"For all the sound and fury over his public remarks and tweets in Washington, President Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia has been a very different story. The president gave the right speech in the right place at the right time. There will still be critics on issues like human rights and Yemen, but the president had a different focus -- and almost certainly the right one. ...

"One speech cannot change Arab or Muslim perceptions of the president or the U.S. as an ally. Much will depend on the years and actions that follow. Words really matter, however, and especially in the Middle East. This time, the president used the right words to start rebuilding the foundations of America's strategic partnerships in the Muslim world and Middle East, and to deal with truly urgent threats. This speech is the right beginning -- in remarkably well crafted terms -- and it deserves bipartisan and expert respect."

"I have heard about 'Witch-Hunts' all of my life. When I was a small child, Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.) and the House Un-American Activities Committee were said by the left-wingers to be on a 'witch-hunt' for Communists in the government. That's what the left alleged against Richard Nixon when he was a young Congressman from Yorba Linda, too. The allegation was a bit misleading, though, because as far as we know, there are no such things as witches. There's Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi and they are not nice, but no one could prove that there are even such things as witches, let alone that there are witches in high office. ...

"Now, we have a new kind of witch-hunt going on against the administration and the person of Donald Trump. The allegation is that there was some kind of control of the 2016 Presidential Campaign exercised by the Russians and that the control ran by some kind of collusion between Russia and Donald Trump. And now, with the appointment of Mr. Mueller as a Special Prosecutor in this case, we see a REAL witch-hunt hit high gear. This one is a REAL witch-hunt because there is no evidence at all of any kind whatsoever that there was any collusion with the Russians by Trump. There is no evidence that the Russians controlled Trump or anyone in his campaign.

"It's all about a fantasy. So, now we have a hunt for something that is non-existent, as far as anyone knows."

"Bob Mueller is a widely respected former prosecutor, U.S. attorney, high-ranking Justice Department official, and FBI director. He is highly regarded by both parties. This is perhaps best exhibited by the fact that when his ten-year term as the FBI director appointed by President George W. Bush expired in 2011, President Obama asked him to stay on for an additional two years, and Congress quickly agreed to extend his term. He is a straight shooter, by the book, and studiously devoid of flash. ...

"I remain a skeptic of special prosecutors or special counsels. Democrats are so Trump-deranged that I suspect, despite Mueller's solid reputation, they will claim the fix is in if impeachment does not appear to be on the horizon in short order. But most people will give Mueller a chance. And he deserves that."

"Since August, when a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers announced that it was auctioning off highly classified National Security Agency hacking tools, a low-grade panic has seized the nation's largest intelligence agency.

"In April, when the Shadow Brokers dumped dozens of the agency's software exploits on the web, free to criminals and foreign spies alike, the clock began ticking toward inevitable calamity. And since Friday, the agency has watched as malicious software based on its creations spread across the world, shutting down hospitals, disrupting rail traffic and spurring frustration and chaos in some 150 countries.

"'For half a century, N.S.A. pried into other people's secrets,' said Amy B. Zegart, a Stanford University professor who studies intelligence agencies. 'Now they're suddenly sitting ducks who have their secrets stolen and used around the world.'

"The weekend's ransomware attack is only the latest in a series of trials for the agency. In 2005, the revelation by The New York Times that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping inside the United States without court orders set off a yearslong debate over American privacy and led to new legal limits on surveillance. In 2013, Edward J. Snowden gave journalists hundreds of thousands of N.S.A. documents he had taken as a contractor, igniting a global debate over the agency's targeting of allies as well as foes. Last August, shortly after the Shadow Brokers' debut, a veteran intelligence contractor named Harold T. Martin III was charged with walking out of the National Security Agency and other agencies with a staggering 50 terabytes of confidential data. ...

"The latest nightmare for the agency, which is responsible for eavesdropping, code breaking and cyberespionage, appears to be far from over. Early Tuesday, a post purportedly from the Shadow Brokers announced that it was starting a sort of hack-of-the-month club."

Read entire article here.

"Many journalists believe it's literally impossible to be unfair to Donald Trump or the people who work for him. Extremism in the pursuit of Trump is no vice. That's the view in newsrooms, and you hear it in conversations all around Washington, a city that voted 91 percent for Hillary Clinton last fall.

"Media figures, adults, smart people who have been around, have perspective -- or did have perspective. They've succumbed to Trump hatred that is so intense, it has destroyed their judgment and in some cases affected their character.

"I see it all the time. Where normal people see flaws -- and they do exist -- with the president, they see crimes and conspiracies. The rest of us may complain that Trump is undisciplined and implusive, they regard him as the single gretest threat to Western civilization since nuclear weapons..."

"Sure, Congress polls right around the popularity of 'Outhouse scuba diving' and 'Borrowing Charlie Sheen's toothbrush,' but then who wants to live in a country where we like our politicians? It's not like in 2016 we were high-fiving these guys. We get that a GOP Congress is a necessary evil. But we also get that a Democrat Congress is an unnecessary evil. ...

"Here's how this goes. The Democrats, along with the media and Team Tinfoil, keep whining about Russians Russians Russians, and normal people keep tuning them out. While they're babbling about nonsense that means nothing outside of the coastal looney bins, normal people are tuning into how the stock market and the job market just keep getting better, how we're not taking guff from foreign creeps anymore, and we're not talking about how much taxes will go up but about how much they'll go down.

"Tax reform is going to pass. Obamacare is getting repealed -- it's as dead in the Senate as it was in the House, which is not at all. Our military is getting rebuilt. We're going to stop leading with our chin on trade. Things are going to keep getting better, and people will see it.

"The only way the President can still screw this up is by choosing to screw this up. He won't do it by messing with liberals. Keep tweeting those twerps into a sputtering rage! It pays dividends every time he provokes them to new heights of lunacy."

"The 10-month-old Russia probe remains an investigation in search of a crime. The Obama team's unmasking of Flynn's identity in foreign-surveillance reports and leaking that classified information to The Washington Post is a crime in search of an investigation.

"Unfortunately, justice will have to wait for Comey's replacement to launch an aggressive inquiry to hunt down the leakers and lock them up. And he may first have to clean house to do it, starting with Comey's deputy."

"The last thing the country needs is another out-of-control probe that won't give us the answers we need about Russia and Trump. ...

"If we are to ever get to the bottom of the charges about Russia and Trump, some sort of bipartisan special commission or joint congressional committee will be necessary to produce a report that has a chance of being believed on both sides of the aisle. But given our experience with special prosecutors, we know that the appointment of one would provide neither justice nor closure to a bifurcated nation. To the contrary, despite the chorus of calls for such a move, a special prosecutor would be the worst-case scenario: It would create a prolonged investigation that would do little or nothing to give Americans the information they need. ...

"No matter how scrupulous the efforts of the FBI and Congress to investigate Russia's misdeeds, we all know that nothing short of Trump's head on a metaphorical spike will satisfy Trump's critics. If a bipartisan effort to deal with this issue is necessary, let it be a commission like the one that dealt with 9/11. A special prosecutor would encourage Democratic fantasies but do nothing to get to the bottom of an issue that might not involve the wrongdoing that Trump'€™s critics already take as self-evident fact."

"While the FBI was investigating Bill Clinton for the White Water corruption situation, President Clinton fired the FBI Director. The media took President Clinton's actions at face value. They did not question him. In fact, conservatives who raised red flags were dismissed. Today, we get to see what happens when a Republican does what Bill Clinton did. ....

"The reality ... is that many of those most critical of the President firing Comey were the same people demanding Comey be fired for his handling of Hillary Clinton's emails. We have a hyper-partisan environment in which all sides too easily and too quickly abandon intellectual honesty. It is notable that Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins, two of the GOP's most strident critics of Donald Trump, are okay with this firing.

"It is not a constitutional crisis, nor is it a dark day for democracy. It is a President exercising his constitutional duties on the advice of his cabinet ministers. The timing is bothersome and looks bad, but the underlying rationale suggests the decision was made thoughtfully. However, the left will never believe President Trump nor believe anything other than the worst possible conspiracies about him. Russiaism is the new Birtherism."

"Consider: Would the anxieties over the hacked [French Presidential candidate] Macron materials have ascended to such heights had the targets been a Republican and the Republican establishment? An imperfect example exists that helps test that question. The confidential Steele dossier about Trump, eventually published by BuzzFeed, began its life as a piece of confidential opposition research commissioned by an anti-Trump figure. The all-American purpose of oppo, as everybody knows, is to undermine -- or sabotage -- the candidate on the other side, but anonymously. Campaigns produce reams of it each election, and traditionally dispense it to reporters with a gavage, the barnyard instrument used to force-feed a pate goose. Journalists at the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Poynter and elsewhere damned the Steele dossier's publication but nearly every major news organization publicized its incendiary and prurient assertions. The outrage over the Steele dossier never approached the furor that greeted the hacked emails, suggesting that the establishment thinks Republicans aren't as deserving of protections from 'political sabotage' as Democrats.

"So, go ahead and cringe over the analysis and publication of hacked materials. Just you understand that it's the macro version of the micro thing the press does every day. And it's legal, as the Supreme Court ruled in 2001 in Bartnicki v. Vopper, when it properly held that the First Amendment allows the publication of illegally intercepted communications. The only defect in that ruling is that it contains no footnote stating that behind most great works of journalism is a daring theft or a stunning betrayal of confidence."