominees for the position of ambassador.

During the media segment, President Trump was questioned about the national security cabinet members use of the Signal app to discuss administration plans to open sea lanes and confront Houthi terrorists. President Trump noted the difficulty of secure communication that would be responsive and fast for the purposes of rapid discussion.

President Trump fully supports National Security Advisor Mike Waltz who is attributed with the problem of originating an inadvertent invitation to a journalist the chat group. Overall, there are several media questions about this specific topic and President Trump seemingly appreciates the line of inquiry but swats away attempt attack his cabinet.

.

(more…)

President Trump has given remarks supporting National Security Advisor Mike Waltz during an interview with NBC.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump stood by his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, after The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief was accidentally added to a private, high-level chat on the messaging app Signal where military plans were being discussed.

“Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” Trump said Tuesday in a phone interview with NBC News.

When asked what he was told about how Goldberg came to be added to the Signal chat, Trump said, “It was one of Michael’s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there.”

Trump said Goldberg’s presence in the chat had “no impact at all” on the military operation.

The president expressed confidence in his team, saying he was not frustrated by the events leading up to The Atlantic’s story. The situation, Trump said, was “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one.” (more)

The rest of the DC setup is transparently clear.  (1) Goldberg held the story until the day before a long-scheduled Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. (2) The SSCI then used the hearing to blast the heads of the Trump administration intelligence silos on the issue of “classified” information in the text messages.

(more…)