Trump opens window into his rage with Mueller attack

CNN Reports...

Donald Trump is giving Americans a glimpse of the fury raging inside him as a pivotal moment nears for special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, and different strands of political and legal vulnerability swirling around the President become ever more threatening.

Trump launched his most personal attack to date against Mueller in a tweetstorm Sunday unleashed just two days before the special counsel's office takes its first prosecution -- that of the President's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort -- to trial in Virginia.

"There is no Collusion! The Robert Mueller Rigged Witch Hunt, headed now by 17 (increased from 13, including an Obama White House lawyer) Angry Democrats, was started by a fraudulent Dossier, paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC. Therefore, the Witch Hunt is an illegal Scam!" Trump tweeted Sunday.

Trump's tweets on Sunday represented his most specific attempt yet to discredit any findings of the Mueller investigation into alleged election collusion with Russians, following clear signs that his previous assaults have been effective in hardening the opinion of GOP voters against the probe.

The attacks are not simply a window into his own rage, they also represent a coherent hardball strategy to unite his ever loyal political base and other Republicans behind him. With 100 days to go until midterm elections, that could be tough for the GOP.

But they also have the effect of wresting attention from the President's best hope of averting a Democratic rout in the election, the building narrative that he has unleashed a period of national prosperity, highlighted by economic growth rate of 4.1% in the second quarter of the year.

The President's Sunday outburst came days after CNN reported that Michael Cohen, the President's former lawyer, is willing to tell Mueller that Trump knew in advance about the June 2016 meeting in Trump tower in which Russians were willing to hand over dirt on Hillary Clinton. The President has denied he knew about the meeting beforehand.

Also last week, it emerged that Allen Weisselberg, the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, has been subpoenaed in the federal criminal investigation into Cohen in a move that adds to a sense that a net is closing around the President's inner circle.

And ironically, given the President's chosen method of attack Sunday, The New York Times reported last week that Mueller was examining Trump's tweets to see whether they show malicious intent to obstruct justice in the firing of former FBI Director James Comey.

"Is Robert Mueller ever going to release his conflicts of interest with respect to President Trump, including the fact that we had a very nasty & contentious business relationship, I turned him down to head the FBI (one day before appointment as S.C.) & Comey is his close friend," Trump said in a second tweet.

The President followed up with a third blast against Mueller.

"...Also, why is Mueller only appointing Angry Dems, some of whom have worked for Crooked Hillary, others, including himself, have worked for Obama....And why isn't Mueller looking at all of the criminal activity & real Russian Collusion on the Democrats side-Podesta, Dossier?"

Trump's trio of tweets were packed with inaccuracies and misrepresentations, but closely mirrored the conspiracy theories driven by his allies in conservative media that are designed to rough up Mueller and tarnish the credibility of his investigation to politicize any eventual allegations of wrongdoing he makes against Trump or members of his team.

It was not immediately clear what the President meant when he claimed there were conflicts of interests involving Mueller. The New York Times reported in January that the President claimed a dispute over membership fees had prompted Mueller to leave a Trump golf club in Washington in 2011 when he was FBI Director. A joint news conference with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte at the White House could provide reporters with an opportunity to question Trump about the accusation Monday afternoon.

Ethics experts from the Justice Department determined last year when Mueller was appointed special counsel that his participation in the matters assigned to him is appropriate.

Trump targets the press

Trump's attacks on Mueller followed yet another extraordinary assault on the media by the President after he broke details of a private meeting he had with A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times on July 20.

"When the media - driven insane by their Trump Derangement Syndrome - reveals internal deliberations of our government, it truly puts the lives of many, not just journalists, at risk! Very unpatriotic!" Trump tweeted on Sunday afternoon.

Taken together with the Mueller offensive, the tweet represented an escalation of Trump's strategy to discredit the integrity and moral standing of any institution that will ultimately help to shape a national consensus on his conduct.

Who has more credibility?

There has been no publicly available evidence that Trump or his subordinates knowingly conspired with a Russian effort to help him win power in 2016. But Trump's constant attacks on Mueller will inevitably renew speculation about Mueller's position and whether the President will attempt to fire him. Such a move could trigger a crisis of governance in Washington and test whether Republicans, who have largely been unwilling to challenge Trump in the Russia election interference drama and will hold the President to account.

Trump's allies also sought to shred the credibility of Cohen, after the President's former confidant turned against him, and following the airing last week of a tape obtained by CNN on which the two men discussed how they would buy the rights to a Playboy model's story about an alleged affair Trump had with her years before he turned to politics.

In an interview on Fox News Saturday evening, the President's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said Trump's legal team was investigating the tape of Trump and Cohen and suggested it might have been doctored.

On Sunday, on CBS "Face the Nation," Giuliani said, "I don't see how you can believe Michael Cohen," and accused Cohen of violating Trump's attorney-client privilege.

Cohen's attorney Lanny Davis issued a statement calling Giuliani "confused."

"Mr. Giuliani seems to be confused. He expressly waived attorney client privilege last week and repeatedly and inaccurately -- as proven by the tape -- talked and talked about the recording, forfeiting all confidentiality," Davis said.

The cresting intrigue about Mueller, Cohen and the President's increasingly tetchy mood robbed the White House of a clean victory lap, following the positive economic data released Friday.

The 4.1% GDP growth rate figure will form the centerpiece of Trump's midterm election argument to voters that he has unleashed a new age of American prosperity that Republicans hope will prove more important to their choice than the ominous developments in the Russia probe and the uproar perpetually whipped up by the President's convention-shattering style.

"Policies matter a lot ... and I think the President deserves a victory lap," the President's top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union."

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Source: CNN

Trump planning emergency aid to farmers affected by tariffs

Photo: Pixabay / (MGN)

The Trump administration readied a plan Tuesday to send billions in emergency aid to farmers who have been caught in the crossfire of President Donald Trump's trade disputes with China and other U.S. trading partners.

The Agriculture Department was expected to announce the proposal that would include direct assistance and other temporary relief for farmers, according to two people briefed on the plan, who were not authorized to speak on the record.

The plan comes as President Donald Trump is scheduled to speak at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Kansas City in the heart of the nation's farm country.

Trump declared earlier Tuesday that "Tariffs are the greatest!" and threatened to impose additional penalties on U.S. trading partners as he prepared for negotiations with European officials at the White House.

The Trump administration has slapped tariffs on $34 billion in Chinese goods in a dispute over Beijing's high-tech industrial policies. China has retaliated with duties on soybeans and pork, affecting Midwest farmers in a region of the country that supported the president in his 2016 campaign.

Trump has threatened to place tariffs on up to $500 billion in products imported from China, a move that would dramatically ratchet up the stakes in the trade dispute involving the globe's biggest economies.

Before departing for Kansas City, Trump tweeted that U.S. trade partners need to either negotiate a "fair deal, or it gets hit with Tariffs. It's as simple as that."

The president has engaged in hard-line trading negotiations with China, Canada and European nations, seeking to renegotiate trade agreements he says have undermined the nation's manufacturing base and led to a wave of job losses in recent decades.

The imposition of punishing tariffs on imported goods has been a favored tactic by Trump, but it has prompted U.S. trading partners to retaliate, creating risks for the economy.

Trump has placed tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, saying they pose a threat to U.S. national security, an argument that allies such as the European Union and Canada reject. He has also threatened to slap tariffs on imported cars, trucks and auto parts, potentially targeting imports that last year totaled $335 billion.

During a Monday event at the White House featuring American-made goods, Trump displayed a green hat that read, "Make Our Farmers Great Again."

"We're stopping the barriers to other countries. They send them in and take advantage of us," Trump said. "This is the way it's going to go — make our farmers great again."

The president is meeting with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on Wednesday. The U.S. and European allies have been at odds over the president's tariffs on steel imports and are meeting as the trade dispute threatens to spread to automobile production.

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Source: ABCNews

Iran shoots back at Trump: 'Color us unimpressed'

CNN reports..

Iran has shot back at US President Donald Trump, dismissing his all-caps Twitter warning that the country would suffer consequences if it continued to threaten the US, saying it was unimpressed by the late-night tweet.

"COLOR US UNIMPRESSED," Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted Monday night, employing Trump's penchant to use all capital letters in his tweets.

"The world heard even harsher bluster a few months ago. And Iranians have heard them -- albeit more civilized ones -- for 40 yrs. We've been around for millennia & seen fall of empires, incl our own, which lasted more than the life of some countries. BE CAUTIOUS."

COLOR US UNIMPRESSED: The world heard even harsher bluster a few months ago. And Iranians have heard them —albeit more civilized ones—for 40 yrs. We’ve been around for millennia & seen fall of empires, incl our own, which lasted more than the life of some countries. BE CAUTIOUS!

— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) July 23, 2018

Zarif's online comments are the latest in the escalating war of words between Washington and Tehran. Zarif's tweet comes less than a day after Trump posted a furious Twitter warning to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

"NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE," Trump tweeted after returning to the White House from a weekend at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey.

"WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!"

To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2018

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Monday Trump was responding to forceful comments Rouhani made earlier Sunday, in which he warned Trump "do not play with the lion's tail, because you will regret it eternally."

Later Monday morning, national security adviser John Bolton said Trump told him that "if Iran does anything at all to the negative, they will pay a price like few countries have ever paid before."

Foreign policy challenge

Iran experts are unsure if the 280 character-limit broadsides are more likely to foreshadow conflict or if they are a way to project strength before engaging Tehran diplomatically.

Trump employed similarly heated rhetoric when responding to threats and missile tests by North Korea last year.

"The reality is he's such an erratic President that you could see him dropping bombs on Iran or you could see him trying to build hotels in Iran," said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment.

"He's much more impulsive than he is strategic."

When asked if Trump risked inciting war with Iran, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters Monday morning, "if anybody is inciting anything, look no further than to Iran."

She wouldn't directly say whether Trump consulted with his national security team before the tweet. He speaks with them daily, she said, but declined to give any details about any steps Trump is looking to take with Iran.

"The President's been, I think, pretty strong since day one in his language toward Iran. He was responding to comments made from them, and he's going to continue to focus on the safety and security of American people," Sanders said at the White House briefing later Monday. She declined repeated questions about whether Trump would consider meeting with Rouhani.

Trump came into office vowing to take a hard line on Iran and scrap the Obama-negotiated nuclear deal of 2015, a promise he fulfilled in May.

The agreement forced Iran to curtail its uranium enrichment capacity to prevent it developing nuclear weapons, and imposed stringent verification processes, in exchange for relief on crippling sanctions.

One of Trump's many criticisms of the accord, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was that it did not do enough to stop Iran from funding extremist groups throughout the Middle East.

The other signatories to the deal, including France, the UK and Germany, have vowed to stand by it.

'Something that resembles the mafia'

On Sunday night, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched a blistering attack on Iran's religious rulers. The speech, which came hours after Rouhani's threat but before Trump's tweet, has been interpreted as part of a concerted effort within the Trump administration to step up economic and political pressure on Iran.

"The level of corruption and wealth among regime leaders shows that Iran is run by something that resembles the mafia more than a government," Pompeo said during an appearance at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.

Like Trump, Pompeo is a longstanding critic of the nuclear deal.

"We are asking every nation who is sick and tired of the Islamic Republic's destructive behavior to join our pressure campaign. This especially goes for our allies in the Middle East and Europe, people who have themselves been terrorized by violent regime activity for decades," said Pompeo.

Pompeo, the former director of the CIA, also used the speech to allege that the county's leaders have made billions of dollars from corrupt dealings.

The secretary accused Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's head of state, of maintaining a personal off-the-books hedge fund worth $95 billion.

"These hypocritical holy men have devised all kinds of crooked schemes to become some of the wealthiest men on Earth while their people suffer."

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Source:CNN

Trump turns up the heat on trade: 'Tariffs are the greatest!'

Alex Wong | Getty Images

President Donald Trump holds up a 'Make Our Farmers Great Again' hat as he speaks during the 2018 Made in America Product Showcase event July 23, 2018 in the Cross Hall of the White House in Washington, DC. 

CNBC Reports...

President Donald Trump holds up a 'Make Our Farmers Great Again' hat as he speaks during the 2018 Made in America Product Showcase event July 23, 2018 in the Cross Hall of the White House in Washington, DC.

President Donald Trump cranked up the rhetoric on tariffs on Tuesday, saying they are a good bargaining tool in his quest to get better trade agreements.

In a morning tweet, the president dug in on his position in the global trade war, declaring "Tariffs are the greatest!"

Tariffs are the greatest! Either a country which has treated the United States unfairly on Trade negotiates a fair deal, or it gets hit with Tariffs. It’s as simple as that - and everybody’s talking! Remember, we are the “piggy bank” that’s being robbed. All will be Great!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2018

The tweet comes as Trump has levied tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese imports and has targeted $16 billion more than will come on line soon. Also, the administration is looking into another $200 billion in targeted duties on a number of Chinese goods.

China has retaliated with tariffs of its own, though the administration is banking on the idea that the U.S. will ultimately prevail in a tit-for-tat battle. The U.S. ran a $376 billion trade deficit with China in calendar year 2017 and that number was $152 billion for the first five months of 2018, according to Census Bureau data.

Trump's chief economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, said at the Delivering Alpha conference last week that he does not like tariffs but also believes they can be effective in trying to level the playing field in trade.

In an earlier tweet Tuesday, Trump insisted that the tariffs his administration has imposed are working to bring other countries to the bargaining table.

Countries that have treated us unfairly on trade for years are all coming to Washington to negotiate. This should have taken place many years ago but,
as the saying goes, better late than never!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 24, 2018

The remarks are similar to tweets in March when Trump said "trade wars are good, and easy to win."

Voters generally disagree with the president's positions on trade. In a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 49 percent of respondents said the tariffs would raise the cost of goods and hurt the economy, while just 25 percent said they would preserve American jobs and help the economy.

Investors, though, have largely shrugged off the controversy.

The S&P 500 is up 5 percent for the year about 1.9 percent over the last month, despite the Trump saber-rattling on trade and other issues.

In an interview Thursday with CNBC, the president even threatened to impose tariffs on all $505 billion of goods the U.S. imports from China. Stocks mostly remained unchanged since the remarks.

Ed Mills, Washington policy analyst at Raymond James, said investors will need to closely watch developments.

"In recent months we have seen Trump increasingly operate on a go it alone strategy, relying more in his personal instincts and less on input from advisors. We expect these tendencies to continue and shape the direction of policy decisions in the near-term, leading to potentially binary outcomes," Mills said in a note.


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Source:CNBC 

Carter Page Surveillance Documents Indicate State Department Provided Initial Info After Interacting with Hoax Dossier Author

Breibart reports..

NEW YORK — Documents released on Saturday related to the wiretapping of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page reveal information that contributed to the government’s application to monitor Page originated with the State Department under the Obama administration in October 2016.

That detail may be particularly relevant since numerous officials from John Kerry’s State Department have been fingered for playing roles in the distribution – and in one case, possibly also the compilation – of the largely discredited, 35-page anti-Trump dossier which focused in significant part on Page.

Much of the interaction between the State Department and the dossier author took place just prior to the October 2016 date mentioned in the newly released Page documents. Dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British spy, was commissioned to produce the questionable document by the controversial Fusion GPS opposition research firm, which was paid for its anti-Trump work by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

State Department official Jonathan Winer admitted to exchanging documents and information with Steele, and passed the dossier contents to other officials at the State Department.  Winer also admitted to receiving information from Clinton associate Sidney Blumenthal that originated with Cody Shearer, a shadowy former tabloid journalist who has long been closely associated with various Clinton scandals. Winer conceded that he passed Shearer’s anti-Trump material to Steele.

On Saturday, a heavily redacted version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) application along with several renewals were released in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Most of the more than 400 pages were redacted. The second bullet point in each of the applications reveals that the information of Page’s “status” was first provided to the FBI by the State Department in October 2016.

That section states:

The target of this application is Carter W. Page, a US person, and an agent of a foreign power, described in detail below. The status of the target was determined in or about October 2016 from information provided by the US Department of State.

The rest of that section is redacted. Unredacted sections in the application do not provide any further clues about which information was provided by the State Department.

Kerry’s State Department has been under scrutiny for its ties to the dossier and for its possible role in aiding in the FBI’s contacts with dossier author Steele.

First there is State Department official Winer. After his name surfaced in news media reports related to probes by House Republicans into the dossier, Winer authored a Washington Post oped in which he conceded that while he was working at the State Department he exchanged documents and information with dossier author and former British spy Christopher Steele.

Winer further acknowledged that while at the State Department, he shared anti-Trump material with Steele passed to him by longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, whom Winer described as an “old friend.” Winer wrote that the material from Blumenthal – which Winer in turn gave to Steele – originated with Cody Shearer.

Winer served under Bill Clinton’s administration as the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement. He wrote in his Washington Post oped that he rejoined the State Department in 2013 at the insistence of John Kerry.

In the Post piece, Winer related that while he was at the State Department, he repeatedly passed documents from Steele related to Russia to State officials, including to Victoria Nuland, a career diplomat who worked under the Clintons and served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs under Kerry.

“Over the next two years, I shared more than 100 of Steele’s reports with the Russia experts at the State Department, who continued to find them useful,” he wrote.

Winer wrote that in the summer of 2016, Steele “told me that he had learned of disturbing information regarding possible ties between Donald Trump, his campaign and senior Russian officials.”

Winer says that he met with Steele in September 2016 to discuss details that would later become known as the anti-Trump dossier. Winer wrote that he prepared a two-page summary of Steele’s information and “shared it with Nuland, who indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of state needed to be made aware of this material.”

Besides bringing Steele’s dossier information to the State Department, Winer conceded that he also passed information from Blumenthal to Steele, specifically charges about Trump that originated with Shearer.

Winer described what he claimed was the evolution of his contacts with Blumenthal regarding Shearer’s information, which he says he passed to Steele:

In late September, I spoke with an old friend, Sidney Blumenthal, whom I met 30 years ago when I was investigating the Iran-Contra affair for then-Sen. Kerry and Blumenthal was a reporter at the Post. At the time, Russian hacking was at the front and center in the 2016 presidential campaign. The emails of Blumenthal, who had a long association with Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been hacked in 2013 through a Russian server.

While talking about that hacking, Blumenthal and I discussed Steele’s reports. He showed me notes gathered by a journalist I did not know, Cody Shearer, that alleged the Russians had compromising information on Trump of a sexual and financial nature.

What struck me was how some of the material echoed Steele’s but appeared to involve different sources. On my own, I shared a copy of these notes with Steele, to ask for his professional reaction. He told me it was potentially “collateral” information. I asked him what that meant. He said that it was similar but separate from the information he had gathered from his sources. I agreed to let him keep a copy of the Shearer notes.

Shearer has numerous close personal and family connections to the Clintons and has reportedly been involved in numerous antics tied to them. National Review previously dubbed Shearer a “Creepy Clinton Confidante” and “The Strangest Character in Hillary’s Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy.”

In his Washington Post oped, Winer does not say whether he knew at the time he interfaced with Steele that the ex-British spy was working for Fusion GPS, or that Fusion was being paid by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign via the Perkins Coie law firm.

Besides Winer, there is Victoria Nuland, a senior official in Kerry’s State Department, who gave the green light for the FBI to first meet with Steele regarding his wild claims about Trump and Russia, according to a recently released book. It was at that meeting that Steele initially reported his dossier charges to the FBI, the book relates.

The book, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, is authored by reporters by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.

The book documents Steele told Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson that he believed the claims that he uncovered about Trump represented a “grave national security threat” that needed to be reported to the FBI. Simpson eventually allowed Steele to report the dossier’s claims to the FBI, the book reports.

Steele sought out Rome-based FBI Special Agent Michael Gaeta, with whom he had worked on a previous case. Before Gaeta met with Steele on July 5, 2016, the book relates that the FBI first secured the support of Nuland.

Regarding the arrangements for Steele’s initial meeting with the FBI about the dossier claims, Isikoff and Corn report:

There were a few hoops Gaeta had to jump through. He was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Rome. The FBI checked with Victoria Nuland’s office at the State Department : Do you support this meeting ? Nuland, having found Steele’s reports on Ukraine to have been generally credible, gave the green light.

Within a few days, on July 5, Gaeta arrived and headed to Steele’s office near Victoria station . Steele handed him a copy of the report. Gaeta, a seasoned FBI agent, started to read . He turned white. For a while, Gaeta said nothing . Then he remarked, “I have to report this to headquarters.”

The book documents that Nuland previously received Steele’s reports on the Ukrainian crisis and had been familiar with Steele’s general work.

Nuland previously served as chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott under Bill Clinton’s administration, and then served as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs.

Nuland faced confirmation questions prior to her most recent appointment as assistant secretary of state over her reported role in revising controversial Obama administration talking points about the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks. Her reported changes sought to protect Hillary Clinton’s State Department from accusations that it failed to adequately secure the woefully unprotected U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi.

Meanwhile, an extensive New Yorker profile of Steele named Kerry’s chief of staff at the State Department, John Finer, as obtaining the contents of a two-page summary of the dossier and eventually deciding to share the questionable document with Kerry. Finer received the dossier summary from Winer, the magazine reported.

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Source: Breibart 

Iranian President Warns Trump About 'Mother Of All Wars'

Reuters  reports...

DUBAI (Reuters) - Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Sunday cautioned U.S. President Donald Trump about pursuing hostile policies against Tehran, saying “America should know ... war with Iran is the mother of all wars,” but he did not rule out peace between the two countries, either.

Iran faces increased U.S. pressure and looming sanctions after Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from a 2015 international deal over Iran’s nuclear program.

Addressing a gathering of Iranian diplomats, Rouhani said: “Mr Trump, don’t play with the lion’s tail, this would only lead to regret,” the state new agency IRNA reported.

“America should know that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars,” Rouhani said, leaving open the possibility of peace between the two countries which have been at odds since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

“You are not in a position to incite the Iranian nation against Iran’s security and interests,” Rouhani said, in an apparent reference to reported efforts by Washington to destabilize Iran’s Islamic government.

In Washington, U.S. officials familiar with the matter told Reuters that the Trump administration has launched an offensive of speeches and online communications meant to foment unrest and help pressure Iran to end its nuclear program and its support of militant groups.

Current and former U.S. officials said the campaign paints Iranian leaders in a harsh light, at times using information that is exaggerated or contradicts other official pronouncements, including comments by previous administrations.

Rouhani scoffed at Trump’s threat to halt Iranian oil exports and said Iran has a dominant position in the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil shipping waterway.

“Anyone who understands the rudiments of politics doesn’t say ‘we will stop Iran’s oil exports’...we have been the guarantor of the regional waterway’s security throughout history,” Rouhani said, cited by the semi-official ISNA news agency.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday backed Rouhani’s suggestion that Iran may block Gulf oil exports if its own exports are halted.

Rouhani’s apparent threat earlier this month to disrupt oil shipments from neighboring countries came in reaction to efforts by Washington to force all countries to stop buying Iranian oil.

Iranian officials have in the past threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for any hostile U.S. action.

Separately, a top Iranian military commander warned that the Trump government might be preparing to invade Iran.

“The enemy’s behavior is unpredictable,” military chief of staff General Mohammad Baqeri said, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.

“Although the current American government does not seem to speak of a military threat, according to precise information it has been trying to persuade the U.S. military to launch a military invasion (of Iran),” Baqeri said.

Iran’s oil exports could fall by as much as two-thirds by the end of the year because of new U.S. sanctions, putting oil markets under huge strain amid supply outages elsewhere.

Washington initially planned to totally shut Iran out of global oil markets after Trump abandoned the deal that limited Iran’s nuclear ambitions, demanding all other countries to stop buying its crude by November.

But it has somewhat eased its stance since, saying that it may grant sanction waivers to some allies that are particularly reliant on Iranian supplies.

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Source: Reuters

Trump-Putin: Top US spy retracts 'awkward response'

BBC reports...

The head of US intelligence has said that he did not mean to disrespect President Donald Trump with his "awkward response" on hearing the news that he had invited Russian leader Vladimir Putin to visit Washington.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats had laughed in surprise, saying, "That's going to be special".

The invitation came after Mr Trump's first summit with Mr Putin in Finland.

Mr Coats has previously said Russia has attempted to undermine US democracy.

The intelligence chief was speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado on Thursday when news of a possible second Trump-Putin summit later this year broke. He asked his interviewer, "Say that again, did I hear you?"

Then following surprised laughter, Mr Coats said: "Okay, that's going to be special."

Mr Coats downplayed his public reaction two days later in a statement, saying: "Some press coverage has mischaracterised my intentions in responding to breaking news presented to me during a live interview."

"My admittedly awkward response was in no way meant to be disrespectful or criticise the actions of the President," he said on Saturday.

He went on to say that he and the intelligence community were committed to supporting President Trump's "ongoing efforts to prevent Russian meddling in our upcoming elections".

The White House, which has not commented on the statement, was reportedly furious about Mr Coats' initial remarks, with one senior official telling the Washington Post, "Coats has gone rogue".

Mr Trump has drawn strong criticism from both Republicans and Democrats over his initial reluctance to blame Russia for alleged meddling in the 2016 US elections that he won.

Confusion followed after his return to the US, where he has since said that he misspoke at a joint news conference in Helsinki with Mr Putin and does hold the Russian leader personally responsible.

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Source: BBC