Lee Smith is one of a very select DC journalists and authors who appropriately understands the full context of each aspect he discusses.  During an interview with Steve Bannon {Direct Rumble Link Here}, Lee Smith puts the focus of the Durham silo directly on the shoulders of Bill Barr.  Smith is 100% correct. WATCH:

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Homeowner equity is being erased. As higher interest rates continue to put pressure on borrowers, the ability of the average person to afford a mortgage diminishes.  Higher mortgage rates lead to downward pressure on residential home values as fewer borrowers can afford higher payments.  Simultaneously, commercial real estate is dropping in value as vacancies continue increasing.

Put both of these issues together and already tenuous banks holding mortgage bonds as assets can become more unstable.

This dynamic creates the continual tremors in the background of an economy already suffering from high inflation and low consumer purchasing of durable goods.

A perfect storm starts to realize.

(Wall Street Journal) – Sales of previously owned homes fell in April from the prior month and prices declined from a year earlier by the most in more than 11 years.

U.S. existing home sales, which make up most of the housing market, fell 3.4% in April from the prior month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.28 million, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday. April sales fell 23.2% from a year earlier.

The national median existing-home price fell 1.7% in April from a year earlier to $388,800, the biggest year-over-year price decline since January 2012, NAR said. Median prices, which aren’t seasonally adjusted, were down 6% from a record $413,800 in June. Home prices have fallen the most in the western half of the U.S., while prices continue to rise from a year earlier in many eastern markets. (read more) 

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Those of you who are keen financially minded individuals will note exactly what is happening in these recent reports, HOME DEPT HERE – TARGET HERE.  Those of you who are retail investors in the stock market might also see the bigger picture.

Home Depot and Target essentially share the same customer base or market audience. They service a larger segment of the American middle class.  Both companies are reporting negative financial outcomes as a result of low comparable sales, or same store sales comparisons, to last year.   This should not be a surprise, yet Wall Street is seemingly caught off guard.

Right now, we are on the tail end of the massive inflation cycle that took place in 2021 through 2022.  Current inflation, as measured by the rate of price increase over the same period last year, is lower.

Now we are starting to see companies reporting sales comparable without the benefit of massive inflation to assist.

Example – when inflation is running at 10%, a company can report 8% sales growth, and everyone smiles.  However, the sales growth was created by the inflation.  The actual unit sales of goods have declined; the store is reporting higher sales because the prices are higher.  When the sales cycle through to lower inflationary comparisons, the drop in unit sales shows up as drops in topline sales.   This is the cause of both Target and Home Depot now reporting lower than expected comparable sales versus last year.

In real terms, this is why using sales data as a measure of economic growth is less valuable during periods of high inflation.  Significant inflation hides the diminished sales of units, which should be the true measure of sales growth.  I have been tracking unit sales as a measure of economic activity, and the truth is that unit sales have been declining since the fourth quarter of 2021.

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Perhaps it’s the Ron DeSantis national pretending 2024 campaign driven by a “book tour.”  Perhaps it’s the international travel that distracts a sitting governor from supporting a Republican candidate in the largest geographic metropolitan area in the state.  Whatever the reason, the Jacksonville Florida mayoral contest was won by a Democrat, Donna Deegan.

I have warned, against some of the most vitriolic pushback, that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is setting up the state of Florida for some major problems in the future. There are lots of granular points that I can reference, but the bigger picture they create is one that will be very damaging in the future.  The class division in Florida, the distance between the haves and have-nots, is growing exponentially.

Lower and middle-income Floridians are being crushed as the ‘Instagram selfie-my-lunch’ crowd, the largest coalition of support for Ron DeSantis, ignores it.

Believe me on this, DeSantis Republicans representing the financially elite and being condescendingly dismissive of the non-elite, is not a path to future Republican electoral victory.  From my perspective the backlash is visible. It only takes a few thousand voters staying home in protest to make a difference.

Those same enforcement police, newly empowered with tools against ANTIFA woke protests, will hold those same tools when it’s Joe the plumber protesting his economic status.

JACKSONVILLE – Democrat Donna Deegan won the Jacksonville mayor’s race Tuesday night, a shocking upset that hands Florida Democrats a major shot of energy less than six months after they were trounced in the 2022 midterms and considered left for dead by the national party.

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Paul Sperry at RealClearPolitics has an article today citing one part of the Durham report that deserves a little CTH attention.

I hope you will forgive my indulgent snickers, as the graphic you see below was created by me in early 2018, a full five years before the release of this Durham report.  I even referred to the Steele Dossier as the Nellie Ohr Dossier. lol

As noted by Sperry, “According to the 306-page report, former Justice Department prosecutor Bruce Ohr’s wife Nellie Ohr first plowed the ground for the dossier with a series of research reports she wrote for Fusion GPS, the D.C.-based opposition research firm the Clinton campaign commissioned to dig up dirt on Trump and Russia.”

[…] Durham suggests Nellie Ohr planted the seeds of sourcing for the most explosive allegations leveled by the dossier against Trump, including the oft-cited notion that he and his campaign were engaged in a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” with the Kremlin. The dossier attributed this, falsely, to Millian. Durham found that the Belarusian-American realtor was never a source for the dossier and was simply invented as one, along with the allegations attributed to him.

In fact, Durham says that Millian initially wasn’t even on the radar of Steele and his dossier “collector” Igor Danchenko, a former Brookings Institution analyst who’s admitted much of the information he provided Steele was alcohol-lubricated gossip. Millian was called to their attention by Nellie Ohr, who the prosecutor said “implicated” Millian through her own reports. Durham suggests Steele and Danchenko merely followed her leads. 

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The bottom line is that everything the Obama justice department, IC and FBI did, to include support from Republicans in congress during the 2016 election and aftermath, was a coup d’état against U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration.  This is the truth of the thing.

The U.S. media participation and subsequent denial of their culpability looks increasingly pathetic in the aftermath of the report outlined by Special Counsel John Durham. However, it doesn’t take a media admission of the coup effort for the demonstrable actions and evidence of the coup to be factual.

Read THE REPORT, all the evidence is there. The truth stands alone, regardless of the discomfort it creates. {Direct Rumble Link} WATCH:

Under impeachment standards created by our constitutional republic, it takes a vote in the house to begin an impeachment investigation. The impeachment investigation then produces a finding which is delivered to congress and a vote is held.

John Durham spent four years conducting the investigation. The report outlining the coup is complete and delivered to congress.  The only thing needed is a vote.

This might make House Speaker Kevin McCarthy very uncomfortable.  However, do or do not, there is no ‘TRY’.

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People ask why I find it difficult to write about the Durham report empirically confirming everything we previously outlined in the past five years.  Here’s my answer.

Eventually, after the shock & awe of the Durham confirmations wear off, I am hopeful that people will stand back and realize the bigger question that covers all of the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy nonsense.   This was a United States government operation to conduct full-throated surveillance on a U.S. presidential candidate, and then remove that candidate from the office of the presidency after his victory in the 2016 election.

With John Durham outlining in granular details how the FBI, DOJ and larger intelligence apparatus acted politically to weaponize government on behalf of an allied presidential candidate in Hillary Clinton, a bigger question remains.  There never was any merit to the Trump-Russia nonsense, so what exactly were Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann doing for two years?

Using the silo defense as a method of obfuscation, John Durham noted in his report [page #2] as below, never delved into that obvious question.  Durham specifically, and with great intent, says he did not look at what Mueller and Weissmann were doing; even though, Durham destroyed any predication that might have given merit to the intention of their special counsel existence.

Durham writes a 316-page report, meticulously detailing the false construct of the Trump-Russia narrative.  Yet for some reason, the Mueller/Weissmann investigation, an entire special counsel investigation that was predicated and justified by that false Trump-Russia narrative, never found the same evidence?

Durham never looked at it.  Why? Because he knew Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann were installed to cover up the original fabrications by the CIA, FBI, DOJ and U.S. intelligence apparatus.  Mueller’s probe existed in material fact to hide the Obama weaponization to target Donald Trump.   Durham knew this; that’s why he never touched it.

Stop pretending.  Once you stop pretending, you realize just how rotten this system is.

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Appearing on Newsmax, former Republican Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), Devin Nunes, gives his first assessment of the Durham report as it was released mid-day Monday. {Direct Rumble Link}

Devin Nunes was one of the first people in congress to realize the FBI, DOJ and Obama-era intelligence community were conducting full surveillance of candidate Donald Trump in 2016.  Nunes statements in March 2017 preceded the counter offensive narrative launched by Senator Mark Warner in collaboration with then FBI Director James Comey. WATCH:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan has reportedly invited John Durham to testify before the committee May 25th.

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People have been gobsmacked by a seemingly 180° change in the ideological outlook of Twitter owner Elon Musk.  The hiring of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) czar Linda Yaccarino as CEO caught everyone by surprise. {link} A Day later he conceded a free speech position to the government of Turkey, agreeing to silence the political opposition of Recep Erdogan. {link}  Perhaps some clarity can be found in a recent Bloomberg article:

Pay attention to DATES:

(Bloomberg) Elon Musk was issued a subpoena by the US Virgin Islands in its lawsuit accusing JPMorgan Chase & Co. of knowingly benefiting from Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking.

The US territory said in court papers it had reason to believe Epstein may have referred or attempted to refer Musk to JPMorgan as a client. Several other billionaires, including the Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have also been issued subpoenas by the USVI.

The USVI on Monday asked the judge overseeing the case to authorize alternative means of serving the April 28 subpoena on Musk. The territory said it made good-faith efforts to obtain an address for Musk, including hiring private investigators, but had been unable to locate one. 

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Special Counsel John Durham has released a highly anticipated 316-page report outlining corrupt U.S. activity during the targeting of presidential candidate, president elect, and subsequent President, Donald J Trump.

[FULL REPORT pdf HERE]

I have completed my first review of the report, and suffice to say the details within it are not new.  The majority of the reaction so far has been centered around how Special Counsel Durham is not prosecuting anyone for their corrupt conduct outlined within the report.  However, for the sake of this first review, I will draw attention to a few aspects you will likely not see discussed anywhere else.

Please note this detail found at the bottom of page 3 and top two lines of page #4:

[…] “The Office exercised its judgment regarding what to investigate but did not investigate every public report of an alleged violation of law in connection with the intelligence and law enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns.”

As perhaps the only person who tracked down and subsequently interviewed the investigators on the Durham team, and as a person who subsequently came away with a full understanding of how the silo operation inside this investigation was going to play out, I can reasonably assure you that notation and reference by team Durham is entirely directed to us.

That statement above tells us why none of the DC politicians who engaged in specific violations of law were criminally charged. This is part of the silo effect within government, which I will explain later.  As a good friend said, “Yeah great, but we don’t have badges.”  So, we went to the badges with the evidence, but the badges did not want to act upon the evidence, because it would have been, in their estimation, too damaging to the framework of our government.

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