"We are not going to negotiate our way to the negotiating table!"

A man who is emerging as one of the most valuable members of the Trump team is Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Here is a video of him talking to the staff of the State Department. If you are able to view the video, you will be struck by the way he gestures with his hands as he makes various points.

US Economic prosperity, national security, but not at the expense of others. Bringing relationships back into balance NATO, trading partners). Our fundamental values around freedom and human dignity never change. Our policies do change, depending on the countries we are dealing with, and the situation we are confronting. Speaking from a posture of strength.

He starts with North Korea. First he wanted to find out, where are our allies, then engage with other regional powers (Russia and China). Denuclearize the peninsula: our shared policy. First, we have leaned hard into China. We are preparing additional sanctions, but we are hopeful that North Korea will see their security and economic prosperity will be achieved through their following their commitments to denuclearize. We are not going to negotiate our way to the negotiating table!

Tillerson then goes to China, where we have an opportunity to define the relationship for the next 50 years. Trump will be going to Viet Nam and the Philipines in the fall.

Tillerson believes we are defeating ISIS in the Middle East, and he is determined to stop them from spreading into North Africa. He stressed that more work needs to be done in cybersecurity and social media.

He mentioned Saudia Arabia and getting Muslim nations to focus on how they want to be perceived by the rest of the world.

The poor relationship with Russia must change. We must always let our allies know what we are doing. Putin agrees that the relationship is at a low point.

We cannot let Africa become a breeding ground for ISIS. Africa has "health challenges." We want to support emerging governments and encourage trading opportunities.

The focus here in the western hemisphere is to improve trade relationships and defeat organized crime. There will be a meeting May 18 focusing on transnational organized crime.

In many ways, the Cold War was easier to navigate than what we have now. History froze. Constraints were put in place. Now, however, conflicts are not being contained.

Tillerson encouraged his staff to approach the future "with no constraints" on their thinking. He sincerely values their perspective on how we got here and where we need to go.

Where are the Trump tweets on this one?

Breitbart reports,

In an unusual move, a federal judge in Washington State granted a nationwide emergency order on Friday night blocking President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting immigration travel, declaring the order unconstitutional. The Trump Justice Department can now appeal the order on an expedited basis.

Read more here.

In a related story, Breitbart also brings us this news:

The U.S. State Department will allow people with valid visas into the United States, a department official said on Saturday, in order to comply with an opinion from a federal judge in Seattle barring President Donald Trump’s executive action.

“We have reversed the provisional revocation of visas,” the State Department official said in a statement. “Those individuals with visas that were not physically canceled may now travel if the visa is otherwise valid.”

The challenge Tillerson faces

At The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance reminds us that our new Secretary of State faces huge obstacles within his own Department.

Suffice to say, anyone who has followed DC politics for any substantive amount of time is aware of the inherent ideological issues within The U.S. State Department. Filled with bureaucrats whose career has been at the epicenter of left-wing globalist advocacy.

If you go back to rethinking the larger State Dept. challenge, Rex Tillerson will essentially be in charge of a U.S. Department that is comprised almost exclusively of Kerry/Clinton/Obama/Bush/UniParty/GOPe big “G” Globalists.

When you accept the scope of the challenge, and recognize their best interests will involve working earnestly and diligently to undermine the structure of a Trump administration at every opportunity; perhaps only then can we identify the specific challenge and how Tillerson is uniquely skilled to deliver results.

Deconstruction and realignment while simultaneously managing/controlling the amount of damage internal agents can do toward larger administration objectives is a tenuous undertaking. Taking the rotting vehicle down to the frame and cutting out the cancerous rust is going to be an epic battle with few Washington DC supporters as Trump endeavors through the restoration phase.

It can be anticipated the leadership within both wings of the UniParty (Democrat and Republican) will actually prefer to impede such an effort:

“There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new order of things. … Whenever his enemies have occasion to attack the innovator they do so with the passion of partisans, while the others defend him sluggishly so that the innovator and his party alike are vulnerable.”

~ Niccolo Machiavelli

Read more here.

How the Obama administration used our tax dollars to try to unseat Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu

Adam Kredo reports in the Free Beacon,

Congress on Friday launched a wide-ranging probe into a secret Obama administration-funded campaign to unseat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to information exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The probe comes on the heels of an internal government report determining that the State Department provided hundreds of thousands to an organization that plotted to unseat Netanyahu in the country’s 2015 election.

Obama administration officials were found to have deleted emails from State Department accounts containing information about its relationship with OneVoice, the non-profit group that led the effort.

OneVoice, which was awarded $465,000 in U.S. grants through 2014, has been under congressional investigation since 2015, when it was first accused of funneling some of that money to partisan political groups looking to unseat Netanyahu. This type of behavior by non-profit groups is prohibited under U.S. tax law.

A group of nine leading lawmakers led by Sen. David Perdue (R., Ga.) are now formally petitioning the State Department to come clean about the effort and provide answers about how U.S. taxpayer dollars were permitted to be spent on an organization working against the elected leader of America’s closest Middle East ally, according to a readout of the investigation obtained by the Free Beacon.

“State Department officials failed to properly vet the OneVoice grant proposal because they failed to properly conduct an analysis of risks in the pre-award phase,” the senators wrote in a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry. “Unfortunately, it seems that inconsistency and apathy toward oversight of such grants at the State Department is not new. Our aid dollars should be going toward solving real problems, not contributing to the destabilization of allied governments.”

The lawmakers—including Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), Mark Kirk (R., Ill.), Orrin Hatch (R., Utah), Mike Lee (R., Utah), and Johnny Isakson (R., Ga.) among others—wrote that the State Department turned a blind eye to OneVoice’s highly partisan activities and failed to perform proper oversight about how U.S. funds were being spent by the group.

...State Department officials were aware of OneVoice’s partisan activities, but still permitted the grant money to be awarded, according to the senators, who are pushing for the administration to take disciplinary action against the officials involved.

...They also are seeking to determine what “disciplinary action” is being taken against U.S. officials who knew about the plan to unseat Netanyahu but failed to take action to report this behavior.

Read more here.

Ebenezer Scrooge is far more personable

It's hilarious because it's treason and a felony.

Private email servers are not subject to Freedom of Information requests.

Raw, naked graft at the intersection of the Clinton Foundation and the State Department.

Do we have one more revolution left within us?

B.S. from the White House to the press

From Henry Kissinger's White House Years: When Nixon offered Kissinger the job as National Security Adviser, he told Kissinger he did not trust the State Department, and that he definitely did not trust the C.I.A., whom Nixon viewed as a bunch of elite liberals. Nixon told Kissinger, therefore, that he wanted to run foreign policy out of the White House.

However, on Dec 2, 1968, when Nixon introduced Kissinger to the press, he lied about his intentions, and Kissinger backed him up!

The President and top advisers lying? Whoever heard of such a thing?

Hillary's State Department: A Culture of Complacency?

Hillary Clinton? Complacent? That's not an adjective I would have used to describe her. However, Jim Geraghty makes some points worthy of consideration:

As I laid out on Campaign Spot yesterday, Boko Haram's terror tactics were crystal clear by 2009; by 2012, it was ludicrously inaccurate to characterize them as "focused on trying to discredit the Nigerian government."

With Benghazi and now Nigeria, we have two examples of State Department people on the ground sending back warnings of gathering terrorist threats . . . and in both cases, the warnings were ignored.

Remember all the talk about New Jersey governor Chris Christie's alleged culture of bullying within his administration? How about the signs of a culture of complacency in Hillary Clinton's State Department?

Read more here:

http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/377618/secretary-state-hillary-clintons-culture-complacency-jim-geraghty

How do you squander $6 billion dollars?

The Fiscal Times reports, "The State Department has no idea what happened to $6 billion used to pay its contractors." Breitbart reports,

In a "management alert" released publicly April 3rd, State Department Inspector General (IG) Steve Linick said that the "lack of internal control at the department" has led to the loss of $6 billion in the last six years.

The last six years. Let's see now, who was Secretary of State during those years? Oh yeah, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

Keystone Pipeline: 2,000 or 42,000 new jobs?

In his interview with Bill O'Reilly, Obama said the Keystone Pipeline would only create 2,000 jobs. His own State Department put the number at 42,000. Not to mention its affect on fuel prices.