FDL Review

On July 19th, this editorialist recommended that Casey Cagle "pick up the phone and tell Brian Kemp that [he] will no longer be a candidate in the race for the governorship" of the state of Georgia. However, this scenario didn't play out, and Kemp, then the frontrunner in the polls, was forced to undergo a primary.


However, for Kemp, currently the Georgia secretary of state, the final result was merrier than the one that I envisioned. He took almost 70% of the electorate, losing only two small counties to Cagle, the Georgia lieutenant governor: Monroe and Stephens.
In Monroe County, Cagle led by just 78 votes.


To put it in perspective, Kemp crushed Cagle by 38.8 points statewide and came within 80 votes of winning all but one county. Kemp even won "Cagle’s native Hall County, where his family has lived for generations, by 12 percentage points," according to The New York Times.

These results served as a rude awakening for the Georgia establishment, which quickl…

President Donald Trump endorsed Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, who currently serves as Georgia's secretary of state. Next Tuesday, Kemp, who brands himself as a "conservative businessman," will face off Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle, a longtime Atlanta establishmentarian, in the state’s primary runoff.


In a tweet published on Wednesday, the president wrote,

Brian Kemp is running for Governor of the great state of Georgia. The Primary is on Tuesday. Brian is tough on crime, strong on the border and illegal immigration. He loves our Military and our Vets and protects our Second Amendment. I give him my full and total endorsement.
Kemp, as Trump said, is a strong advocate for gun rights, school choice, hardline policies against illegal immigration, and ethics reform for Atlanta. He backs Trump, saying that if his support for the president "offends you, then I'm not your guy. But if you are ready for a politically incorrect conservative, I&…

President Donald Trump has been accused by his critics of being weak on Vladimir Putin's Russia, which has cemented its status as a global pariah due to its aggressive military actions and repeated interference in foreign elections. Today, Trump attempted to put those accusations to rest, stating that he has been stronger on Russia than his predecessors:

.@POTUS: "There's been no president ever as tough as I have been on Russia. All you have to do is look at the numbers, look at what we have done, look at sanctions." pic.twitter.com/BxLsoU6TFG — FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) July 18, 2018
An examination of President Trump's policies, rather than his words, backs up this claim. Since Trump has taken office,

Anti-tank weapons have been sold to Ukraine, allowing them to defend themselves against Russian advances.The U.S. has ramped up sanctions on Russian industrialists and members of the Russian government because of Putin's interference in the 2016 presidential e…

The Fusion GPS dossier, a collection of memos that was compiled by Christopher Steele, was financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign in conjunction with the Democratic National Committee. The document was packed with salacious, unverified content, notably alleging that the Russian government possessed "a covert video supposedly showing Russian prostitutes following Trump's instructions to urinate on a bed once slept in by the Obamas at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton," according to The Week.

As you may expect, the dossier is hardly a reliable piece of intelligence. Serious questions remain about the circumstances under which it was compiled, and worse yet, many of its contents are blatantly incorrect.


David Harsanyi of The New York Post validated the former consideration, writing that "sources in [Fusion GPS] were correcting Steele, who’d mischaracterized a meeting with a Trump source. No, there was no 'walk-in' from the Trump campaign, as Steele had maintained in hi…

On the global stage, President Donald Trump, a disruptor of norms to the extreme, has been smeared as a puppet for Russia’s Vladimir Putin. European critics point to the fact that the U.S. president has chastised close allies, such as Germany at the NATO summit, to make the claim that he is attempting to fracture the West.

However, a more careful consideration of the actions of Trump (as well as those of his European critics) paints a vastly different picture.


Trump, far from being a stooge for the Kremlin, has approved harsh sanctions against Russian industrialists and government officials, sold anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainians without fear of Russian retaliation, and encouraged the growth of American energy enterprises through deregulation.

Regarding the latter, Trump said, "We have ended the war on American energy -- and we have ended the war on beautiful clean coal. We are now very proudly, an exporter of energy to the world."

This presidential support for American e…

On Friday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that 12 Russian nationals, connected with the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), were indicted for their alleged role in hacking the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton campaign, and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee servers in 2016.


The charges included "identity theft, conspiracy to launder money and conspiracy to commit computer crimes," according to a CNN report.
Per the indictment, Russian officials accessed the emails with passwords obtained through spearfishing. They then proliferated these emails through websites that they built, Facebook and Twitter accounts that they created, and "Organization 1," presumably a coded name for WikiLeaks.
However, despite the fact that the accounts that disseminated the emails clearly appear to have been linked to the GRU, independent observers still question whether the alleged DNC hack was conducted by the Kremlin.
According to repor…