MANCHESTER, N.H. – President Trump has a message for New Hampshire Republicans ahead of his visit Thursday: "Corey's an outstanding guy. If he ran and won, he would be a great senator."



The Corey the president is referring to is Corey Lewandowski, who managed Trump's presidential campaign from its start in 2015 through the 2016 primaries and who remains a close outside adviser to the president. The New Hampshire resident and Washington, D.C., consultant and lobbyist generated buzz a couple of weeks ago when he said he was seriously considering a 2020 run for the U.S Senate in his home state.



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"I would fully expect that the president would say he has no greater ally than Corey Lewandowski, because that is true, and that he would look forward to having Corey run for the Senate," said David Bossie, the longtime president and chairman of the conservative advocacy group Citizens United and a Fox News contributor.



Bossie, a close outsider adviser to the president who served as deputy campaign manager of Trump's 2016 White House bid, is also close with Lewandowski.



"Obviously an endorsement by the president, if he (Lewandowski) was to get in the race, would make him, in my opinion, unbeatable in the primary," he told Fox News.



Bossie released a poll on Tuesday indicating that Lewandowski would become the front-runner in the race – over the three other declared or likely Republican candidates – if he were to run – and that the president's support would only enhance his front-runner status. Trump – whose approval rating is underwater in the state – remains very popular with most Granite State Republicans. His approval rating stood at 82 percent among Republicans in a University of New Hampshire poll released this week.



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Survey of likely GOP Senate voters released by Lewandowski friend, ally, Bossie



MANCHESTER, N.H. —
Former Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski leads the 2020 Republican U.S. Senate field in a new poll conducted this week by one of the president’s top pollsters and released by a friend and ally of Lewandowski.



The poll of 400 likely Republican Senate primary voters was conducted by Trump campaign pollsters Tony Fabrizio, David Lee and Travis Tunis for David Bossie, the president of the Citizens United advocacy group who co-authored two books about Trump with Lewandowski.



It showed prospective candidate Lewandowski as the choice of 30 percent of those surveyed, with retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc at 11 percent, former New Hampshire House Speaker Bill O’Brien at 10 percent and attorney Bryant “Corky” Messner at 1 percent, with 49 percent undecided. Bolduc and O'Brien are declared candidates for the seat held by Democratic incumbent Jeanne Shaheen, while Messner is exploring a run.



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A top ally of former Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has released a new poll aimed at convincing him to run for Senate — and at swaying the president to endorse him.



The survey, which was commissioned by Lewandowski confidante and Citizens United President David Bossie, shows that the former Trump aide would become the Republican front-runner if he runs and that an endorsement from the president further boost his standing.



The poll comes as Trump is set to head to New Hampshire for a political rally on Thursday. There is widespread speculation in New Hampshire and Washington political circles about whether the president will use the rally to endorse or talk up Lewandowski, who is weighing jumping into the Republican primary to take on Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.).



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Liberal mega-donor George Soros made some big bets during the last U.S. presidential election. One was that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency. Another was that he could reshape Ukraine’s government to his liking, and that his business empire might find fertile ground in that former Soviet state.



So when Donald Trump’s improbable march to the White House picked up steam in the spring of 2016, Team Soros marched to the top of the State Department to protect some of those investments, according to newly released department memos providing a rare glimpse into the Democratic donor’s extraordinary access to the Obama administration.



Then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland received repeated calls, emails and meeting requests from Soros, according to the memos obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the conservative group Citizens United.



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The FBI is going to court to fight the public release of a small number of documents the State Department sent to agents from Christopher Steele, the British intelligence operative and Hillary Clinton-paid political muckraker, during the 2016 election. 



Normally, such Freedom of Information Act cases don't merit public attention. This one does.



To hear the FBI tell it, the release of former Deputy Assistant Secretary Kathleen Kavalec's documents is tantamount to giving up the keys to President Trump's nuclear briefcase, aiding the enemy or assisting terrorists.



"We know that terrorist organizations and other hostile or foreign intelligence groups have the capacity and ability to gather information from myriad sources, analyze it and deduce means and methods from disparate details to defeat the U.S. government's collection efforts," an FBI assistant section chief swore in an affidavit supporting the request to keep the documents secret.



The FBI can't afford to "jeopardize the fragile relationships that exist between the United States and certain foreign governments," the FBI official declared in another dramatic argument against the conservative group Citizens United's request to release the memos. 



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“He was interviewing the Hill's John Solomon and credited memos obtained by conservative group Citizens United through open-records litigation and first reported by Solomon with aiding the watchdog investigation reach a breakthrough.”



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A high-level dispute over which senior government officials pushed the unverified Steele dossier amid efforts to surveil the Trump campaign has broken out into the open again, after it emerged that Attorney General William Barr appointed a U.S. attorney to examine the origins of the Russia investigation and determine if the FBI and DOJ's actions were "lawful and appropriate."



Sources familiar with the records told Fox News that a late-2016 email chain indicated then-FBI Director James Comey told bureau subordinates that then-CIA Director John Brennan insisted the dossier be included in the intelligence community assessment on Russian interference, known as the ICA.



Fox News was told that the email chain – not yet public -- referred to the dossier as "crown material," but it was not clear why this apparent code was used. On Tuesday night, former GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy said on Fox News' "The Story with Martha MacCallum" that "Comey has a better argument than Brennan, based on what I've seen."



A day earlier, Gowdy told Fox News, "Whoever is looking into this, tell them to look into emails" from December 2016 involving Brennan and Comey. Gowdy, who is now a Fox News contributor, said his assessment was based on sensitive Russia records he reviewed as then-chairman of the Republican-led House Oversight Committee.



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“To everything there is a season,” the Good Book counsels, and for diehard critics of Donald Trump, clinging to their belief in his sinister designs, it’s always open season on the president. To “a time to be born, a time to die” they have added “a time to accuse, a time to face accusation.” For the president’s adversaries, that time has arrived.



James Comey, the former director of the FBI whose firing set off the futile Russia collusion investigation, took to the stage at a CNN townhall the other day to persuade an audience that he, and not President Trump, is on the side of the angels. He’s still determined to find that unicorn in the garden who will smoke out the perpetrators of interference in the 2016 presidential election.



When the moderator asked whether he thought Mr. Trump acted with corrupt intent, he replied that “it sure looks that way.” Despite the inconvenient fact that the president was cleared of colluding with the Russians, Mr. Comey now says the president ought to be indicted for obstructing the Mueller probe once he leaves office.



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In all Washington investigations, the essential questions become who knew it and when did they know it.



In the case of FBI informant Christopher Steele and the credibility of his now-disproven Russia collusion allegations against Donald Trump, we have some important clarity: Government officials confirm that an October 2016 email revealing that Steele met with State Department officials — a breach of protocol for an informant if it was unauthorized — was sent to an FBI counterintelligence supervisor.



Multiple sources confirm to me that the recipient of the State Department email was Special Agent Stephen Laycock, then the FBI’s section chief for Eurasian counterintelligence and now one of the bureau’s top executives as the assistant director for intelligence under Director Christopher Wray.



The email to Laycock from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec arrived eight days before the FBI swore to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that it had no derogatory information on Steele and used his anti-Trump dossier to secure a secret surveillance warrant to investigate Trump’s possible ties to Moscow.



Officials tell me that Laycock immediately forwarded the information he received about Steele on Oct. 13, 2016, to the FBI team leading the Trump-Russia investigation, headed by then-fellow Special Agent Peter Strzok.



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The Justice Department inspector general has determined the three Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant extensions against onetime Trump campaign aide Carter Page were illegally obtained, attorney Joe diGenova said on Thursday.



In an investigation that began last year, Inspector General Michael Horowitz is examining the Justice Department's and FBI's compliance with legal requirements as well as policies and procedures in applications filed with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court related to Page as part of a larger counterintelligence probe into Trump's campaign.



The inspector general inquiry is expected to be completed in either late May or June, and diGenova, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said Democrats on Capitol Hill are working overtime to investigate and discredit President Trump.



"They are doing that as a diversionary tactic away from the inevitable conclusions of the DOJ inspector general, Michael Horowitz, who, by the way, we have learned has concluded that the final three FISA extensions were illegally obtained," diGenova said on Fox Business. "The only question now is whether or not the first FISA was illegally obtained."



He pointed to memos, obtained by conservative group Citizens United through open-records litigation, that suggest the FBI might have misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the first warrant application about an unverified dossier.



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