2020: Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) declassifications:
April 15: Declassified footnotes from the Horowitz report on Crossfire Hurricane (Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation)
May 7: All witness transcripts from U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s Russia investigation
May 12: List of officials who sought to unmask Flynn between November 6, 2016, and January 31, 2020
May 19: Unredacted Susan Rice CYA email
May 29: Declassified transcripts of the Flynn-Kislyak calls
June 11: Annex A of ICA
July 23: Pientka briefing to Trump, notes, and emails on FBI efforts to use briefings to gather evidence
3
American Business Unleashed
We’re not in the habit of giving stock tips or making market calls. But after spending years reporting on business and finance, we were convinced that, on the night of November 8, 2016, the conventional market wisdom was way off target.
As the night wore on and equity traders began to grasp that Donald Trump would become president of the United States of America, stock markets around the world started selling off. In the U.S., trading in S&P 500 futures would eventually be halted after a 5 percent decline. After midnight, Paul Krugman of the New York Times opined: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”1
We didn’t see it that way. For years we’d been hearing anguished people at companies large and small bemoan the growing federal burden of taxes and regulations. Now the United States would have a president who intended to reduce this hardship and prioritize economic growth.
When Maria sat down around 10:30 on election night for a Fox News panel discussion, Dow futures were down about 700 points. Markets like certainty; it was understandable that some investors were selling. Trump seemed to present more uncertainty than Hillary Clinton, who was essentially promising a continuation of the Obama administration. Trump’s talk about ripping up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for example, created big unknowns and potentially significant risks. That night we were focused on the policy differences between the candidates. Trump wanted to cut taxes and regulation. Hillary wanted to raise taxes. Trump wanted to open the spigot on energy. Hillary wanted to spend money on big government programs. It seemed obvious to conclude this would be a great buying opportunity, which is what Maria told colleagues Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly while the markets were selling off.
In fact, the election night selloff turned out to be a huge buying opportunity. Companies had been sitting on cash—not investing or hiring. Complying with the federal health law known as Obamacare was a nightmare for many business owners. It made them wonder what other big idea from Washington would haunt them in the future. Clinton was likely to increase business costs further, while Trump had vowed to reduce them. Even in the middle of the election night market panic, the implications for corporate revenue and earnings growth seemed obvious.
The next morning, with the Trump victory confirmed, Maria told her colleague Martha MacCallum that she’d be “buying the stock market with both hands.” Investors began doing the same. The Dow Jones Industrial Average surged almost 29 percent, and U.S. stocks added trillions of dollars in value in the twelve months following Donald Trump’s surprise election victory. Investors around the world wanted in on America’s new growth story.
It wasn’t just an American story. The entire world benefits when its largest economy is healthy, and the new leader of the U.S. economy was a businessman elected on a promise to restore prosperity.
Trump had specifically promised a campaign against federal bureaucracy, and did America ever need one. As if taxes hadn’t been high enough, the U.S. government in 2016 forced Americans to spend an eye-watering $1.9 trillion just to comply with federal regulations. That’s according to a 2017 report from Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “If it were a country, U.S. regulation would be the world’s seventh-largest economy, ranking behind India and ahead of Italy,” Crews said. He added that America’s regulatory tab had grown nearly as large as the total pretax profits of corporations.2
Crews has become one of the most hated men in Washington by tabulating the annual hidden costs—those not counted in direct federal spending—that politicians and bureaucrats impose on the American economy. And nobody imposed more than Barack Obama. According to the Crews annual scorecards, the yearly cost of federal regulation soared by more than $700 billion in nominal dollars from 2008, the last full year of the Bush administration, through Obama’s final full year of 2016. “Adjusting for inflation, you can call Obama the $600 Billion Man.”3
One measure of the amount of red tape spewing out of Washington is the number of pages of proposed and final rules printed in the Federal Register. “Of the top 10 all-time-high Federal Register page counts, seven occurred under President Barack Obama,” noted Crews. Businesspeople can only hope that Obama’s last record, “set on his final lap in 2016, will never be broken. Mr. Crews reports that the register ‘finished 2016 at 95,894 pages, the highest level in its history and 19 percent higher than the previous year’s 80,260 pages.’ ”4
As for the additional $600 billion in annual regulatory burdens added during the Obama years, it’s real money. Based on the April 2017 Consumer Expenditure Surveys from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, this hidden tax added up to more than twice what American consumers spent each year on gasoline and more than three times what we spent on electricity. It’s more than we spent on dining out. This bureaucratic tax also amounted to roughly nine times what American consumers spent on alcoholic beverages, and perhaps there’s a connection.5
If business owners weren’t driven to drink, they were certainly driven
