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President Donald Trump said Thursday that text messages critical of him shared by FBI employees amounted to treason, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Journal reporters interviewed Trump for 45 minutes, the paper reported, in a conversation that touched on everything from North Korea to Steve Bannon.

“A man is tweeting to his lover that if [Democrat Hillary Clinton] loses, we’ll essentially do the insurance policy,” Trump said. “We’ll go to phase two and we’ll get this guy out of office.”

“This is the FBI we’re talking about—that is treason,” he added. “That is a treasonous act. What he tweeted to his lover is a treasonous act.”

President Donald Trump has “got the message” that Londoners oppose his views and polices as he cancelled a planned visit to the capital, Sadiq Khan has said.

The London Mayor, a long-term opponent of Mr Trump, said the visit would have been hampered by “mass peaceful protests” as the Presidents’s controversial views were the “polar opposite” of the city’s values.

Mr Trump said he would not visit the UK to open the new US embassy in south London and described the decision to move the building from Mayfair to Vauxhall, as a “bad deal”.

However the prospect of a hostile reception has been cited as a factor behind his decision to cancel the visit, as opponents have threatened mass protests if Mr Trump enters the country.

The President has also been promised a state visit to the UK but the offer has become an increasing headache for Theresa May, drawing opposition from politicians on all sides of the house.

In a statement, Mr Khan said: “It appears that President Trump got the message from the many Londoners who love and admire America and Americans but find his policies and actions the polar opposite of our city’s values of inclusion, diversity and tolerance.

“His visit next month would without doubt have been met by mass peaceful protests.

“This just reinforces what a mistake it was for Theresa May to rush and extend an invitation of a state visit in the first place.

“Let’s hope that Donald Trump also revisits the pursuit of his divisive agenda.”

The pair have clashed in the past after the President berated Mr Khan over his response to the terror attacks in London Bridge last year, where he mocked the mayor’s comments that there was “no reason to be alarmed” by the armed police on the streets.

Mr Khan hit back, saying he was too busy to deal with the ”ill-informed” comments from the President.

Ex-Ukip leader Nigel Farage hit out at Mr Khan and Jeremy Corbyn for backing protests that could have deterred him from visiting.

That says something about how far to the right Trump is, the only supporters he now has are neo Nazis.

Even the Bush administration didn't really make that decision, though, since it wasn't entirely theirs to sell. The US didn't own the embassy but leased it from the Duke of Westminster – a strange arrangement that made it unique among US embassies and led to protracted and often fractious negotiations as the Americans looked to sort it out.

During O. J. Simpson’s trial for murder, his lawyers needed to throw the blame on someone besides their client. They settled on a vague story about drug dealers somehow tied to a close friend of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. The defense never even tried to explain why these malefactors “would have wanted to kill Nicole Brown Simpson (much less Ron Goldman),” Jeffrey Toobin wrote in his book about the trial. “That wasn’t the point of the defense strategy.” All the defense had to do was muddy the proverbial waters and gesture at an alternative theory of the crime.

The behavior of Republicans in Congress who are ostensibly investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election makes sense if you imagine them acting like Simpson’s lawyers. Though pretending to examine a crime against America, they are instead working to cover one up. To do so, they are spinning wild alternative scenarios with just enough surface plausibility to persuade the easily persuadable.

Because Republicans don’t have to prove their alternative theory, you rarely see it fully elaborated. But it goes something like this: Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired Fusion GPS to gather anti-Trump misinformation from Russia. Fusion GPS, working with the retired British spy Christopher Steele, then delivered the Russian smears to the F.B.I., which was determined to thwart Trump. So if anyone was guilty of collusion with Russia in the 2016 election, it was Clinton and her allies.

On Tuesday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, gave a speech on the Senate floor about all the rabbit holes into which Republicans have tried to divert the Russia investigation. His Republican colleagues, he said, “have been repeating, in chorus with the White House and conservative media, the disproven claim that the Russians somehow commissioned the Steele dossier, or that Steele somehow got suckered by the Russians, or that some deep-state F.B.I. set up the whole thing to pressure Trump.”

This tapestry of disinformation is the background to one of Trump’s tweets on Thursday morning, which said in part, “Disproven and paid for by Democrats ‘Dossier used to spy on Trump Campaign. Did FBI use Intel tool to influence the Election?’ @foxandfriends Did Dems or Clinton also pay Russians?”

If it were just the president trying to sell the country on this photonegative version of reality, it would be unsurprising, since he is both a fabulist and a master of projection.

But now congressional Republicans who are supposed to be investigating Russia’s actions in the 2016 election are instead using their power to bolster Trump’s counternarrative. On Jan. 5, Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham sent a letter to the the Justice Department asking it to open a criminal investigation into Steele, apparently for lying to the F.B.I.

Simply as a matter of procedure, the move shocked some Justice Department veterans. “I cannot think of a time that Congress has referred something to the F.B.I. alleging a lie to the F.B.I.,” Matthew Miller, a former Justice Department spokesman, told me. “It is, I believe, unprecedented.” It seemed like a stunt to undermine Steele’s credibility.

Also on Tuesday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, grew frustrated with Republican stonewalling and unilaterally released the 312-page transcript of the testimony of the Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn R. Simpson before the Judiciary Committee in August. Republicans on the committee had tried to keep the transcript secret. Reading it, it was clear why.

Again and again, the transcript shows Republican lawyers on the committee asking questions meant to substantiate the Trumpist narrative, particularly about whether Fusion GPS had been hired with the specific aim of starting an F.B.I. investigation. Simpson’s detailed answers, given under oath, make the Republican theory look ridiculous.

In the questioning, Steele comes off as an earnest, upright figure who was stunned by his discoveries about Trump and Russia, and who felt duty-bound to go to the F.B.I. If Republicans had reason to believe that Simpson was lying to them, they could have referred him to the Department of Justice, but they did not.

Like all good conspiracy theories, Trump’s counternarrative contains a few facts mixed with all the wild supposition. For example, it’s true that Peter Strzok, a counterintelligence agent who was part of the initial F.B.I. inquiry into Trump’s Russia ties, texted a colleague with whom he was having an affair about the need for an “insurance policy” should Trump become president.

As The Wall Street Journal reported, Strzok was aghast at the seriousness of the investigation and was referring to the need to proceed quickly because should Trump win an upset victory, people suspected of colluding with Russia might end up in sensitive government jobs. (Strzok eventually became part of Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation but was removed as soon as his texts came to light.) Republicans insist on pretending that the “insurance policy” was the dossier itself, a dirty trick created to undermine a potential Trump presidency. From Strzok’s text and a few other details, Republicans are weaving a story in which Trump is the victim rather than the beneficiary of illicit collusion.

Because there’s not even an attempt among Republicans to discover what Russia really did in the 2016 election, nothing much is being done to prepare for further Russian incursions. “The ultimate test is, when the November 2018 elections come, have we done what we should have done in order to protect those elections from foreign interference,” Whitehouse told me Thursday. “I don’t see us on the path to a good answer to that question.” You can’t solve a crime when you’re more interested in protecting the suspects.

“I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, ” Trump told the Journal in a 45-minute sit-down at the White House.

This week, a video surfaced of a Harvard professor, Steven Pinker, which appeared to show him lauding members of a racist movement. The clip, which was pulled from a November event at Harvard put on by Spiked magazine, showed Mr. Pinker referring to “the often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right” and calling them “internet savvy” and “media savvy.”

It’s getting harder and harder to talk about anything controversial online without every single utterance of an opinion immediately being caricatured by opportunistic outrage-mongers, at which point everyone, afraid to be caught exposed in the skirmish that’s about to break out, rushes for the safety of their ideological battlements, where they can safely scream out their righteousness in unison.

Posting a topical article doesn't automatically mean that someone endorses the piece or accepts it uncritically.

Political Correctness is "decadent phase" of once legitimate movement - Steven Pinker

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Even Fox & Friends is Criticizing Trump For ‘Sh*thole’ Comment: ‘The President Made a Mistake’ (VIDEO) http://bit.ly/2ARtff0