welcome to trumpland
the face of the failed american state
april 24, 2019
"On some great and glorious day..."
"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
HL Mencken July 1920
Trump
American traitor
Economy raider
Vote suppressor
Minority oppressor
Truth-ambivalent
Nazi-equivalent
Democracy hating
Media berating
Mafia don
Two-bit con
Egomaniacal turd
Don’t believe a single word
itmfa
COHEN: TRUMP IS A RACIST, A CON MAN, AND A CHEAT!!!
Traitors All
NanceGreggs - demo underground
4/13/19
Donald Trump is a traitor. We know that, because we have seen the evidence. He handed classified information to the Russians, has done everything in his power to benefit Russia to the detriment of our own country, and has sided with Putin rather than our own intelligence agencies. The examples of this “pResident’s” treason is a lengthy list that doesn’t require repeating. We’ve all seen it, we’ve all heard it, and only the traitors among us are still denying it.
But Trump did not act alone. He continues to work with those willing to sell out their country by enabling him, lying for him, covering for him – hand-picked traitors, chosen to fill positions where they can shield him from scrutiny, and protect him from being exposed as the traitor he is.
And he chooses well – like a DHS head too callous to be moved by the cries of traumatized children being ripped away from their mothers, or a WH security personnel chief happy to issue security clearances to people already determined to be security risks. And now an Attorney General willing ignore his oath of office, and shit on the Constitution while selling his countrymen down the river.
Some traitors play more passive roles while hiding behind their alleged Christian values. Mike Pence keeps the evangelicals in line as he supports a lying, corrupt, pussy-grabber – aided and abetted by so-called religious leaders who sell their flocks a line of bullshit about Trump being “chosen by God”. In other words, some traitors not only steer their fellow citizens away from the truth, they will lead them away from their own Christian beliefs.
And then there are the in-your-face traitors, the media personalities who consistently mislead their viewers by repeating lies as though they were facts, the pundits who show up on news shows to smile into the camera while defending the indefensible, the spokes-whores who don’t hesitate to cover-up the treachery of those in their party whose favour means greater access to the powers-that-be – the political operatives who are in a position to reward party loyalty, and the willingness to undermine our very democracy if it results in personal gain.
But Trump’s most brilliant choice was his choice of party – an organization so rife with corruption, lust for power, and blatant greed, it’s easy to find people willing to engage in a little treason in exchange for money, an influential position, even an invite to Mar-a-Lago – where, if you’re lucky, you can actually skinny-dip with a Chinese spy.
In other words, if you’re looking for someone who’d betray their own country for a shot at a cabinet position, a cushy government job, or a title that impresses, the GOP is a happy hunting ground, where finding a current-day Benedict Arnold is as easy as shooting a hibernating bear and her cubs.
The Republicans are no longer our “friends across the aisle”; they are no longer people who have the same goals we have, but simply disagree on how to achieve them. With the election of Trump, they have revealed themselves to be traitors willing to betray their own country, and everything it stands for, in exchange for the promise of wealth and power.
Traitors all – from those willing to look the other way, to those willing to go-along-to-get-along, to those willing to actively participate in treason in exchange for cash, influence, or political advancement – and especially those who serve the Traitor-in-Chief by simply ensuring that blatant treason is distracted from, obfuscated, lied about – but never exposed.
But Trump did not act alone. He continues to work with those willing to sell out their country by enabling him, lying for him, covering for him – hand-picked traitors, chosen to fill positions where they can shield him from scrutiny, and protect him from being exposed as the traitor he is.
And he chooses well – like a DHS head too callous to be moved by the cries of traumatized children being ripped away from their mothers, or a WH security personnel chief happy to issue security clearances to people already determined to be security risks. And now an Attorney General willing ignore his oath of office, and shit on the Constitution while selling his countrymen down the river.
Some traitors play more passive roles while hiding behind their alleged Christian values. Mike Pence keeps the evangelicals in line as he supports a lying, corrupt, pussy-grabber – aided and abetted by so-called religious leaders who sell their flocks a line of bullshit about Trump being “chosen by God”. In other words, some traitors not only steer their fellow citizens away from the truth, they will lead them away from their own Christian beliefs.
And then there are the in-your-face traitors, the media personalities who consistently mislead their viewers by repeating lies as though they were facts, the pundits who show up on news shows to smile into the camera while defending the indefensible, the spokes-whores who don’t hesitate to cover-up the treachery of those in their party whose favour means greater access to the powers-that-be – the political operatives who are in a position to reward party loyalty, and the willingness to undermine our very democracy if it results in personal gain.
But Trump’s most brilliant choice was his choice of party – an organization so rife with corruption, lust for power, and blatant greed, it’s easy to find people willing to engage in a little treason in exchange for money, an influential position, even an invite to Mar-a-Lago – where, if you’re lucky, you can actually skinny-dip with a Chinese spy.
In other words, if you’re looking for someone who’d betray their own country for a shot at a cabinet position, a cushy government job, or a title that impresses, the GOP is a happy hunting ground, where finding a current-day Benedict Arnold is as easy as shooting a hibernating bear and her cubs.
The Republicans are no longer our “friends across the aisle”; they are no longer people who have the same goals we have, but simply disagree on how to achieve them. With the election of Trump, they have revealed themselves to be traitors willing to betray their own country, and everything it stands for, in exchange for the promise of wealth and power.
Traitors all – from those willing to look the other way, to those willing to go-along-to-get-along, to those willing to actively participate in treason in exchange for cash, influence, or political advancement – and especially those who serve the Traitor-in-Chief by simply ensuring that blatant treason is distracted from, obfuscated, lied about – but never exposed.
the buffoon of the world!!
"when he opens his mouth he lies but he thinks you are too stupid to know that!!"
4/24/2019
*Trump is now obstructing justice right before our eyes — and he shows no signs of stopping
Last week, the public finally got to read (most of) a report by special counsel Robert Mueller detailing the results of an investigation into Donald Trump and his campaign’s involvement with Russian efforts to interfere with American democracy and Trump’s efforts to obstruct justice.
*Trump says he is sending 'armed soldiers' to US-Mexico border
*Mueller’s mystery referrals are ‘fueling anxiety’ as Trump rages against notetakers in the White House: report Although the President initially appeared to celebrate the report’s findings — based on the very truncated Barr memo — sources behind the scenes tell Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman that he was always furious about what he knew the full report would reveal.
*Trump just went berserk over a phone call – here’s what set him off
Pissident Donald Trump responded to a couple of throwaway lines by MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson with a furious denial that accidentally confirmed the comment he was initially pushing back against.
---
*HERE'S CREW'S MASSIVE CONFLICTS-OF-INTEREST REPORT ON TRUMP
(HTTPS://WWW.CITIZENSFORETHICS.ORG/PROFITINGFROMTHEPRESIDENCY/ )
(HTTPS://WWW.CITIZENSFORETHICS.ORG/TRUMP-TIMELINE/ )
*COLLUSION IN PLAIN SIGHT ANALYZING RUSSIAN ATTACKS ON OUR DEMOCRACY – AND TRUMP'S INVOLVEMENT(HTTPS://THEMOSCOWPROJECT.ORG/)
*trump-russia scandal(ARCHIVES)
Trump says he’ll close the border 1 day after Mexico affirms commitment to immigration enforcement
"Keeping control of our southern border is not optional, it's an obligation of the Mexican government."
REBEKAH ENTRALGO - thinkprogress
APR 24, 2019, 1:35 PM
Pissident Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened Mexican officials, saying he intends to close a section of the southern border if Mexico does not do more to curb migration to the United States.
“A very big Caravan of over 20,000 people started up through Mexico,” Trump wrote on Twitter Wednesday morning. “It has been reduced in size by Mexico but is still coming. Mexico must apprehend the remainder or we will be forced to close that section of the Border & call up the Military. The Coyotes & Cartels have weapons!”
In a subsequent tweet, the president went so far as to accuse Mexican enforcement officials of working with cartel members to intimidate the U.S. National Guard, adding, “We are now sending ARMED SOLDIERS to the Border. Mexico is not doing nearly enough in apprehending & returning!”
Trump’s threats come just one day after top Mexican officials reaffirmed their commitment to enforcing immigration policies. In a statement, Mexican Interior Secretary Olga Sánchez Cordero reiterated that the country will continue to register migrants, provide humanitarian visas, and patrol Mexico’s northern and southern borders.
“The federal government is doing everything it can to help these people and provide them with humanitarian assistance,” Sánchez Cordero said Tuesday. “Keeping control of our southern border is not optional, it’s an obligation of the Mexican government. This is what we are doing, in an orderly fashion and in compliance with the law.”
Tonatiuh Guillén López, commissioner of the National Migration Institute (INM) based in Mexico City, stressed that the recent influx of migrants, most of them women and children from Central America, Cuba, and South Asia, has nothing to do with the Mexico.
“One third of all migrants are now children, and that is worrisome,” he said. “This composition has nothing to do with the Mexican government. The fact that children are coming from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala is a problem these countries must address.”
“It’s a complex scenario. It’s not that it has no solution, it’s that we are working on the solution. Migrants receive all possible assistance at the immigration stations, but these centers are very pressed for space. We know that, but the situation is due in large part to the unusually high numbers of migrants. Many federal and state government institutions are making a huge effort to provide food, shelter and medical services,” Guillén López added.
Trump needs the support of Mexican and Central American officials in order to help curb what migration experts call the “root causes” of immigration. Threatening to either close the border or end foreign aid do nothing but erode those relationships. Even more concerning is that the majority of these threats are being leveled without any attempt to first communicate with the Mexican government. While Trump threatened to impose tariffs of 25% on cars manufactured in Mexico a few weeks ago, Mexico’s Undersecretary for North America Jesus Seade told BuzzFeed News that, “there hasn’t been any follow up, we are not expecting, we are not losing sleep about that.”
It’s not as though Mexico has done nothing to address migration. Mexico has amped up enforcement operations in recent months after Sánchez Cordero announced that, during the first three months of 2019, 300,000 migrants had entered the country. The Mexican interior secretary, however, reportedly has a history of inflating numbers of migrants. She claimed a caravan of 20,000 migrants had entered Mexico, but Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a group which has accompanied several caravans in Mexico, told the Associated Press that “there has never been a caravan of the size that Sanchez Cordero mentioned.”
Just this week, Mexican immigration enforcement officials targeted a group of 3,000 migrants which included small children in Chiapas. Those detained were sent to a shelter in nearby Tapachula, but officials did not clarify whether they would be deported. Last week, INM released a report stating 5,336 migrants were in shelters or immigration centers in Chiapas, and over 1,500 of them were “awaiting deportation.” Groups like the National Human Rights Commission are monitoring the situation to ensure that the rights of vulnerable migrants are not being infringed upon during their time in Mexico.
“A very big Caravan of over 20,000 people started up through Mexico,” Trump wrote on Twitter Wednesday morning. “It has been reduced in size by Mexico but is still coming. Mexico must apprehend the remainder or we will be forced to close that section of the Border & call up the Military. The Coyotes & Cartels have weapons!”
In a subsequent tweet, the president went so far as to accuse Mexican enforcement officials of working with cartel members to intimidate the U.S. National Guard, adding, “We are now sending ARMED SOLDIERS to the Border. Mexico is not doing nearly enough in apprehending & returning!”
Trump’s threats come just one day after top Mexican officials reaffirmed their commitment to enforcing immigration policies. In a statement, Mexican Interior Secretary Olga Sánchez Cordero reiterated that the country will continue to register migrants, provide humanitarian visas, and patrol Mexico’s northern and southern borders.
“The federal government is doing everything it can to help these people and provide them with humanitarian assistance,” Sánchez Cordero said Tuesday. “Keeping control of our southern border is not optional, it’s an obligation of the Mexican government. This is what we are doing, in an orderly fashion and in compliance with the law.”
Tonatiuh Guillén López, commissioner of the National Migration Institute (INM) based in Mexico City, stressed that the recent influx of migrants, most of them women and children from Central America, Cuba, and South Asia, has nothing to do with the Mexico.
“One third of all migrants are now children, and that is worrisome,” he said. “This composition has nothing to do with the Mexican government. The fact that children are coming from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala is a problem these countries must address.”
“It’s a complex scenario. It’s not that it has no solution, it’s that we are working on the solution. Migrants receive all possible assistance at the immigration stations, but these centers are very pressed for space. We know that, but the situation is due in large part to the unusually high numbers of migrants. Many federal and state government institutions are making a huge effort to provide food, shelter and medical services,” Guillén López added.
Trump needs the support of Mexican and Central American officials in order to help curb what migration experts call the “root causes” of immigration. Threatening to either close the border or end foreign aid do nothing but erode those relationships. Even more concerning is that the majority of these threats are being leveled without any attempt to first communicate with the Mexican government. While Trump threatened to impose tariffs of 25% on cars manufactured in Mexico a few weeks ago, Mexico’s Undersecretary for North America Jesus Seade told BuzzFeed News that, “there hasn’t been any follow up, we are not expecting, we are not losing sleep about that.”
It’s not as though Mexico has done nothing to address migration. Mexico has amped up enforcement operations in recent months after Sánchez Cordero announced that, during the first three months of 2019, 300,000 migrants had entered the country. The Mexican interior secretary, however, reportedly has a history of inflating numbers of migrants. She claimed a caravan of 20,000 migrants had entered Mexico, but Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a group which has accompanied several caravans in Mexico, told the Associated Press that “there has never been a caravan of the size that Sanchez Cordero mentioned.”
Just this week, Mexican immigration enforcement officials targeted a group of 3,000 migrants which included small children in Chiapas. Those detained were sent to a shelter in nearby Tapachula, but officials did not clarify whether they would be deported. Last week, INM released a report stating 5,336 migrants were in shelters or immigration centers in Chiapas, and over 1,500 of them were “awaiting deportation.” Groups like the National Human Rights Commission are monitoring the situation to ensure that the rights of vulnerable migrants are not being infringed upon during their time in Mexico.
Trump To The Hungry: ‘Let Them Eat … Whatever’
Republican Work-for-Food-Stamps Plan Could Force 750,000 Americans Out of the Anti-Poverty Program
By Terry H. Schwadron, DCReport New York Editor
4/16/19
The federal Department of Agriculture program pushed by the White House to require food stamp recipients to work likely will affect nearly 50,000 New York City residents—and more than 750,000 nationwide, according to a new study by the Mayor’s office in New York.
What passed last year as part of the big farm bill package included a provision that food stamp recipients—a program administered by the Agriculture Department—must be working, in a job training program or actively looking for work if able-bodied individuals without dependent children.
It’s worth looking at the distance between what looks good in Washington and what looks not-so-good on the ground.
Those Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents or “ABAWDs” aged 18 to 49, are limited to three months of food stamp benefits over three years unless they work, volunteer or get job training at least 80 hours a month. As it stands, states can grant individual exemptions or waive time limits in areas of high unemployment or lack of sufficient job openings.
Trump defines those waivers as possible in areas where unemployment tops 7% over a 24-month period. New York City’s unemployment rate is 4.2%. New York State waivers include the Bronx, parts of Queens and Upper Manhattan.
All in, the rules could cost New York City almost $100 million a year in lost benefits, resulting in more than $150 million annually in lost business, say city officials. In formal comments opposing the plan, the Office of the Mayor told federal officials nearly 50,000 city residents would lose a monthly average of $151 in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
Those food stamps normally are spent at 9,400 New York City supermarkets, bodegas, farmers markets and other retailers which could lose revenue and, therefore, jobs.
Outside the City, 33 New York counties, five cities and a town, also have waivers. New York State would lose 89% of its current waivers, newly subjecting 107,000 SNAP beneficiaries to time limits, according to Hunger Solutions New York.
The City Limits newsletter quotes Nicholas Freudenberg, director of the City University of New York’s Urban Food Policy Institute as saying, “We may be saving a few bucks by not paying them SNAP, but we’re generating costs that will eventually end up as public costs for taking care of people.”
The USDA estimates it will save the federal government a projected $15 billion over a decade.
The proposal shows “blatant disregard for the socio-economic realities facing ABAWD individuals,” according to the city’s formal comment on the proposed rule, which said the change will worsen hunger, while increasing administrative and fiscal burdens. It also sidesteps the effects of employment discrimination, the city contends.
Some 40% of the city’s ABAWD population is black and 28% is Latino, according to the mayor’s office. While the city’s overall ABAWD unemployment rate was 6.4 % in 2017, it was 10.8% for Blacks and 7.9% for Latinos. In January, 28.6% had no permanent address, and 4.4% were living in shelters.
City Hall hasn’t always advocated expanding SNAP benefits. Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg did not allow waivers.
A Mathematica Policy Research study of the 1.2 million ABAWDs who would be newly subject to time-limits, found 97% live in poverty compared to 80% of others on SNAP. Eleven percent were working, although less than an average of 20 hours a week.
The reactions offer an interesting depiction of translating policy to people:
Clearly, this is how we make America Great Again. Imagine how this group could improve health care.
What passed last year as part of the big farm bill package included a provision that food stamp recipients—a program administered by the Agriculture Department—must be working, in a job training program or actively looking for work if able-bodied individuals without dependent children.
It’s worth looking at the distance between what looks good in Washington and what looks not-so-good on the ground.
Those Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents or “ABAWDs” aged 18 to 49, are limited to three months of food stamp benefits over three years unless they work, volunteer or get job training at least 80 hours a month. As it stands, states can grant individual exemptions or waive time limits in areas of high unemployment or lack of sufficient job openings.
Trump defines those waivers as possible in areas where unemployment tops 7% over a 24-month period. New York City’s unemployment rate is 4.2%. New York State waivers include the Bronx, parts of Queens and Upper Manhattan.
All in, the rules could cost New York City almost $100 million a year in lost benefits, resulting in more than $150 million annually in lost business, say city officials. In formal comments opposing the plan, the Office of the Mayor told federal officials nearly 50,000 city residents would lose a monthly average of $151 in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
Those food stamps normally are spent at 9,400 New York City supermarkets, bodegas, farmers markets and other retailers which could lose revenue and, therefore, jobs.
Outside the City, 33 New York counties, five cities and a town, also have waivers. New York State would lose 89% of its current waivers, newly subjecting 107,000 SNAP beneficiaries to time limits, according to Hunger Solutions New York.
The City Limits newsletter quotes Nicholas Freudenberg, director of the City University of New York’s Urban Food Policy Institute as saying, “We may be saving a few bucks by not paying them SNAP, but we’re generating costs that will eventually end up as public costs for taking care of people.”
The USDA estimates it will save the federal government a projected $15 billion over a decade.
The proposal shows “blatant disregard for the socio-economic realities facing ABAWD individuals,” according to the city’s formal comment on the proposed rule, which said the change will worsen hunger, while increasing administrative and fiscal burdens. It also sidesteps the effects of employment discrimination, the city contends.
Some 40% of the city’s ABAWD population is black and 28% is Latino, according to the mayor’s office. While the city’s overall ABAWD unemployment rate was 6.4 % in 2017, it was 10.8% for Blacks and 7.9% for Latinos. In January, 28.6% had no permanent address, and 4.4% were living in shelters.
City Hall hasn’t always advocated expanding SNAP benefits. Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg did not allow waivers.
A Mathematica Policy Research study of the 1.2 million ABAWDs who would be newly subject to time-limits, found 97% live in poverty compared to 80% of others on SNAP. Eleven percent were working, although less than an average of 20 hours a week.
The reactions offer an interesting depiction of translating policy to people:
- “If this was really about the dignity of work and efficiency of the program, we would wait to see the final results from the 2014 Farm Bill, which provided $200 million for 10 employment and training pilot projects,” said Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio).
- “Limiting ABAWD waivers—especially without adding a penny for job creation or wage hikes—would increase hunger and fail to increase employment,” says Joel Berg, CEO of the NYC-based Hunger Free America. Instead, the proposal should include a “serious job program, with serious job training, with work subsidies to help small employers hire more people, [and] expansion of the earned income tax credit.”
- The administration’s proposal does not address “the problem of people going hungry or needing assistance. It’s just going to shift that burden downstream, whether to the state, to the city, to the charities in the New York region and to hungry people themselves,” says FRAC’s Ellen Vollinger.
Clearly, this is how we make America Great Again. Imagine how this group could improve health care.
The Tyranny Of Donald J. Trump
Two Generations of Tax Cheating, and Now He Holds Himself and His Family Above the Law
By David Cay Johnston, DCReport Editor-in-Chief
4/11/19
Donald J. Trump and his team have now openly declared that he is above the law rather than, as our Constitution provides, a public servant whose duty is to faithfully execute the law.
His administration is taking numerous steps that move us in the direction of a Trumpian dictatorship by defeating the rule of law, something I’ve warned about since 2016. We’ll look at one aspect of this today: Trump family taxes.
Trump and his team insist that no one is ever going to see his tax returns, which he promised voters he would make public as every president has done back to Richard Nixon.
Now his sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, has scurried away from the investigative spotlight of her fellow federal judges, who were looking into whether she was a tax cheat in black robes. By resigning from the federal bench, Trump’s older sister ends that inquiry, the kind of legal favor our system affords those in positions of power to escape scrutiny.
As for defiance of the law, Trump, his personal lawyers and the White House acting chief of staff all declared in recent days that they will defy a 1924 anti-corruption statute that gives certain members of Congress, and one Congressional employee, the unqualified authority to examine any tax return.
Trump claims that “the law is 100% on my side” in refusing the turn over the documents. In fact, the law is 100% against Trump. When I asked a half dozen former top Congressional tax-writing staffers about Trump’s claim some of them laughed out loud, while others said in sober turns that there is no legal argument on Trump’s side – none.
The most direct Trump declaration that he is above the law is his directing the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service to keep his federal income tax returns locked up. No previous president has defied this statute and no document request has ever been refused, a host of people who worked for the tax-writing committees on Capitol Hill told me.
Trump’s arguments are mere political rhetoric. But it gets worse than that.
Trump lawyer William S. Consovoy in an April 5 letter asked Treasury to hold back the documents. Consovoy asserted mind-reading powers in his letter: “His request is a transparent effort by one political party to harass an official from the other party because they dislike his politics and speech.”
Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, declared on Fox News Sunday that the Trump administration will “never” comply with the law.
‘Party of the Lawless’
Mulvaney’s words show how the political party that once sold itself as the party of law and order has, under Trump, become the party of lawlessness, at least for those in power.
“They knew they are not going to get these taxes,” Mulvaney said, referring not to the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee who alone would receive the documents, but Democrats as a whole.
These declarations require diligence by Congress and the federal courts, as well as by New York state and Manhattan authorities if we are to preserve the rule of law. The duty of these officials, under law and the oaths they swore, is to thoroughly investigate Trump’s business dealings, taxes and other matters to see how they affect his fitness for office, whether he committed tax and other crimes and whether the IRS is properly auditing the tax returns of the president.
Think of judge Trump Barry’s resignation as one of the many ways American government is infected by institutionalized corruption, an issue explored deeply by Zephyr Teachout in her revealing and concise book Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United.
While the federal judiciary is letting Judge Trump slither away, the prosecutorial authorities still have the power to investigate whether she and her siblings engaged in years of calculated tax cheating, as The New York Times persuasively demonstrated last October.
The Cheating Goes On
There is no statute of limitations on criminal tax fraud and there is reason aplenty to believe Trump family tax cheating has continued up to this day.
At issue are Trump’s last six years of tax returns and related “tax information.” Representative Richard Neal (D-Mass), who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee requested the returns and related information in an April 3 letter.
Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, called the request “unprecedented” – it’s not – and said he needed time to consult the law. Treasury posted the letter on Twitter.
The law is crystal clear that the Treasury secretary or his designee, the IRS commissioner, “shall” produce the returns “on written request.” Every request has been honored until now.
Mnuchin is a former Goldman Sachs-er, hedge fund operator, mortgage foreclosure mogul and Hollywood movie producer (The Lego Movie; Suicide Squad), exactly the kind of swamp dweller who Trump told voters he would rid Washington of by “draining the swamp.”
Presidents take an oath to faithfully execute their office, which includes complying with all federal laws, while dictators are by definition above the law.
Trump’s declaration should alarm all American, but especially those Republicans who claim to support strict interpretations of the clear meaning of both statutes and Constitutional principles.
Even Richard Nixon complied with this law during Watergate more than four decades ago, resulting in a second IRS audit of his returns as well as scrutiny by Congressional tax experts.
Nixon Complied with the Law
That second audit turned up a fraudulent tax deduction which saved Nixon $500,000 in taxes, about $3.4 million in today’s money. Chairman Neal’s request specifically cites the quality of IRS audits of presidential tax returns as a justification for examination of them by his committee, which oversees the IRS.
“In all of my years of public life. I have never profited. Never profited from public service I’ve earned every cent,” Nixon said in 1973. “And — all of my years of public life. I have never obstructed justice. And I think to that I could say that in my years of public life. That I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook, I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”
Actually, he was a crook, but his handpicked successor Gerald Ford pardoned him.
Trump takes a different approach, asserting that voters have no interest in his tax returns.
Mulvaney takes a similar tack, ignoring the law in favor of presumed political passions.
“That’s an issue that was already litigated during the election,” Mulvaney said. “Voters knew the president could have given his tax returns. They knew that he didn’t, and they elected him anyway.”
Of course, the voters chose Trump’s opponent by three million votes. It was the Electoral College that chose Trump. But only the enablers of a tyrant would argue that popular passions, not law, govern official conduct.
His administration is taking numerous steps that move us in the direction of a Trumpian dictatorship by defeating the rule of law, something I’ve warned about since 2016. We’ll look at one aspect of this today: Trump family taxes.
Trump and his team insist that no one is ever going to see his tax returns, which he promised voters he would make public as every president has done back to Richard Nixon.
Now his sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, has scurried away from the investigative spotlight of her fellow federal judges, who were looking into whether she was a tax cheat in black robes. By resigning from the federal bench, Trump’s older sister ends that inquiry, the kind of legal favor our system affords those in positions of power to escape scrutiny.
As for defiance of the law, Trump, his personal lawyers and the White House acting chief of staff all declared in recent days that they will defy a 1924 anti-corruption statute that gives certain members of Congress, and one Congressional employee, the unqualified authority to examine any tax return.
Trump claims that “the law is 100% on my side” in refusing the turn over the documents. In fact, the law is 100% against Trump. When I asked a half dozen former top Congressional tax-writing staffers about Trump’s claim some of them laughed out loud, while others said in sober turns that there is no legal argument on Trump’s side – none.
The most direct Trump declaration that he is above the law is his directing the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service to keep his federal income tax returns locked up. No previous president has defied this statute and no document request has ever been refused, a host of people who worked for the tax-writing committees on Capitol Hill told me.
Trump’s arguments are mere political rhetoric. But it gets worse than that.
Trump lawyer William S. Consovoy in an April 5 letter asked Treasury to hold back the documents. Consovoy asserted mind-reading powers in his letter: “His request is a transparent effort by one political party to harass an official from the other party because they dislike his politics and speech.”
Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, declared on Fox News Sunday that the Trump administration will “never” comply with the law.
‘Party of the Lawless’
Mulvaney’s words show how the political party that once sold itself as the party of law and order has, under Trump, become the party of lawlessness, at least for those in power.
“They knew they are not going to get these taxes,” Mulvaney said, referring not to the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee who alone would receive the documents, but Democrats as a whole.
These declarations require diligence by Congress and the federal courts, as well as by New York state and Manhattan authorities if we are to preserve the rule of law. The duty of these officials, under law and the oaths they swore, is to thoroughly investigate Trump’s business dealings, taxes and other matters to see how they affect his fitness for office, whether he committed tax and other crimes and whether the IRS is properly auditing the tax returns of the president.
Think of judge Trump Barry’s resignation as one of the many ways American government is infected by institutionalized corruption, an issue explored deeply by Zephyr Teachout in her revealing and concise book Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United.
While the federal judiciary is letting Judge Trump slither away, the prosecutorial authorities still have the power to investigate whether she and her siblings engaged in years of calculated tax cheating, as The New York Times persuasively demonstrated last October.
The Cheating Goes On
There is no statute of limitations on criminal tax fraud and there is reason aplenty to believe Trump family tax cheating has continued up to this day.
At issue are Trump’s last six years of tax returns and related “tax information.” Representative Richard Neal (D-Mass), who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee requested the returns and related information in an April 3 letter.
Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, called the request “unprecedented” – it’s not – and said he needed time to consult the law. Treasury posted the letter on Twitter.
The law is crystal clear that the Treasury secretary or his designee, the IRS commissioner, “shall” produce the returns “on written request.” Every request has been honored until now.
Mnuchin is a former Goldman Sachs-er, hedge fund operator, mortgage foreclosure mogul and Hollywood movie producer (The Lego Movie; Suicide Squad), exactly the kind of swamp dweller who Trump told voters he would rid Washington of by “draining the swamp.”
Presidents take an oath to faithfully execute their office, which includes complying with all federal laws, while dictators are by definition above the law.
Trump’s declaration should alarm all American, but especially those Republicans who claim to support strict interpretations of the clear meaning of both statutes and Constitutional principles.
Even Richard Nixon complied with this law during Watergate more than four decades ago, resulting in a second IRS audit of his returns as well as scrutiny by Congressional tax experts.
Nixon Complied with the Law
That second audit turned up a fraudulent tax deduction which saved Nixon $500,000 in taxes, about $3.4 million in today’s money. Chairman Neal’s request specifically cites the quality of IRS audits of presidential tax returns as a justification for examination of them by his committee, which oversees the IRS.
“In all of my years of public life. I have never profited. Never profited from public service I’ve earned every cent,” Nixon said in 1973. “And — all of my years of public life. I have never obstructed justice. And I think to that I could say that in my years of public life. That I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook, I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”
Actually, he was a crook, but his handpicked successor Gerald Ford pardoned him.
Trump takes a different approach, asserting that voters have no interest in his tax returns.
Mulvaney takes a similar tack, ignoring the law in favor of presumed political passions.
“That’s an issue that was already litigated during the election,” Mulvaney said. “Voters knew the president could have given his tax returns. They knew that he didn’t, and they elected him anyway.”
Of course, the voters chose Trump’s opponent by three million votes. It was the Electoral College that chose Trump. But only the enablers of a tyrant would argue that popular passions, not law, govern official conduct.
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Trump admits he wants to disperse migrants to punish blue states because he thinks they’re ‘dangerous’
Brad Reed - raw story
12 APR 2019 AT 12:46 ET
Pissident Donald Trump on Friday admitted that he wants to drop undocumented immigrants into blue-state cities as a plan to punish his political foes.
“Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only,” the president wrote on Twitter. “The Radical Left always seems to have an Open Borders, Open Arms policy — so this should make them very happy!”
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the Trump White House believed it could exact revenge on its foes by releasing undocumented immigrants into sanctuary cities, although it was stopped from doing so by both officials at the Department of Homeland Security and at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which feared congressional backlash in the form of funding cuts.
Trump over the last week has been firing multiple officials at DHS because they have reportedly been pushing back on orders that they believe violate the law.
“Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only,” the president wrote on Twitter. “The Radical Left always seems to have an Open Borders, Open Arms policy — so this should make them very happy!”
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the Trump White House believed it could exact revenge on its foes by releasing undocumented immigrants into sanctuary cities, although it was stopped from doing so by both officials at the Department of Homeland Security and at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which feared congressional backlash in the form of funding cuts.
Trump over the last week has been firing multiple officials at DHS because they have reportedly been pushing back on orders that they believe violate the law.
Bombshell report links Trump’s Azerbaijan hotel to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard
Travis Gettys - raw story
08 APR 2019 AT 11:07 ET
The Trump administration on Monday officially designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. But reporting from The New Yorker indicates that President Donald Trump could have business entanglements with the foreign military group.
Trump and his eldest daughter developed a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation run by a family known as “the Corleones of the Caspian” with links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
The Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku — conceived in 2008 as a luxury apartment building but converted in 2014 into a hotel — has never opened, and both local observers and international experts are baffled by the building’s existence, reported The New Yorker in 2017.
The project was intended as an “ultra-luxury property” with both hotel and residential space, but both its location and timing are odd, according to the report.
Trump Tower Baku is located in an underdeveloped part of the city’s downtown, across the street from a discount shopping center and miles away from the main business district.
“Why would someone put a luxury hotel there?” said former top official in Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Tourism. “Nobody who can afford to stay there would want to be in that neighborhood.”
The Trump Organization announced the project would be converted into just a hotel in 2014, after a construction boom had ended in Baku and luxury hotel occupancy rate hovered around 35 percent, the magazine reported.
A Cornell University expert told The New Yorker that developers of five-star hotels typically must demonstrate an average occupancy rate of at least 60 percent over 10 years.
Newsweek‘s Kurt Eichenwald reported in September 2017 that Trump’s financial filings show he’s partners in the Baku deal with the son of Azerbaijan’s transportation minister.
U.S. officials believe that official, Ziya Mammadov, laundered money for the Iranian military, although no formal charges were brought against him or his son, Anar Mammadov — who is Trump’s partner in the Baku hotel venture.
The New Yorker examined Trump’s ties to Ziya Mammadov — one of the wealthiest and most powerful oligarchs in one of the world’s most corrupt nations — and his brother, Elton Mammadov, an influential member of the Azerbaijani parliament, who signed contracts for the project and founded Baku XXI Century, which owns the tower.
The Mammadov family, described by Foreign Policy magazine as “The Corleones of the Caspian,” has a reputation for using their government positions to enrich themselves and their partners — which includes construction firms tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
The Trump administration has now condemned that group — which has been accused of drug trafficking, sponsoring terrorism abroad and money laundering — as a terrorist organization.
“This unprecedented step, led by the Department of State, recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a State Sponsor of Terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft,” Trump said in a statement.
The Baku development was the subject of numerous reports after Trump announced his presidential campaign in 2015, and the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, Alan Garten, dismissed any concerns by saying the company never engaged directly with Mammadov.
Garten claimed Trump played only a passive role in the Baku development by licensing his name for use by Mammadov’s son, for which he was paid at least $2.8 million, according to limited public filings.
Other documents suggest Trump was paid an additional $2.5 million for the use of his name in 2012, and the future U.S. president also signed a contract to manage the hotel after it opened for an undisclosed fee tied to the venture’s performance.
Garten announced a month after Trump’s election that the Trump Organization had severed ties with the hotel, but The New Yorker reported those claims were incomplete and inaccurate.
Jan deRoos, the Cornell professor, said the Trump Organization’s interest in the Baku project — which was overseen by Ivanka Trump — was atypical and “very, very intense.”
That close involvement may open up the Trump Organization to criminal prosecution under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which was passed in 1977 to forbid American companies from rewarding corrupt foreign officials — even if they did so unwittingly.
Garten all but admitted corruption was involved with the project — “I’m not going to sit here and defend the Mammadovs,” he said — but he insisted the Trump Organization should be exempt from prosecution because the company didn’t control the project and didn’t pay money to anyone.
However, a legal expert who specializes in the foreign corruption law dismissed those claims as nonsense.
“You can’t go into business deals in Azerbaijan assuming that you are immune from the FCPA, nor can you escape liability by looking the other way,” said Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at George Washington University Law School. “The entire Baku deal is a giant red flag — the direct involvement of foreign government officials and their relatives in Azerbaijan with ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Corruption warning signs are rarely more obvious.”
Trump complained about the law during a phone-in appearance on CNBC in May 2012, the month before the Baku deal was completed.
“Every other country goes into these places and they do what they have to do,” Trump said. “It’s a horrible law and it should be changed.”
He complained that American companies that refused to give bribes — and The New Yorker reports on duffel bags of cash changing hands during construction — would “do business nowhere.”
“There is one answer — go to your room, close the door, go to sleep and don’t do any deals, because that’s the only way,” Trump whined to CNBC. “The only way you’re going to do it is the other way.”
Trump and his eldest daughter developed a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation run by a family known as “the Corleones of the Caspian” with links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
The Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku — conceived in 2008 as a luxury apartment building but converted in 2014 into a hotel — has never opened, and both local observers and international experts are baffled by the building’s existence, reported The New Yorker in 2017.
The project was intended as an “ultra-luxury property” with both hotel and residential space, but both its location and timing are odd, according to the report.
Trump Tower Baku is located in an underdeveloped part of the city’s downtown, across the street from a discount shopping center and miles away from the main business district.
“Why would someone put a luxury hotel there?” said former top official in Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Tourism. “Nobody who can afford to stay there would want to be in that neighborhood.”
The Trump Organization announced the project would be converted into just a hotel in 2014, after a construction boom had ended in Baku and luxury hotel occupancy rate hovered around 35 percent, the magazine reported.
A Cornell University expert told The New Yorker that developers of five-star hotels typically must demonstrate an average occupancy rate of at least 60 percent over 10 years.
Newsweek‘s Kurt Eichenwald reported in September 2017 that Trump’s financial filings show he’s partners in the Baku deal with the son of Azerbaijan’s transportation minister.
U.S. officials believe that official, Ziya Mammadov, laundered money for the Iranian military, although no formal charges were brought against him or his son, Anar Mammadov — who is Trump’s partner in the Baku hotel venture.
The New Yorker examined Trump’s ties to Ziya Mammadov — one of the wealthiest and most powerful oligarchs in one of the world’s most corrupt nations — and his brother, Elton Mammadov, an influential member of the Azerbaijani parliament, who signed contracts for the project and founded Baku XXI Century, which owns the tower.
The Mammadov family, described by Foreign Policy magazine as “The Corleones of the Caspian,” has a reputation for using their government positions to enrich themselves and their partners — which includes construction firms tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
The Trump administration has now condemned that group — which has been accused of drug trafficking, sponsoring terrorism abroad and money laundering — as a terrorist organization.
“This unprecedented step, led by the Department of State, recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a State Sponsor of Terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft,” Trump said in a statement.
The Baku development was the subject of numerous reports after Trump announced his presidential campaign in 2015, and the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, Alan Garten, dismissed any concerns by saying the company never engaged directly with Mammadov.
Garten claimed Trump played only a passive role in the Baku development by licensing his name for use by Mammadov’s son, for which he was paid at least $2.8 million, according to limited public filings.
Other documents suggest Trump was paid an additional $2.5 million for the use of his name in 2012, and the future U.S. president also signed a contract to manage the hotel after it opened for an undisclosed fee tied to the venture’s performance.
Garten announced a month after Trump’s election that the Trump Organization had severed ties with the hotel, but The New Yorker reported those claims were incomplete and inaccurate.
Jan deRoos, the Cornell professor, said the Trump Organization’s interest in the Baku project — which was overseen by Ivanka Trump — was atypical and “very, very intense.”
That close involvement may open up the Trump Organization to criminal prosecution under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which was passed in 1977 to forbid American companies from rewarding corrupt foreign officials — even if they did so unwittingly.
Garten all but admitted corruption was involved with the project — “I’m not going to sit here and defend the Mammadovs,” he said — but he insisted the Trump Organization should be exempt from prosecution because the company didn’t control the project and didn’t pay money to anyone.
However, a legal expert who specializes in the foreign corruption law dismissed those claims as nonsense.
“You can’t go into business deals in Azerbaijan assuming that you are immune from the FCPA, nor can you escape liability by looking the other way,” said Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at George Washington University Law School. “The entire Baku deal is a giant red flag — the direct involvement of foreign government officials and their relatives in Azerbaijan with ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Corruption warning signs are rarely more obvious.”
Trump complained about the law during a phone-in appearance on CNBC in May 2012, the month before the Baku deal was completed.
“Every other country goes into these places and they do what they have to do,” Trump said. “It’s a horrible law and it should be changed.”
He complained that American companies that refused to give bribes — and The New Yorker reports on duffel bags of cash changing hands during construction — would “do business nowhere.”
“There is one answer — go to your room, close the door, go to sleep and don’t do any deals, because that’s the only way,” Trump whined to CNBC. “The only way you’re going to do it is the other way.”
Trump’s Biggest Lie
He Likes to Claim He’s Keeping His Campaign Promises, But Let’s Look at His Record
By David Cay Johnston, DCReport Editor-in-Chief
4/3/19
Donald Trump’s latest flip-flops on healthcare and the Mexican border continue a pattern of promises, and reversals, that gets far too little attention. His flip-flops show that Trump ignores the interests of the party he latched onto in favor of whatever crazy idea pops into his head.
Although at his rallies Trump delights his uninformed supporters with claims that he’s followed through on his campaign promises—The Wall—he is actually delivering very little.
In all of these Trump has demonstrated that he knows nothing of policy or partisan agendas, only what serves himself. He does not know the pulse of America, only of the true believers of his cult of personality.
For Republican officeholders, down Trump’s path lies political death. We saw a sign of coming disaster for the GOP last fall when Democrat running for the House garnered 4.3 million more votes than Republicans—a greater popular vote margin than Hillary Clinton’s over Trump in 2016, though he won the Electoral College.
Trump inflicted heavy damage last week on Republican politicians when the Justice Department stopped defending the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. Now Justice seeks to kill Obamacare in the courts.
Only an idiot, or a narcissist, would fail to realize the widespread fear of losing health insurance and related fear of being uninsurable because of a pre-existing condition, something virtually universal among those from middle age to 65, when Medicare kicks in. Pregnancy, by the way, is a pre-existing condition.
A conspiratorial cynic might think that the Democrats secretly planted the idea in Trump’s jumbled mine that repealing Obamacare is the path to a second term.
The other thoughtless flip-flop came when Trump declared he may shut down the Mexican border not just to asylum seekers, but to all commerce. If that happens, say adios to many fruits in winter, not to mention many of the 1.2 million American jobs that depend on trade with Mexico and, in turn, many jobs that depend on the incomes of those million-plus workers.
In 2020, every House Republican is up for election. So are 22 of 53 Republican senators. In addition, nine Republican governors face voters in 2019 or 2020, seven of them vulnerable to losing.
If Trump continues flailing about, in November 2020 we’ll find out just how big of a mistake Republican politicians made by not standing up to him.
Although at his rallies Trump delights his uninformed supporters with claims that he’s followed through on his campaign promises—The Wall—he is actually delivering very little.
- Candidate Trump promised a $1 trillion program to repair and improve America’s infrastructure but has done nothing. Had he pushed an infrastructure bill, the Democrats would have had to go along or risk the wrath of the working class. But instead, they can run on Republicans failure to fulfill the promise of jobs and smoother roads.
- He promised a huge tax cut for most Americans—$50,000 of tax-free income for married couples ($25,000 for singles)—and no taxes for 75 million Americans. The tax law he signed in December 2017 showered almost all its benefits on big multinational corporations like Apple and the best-off Americans while raising total taxes on millions of people. And don’t forget that Trump got Congress to raise the threshold for paying income taxes from almost $23,000 for a family of four to just $24,000—not much, not much at all.
- He pledged to defund Planned Parenthood, which continues providing gynecological care to millions of mostly poor women. As with his wall, Trump is trying here, but not delivering.
- He promised to bring back waterboarding and other torture, but as commander-in-chief, Trump failed to persuade America’s military leadership to resume this criminal activity, for which our country executed senior Japanese officers after World War II.
- And he promised to staff his administration with “the best people,” instead of giving us not just know-nothings like Betsy DeVos and Wilbur Ross, but a squad of cheaters and Treasury looters like the departed EPA chief Scott Pruitt and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Trump’s latest loser? Self-proclaimed tax expert Stephen Moore, widely derided as a hackwho knows little of economics and who turned out to be a tax cheat—and a clumsy one at that.
In all of these Trump has demonstrated that he knows nothing of policy or partisan agendas, only what serves himself. He does not know the pulse of America, only of the true believers of his cult of personality.
For Republican officeholders, down Trump’s path lies political death. We saw a sign of coming disaster for the GOP last fall when Democrat running for the House garnered 4.3 million more votes than Republicans—a greater popular vote margin than Hillary Clinton’s over Trump in 2016, though he won the Electoral College.
Trump inflicted heavy damage last week on Republican politicians when the Justice Department stopped defending the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. Now Justice seeks to kill Obamacare in the courts.
Only an idiot, or a narcissist, would fail to realize the widespread fear of losing health insurance and related fear of being uninsurable because of a pre-existing condition, something virtually universal among those from middle age to 65, when Medicare kicks in. Pregnancy, by the way, is a pre-existing condition.
A conspiratorial cynic might think that the Democrats secretly planted the idea in Trump’s jumbled mine that repealing Obamacare is the path to a second term.
The other thoughtless flip-flop came when Trump declared he may shut down the Mexican border not just to asylum seekers, but to all commerce. If that happens, say adios to many fruits in winter, not to mention many of the 1.2 million American jobs that depend on trade with Mexico and, in turn, many jobs that depend on the incomes of those million-plus workers.
In 2020, every House Republican is up for election. So are 22 of 53 Republican senators. In addition, nine Republican governors face voters in 2019 or 2020, seven of them vulnerable to losing.
If Trump continues flailing about, in November 2020 we’ll find out just how big of a mistake Republican politicians made by not standing up to him.
I am I, Don Trumpote, The Lord of la 'Murica, My destiny calls and I go
These are some of the ridiculous exaggerations Trump told banks to score loans
Sarah K. Burris - raw story
28 MAR 2019 AT 13:44 ET
It was revealed in recent weeks that President Donald Trump dramatically inflated his wealth not only to the American people in 2016 and Forbes, but when applying for loans at Deutsche Bank. But the way he did it continues to show the shocking hubris of the self-described billionaire.
In a new report from Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold, it was revealed Trump falsely added 10 stories to Trump Tower, 800 acres to his winery property and lied about 24 “ready-to-sell” lots to his California property.
His other major asset is his “brand” value. In 2013, he calculated that it was worth $4 billion, which was double his net worth of the previous years.
The most shocking, however, is that Trump has been allowed to get off scot-free because the fraud was too ridiculous to believe.
In an interview, George Washington University professor Kyle Welch explained that Trump “could be protected by disclaimers that his own accountants added to the statements, warning readers that they weren’t seeing the full picture.”
He noted that the “sheer scale of the exaggerations” could ultimately help Trump’s case because they were “so far off from reality” that no bank would actually be fooled.
The only reason that a fraud like this would have been uncovered is if the bank went bankrupt or Trump defaulted on the loan. According to a loan officer and bank vice president that spoke with Raw Story, if the bank failed, the FDIC would come in to investigate, would uncover it and refer it to the FBI and Justice Department.
When compiling investments for loans, banks look at the assets and ask questions if they don’t believe the applicant. Banks typically have their own appraisers who look at assets and it’s unclear why that wasn’t done in the case of Deutsche Bank. If a bank discovers that the assets were overinflated, they can pursue charges, but it’s incredibly difficult to prove fraud.
If a loan applicant estimates the value of their business or property it’s one thing, but in Trump’s case, it can be proven he knew the actual size of his own building.
The loan officer also wondered if Trump signed the paperwork himself. While it was likely compiled by CPAs and lawyers, if Trump signed the documents that inflated the properties, he’s on the hook. She used Joe and Teresa Giudice on the “Real Housewives of New Jersey” as an example. The couple had representatives prepare their loan documents and signed them without reading it. In the end, they were on the hook for fraud.
The bank executive also noted that when many Oklahoma banks failed in the 1980s this kind of obvious wealth inflation was what sent many bank presidents and loan officers to jail. When the banks failed the FDIC came in to examine the loans and debts, discovering grossly inflated assets on loan applications.
Professor Welsh said that he’s never seen documents that stretch the truth as much as Trump’s.
“It’s humorous,” he said. “It’s a humorous financial statement.”
According to legal experts interviewed by The Post said that the disclaimer could shield Trump from fraud prosecution. “After all, his own accountants told readers they weren’t getting the full story.”
According to former federal prosecutor Jacob Frenkel, “the transparent disclaimers — even if frustrating — typically wipe out a basis” for bringing fraud charges.
In 2007, Americans bailed out banks that made reckless loans that customers defaulted on. Democrats worked to put regulations in place hoping that it wouldn’t happen again, but Trump and the GOP led-Senate have worked to get rid of those regulations.
You can read the full report and see the documents at The Washington Post.
In a new report from Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold, it was revealed Trump falsely added 10 stories to Trump Tower, 800 acres to his winery property and lied about 24 “ready-to-sell” lots to his California property.
His other major asset is his “brand” value. In 2013, he calculated that it was worth $4 billion, which was double his net worth of the previous years.
The most shocking, however, is that Trump has been allowed to get off scot-free because the fraud was too ridiculous to believe.
In an interview, George Washington University professor Kyle Welch explained that Trump “could be protected by disclaimers that his own accountants added to the statements, warning readers that they weren’t seeing the full picture.”
He noted that the “sheer scale of the exaggerations” could ultimately help Trump’s case because they were “so far off from reality” that no bank would actually be fooled.
The only reason that a fraud like this would have been uncovered is if the bank went bankrupt or Trump defaulted on the loan. According to a loan officer and bank vice president that spoke with Raw Story, if the bank failed, the FDIC would come in to investigate, would uncover it and refer it to the FBI and Justice Department.
When compiling investments for loans, banks look at the assets and ask questions if they don’t believe the applicant. Banks typically have their own appraisers who look at assets and it’s unclear why that wasn’t done in the case of Deutsche Bank. If a bank discovers that the assets were overinflated, they can pursue charges, but it’s incredibly difficult to prove fraud.
If a loan applicant estimates the value of their business or property it’s one thing, but in Trump’s case, it can be proven he knew the actual size of his own building.
The loan officer also wondered if Trump signed the paperwork himself. While it was likely compiled by CPAs and lawyers, if Trump signed the documents that inflated the properties, he’s on the hook. She used Joe and Teresa Giudice on the “Real Housewives of New Jersey” as an example. The couple had representatives prepare their loan documents and signed them without reading it. In the end, they were on the hook for fraud.
The bank executive also noted that when many Oklahoma banks failed in the 1980s this kind of obvious wealth inflation was what sent many bank presidents and loan officers to jail. When the banks failed the FDIC came in to examine the loans and debts, discovering grossly inflated assets on loan applications.
Professor Welsh said that he’s never seen documents that stretch the truth as much as Trump’s.
“It’s humorous,” he said. “It’s a humorous financial statement.”
According to legal experts interviewed by The Post said that the disclaimer could shield Trump from fraud prosecution. “After all, his own accountants told readers they weren’t getting the full story.”
According to former federal prosecutor Jacob Frenkel, “the transparent disclaimers — even if frustrating — typically wipe out a basis” for bringing fraud charges.
In 2007, Americans bailed out banks that made reckless loans that customers defaulted on. Democrats worked to put regulations in place hoping that it wouldn’t happen again, but Trump and the GOP led-Senate have worked to get rid of those regulations.
You can read the full report and see the documents at The Washington Post.
Trump just revealed he has no idea what’s going on in the government he’s supposed to run
CODY FENWICK, ALTERNET - COMMENTARY - raw story
22 MAR 2019 AT 14:12 ET
At many different points in his presidency, Donald Trump has appeared to have no idea what was actually happening in the administration he is supposed to run. And on Friday, Trump made that fact vividly clear yet again with a stunning — even for him — post on Twitter.
After the Treasury Department announced it would be levying new sanctions on shipping companies for working with North Korea, the president abruptly reversed that decision:
Donald J. Trump✔
@realDonaldTrump
It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!
10:22 AM - Mar 22, 2019
(In fact, the announcement was made on Thursday, not Friday.)
Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, trying to explain this decision, said simply, “President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesn’t think these sanctions will be necessary.”
Though he’s in charge of the executive branch, this is a completely unorthodox and reckless approach to sanctions policy. If Trump had a strong opinion in the Treasury Department’s coming sanctions decision, he could have intervened earlier and avoided sending such conflicting messages. Instead, he made clear that he had no idea what was going on right under his nose in the Treasury Department through the formal sanctions process, making himself look inept and weak. Perhaps more importantly, however, he sends the message to the rest of the world that nothing the executive branch does has any authority unless he has personally weighed in — a move which undermines the government’s ability to accomplish, well, almost anything, as well as the undercutting the rule of law.
“What?” said national security lawyer Bradley Moss in response to the tweet. “Treasury goes through their sanctions process and then at the drop of a hat you reverse it?”
CNN reporter Kaitlin Collins noted that the turnabout was “Big.”
“The sanctions were on Chinese shipping companies that the Trump administration said helped North Korea evade international sanctions,” she said. “Treasury Secretary Mnuchin said the ‘full implementation’ of those UN sanctions is “crucial” to the success of North Korea denuclearizing.”
“The United States and our like-minded partners remain committed to achieving the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea and believe that the full implementation of North Korea-related UN Security Council resolutions is crucial to a successful outcome,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a press release. “Treasury will continue to enforce our sanctions, and we are making it explicitly clear that shipping companies employing deceptive tactics to mask illicit trade with North Korea expose themselves to great risk.”
John Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, had said Thursday that the sanctions were “important” and that “the maritime industry must do more to stop North Korea’s illicit shipping practices.”
After the Treasury Department announced it would be levying new sanctions on shipping companies for working with North Korea, the president abruptly reversed that decision:
Donald J. Trump✔
@realDonaldTrump
It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!
10:22 AM - Mar 22, 2019
(In fact, the announcement was made on Thursday, not Friday.)
Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, trying to explain this decision, said simply, “President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesn’t think these sanctions will be necessary.”
Though he’s in charge of the executive branch, this is a completely unorthodox and reckless approach to sanctions policy. If Trump had a strong opinion in the Treasury Department’s coming sanctions decision, he could have intervened earlier and avoided sending such conflicting messages. Instead, he made clear that he had no idea what was going on right under his nose in the Treasury Department through the formal sanctions process, making himself look inept and weak. Perhaps more importantly, however, he sends the message to the rest of the world that nothing the executive branch does has any authority unless he has personally weighed in — a move which undermines the government’s ability to accomplish, well, almost anything, as well as the undercutting the rule of law.
“What?” said national security lawyer Bradley Moss in response to the tweet. “Treasury goes through their sanctions process and then at the drop of a hat you reverse it?”
CNN reporter Kaitlin Collins noted that the turnabout was “Big.”
“The sanctions were on Chinese shipping companies that the Trump administration said helped North Korea evade international sanctions,” she said. “Treasury Secretary Mnuchin said the ‘full implementation’ of those UN sanctions is “crucial” to the success of North Korea denuclearizing.”
“The United States and our like-minded partners remain committed to achieving the final, fully verified denuclearization of North Korea and believe that the full implementation of North Korea-related UN Security Council resolutions is crucial to a successful outcome,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a press release. “Treasury will continue to enforce our sanctions, and we are making it explicitly clear that shipping companies employing deceptive tactics to mask illicit trade with North Korea expose themselves to great risk.”
John Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, had said Thursday that the sanctions were “important” and that “the maritime industry must do more to stop North Korea’s illicit shipping practices.”
John McCain Torpedoed Trump’s Attempt to Get Federal Aid For Luxury Housing in 1996
by Tommy Christopher | media ite
Mar 21st, 2019, 4:41 pm
The animus that fuels Donald Trump‘s still-escalating attacks on the late Senator John McCain may have originated not with political differences, but with McCain’s interference in Trump’s pursuit of millions in federal assistance for a project that McCain said would “predominantly benefit upper income Americans.”
Trump’s attacks this week (so far) culminated in a five-minute rant during which he falsely claimed that he had “approved” McCain’s funeral, complained that he hadn’t been thanked for the gesture, and even took credit for a piece of legislation that was literally named after McCain.
But Trump’s hostility toward McCain goes back long before he infamously attacked the former prisoner of war’s military service during the 2016 presidential campaign by saying McCain was “a war hero cause he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
He made a similar attack in 1999, telling Dan Rather McCain “was captured. Does being captured make you a hero? I don’t know. I’m not sure.”
Three years before that, though, it was John McCain who took aim at Trump over the then-real estate developer’s application for federal mortgage guarantees. In a statement that was submitted for the record on McCain’s behalf, the then-senator singled Trump out while submitting an amendment to an appropriations bill.
In the statement, McCain noted that HUD “is processing an application from a team of developers, headed by the venerable Donald Trump, to obtain Federal Housing Authority mortgage guarantees for their luxury apartment development in Manhattan known as Riverside South.”
“The HUD program to which Mr. Trump and his associates are applying for assistance is intended to promote development within urban renewal areas,” McCain continued. “To help qualify for the aid, Mr. Trump’s group has pledged to reserve 20 percent of the units for low- and moderate-income residents.”
“The issuance of the Federal mortgage guarantee and the 20 percent low-income reserve will entitle Mr. Trump and his partners to a vast array of municipal tax benefits, which one group calculates to be in the range of nearly $4.5 million per ‘needy’ individual assisted–not exactly what most Americans would consider cost-effective use of Government assistance,” McCain wrote.
“I certainly have nothing against luxury apartments nor do I have anything against very successful project developers, including Mr. Trump,” McCain said. “I do object, however, to asking the taxpayer to bear the risk of a development for one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the country, to help finance a project that will predominantly benefit upper income Americans.”
He noted that if Trump’s proposal were approved, “taxpayers will be on the hook for over $350 million,” and that those taxpayers “will take this enormous risk–the largest ever in the history of the program–to help provide housing, in some instances, for people who earn an annual income of over $200,000 per year.”
McCain went on to say that “the Donald Trumps of the world can more than afford to bear the risk of their endeavors, and should not be indemnified with taxpayer dollars.”
The amendment that McCain proposed was approved unanimously, via voice vote.
A lot has changed since the nineties, but Trump is still attacking John McCain, and Trump still can’t get Congress to give him money to build what he wants.
Trump’s attacks this week (so far) culminated in a five-minute rant during which he falsely claimed that he had “approved” McCain’s funeral, complained that he hadn’t been thanked for the gesture, and even took credit for a piece of legislation that was literally named after McCain.
But Trump’s hostility toward McCain goes back long before he infamously attacked the former prisoner of war’s military service during the 2016 presidential campaign by saying McCain was “a war hero cause he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
He made a similar attack in 1999, telling Dan Rather McCain “was captured. Does being captured make you a hero? I don’t know. I’m not sure.”
Three years before that, though, it was John McCain who took aim at Trump over the then-real estate developer’s application for federal mortgage guarantees. In a statement that was submitted for the record on McCain’s behalf, the then-senator singled Trump out while submitting an amendment to an appropriations bill.
In the statement, McCain noted that HUD “is processing an application from a team of developers, headed by the venerable Donald Trump, to obtain Federal Housing Authority mortgage guarantees for their luxury apartment development in Manhattan known as Riverside South.”
“The HUD program to which Mr. Trump and his associates are applying for assistance is intended to promote development within urban renewal areas,” McCain continued. “To help qualify for the aid, Mr. Trump’s group has pledged to reserve 20 percent of the units for low- and moderate-income residents.”
“The issuance of the Federal mortgage guarantee and the 20 percent low-income reserve will entitle Mr. Trump and his partners to a vast array of municipal tax benefits, which one group calculates to be in the range of nearly $4.5 million per ‘needy’ individual assisted–not exactly what most Americans would consider cost-effective use of Government assistance,” McCain wrote.
“I certainly have nothing against luxury apartments nor do I have anything against very successful project developers, including Mr. Trump,” McCain said. “I do object, however, to asking the taxpayer to bear the risk of a development for one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the country, to help finance a project that will predominantly benefit upper income Americans.”
He noted that if Trump’s proposal were approved, “taxpayers will be on the hook for over $350 million,” and that those taxpayers “will take this enormous risk–the largest ever in the history of the program–to help provide housing, in some instances, for people who earn an annual income of over $200,000 per year.”
McCain went on to say that “the Donald Trumps of the world can more than afford to bear the risk of their endeavors, and should not be indemnified with taxpayer dollars.”
The amendment that McCain proposed was approved unanimously, via voice vote.
A lot has changed since the nineties, but Trump is still attacking John McCain, and Trump still can’t get Congress to give him money to build what he wants.
New York AG subpoenas Deutsche Bank about Trump investments unearthed in Cohen testimony
Sarah K. Burris - raw story
11 MAR 2019 AT 23:04 ET
During Michael Cohen’s testimony to Congress nearly two weeks ago, the former “fixer” of President Donald Trump revealed several possible financial crimes that have sparked an investigation by the New York attorney general.
According to a Monday report by the New York Times, the attorney general’s office issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank and Investors Bank for records relating to the Trump Organization projects noted by Cohen as well as the failed loan to buy the Buffalo Bills in 2014.
“The inquiry opens a new front in the scrutiny of Deutsche Bank, one of the few lenders willing to do business with Donald J. Trump in recent years,” The Times reported. “The bank is already the subject of two congressional investigations and was examined last year by New York banking regulators, who took no action.”
Cohen testified that Trump inflated his assets in financial statements required when applying for the loan. Cohen gave copies of statements that he gave to Deutsche Bank on Trump’s behalf.
The investigation is not a criminal one, according to The Times, though the scope is unclear, because the attorney general has the power to investigate fraud cases and issue fines.
According to a Monday report by the New York Times, the attorney general’s office issued subpoenas to Deutsche Bank and Investors Bank for records relating to the Trump Organization projects noted by Cohen as well as the failed loan to buy the Buffalo Bills in 2014.
“The inquiry opens a new front in the scrutiny of Deutsche Bank, one of the few lenders willing to do business with Donald J. Trump in recent years,” The Times reported. “The bank is already the subject of two congressional investigations and was examined last year by New York banking regulators, who took no action.”
Cohen testified that Trump inflated his assets in financial statements required when applying for the loan. Cohen gave copies of statements that he gave to Deutsche Bank on Trump’s behalf.
The investigation is not a criminal one, according to The Times, though the scope is unclear, because the attorney general has the power to investigate fraud cases and issue fines.
trump's fuck you budget!!!
Trump’s new budget abandons all pretense of being fiscally responsible
It doesn't even call for a balanced budget in ten years.
RYAN KORONOWSKI - thinkprogress
MAR 11, 2019, 2:28 PM
Pissident Donald Trump’s new budget proposal for the fiscal year 2020, which was released on Monday, breaks with his repeated campaign promises to rein in the debt and eliminate the deficit.
The newly released budget document — which has very little chance of being enacted wholesale, but nevertheless kicks off the annual federal budget process by articulating the administration’s priorities — calls for massive cuts in domestic programs, increases defense spending, and renews the president’s traditional call for billions of dollars to be allocated for the purpose of building a wall on the Mexican border. Trump has been continually rebuffed by Congress on that last request.
Nonetheless, the document’s intended message contends to be one of fiscal discipline.
“My 2020 Budget builds on the tremendous progress we have made and provides a clear roadmap for the Congress to bring Federal spending and debt under control. We must protect future generations from Washington’s habitual deficit spending,” Trump writes in the “budget message of the president” the precedes the budget document’s accounting.
However, increasing the larger defense budget while simultaneously cutting the relatively small domestic programs and maintaining lower corporate taxes is not a recipe for fiscal security, according to the numbers actually contained within the administration’s proposal.
The stark fiscal reality is not what candidate Trump promised before he was elected.
Rising deficits
Shortly before his inauguration, Trump told Sean Hannity that he would “balance the budget very quickly … I think over a five-year period. And I don’t know, maybe I could even surprise you.” Trump also said he would “freeze the budget.”
Monday’s budget document, however, projects that the annual deficit — the difference between what the federal government takes in versus what it spends — will reach $1.1 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2019, or this September.
One year ago, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficit would rise above $1 trillion in 2020, so in that sense things are at least running ahead of schedule.
The budget proposal from the Trump administration does not foresee, as is traditional for these optimistic fiscal blueprints, a projected balanced budget in ten years. According to reports, the Trump administration is projecting that the budget would be balanced by the year 2034. However, that’s a dubious prospect without continued high levels of GDP growth — a scenario unlikely to be sustainable for such a long period of time.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration sees nothing but rosy scenarios ahead. “I don’t think good growth policies have to obsess, necessarily, about the budget deficits and so forth,” White House top economic adviser Larry Kudlow told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. “Look, Chris, my view, and I believe the view of the administration, we are going to point a steady glide path towards lower federal spending and federal borrowing as a share of the economy, as a share of GDP. That lowers the burden of debt.”
Kudlow answered Wallace’s repeated questions about higher deficit spending by pointing to how those deficits compare to the current economic growth, and the performance of the markets.
“I don’t think that’s a burden on the economy,” Kudlow said.”In the long run, we do want to reduce the burden of spending and borrowing, absolutely, but always as a share of GDP.”
Piling on more debt
In his official campaign launch address, Trump promised to “reduce our $18 trillion in debt.” In March 2016, Trump told The Washington Post that he could get rid of the debt “fairly quickly.” When pressed, he said, “Well, I would say over a period of eight years.”
At the time of this telling, the debt stood at $19.3 trillion and rose to approximately $19.5 trilllion by the time Trump was sworn in. Now, the deficit is more that $22 trillion — and Trump’s budget proposal projects that total federal deficit will be $22.8 trillion at the end of the 2019 fiscal year, increasing by about a trillion dollars each year. Even with its rosy assumptions, the Trump administration still projects it will add $8.8 trillion to the debt from the end of fiscal year 2019 to fiscal year 2029.
Tax cuts
Trump contended that, were he to be elected, he would “bring our energy companies back and they will be able to compete and they’ll make money and pay off our national debt and budget deficits.” This has not yet happened.
In fact, when Trump’s 2018 budget proposal is compared to his 2020 budget proposal, the projected revenue per year has actually fallen by about $300 billion.
Moreover, the tax cut bill that Trump and his compatriots in Congress pushed through at the end of 2017 was intended to cut taxes for wealthy individuals and corporations so that their increased growth and productivity would make its way back into the federal treasury and help shrink the deficit. This, too, has failed to come to pass.
Since taking office, Trump has quieted on the debt, tweeting about it less than a handful of times, once in February 2017, and again in November 2017 and August 2018.
Trump’s first joint address to Congress and his subsequent two State of the Union addresses also failed to mention the debt, the budgetary deficit, or anything related to fiscal policy. Last year, Trump’s budget director and current chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, dismissed his boss’ budget promises as “hyperbole.”
The newly released budget document — which has very little chance of being enacted wholesale, but nevertheless kicks off the annual federal budget process by articulating the administration’s priorities — calls for massive cuts in domestic programs, increases defense spending, and renews the president’s traditional call for billions of dollars to be allocated for the purpose of building a wall on the Mexican border. Trump has been continually rebuffed by Congress on that last request.
Nonetheless, the document’s intended message contends to be one of fiscal discipline.
“My 2020 Budget builds on the tremendous progress we have made and provides a clear roadmap for the Congress to bring Federal spending and debt under control. We must protect future generations from Washington’s habitual deficit spending,” Trump writes in the “budget message of the president” the precedes the budget document’s accounting.
However, increasing the larger defense budget while simultaneously cutting the relatively small domestic programs and maintaining lower corporate taxes is not a recipe for fiscal security, according to the numbers actually contained within the administration’s proposal.
The stark fiscal reality is not what candidate Trump promised before he was elected.
Rising deficits
Shortly before his inauguration, Trump told Sean Hannity that he would “balance the budget very quickly … I think over a five-year period. And I don’t know, maybe I could even surprise you.” Trump also said he would “freeze the budget.”
Monday’s budget document, however, projects that the annual deficit — the difference between what the federal government takes in versus what it spends — will reach $1.1 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2019, or this September.
One year ago, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficit would rise above $1 trillion in 2020, so in that sense things are at least running ahead of schedule.
The budget proposal from the Trump administration does not foresee, as is traditional for these optimistic fiscal blueprints, a projected balanced budget in ten years. According to reports, the Trump administration is projecting that the budget would be balanced by the year 2034. However, that’s a dubious prospect without continued high levels of GDP growth — a scenario unlikely to be sustainable for such a long period of time.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration sees nothing but rosy scenarios ahead. “I don’t think good growth policies have to obsess, necessarily, about the budget deficits and so forth,” White House top economic adviser Larry Kudlow told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. “Look, Chris, my view, and I believe the view of the administration, we are going to point a steady glide path towards lower federal spending and federal borrowing as a share of the economy, as a share of GDP. That lowers the burden of debt.”
Kudlow answered Wallace’s repeated questions about higher deficit spending by pointing to how those deficits compare to the current economic growth, and the performance of the markets.
“I don’t think that’s a burden on the economy,” Kudlow said.”In the long run, we do want to reduce the burden of spending and borrowing, absolutely, but always as a share of GDP.”
Piling on more debt
In his official campaign launch address, Trump promised to “reduce our $18 trillion in debt.” In March 2016, Trump told The Washington Post that he could get rid of the debt “fairly quickly.” When pressed, he said, “Well, I would say over a period of eight years.”
At the time of this telling, the debt stood at $19.3 trillion and rose to approximately $19.5 trilllion by the time Trump was sworn in. Now, the deficit is more that $22 trillion — and Trump’s budget proposal projects that total federal deficit will be $22.8 trillion at the end of the 2019 fiscal year, increasing by about a trillion dollars each year. Even with its rosy assumptions, the Trump administration still projects it will add $8.8 trillion to the debt from the end of fiscal year 2019 to fiscal year 2029.
Tax cuts
Trump contended that, were he to be elected, he would “bring our energy companies back and they will be able to compete and they’ll make money and pay off our national debt and budget deficits.” This has not yet happened.
In fact, when Trump’s 2018 budget proposal is compared to his 2020 budget proposal, the projected revenue per year has actually fallen by about $300 billion.
Moreover, the tax cut bill that Trump and his compatriots in Congress pushed through at the end of 2017 was intended to cut taxes for wealthy individuals and corporations so that their increased growth and productivity would make its way back into the federal treasury and help shrink the deficit. This, too, has failed to come to pass.
Since taking office, Trump has quieted on the debt, tweeting about it less than a handful of times, once in February 2017, and again in November 2017 and August 2018.
Trump’s first joint address to Congress and his subsequent two State of the Union addresses also failed to mention the debt, the budgetary deficit, or anything related to fiscal policy. Last year, Trump’s budget director and current chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, dismissed his boss’ budget promises as “hyperbole.”
“A-plus treatment” for Alabama tornado victims: Trump decides which lives matter — and which do not
Why Trump's response to Alabama tornados is different from his response to California wildfires and Hurricane Maria
BRIAN L. OTT - salon
MARCH 6, 2019 1:25PM (UTC)
How a person responds in times of tragedy and hardship reveals their true character. I’m not talking about made up tragedies like the ludicrous national emergency the president recently declared at the southern border of the U.S., though that too speaks volumes about the president’s character. I’m talking about actual tragedies, like the deadly tornadoes that swept through it Alabama, Georgia and Florida on Sunday killing as many as 23 people. President Trump's response to this tragedy in comparison to his response to other natural disasters such as the California wildfires and Hurricane Maria very much reveals his true values.
On Monday morning, our tweeter-in-chief had this to say on Twitter: “FEMA has been told directly by me to give the A Plus treatment to the Great State of Alabama and the wonderful people who have been so devastated by the Tornadoes. @GovernorKayIvey, one of the best in our Country, has been so informed. She is working closely with FEMA (and me!).”
Let’s begin with what’s absent from the president’s tweet: any expression of sympathy and sorrow for the families of those who have lost loved ones.
The president instead goes right to work making this tragedy all about himself, bragging that he has instructed FEMA to give Alabama “A Plus treatment” and literally exclaiming (notice the exclamation point) that Governor Kay Ivey is “working closely with FEMA (and me!).” This A Plus narcissist apparently never gets tired of making everything about himself.
Still, while singing his own praise, Trump does manage to give a shout out both to the state of Alabama and its Republican governor. Trump, of course, likes states that voted for him during the 2016 election and he won the state of Alabama with 62.1 percent of the vote.
California, by contrast, was won by Hillary Clinton with an equally impressive 61.7 percent of the vote. So, it really wasn't a surprise that when that state was devastated by wildfires in November 2018 that the president tweeted: “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”
It is difficult not to notice how Trump blames the state of California for the tragedy that befell it and then complains about how much it’s going to cost. The Camp Fire in Northern California also killed 23 people, but the president makes no reference to the tragic loss of human life.
Trump’s response to the tornadoes in Alabama is also remarkably different than his now infamous response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. While Puerto Ricans are American citizens, they don’t actually vote in presidential elections. Not surprisingly, Trump's administration was slow to respond to the crisis on the island.
Worse still, as the scope of the tragedy in Puerto Rico later became clear, the president actually contested how serious the tragedy was:
Donald J. Trump✔
@realDonaldTrump
...really hard to help but many have lost their homes. Military is now on site and I will be there Tuesday. Wish press would treat fairly!
3:45 PM - Sep 28, 2017
Donald J. Trump✔
@realDonaldTrump
3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000...
4:37 AM - Sep 13, 2018
It is unconscionable that a president would argue over the number of deaths in Puerto Rico and then blame Democrats for inflating those numbers. We have long understood that the president is a callous narcissist. But the juxtaposition of his response to the tragedy in Alabama and the tragedies in California and Puerto Rico suggest that not all lives matter equally to him. And, so, we are left with the realization that the president’s rhetorical response to human tragedy is tragically inhumane.
This is typical of how the president consistently treats people in his rhetoric. Those that support him are worthy of his support; they are true Americans. Those who don’t support him aren’t really people at all, and they’re certainly not Americans.
On Monday morning, our tweeter-in-chief had this to say on Twitter: “FEMA has been told directly by me to give the A Plus treatment to the Great State of Alabama and the wonderful people who have been so devastated by the Tornadoes. @GovernorKayIvey, one of the best in our Country, has been so informed. She is working closely with FEMA (and me!).”
Let’s begin with what’s absent from the president’s tweet: any expression of sympathy and sorrow for the families of those who have lost loved ones.
The president instead goes right to work making this tragedy all about himself, bragging that he has instructed FEMA to give Alabama “A Plus treatment” and literally exclaiming (notice the exclamation point) that Governor Kay Ivey is “working closely with FEMA (and me!).” This A Plus narcissist apparently never gets tired of making everything about himself.
Still, while singing his own praise, Trump does manage to give a shout out both to the state of Alabama and its Republican governor. Trump, of course, likes states that voted for him during the 2016 election and he won the state of Alabama with 62.1 percent of the vote.
California, by contrast, was won by Hillary Clinton with an equally impressive 61.7 percent of the vote. So, it really wasn't a surprise that when that state was devastated by wildfires in November 2018 that the president tweeted: “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”
It is difficult not to notice how Trump blames the state of California for the tragedy that befell it and then complains about how much it’s going to cost. The Camp Fire in Northern California also killed 23 people, but the president makes no reference to the tragic loss of human life.
Trump’s response to the tornadoes in Alabama is also remarkably different than his now infamous response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. While Puerto Ricans are American citizens, they don’t actually vote in presidential elections. Not surprisingly, Trump's administration was slow to respond to the crisis on the island.
Worse still, as the scope of the tragedy in Puerto Rico later became clear, the president actually contested how serious the tragedy was:
Donald J. Trump✔
@realDonaldTrump
...really hard to help but many have lost their homes. Military is now on site and I will be there Tuesday. Wish press would treat fairly!
3:45 PM - Sep 28, 2017
Donald J. Trump✔
@realDonaldTrump
3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000...
4:37 AM - Sep 13, 2018
It is unconscionable that a president would argue over the number of deaths in Puerto Rico and then blame Democrats for inflating those numbers. We have long understood that the president is a callous narcissist. But the juxtaposition of his response to the tragedy in Alabama and the tragedies in California and Puerto Rico suggest that not all lives matter equally to him. And, so, we are left with the realization that the president’s rhetorical response to human tragedy is tragically inhumane.
This is typical of how the president consistently treats people in his rhetoric. Those that support him are worthy of his support; they are true Americans. Those who don’t support him aren’t really people at all, and they’re certainly not Americans.
Here are the investigations that will haunt Trump and his family long after Mueller’s final report is delivered
Alex Henderson, AlterNet - raw story
03 MAR 2019 AT 10:26 ET
Some critics of President Donald Trump are hoping that when the final report for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is released, it will be so damning that impeachment will be inevitable. But if there is a major lesson to be learned from attorney Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee on February 27, 2019, it is that Trump’s legal woes don’t begin or end with Russiagate. Cohen, who spent more than a decade in Trump’s employ, wasn’t allowed to discuss Mueller’s probe at the Wednesday hearing—and yet, he spoke for hours about things he believed could imperil Trump legally, from banking and tax matters to campaign finance violations.
The federal prosecutors Cohen has been cooperating with include not only Mueller’s office, but also, U.S. attorneys for the Southern District of New York. And investigations of Trump will not end after Mueller’s final report is delivered.
Here are some legal or political entities apart from Mueller’s team that will no doubt be paying close attention to President Trump, members of his family and his business associates in the months ahead.
1. The Southern District of New York
After Cohen’s February 27 testimony, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told CNN’s Chris Cuomo, “I’ve always said, Chris, that Bob Mueller is not what should concern the president or the White House. That’s the Southern District of New York.” Christie added that Southern District prosecutors “have no limit on their scope. Bob Mueller has a limit on his scope; it’s Russia and Russia-related activities.”
Christie went on to say that he is confident that the Southern District is building a case against Trump’s associates as well as Trump himself after he leaves office. Cohen, he stressed, spent more than a decade working for Trump and has extensive knowledge of the president’s business activities—and he predicted that Cohen will be having a lot more conservations with Southern District prosecutors.
2. The New York State Attorney General’s Office
In 2018, former New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood proved to be a major thorn in Trump’s side—and it was under her watch that Trump agreed to dissolve his charity, the Donald J. Trump Foundation. Underwood declared that she saw a “shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation, including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing and much more. This amounted to the Trump Foundation functioning as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests.”
But the New York State Attorney General’s Office won’t be easing up on Trump now that Underwood is gone. Underwood’s successor, fellow Democrat Letitia James, has made it clear that she has an abundance of Trump-related investigations in mind and plans to examine everything from his real estate holdings to whether or not he has violated the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause, which restricts presidents and other federal officials from receiving payments or gifts from foreign powers.
A spokesperson for James told Philly.com that she is “reviewing Michael Cohen’s testimony carefully to determine if it will impact” any “investigation that the office is undertaking.”
3. The District of Columbia Attorney General’s Office
On February 26, the District of Columbia Attorney General’s Office subpoenaed Trump’s inaugural committee for documents pertaining to its finances. DC Attorney General Karl A. Racine, in the subpoena, said his office is investigating Trump’s inaugural committee to see if “expenditures of its nonprofit funds were wasteful, mismanaged, and/or improperly provided private benefit, causing the committee to exceed or abuse its authority or act contrary to its nonprofit purpose.” Previously, the DA’s offices of the District of Columbia and Maryland filed a lawsuit against Trump, alleging he had received illegal payments from foreign governments through his Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
4. The House Financial Services Committee and House Ways and Means Committee
Democratic Rep. Gerald Connolly of Virginia said of Cohen’s February 27 testimony, “He set a very rich table. We’re now looking at a 10-course meal.” And there are many Trump-related matters that Democrats in the House of Representatives can investigate. For example, the House Finance Committee has said it will be taking a look at the Donald J. Trump Foundation. The House Ways and Means Committee has been expressing interest in Trump’s tax returns, and Rep. Maxine Waters (who now heads the House Financial Services Committee) has indicated she plans to investigate whether or not Trump “directed payments into” the Donald J. Trump Foundation “to keep from paying taxes.”
On top of all that, California Rep. Brad Sherman (also on the House Financial Services Committee) has said that House Democrats will be looking into Cohen’s allegation that Trump exaggerated his net worth in order to lower his insurance premiums and receive bank loans.
The federal prosecutors Cohen has been cooperating with include not only Mueller’s office, but also, U.S. attorneys for the Southern District of New York. And investigations of Trump will not end after Mueller’s final report is delivered.
Here are some legal or political entities apart from Mueller’s team that will no doubt be paying close attention to President Trump, members of his family and his business associates in the months ahead.
1. The Southern District of New York
After Cohen’s February 27 testimony, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told CNN’s Chris Cuomo, “I’ve always said, Chris, that Bob Mueller is not what should concern the president or the White House. That’s the Southern District of New York.” Christie added that Southern District prosecutors “have no limit on their scope. Bob Mueller has a limit on his scope; it’s Russia and Russia-related activities.”
Christie went on to say that he is confident that the Southern District is building a case against Trump’s associates as well as Trump himself after he leaves office. Cohen, he stressed, spent more than a decade working for Trump and has extensive knowledge of the president’s business activities—and he predicted that Cohen will be having a lot more conservations with Southern District prosecutors.
2. The New York State Attorney General’s Office
In 2018, former New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood proved to be a major thorn in Trump’s side—and it was under her watch that Trump agreed to dissolve his charity, the Donald J. Trump Foundation. Underwood declared that she saw a “shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation, including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing and much more. This amounted to the Trump Foundation functioning as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests.”
But the New York State Attorney General’s Office won’t be easing up on Trump now that Underwood is gone. Underwood’s successor, fellow Democrat Letitia James, has made it clear that she has an abundance of Trump-related investigations in mind and plans to examine everything from his real estate holdings to whether or not he has violated the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause, which restricts presidents and other federal officials from receiving payments or gifts from foreign powers.
A spokesperson for James told Philly.com that she is “reviewing Michael Cohen’s testimony carefully to determine if it will impact” any “investigation that the office is undertaking.”
3. The District of Columbia Attorney General’s Office
On February 26, the District of Columbia Attorney General’s Office subpoenaed Trump’s inaugural committee for documents pertaining to its finances. DC Attorney General Karl A. Racine, in the subpoena, said his office is investigating Trump’s inaugural committee to see if “expenditures of its nonprofit funds were wasteful, mismanaged, and/or improperly provided private benefit, causing the committee to exceed or abuse its authority or act contrary to its nonprofit purpose.” Previously, the DA’s offices of the District of Columbia and Maryland filed a lawsuit against Trump, alleging he had received illegal payments from foreign governments through his Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
4. The House Financial Services Committee and House Ways and Means Committee
Democratic Rep. Gerald Connolly of Virginia said of Cohen’s February 27 testimony, “He set a very rich table. We’re now looking at a 10-course meal.” And there are many Trump-related matters that Democrats in the House of Representatives can investigate. For example, the House Finance Committee has said it will be taking a look at the Donald J. Trump Foundation. The House Ways and Means Committee has been expressing interest in Trump’s tax returns, and Rep. Maxine Waters (who now heads the House Financial Services Committee) has indicated she plans to investigate whether or not Trump “directed payments into” the Donald J. Trump Foundation “to keep from paying taxes.”
On top of all that, California Rep. Brad Sherman (also on the House Financial Services Committee) has said that House Democrats will be looking into Cohen’s allegation that Trump exaggerated his net worth in order to lower his insurance premiums and receive bank loans.
Donald Trump Spent His Sunday Morning Praising a Brutal Dictator
Rise and grind!
TIM MURPHY - mother jones
FEBRUARY 24, 2019 10:04 AM
Ah, Sundays in the Trump White House: a time to catch up on sleep, make a pot of coffee, and linger over the morning newspaper (Melania goes for the Travel section; Don reaches for the Sunday Styles).
If only! President Donald Trump spent his Sunday morning in his own unique way, tweeting away about his admiration for the worst people in the world. This time it was North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, whom Trump is scheduled to meet in Vietnam to discuss, as Trump put it, “Denuclearization?” Boasting of his “great relationship” with Kim, Trump called the brutal dictator an asset to his country with a potential for great things:
Donald J. Trump✔
@realDonaldTrump
Chairman Kim realizes, perhaps better than anyone else, that without nuclear weapons, his country could fast become one of the great economic powers anywhere in the World. Because of its location and people (and him), it has more potential for rapid growth than any other nation!
5:19 AM - Feb 24, 2019
Conducting diplomacy with dictators is sometimes just part of the job, but Trump is unique in his insistence that the brutal dictators he’s conducting diplomacy with are, in fact, good people. He’s touted his “great relationship” with Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who is best known for his mass murder of drug users (Trump specifically praised him for his approach to the Drug War).
No dictator has come in for as much incongruous praise as Kim. “He speaks and his people sit up at attention,” Trump said of Kim last year. “I want my people to do the same.” Later that year, describing their correspondence on binational talks, Trump said: “We went back and forth, then we fell in love. He wrote me beautiful letters.” Trump’s admiration, he explained, stemmed from Kim’s ability to consolidate power at such a young age—something Kim was able to do through a campaign of assassinations and terror.
Such praise comes with a cost. As my colleague Dan Spinelli noted, during Trump’s push for a nuclear deal with North Korea—with visions of a Nobel Prize dancing in his head—his administration has swept under the rug the slave camps and forced starvation that Kim’s regime has maintained.
If only! President Donald Trump spent his Sunday morning in his own unique way, tweeting away about his admiration for the worst people in the world. This time it was North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, whom Trump is scheduled to meet in Vietnam to discuss, as Trump put it, “Denuclearization?” Boasting of his “great relationship” with Kim, Trump called the brutal dictator an asset to his country with a potential for great things:
Donald J. Trump✔
@realDonaldTrump
Chairman Kim realizes, perhaps better than anyone else, that without nuclear weapons, his country could fast become one of the great economic powers anywhere in the World. Because of its location and people (and him), it has more potential for rapid growth than any other nation!
5:19 AM - Feb 24, 2019
Conducting diplomacy with dictators is sometimes just part of the job, but Trump is unique in his insistence that the brutal dictators he’s conducting diplomacy with are, in fact, good people. He’s touted his “great relationship” with Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who is best known for his mass murder of drug users (Trump specifically praised him for his approach to the Drug War).
No dictator has come in for as much incongruous praise as Kim. “He speaks and his people sit up at attention,” Trump said of Kim last year. “I want my people to do the same.” Later that year, describing their correspondence on binational talks, Trump said: “We went back and forth, then we fell in love. He wrote me beautiful letters.” Trump’s admiration, he explained, stemmed from Kim’s ability to consolidate power at such a young age—something Kim was able to do through a campaign of assassinations and terror.
Such praise comes with a cost. As my colleague Dan Spinelli noted, during Trump’s push for a nuclear deal with North Korea—with visions of a Nobel Prize dancing in his head—his administration has swept under the rug the slave camps and forced starvation that Kim’s regime has maintained.
Trump can’t run the Mueller playbook on New York feds
For starters, they have jurisdiction over the president’s political operation and businesses — subjects that
executive privilege doesn't cover.
By DARREN SAMUELSOHN - politico
02/18/2019 08:05 AM EST
Even as speculation mounts that special counsel Robert Mueller might be winding down his investigation, a parallel threat to President Donald Trump only seems to be growing within his own Justice Department: the Southern District of New York.
Manhattan-based federal prosecutors can challenge Trump in ways Mueller can’t. They have jurisdiction over the president’s political operation and businesses — subjects that aren’t protected by executive privilege, a tool Trump is considering invoking to block portions of Mueller’s report. From a PR perspective, Trump has been unable to run the same playbook on SDNY that he’s used to erode conservatives’ faith in Mueller, the former George W. Bush-appointed FBI director. Legal circles are also buzzing over whether SDNY might buck DOJ guidance and seek to indict a sitting president.
The threat was highlighted when SDNY prosecutors ordered officials from Trump’s inaugural committee to hand over donor and financial records. It was the latest aggressive move from an office that has launched investigations into the president’s company, former lawyer and campaign finance practices. New York prosecutors have even implicated Trump in a crime.
Add it all up and the result is a spate of hard-to-stymie, legally perilous probes that appears on track to drag on well into Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. SDNY stands poised to carry on Mueller’s efforts whenever the special counsel’s office closes shop, and it’s likely to draw even more attention if freshly confirmed Attorney General William Barr — who now oversees the Russia probe as DOJ head — clamps down on the public release of Mueller’s findings.
“When you combine their experience with the traditional independence of the southern district and the reputation it has, this is like another Mueller investigation going on,” said Nick Akerman, a former SDNY assistant attorney who also worked on the Watergate prosecution team.
Mueller can take credit for spawning significant parts of SDNY’s work. The two DOJ units have shared staff, witnesses and leads, and SDNY has been well-positioned to pick up anything that is outside Mueller’s primary lane of investigating collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
A Mueller referral to SDNY, for example, triggered an FBI raid on Michael Cohen's office and hotel room, according to Cohen’s former lawyer. And the fruits of that raid culminated late last year in Cohen’s guilty plea, in which the longtime Trump fixer and former personal attorney admitted in federal court that Trump directed him to make hush money payments to sway the 2016 presidential election.
The New York federal prosecutors are far from finished. They’re still seeking interviews with Trump Organization executives, according to a source with knowledge of the probe. And Trump’s inaugural committee confirmed earlier this month that it had received a wide-ranging subpoena from SDNY for documents as part of a probe into how the group raised and doled out a record $107 million. Investigators are looking at everything from potential mail and wire fraud to illegal foreign contributions and money laundering.
“This is why I’ve been saying for months that the Southern District of New York investigation presents a much more serious threat to the administration, potentially, than what Bob Mueller is doing,” Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor and former federal prosecutor, told ABC News earlier this month.
Elaborating on MSNBC, Christie said that SDNY, unlike Mueller, has “no restrictions on their purview.”
“Bob Mueller has a task: It’s Russian interference and potential collision in the 2016 election,” he said. “Southern District of New York is whatever the heck you want.”
SDNY poses an potent threat because the office has accumulated a perfect storm of witnesses who have guided Trump throughout his career, from his businesses to his meteoric rise in presidential politics up through his inauguration to the White House.
The list of cooperators includes Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer; David Pecker, the CEO of the National Enquirer’s parent company who has admitted to working with Trump for years to kill incriminating media stories; and Rick Gates, who served as Trump campaign deputy and then de facto leader of the inaugural committee. Gates pleaded guilty in the Mueller probe to lying to the FBI last February but his sentencing has been delayed while he cooperates in “several ongoing investigations,” according to a filing last month from the special counsel’s office.
Then there’s Cohen, Trump’s longtime fixer who is scheduled to begin serving a three-year prison sentence next month. Christie called Cohen a “tour guide” for SDNY investigators into the president’s orbit.
Another concern for Trump: SDNY’s independence. Its nickname is the “Sovereign District of New York," and former prosecutors who have worked there describe its authorities and experience as unique among the nation's 93 U.S. attorney offices.
Trump-appointed officials are also not directly overseeing SDNY’s Trump-related investigations. The president’s hand-selected SDNY head, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, has recused himself from the probes, deferring to a pair of longtime federal prosecutors: Robert Khuzami and Audrey Strauss.
An SDNY spokesman declined to comment for this story.
Alumni from the office have said SDNY's investigative powers and independent streak are so robust that — depending on what it finds on Trump — the office could skirt DOJ legal protocol dating to Watergate that holds a sitting president can’t be indicted.
“I’m thoroughly convinced the SDNY will make its own evaluation. They will not say that’s a department policy,” said Jon Sale, a former SDNY and Watergate prosecutor who is close with Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. “They’re obviously looking at the president and I wouldn’t rule out that they could decide you can indict a sitting president.”
Trump's attack-Mueller playbook can’t be replicated in New York. For starters, the bounds of what SDNY is looking at don’t deal with Trump’s tenure in the White House, meaning any push back on executive privilege grounds won’t fly. Trump’s lawyers have said they’ve resisted Mueller’s attempts to get the president to answer questions about potential obstruction of justice matters dealing with his time in the Oval Office. And they continue to signal the president’s team should be allowed to review the special counsel’s finished report to ensure it doesn’t violate the president’s rights.
Trump is limited in his abilities to use his bully pulpit against SDNY — which has nowhere near the name recognition of the special counsel — in the way he has used Twitter, rallies and even the State of the Union to lambaste Mueller.
That’s not to say the president isn’t concerned about SDNY. Trump reportedly complained about SDNY’s pursuit of Cohen to Matthew Whitaker, his former acting attorney general, though Whitaker last week denied to Congress that the president had chided him.
Giuliani has confirmed Trump’s frustrations with SDNY’s handling of the Cohen probe.
“The president and his lawyers are upset about the professional prosecutors in the Southern District of New York going after a noncrime and the innuendo the president was involved,” Giuliani, who served as the U.S. attorney leading SDNY for more than five years during the Reagan administration, told CNN in December.
But in an interview with POLITICO on Friday, Giuliani downplayed any broader concerns that his former office posed a wider threat to the president.
“The same thing will happen as has happened over the last two years with all of these things. They’ll run them down and they’ll find out the president didn’t do anything wrong. Not a darn thing,” Giuliani said.
Trump’s complaints about the Mueller probe — railing against his team of “angry Democrats” and even going after the special counsel himself in more than 70 mentions on Twitter since last March — have helped the president turn his political base against the Russia investigation. A voters, a record low 13 percent of registered Republican voters reported having a favorable view of Mueller in a recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll. While that can help the president maintain GOP support in an impeachment battle, legal experts and Trump’s allies have said similar attacks on SDNY won’t matter much should the battleground become a court of law and not the halls of Congress.
“That’s one you can’t win,” said Andrew McCarthy, a former SDNY prosecutor and National Review columnist whom the president has cited on Twitter while blasting the Mueller probe. “There’s no upside for Trump in attacking the southern district, whereas there might be in attacking Mueller.”
What’s more, SDNY’s efforts have found a allies in Democratic lawmakers who have made the U.S. attorney’s office a key feature of their hearings, floor speeches and in written demands of Trump’s Justice Department.
Ahead of Whitaker’s recent appearance before Congress, House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler told the acting DOJ head that SDNY’s work would be one of his primary lines of questioning. And in a follow-up letter after the hearing, the New York Democrat pressed Whitaker over his denials that Trump lashed out at him about SDNY. Whitaker’s rebuttals, Nadler said, were “directly contradicted by several media reports” and other people with “direct knowledge” of the calls he got from the White House.
In a floor speech last week announcing his opposition to Barr’s confirmation, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned that any Trump pardons for people tied up in either the Mueller or SDNY investigation “would represent an abuse of power that would require a response by Congress.”
Barr said SDNY’s work stands on the other side of a red line that he wouldn’t let Trump cross. Pressed by Democratic senators during his confirmation hearing last month, the soon-to-be attorney general said he’d protest the removal of SDNY’s head if he thought the president had nefarious intentions.
“I would not stand by and allow a U.S. attorney to be fired for the purpose of stopping an investigation,” Barr said.
Manhattan-based federal prosecutors can challenge Trump in ways Mueller can’t. They have jurisdiction over the president’s political operation and businesses — subjects that aren’t protected by executive privilege, a tool Trump is considering invoking to block portions of Mueller’s report. From a PR perspective, Trump has been unable to run the same playbook on SDNY that he’s used to erode conservatives’ faith in Mueller, the former George W. Bush-appointed FBI director. Legal circles are also buzzing over whether SDNY might buck DOJ guidance and seek to indict a sitting president.
The threat was highlighted when SDNY prosecutors ordered officials from Trump’s inaugural committee to hand over donor and financial records. It was the latest aggressive move from an office that has launched investigations into the president’s company, former lawyer and campaign finance practices. New York prosecutors have even implicated Trump in a crime.
Add it all up and the result is a spate of hard-to-stymie, legally perilous probes that appears on track to drag on well into Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. SDNY stands poised to carry on Mueller’s efforts whenever the special counsel’s office closes shop, and it’s likely to draw even more attention if freshly confirmed Attorney General William Barr — who now oversees the Russia probe as DOJ head — clamps down on the public release of Mueller’s findings.
“When you combine their experience with the traditional independence of the southern district and the reputation it has, this is like another Mueller investigation going on,” said Nick Akerman, a former SDNY assistant attorney who also worked on the Watergate prosecution team.
Mueller can take credit for spawning significant parts of SDNY’s work. The two DOJ units have shared staff, witnesses and leads, and SDNY has been well-positioned to pick up anything that is outside Mueller’s primary lane of investigating collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
A Mueller referral to SDNY, for example, triggered an FBI raid on Michael Cohen's office and hotel room, according to Cohen’s former lawyer. And the fruits of that raid culminated late last year in Cohen’s guilty plea, in which the longtime Trump fixer and former personal attorney admitted in federal court that Trump directed him to make hush money payments to sway the 2016 presidential election.
The New York federal prosecutors are far from finished. They’re still seeking interviews with Trump Organization executives, according to a source with knowledge of the probe. And Trump’s inaugural committee confirmed earlier this month that it had received a wide-ranging subpoena from SDNY for documents as part of a probe into how the group raised and doled out a record $107 million. Investigators are looking at everything from potential mail and wire fraud to illegal foreign contributions and money laundering.
“This is why I’ve been saying for months that the Southern District of New York investigation presents a much more serious threat to the administration, potentially, than what Bob Mueller is doing,” Chris Christie, a former New Jersey governor and former federal prosecutor, told ABC News earlier this month.
Elaborating on MSNBC, Christie said that SDNY, unlike Mueller, has “no restrictions on their purview.”
“Bob Mueller has a task: It’s Russian interference and potential collision in the 2016 election,” he said. “Southern District of New York is whatever the heck you want.”
SDNY poses an potent threat because the office has accumulated a perfect storm of witnesses who have guided Trump throughout his career, from his businesses to his meteoric rise in presidential politics up through his inauguration to the White House.
The list of cooperators includes Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer; David Pecker, the CEO of the National Enquirer’s parent company who has admitted to working with Trump for years to kill incriminating media stories; and Rick Gates, who served as Trump campaign deputy and then de facto leader of the inaugural committee. Gates pleaded guilty in the Mueller probe to lying to the FBI last February but his sentencing has been delayed while he cooperates in “several ongoing investigations,” according to a filing last month from the special counsel’s office.
Then there’s Cohen, Trump’s longtime fixer who is scheduled to begin serving a three-year prison sentence next month. Christie called Cohen a “tour guide” for SDNY investigators into the president’s orbit.
Another concern for Trump: SDNY’s independence. Its nickname is the “Sovereign District of New York," and former prosecutors who have worked there describe its authorities and experience as unique among the nation's 93 U.S. attorney offices.
Trump-appointed officials are also not directly overseeing SDNY’s Trump-related investigations. The president’s hand-selected SDNY head, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, has recused himself from the probes, deferring to a pair of longtime federal prosecutors: Robert Khuzami and Audrey Strauss.
An SDNY spokesman declined to comment for this story.
Alumni from the office have said SDNY's investigative powers and independent streak are so robust that — depending on what it finds on Trump — the office could skirt DOJ legal protocol dating to Watergate that holds a sitting president can’t be indicted.
“I’m thoroughly convinced the SDNY will make its own evaluation. They will not say that’s a department policy,” said Jon Sale, a former SDNY and Watergate prosecutor who is close with Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. “They’re obviously looking at the president and I wouldn’t rule out that they could decide you can indict a sitting president.”
Trump's attack-Mueller playbook can’t be replicated in New York. For starters, the bounds of what SDNY is looking at don’t deal with Trump’s tenure in the White House, meaning any push back on executive privilege grounds won’t fly. Trump’s lawyers have said they’ve resisted Mueller’s attempts to get the president to answer questions about potential obstruction of justice matters dealing with his time in the Oval Office. And they continue to signal the president’s team should be allowed to review the special counsel’s finished report to ensure it doesn’t violate the president’s rights.
Trump is limited in his abilities to use his bully pulpit against SDNY — which has nowhere near the name recognition of the special counsel — in the way he has used Twitter, rallies and even the State of the Union to lambaste Mueller.
That’s not to say the president isn’t concerned about SDNY. Trump reportedly complained about SDNY’s pursuit of Cohen to Matthew Whitaker, his former acting attorney general, though Whitaker last week denied to Congress that the president had chided him.
Giuliani has confirmed Trump’s frustrations with SDNY’s handling of the Cohen probe.
“The president and his lawyers are upset about the professional prosecutors in the Southern District of New York going after a noncrime and the innuendo the president was involved,” Giuliani, who served as the U.S. attorney leading SDNY for more than five years during the Reagan administration, told CNN in December.
But in an interview with POLITICO on Friday, Giuliani downplayed any broader concerns that his former office posed a wider threat to the president.
“The same thing will happen as has happened over the last two years with all of these things. They’ll run them down and they’ll find out the president didn’t do anything wrong. Not a darn thing,” Giuliani said.
Trump’s complaints about the Mueller probe — railing against his team of “angry Democrats” and even going after the special counsel himself in more than 70 mentions on Twitter since last March — have helped the president turn his political base against the Russia investigation. A voters, a record low 13 percent of registered Republican voters reported having a favorable view of Mueller in a recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll. While that can help the president maintain GOP support in an impeachment battle, legal experts and Trump’s allies have said similar attacks on SDNY won’t matter much should the battleground become a court of law and not the halls of Congress.
“That’s one you can’t win,” said Andrew McCarthy, a former SDNY prosecutor and National Review columnist whom the president has cited on Twitter while blasting the Mueller probe. “There’s no upside for Trump in attacking the southern district, whereas there might be in attacking Mueller.”
What’s more, SDNY’s efforts have found a allies in Democratic lawmakers who have made the U.S. attorney’s office a key feature of their hearings, floor speeches and in written demands of Trump’s Justice Department.
Ahead of Whitaker’s recent appearance before Congress, House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler told the acting DOJ head that SDNY’s work would be one of his primary lines of questioning. And in a follow-up letter after the hearing, the New York Democrat pressed Whitaker over his denials that Trump lashed out at him about SDNY. Whitaker’s rebuttals, Nadler said, were “directly contradicted by several media reports” and other people with “direct knowledge” of the calls he got from the White House.
In a floor speech last week announcing his opposition to Barr’s confirmation, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned that any Trump pardons for people tied up in either the Mueller or SDNY investigation “would represent an abuse of power that would require a response by Congress.”
Barr said SDNY’s work stands on the other side of a red line that he wouldn’t let Trump cross. Pressed by Democratic senators during his confirmation hearing last month, the soon-to-be attorney general said he’d protest the removal of SDNY’s head if he thought the president had nefarious intentions.
“I would not stand by and allow a U.S. attorney to be fired for the purpose of stopping an investigation,” Barr said.
Trump's NYC eateries written up for 'live mice,' other 'critical' health code violations in recent months
By CHRIS SOMMERFELDT | NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
FEB 17, 2019 | 9:00 AM
Their namesake is a Mr. Clean freak, but some Trump-branded eateries are just plain dirty.
Mice in the kitchen, filthy food prep areas and broken sewage systems are on the list of recent stomach-turning health code violations at a number of Trump-branded restaurants in the city, the Daily News has learned.
Health inspections at Trump properties from Midtown Manhattan to the Bronx’s Ferry Point reveal the President’s namesake company still struggles to keep its day-to-day operations clean — though similar infractions have been reported for years.
Violations at the President’s crown jewel and Manhattan residence — Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue — are perhaps the most gag-inducing.
City Department of Health inspectors visited the tower’s cafe and grill on July 11, 2018 and found “evidence of mice or live mice” in and around the kitchen, according to records that haven’t previously been reported. The inspectors categorized the violation as “critical.”
The inspectors also deemed the restaurant “not vermin proof” and said its “conditions” are “conducive to attracting vermin” and “allowing vermin to exist.”
Moreover, the eatery’s “food contact surfaces” had not been properly maintained and “unacceptable” material had been used to build some “non-food contact” stations, making them practically impossible to clean.
The Trump Tower eatery has been written up for various health code violations every year since 2014, including sightings of “live roaches” in 2016 and “filth flies” in 2017. But inspectors have not — until now — found mice tracks at the posh establishment.
President Trump — who’s technically still the chief executive of the restaurant since he never completely divested from his namesake company when he moved into the Oval Office — has a tendency to not clean up after himself, according to a former business associate.
“He has always been far more focused on creating an image for his properties than in spending what it takes to make them excellent,” the ex-associate told The News, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to be candid.
A spokesperson for the Trump Organization wouldn’t comment directly on the rodent reports but said any “minor infractions” were dealt with immediately. The rep also noted the Midtown eatery has an “A” rating despite the violations.
But a Health Department spokeswoman noted the Trump restaurant is still an outlier, as only about 22% of food establishments in the five boroughs have “mice-related violations.”
Inspectors returned to Trump Tower on Aug. 22 to check out the mezzanine bar — and found another “critical” health violation.
An unidentified “food worker” at the gold-plated bar — where “The Billionaire Martini” costs $20 — was not using “proper utensils to eliminate bare hand contact” with raw foods, according to records. Additionally, the inspectors found a “single service” food item was reused and improperly stored.
A bartender at the skyscraper shrugged off cleanliness concerns and said his work station at least doesn’t have rodents scampering around.
“I haven’t seen any mice here,” the barkeep told The News on a recent evening. “I don’t know about the restaurant, but no mice here.”
The health officials came back again Jan. 31 and found Trump cafe and grill workers weren’t keeping certain foods protected from “potential sources of contamination.”
About 12 miles north, at the Trump Golf Links in the Bronx, inspectors detected more “critical” health violations last Nov. 7.
Food contact surfaces at the club’s eatery were not “properly washed, rinsed and sanitized after each use” or after “activity when contamination may have occurred,” the inspectors reported.
Secondly, the golf restaurant’s plumbing and sewage systems were crap, according to the inspectors.
Records reveal mandatory “anti-siphonage” and “backflow prevention” devices hadn’t been installed as part of the plumbing networks, resulting in floors not being “properly drained.”
The “sewage disposal system,” meanwhile, was simply “in disrepair” and “not functioning properly,” the inspectors said.
Despite the sketchy health inspection records, the President has a long history of bragging about his hotels and restaurants, invariably calling them “beautiful” and “the best,” while knocking other people’s eateries.
“The Red Hen Restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders,” Trump tweeted in June after his press secretary was refused service at the Lexington, Va., establishment because of her role in his administration.
He added, “I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!”
Mice in the kitchen, filthy food prep areas and broken sewage systems are on the list of recent stomach-turning health code violations at a number of Trump-branded restaurants in the city, the Daily News has learned.
Health inspections at Trump properties from Midtown Manhattan to the Bronx’s Ferry Point reveal the President’s namesake company still struggles to keep its day-to-day operations clean — though similar infractions have been reported for years.
Violations at the President’s crown jewel and Manhattan residence — Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue — are perhaps the most gag-inducing.
City Department of Health inspectors visited the tower’s cafe and grill on July 11, 2018 and found “evidence of mice or live mice” in and around the kitchen, according to records that haven’t previously been reported. The inspectors categorized the violation as “critical.”
The inspectors also deemed the restaurant “not vermin proof” and said its “conditions” are “conducive to attracting vermin” and “allowing vermin to exist.”
Moreover, the eatery’s “food contact surfaces” had not been properly maintained and “unacceptable” material had been used to build some “non-food contact” stations, making them practically impossible to clean.
The Trump Tower eatery has been written up for various health code violations every year since 2014, including sightings of “live roaches” in 2016 and “filth flies” in 2017. But inspectors have not — until now — found mice tracks at the posh establishment.
President Trump — who’s technically still the chief executive of the restaurant since he never completely divested from his namesake company when he moved into the Oval Office — has a tendency to not clean up after himself, according to a former business associate.
“He has always been far more focused on creating an image for his properties than in spending what it takes to make them excellent,” the ex-associate told The News, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to be candid.
A spokesperson for the Trump Organization wouldn’t comment directly on the rodent reports but said any “minor infractions” were dealt with immediately. The rep also noted the Midtown eatery has an “A” rating despite the violations.
But a Health Department spokeswoman noted the Trump restaurant is still an outlier, as only about 22% of food establishments in the five boroughs have “mice-related violations.”
Inspectors returned to Trump Tower on Aug. 22 to check out the mezzanine bar — and found another “critical” health violation.
An unidentified “food worker” at the gold-plated bar — where “The Billionaire Martini” costs $20 — was not using “proper utensils to eliminate bare hand contact” with raw foods, according to records. Additionally, the inspectors found a “single service” food item was reused and improperly stored.
A bartender at the skyscraper shrugged off cleanliness concerns and said his work station at least doesn’t have rodents scampering around.
“I haven’t seen any mice here,” the barkeep told The News on a recent evening. “I don’t know about the restaurant, but no mice here.”
The health officials came back again Jan. 31 and found Trump cafe and grill workers weren’t keeping certain foods protected from “potential sources of contamination.”
About 12 miles north, at the Trump Golf Links in the Bronx, inspectors detected more “critical” health violations last Nov. 7.
Food contact surfaces at the club’s eatery were not “properly washed, rinsed and sanitized after each use” or after “activity when contamination may have occurred,” the inspectors reported.
Secondly, the golf restaurant’s plumbing and sewage systems were crap, according to the inspectors.
Records reveal mandatory “anti-siphonage” and “backflow prevention” devices hadn’t been installed as part of the plumbing networks, resulting in floors not being “properly drained.”
The “sewage disposal system,” meanwhile, was simply “in disrepair” and “not functioning properly,” the inspectors said.
Despite the sketchy health inspection records, the President has a long history of bragging about his hotels and restaurants, invariably calling them “beautiful” and “the best,” while knocking other people’s eateries.
“The Red Hen Restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders,” Trump tweeted in June after his press secretary was refused service at the Lexington, Va., establishment because of her role in his administration.
He added, “I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!”
Trump’s profound hatred for Democratic Senator dates back to a petty feud over the Empire State Building
Noor Al-Sibai - raw story
29 JAN 2019 AT 20:49 ET
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) gets under Donald Trump’s skin — and the reason why spans back decades.
Politico reported Tuesday that Trump’s attacks on Blumenthal, a former Connecticut attorney general, have more to do with a family feud than his record in Vietnam.
On Monday night, Trump went after the Connecticut Senator on Twitter.
“How does Da Nang Dick (Blumenthal) serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee when he defrauded the American people about his so called War Hero status in Vietnam, only to later admit, with tears pouring down his face, that he was never in Vietnam,” the president tweeted. “An embarrassment to our Country!”
Blumenthal has admitted that he “misstated” his service during the Vietnam war (he was a Marine reservist during that period) — and according to one former senior White House official, that disambiguation angered Trump.
“Trump gets a bad rap for not serving in the military and when he saw someone else who claimed to have served but technically didn’t,” the official told Politico, “he seized on that opportunity.”
But it was a feud between Blumenthal’s in-laws and Trump over the Empire State Building that may be at the core of the president’s animosity towards the Connecticut Democrat.
“Trump and Blumenthal’s father-in-law, Peter Malkin, were competitors in the Manhattan real estate market,” the report noted, “and eventually clashed over a deal involving control of the iconic Empire State Building.”
According to Blumenthal’s seatmate, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), the former Connecticut attorney general “is picking a scab regularly that Trump’s particularly sensitive about.”
Politico reported Tuesday that Trump’s attacks on Blumenthal, a former Connecticut attorney general, have more to do with a family feud than his record in Vietnam.
On Monday night, Trump went after the Connecticut Senator on Twitter.
“How does Da Nang Dick (Blumenthal) serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee when he defrauded the American people about his so called War Hero status in Vietnam, only to later admit, with tears pouring down his face, that he was never in Vietnam,” the president tweeted. “An embarrassment to our Country!”
Blumenthal has admitted that he “misstated” his service during the Vietnam war (he was a Marine reservist during that period) — and according to one former senior White House official, that disambiguation angered Trump.
“Trump gets a bad rap for not serving in the military and when he saw someone else who claimed to have served but technically didn’t,” the official told Politico, “he seized on that opportunity.”
But it was a feud between Blumenthal’s in-laws and Trump over the Empire State Building that may be at the core of the president’s animosity towards the Connecticut Democrat.
“Trump and Blumenthal’s father-in-law, Peter Malkin, were competitors in the Manhattan real estate market,” the report noted, “and eventually clashed over a deal involving control of the iconic Empire State Building.”
According to Blumenthal’s seatmate, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), the former Connecticut attorney general “is picking a scab regularly that Trump’s particularly sensitive about.”
fox news in charge!!!
Trump touts proposed Bible literacy classes in state schools
BY BRETT SAMUELS - the hill
01/28/19 08:58 AM EST
Pissident Trump on Monday embraced proposals from lawmakers in six states that would allow public schools to offer Bible literacy classes.
The president's tweet came shortly after the subject was discussed on "Fox & Friends."
"Numerous states introducing Bible Literacy classes, giving students the option of studying the Bible. Starting to make a turn back? Great!" Trump wrote on Twitter.
Trump's tweet came roughly a half hour after North Dakota state Rep. Aaron McWilliams (R) appeared on "Fox & Friends." McWilliams is co-sponsoring a measure in North Dakota to support Bible literacy classes.
Similar measures have been introduced in Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia, Virginia and Florida.
USA Today reported that the proposals would require or encourage public schools to offer elective classes on the Bible, with a focus on its historical significance.
Critics of the measures have argued that they could violate the constitutional separation between church and state, USA Today reported.
Trump has often courted the support of evangelical leaders, with many defending him despite criticism over his rhetoric toward immigrants and on the campaign trail.
The president's tweet came shortly after the subject was discussed on "Fox & Friends."
"Numerous states introducing Bible Literacy classes, giving students the option of studying the Bible. Starting to make a turn back? Great!" Trump wrote on Twitter.
Trump's tweet came roughly a half hour after North Dakota state Rep. Aaron McWilliams (R) appeared on "Fox & Friends." McWilliams is co-sponsoring a measure in North Dakota to support Bible literacy classes.
Similar measures have been introduced in Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia, Virginia and Florida.
USA Today reported that the proposals would require or encourage public schools to offer elective classes on the Bible, with a focus on its historical significance.
Critics of the measures have argued that they could violate the constitutional separation between church and state, USA Today reported.
Trump has often courted the support of evangelical leaders, with many defending him despite criticism over his rhetoric toward immigrants and on the campaign trail.
The Atlantic: IMPEACH DONALD TRUMP
Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.
kpete - demo underground
1/17/19
On january 20, 2017, Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.
Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.
...................
The oath of office is a president’s promise to subordinate his private desires to the public interest, to serve the nation as a whole rather than any faction within it. Trump displays no evidence that he understands these obligations. To the contrary, he has routinely privileged his self-interest above the responsibilities of the presidency. He has failed to disclose or divest himself from his extensive financial interests, instead using the platform of the presidency to promote them. This has encouraged a wide array of actors, domestic and foreign, to seek to influence his decisions by funneling cash to properties such as Mar-a-Lago (the “Winter White House,” as Trump has branded it) and his hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Courts are now considering whether some of those payments violate the Constitution.
..........
Trump’s bipartisan critics are not merely arguing that he has dishonored the presidency. The most serious charge is that he is attacking the bedrock of American democracy.
........... By delaying the start of the process, in the hope that even clearer evidence will be produced by Mueller or some other source, lawmakers are delaying its eventual conclusion. Better to forge ahead, weighing what is already known and incorporating additional material as it becomes available.
...........
........The process of impeachment itself is likely to shift public opinion, both by highlighting what’s already known and by bringing new evidence to light. If Trump’s support among Republican voters erodes, his support in the Senate may do the same. One lesson of Richard Nixon’s impeachment is that when legislators conclude a presidency is doomed, they can switch allegiances in the blink of an eye.
.........
With a newly seated Democratic majority, the House of Representatives can no longer dodge its constitutional duty. It must immediately open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump, and bring the debate out of the court of public opinion and into Congress, where it belongs.
MORE:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/impeachment-trump/580468/
Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.
...................
The oath of office is a president’s promise to subordinate his private desires to the public interest, to serve the nation as a whole rather than any faction within it. Trump displays no evidence that he understands these obligations. To the contrary, he has routinely privileged his self-interest above the responsibilities of the presidency. He has failed to disclose or divest himself from his extensive financial interests, instead using the platform of the presidency to promote them. This has encouraged a wide array of actors, domestic and foreign, to seek to influence his decisions by funneling cash to properties such as Mar-a-Lago (the “Winter White House,” as Trump has branded it) and his hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Courts are now considering whether some of those payments violate the Constitution.
..........
Trump’s bipartisan critics are not merely arguing that he has dishonored the presidency. The most serious charge is that he is attacking the bedrock of American democracy.
........... By delaying the start of the process, in the hope that even clearer evidence will be produced by Mueller or some other source, lawmakers are delaying its eventual conclusion. Better to forge ahead, weighing what is already known and incorporating additional material as it becomes available.
...........
........The process of impeachment itself is likely to shift public opinion, both by highlighting what’s already known and by bringing new evidence to light. If Trump’s support among Republican voters erodes, his support in the Senate may do the same. One lesson of Richard Nixon’s impeachment is that when legislators conclude a presidency is doomed, they can switch allegiances in the blink of an eye.
.........
With a newly seated Democratic majority, the House of Representatives can no longer dodge its constitutional duty. It must immediately open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump, and bring the debate out of the court of public opinion and into Congress, where it belongs.
MORE:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/impeachment-trump/580468/
Rudy Giuliani just contradicted nearly all the Trump team’s past collusion denials
This is at least the 10th time the denials have been watered down. It might be the most significant rollback.
By Aaron Blake - washington post
January 17 at 7:34 AM
President Trump’s legal spokesman Rudolph W. Giuliani on Wednesday night appeared to grant the possibility that members of Trump’s campaign did, in fact, collude with the Russians during the 2016 presidential election campaign.
And in the process, he contradicted dozens of previous denials that both the Trump team (and Trump himself) have offered.
“I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign,” Giuliani told CNN’s Chris Cuomo, before getting cut off.
“Yes, you have,” Cuomo said.
Giuliani shot back: “I have not. I said ‘the president of the United States.’”
But while Giuliani himself might not have assured that nobody on the campaign colluded, others including Trump sure have. In fact, the Trump team has moved the goal posts on this question no fewer than 10 times after initially denying any contact at all with “foreign entities.” Trump has said dozens of times that there was “no collusion,” full stop. This appears to be the first time anyone has acknowledged the possibility that someone colluded without Trump’s knowledge.
The most likely explanation for that is the unfolding case against Paul Manafort. We learned recently that he shared polling data with an associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, who special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team has said had ties to Russian intelligence during the 2016 campaign. They also discussed a pro-Russia Ukraine peace plan, which is conspicuous because the Republican National Committee’s platform was amended on that issue.
Giuliani suggested that it was possible Manafort did something wrong but that he was on the campaign for too short a time for anyone to know what he was up to.
“He was only there for six months or four months,” Giuliani said.
Let’s walk through the de-evolution of the Trump team’s collusion denials — a list we’ve updated below.
1. November 2016: No communications, period
Hope Hicks: “It never happened. There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign.”
2. February 2017: There were no communications, “to the best of our knowledge”
Sarah Sanders: “This is a non-story because, to the best of our knowledge, no contacts took place.”
3. March 2017: There were communications, but no planned meetings with Russians
Donald Trump Jr.: “Did I meet with people that were Russian? I’m sure, I’m sure I did. . . . But none that were set up. None that I can think of at the moment. And certainly none that I was representing the campaign in any way, shape or form.”
4. July 8, 2017: There was a planned meeting at Trump Tower, but it was “primarily” about adoption and not the campaign
Trump Jr.: “We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at that time and there was no follow-up.”
5. July 9, 2017: The meeting was planned to discuss the campaign, but the information exchanged wasn't “meaningful”
Trump Jr.: “No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”
6. December 2017: Collusion isn't even a crime
President Trump: “There is no collusion, and even if there was, it’s not a crime.”
Jay Sekulow: “For something to be a crime, there has to be a statute that you claim is being violated. There is not a statute that refers to criminal collusion. There is no crime of collusion.”
7. May 16, 2018: Even if meaningful information were obtained, it wasn't used
Giuliani: “And even if it comes from a Russian, or a German, or an American, it doesn’t matter. And they never used it, is the main thing. They never used it. They rejected it. If there was collusion with the Russians, they would have used it.”
[One thing, Rudy Giuliani: The Trump campaign *did* use it.]
8. May 19, 2018: There was a *second* planned meeting about foreign help in the election, but nothing came of it either
The New York Times reported Sunday on yet another meeting about getting foreign help with the 2016 election. This one came three months before the election and featured Donald Trump Jr. and an emissary, George Nader, who said the princes who lead Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates wanted to assist Trump.
Alan Futerfas, Trump Jr.'s attorney: "They pitched Mr. Trump Jr. on a social media platform or marketing strategy. He was not interested, and that was the end of it.”
9. July 16, 2018: Trump couldn't collude, because Trump didn't even know Putin
Trump: "There was no collusion. I didn't know the president. There was nobody to collude with."
10. July 30, 2018: Collusion isn't a crime, and Trump wasn't physically at the Trump Tower meeting
With Michael Cohen alleging that Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting in real time — despite many previous denials — Giuliani told both CNN and Fox News that Trump wasn't physically at the meeting.
"I’m happy to tell Mueller that Trump wasn’t at the Trump Tower meeting,” Giuliani told CNN, adding that "Don Jr. says he wasn’t there.”
He added on Fox: “He did not participate in any meeting about the Russia transaction. . . . And the other people at the meeting that he claims he had without the president about it say he was never there.”
Giuliani also argued that collusion isn't even a crime.
“I don’t even know if that’s a crime — colluding with Russians,” Giuliani said on CNN. “Hacking is the crime. The president didn’t hack. He didn’t pay for the hacking.”
And on Fox: “I have been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime. Collusion is not a crime.”
11. January 16, 2019: Trump didn’t collude, but no guarantees on others in the campaign
The exchange with Cuomo:
GIULIANI: I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign --
CUOMO: Yes, you have.
GIULIANI: I have no idea -- I have not. I said the president of the United States. There is not a single bit of evidence the president of the United States committed the only crime you could commit here -- conspired with the Russians to hack the DNC.
CUOMO: First of all, crime is not the bar of accountability for a president. It’s about what you knew --
GIULIANI: Well, he didn’t collude with Russia either!
CUOMO: -- what was right, and what was wrong, and what did you deceive about? Those are going to be major considerations.
GIULIANI: The president did not collude with the Russians.
(CROSSTALK)
CUOMO: He said nobody had any contact, tons of people had contact. Nobody colluded, the guy running his campaign --
GIULIANI: He didn’t say nobody --
CUOMO: -- was working on an issue at the same time as the convention.
GIULIANI: He said he didn’t. He didn’t say nobody. How would you know that nobody in your campaign --
CUOMO: He actually did say that, Rudy. He said, nobody, and then he said, as far as I know.
(CROSSTALK)
GIULIANI: Well, as far as he knows, it’s true.
And in the process, he contradicted dozens of previous denials that both the Trump team (and Trump himself) have offered.
“I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign,” Giuliani told CNN’s Chris Cuomo, before getting cut off.
“Yes, you have,” Cuomo said.
Giuliani shot back: “I have not. I said ‘the president of the United States.’”
But while Giuliani himself might not have assured that nobody on the campaign colluded, others including Trump sure have. In fact, the Trump team has moved the goal posts on this question no fewer than 10 times after initially denying any contact at all with “foreign entities.” Trump has said dozens of times that there was “no collusion,” full stop. This appears to be the first time anyone has acknowledged the possibility that someone colluded without Trump’s knowledge.
The most likely explanation for that is the unfolding case against Paul Manafort. We learned recently that he shared polling data with an associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, who special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team has said had ties to Russian intelligence during the 2016 campaign. They also discussed a pro-Russia Ukraine peace plan, which is conspicuous because the Republican National Committee’s platform was amended on that issue.
Giuliani suggested that it was possible Manafort did something wrong but that he was on the campaign for too short a time for anyone to know what he was up to.
“He was only there for six months or four months,” Giuliani said.
Let’s walk through the de-evolution of the Trump team’s collusion denials — a list we’ve updated below.
1. November 2016: No communications, period
Hope Hicks: “It never happened. There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign.”
2. February 2017: There were no communications, “to the best of our knowledge”
Sarah Sanders: “This is a non-story because, to the best of our knowledge, no contacts took place.”
3. March 2017: There were communications, but no planned meetings with Russians
Donald Trump Jr.: “Did I meet with people that were Russian? I’m sure, I’m sure I did. . . . But none that were set up. None that I can think of at the moment. And certainly none that I was representing the campaign in any way, shape or form.”
4. July 8, 2017: There was a planned meeting at Trump Tower, but it was “primarily” about adoption and not the campaign
Trump Jr.: “We primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children that was active and popular with American families years ago and was since ended by the Russian government, but it was not a campaign issue at that time and there was no follow-up.”
5. July 9, 2017: The meeting was planned to discuss the campaign, but the information exchanged wasn't “meaningful”
Trump Jr.: “No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”
6. December 2017: Collusion isn't even a crime
President Trump: “There is no collusion, and even if there was, it’s not a crime.”
Jay Sekulow: “For something to be a crime, there has to be a statute that you claim is being violated. There is not a statute that refers to criminal collusion. There is no crime of collusion.”
7. May 16, 2018: Even if meaningful information were obtained, it wasn't used
Giuliani: “And even if it comes from a Russian, or a German, or an American, it doesn’t matter. And they never used it, is the main thing. They never used it. They rejected it. If there was collusion with the Russians, they would have used it.”
[One thing, Rudy Giuliani: The Trump campaign *did* use it.]
8. May 19, 2018: There was a *second* planned meeting about foreign help in the election, but nothing came of it either
The New York Times reported Sunday on yet another meeting about getting foreign help with the 2016 election. This one came three months before the election and featured Donald Trump Jr. and an emissary, George Nader, who said the princes who lead Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates wanted to assist Trump.
Alan Futerfas, Trump Jr.'s attorney: "They pitched Mr. Trump Jr. on a social media platform or marketing strategy. He was not interested, and that was the end of it.”
9. July 16, 2018: Trump couldn't collude, because Trump didn't even know Putin
Trump: "There was no collusion. I didn't know the president. There was nobody to collude with."
10. July 30, 2018: Collusion isn't a crime, and Trump wasn't physically at the Trump Tower meeting
With Michael Cohen alleging that Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting in real time — despite many previous denials — Giuliani told both CNN and Fox News that Trump wasn't physically at the meeting.
"I’m happy to tell Mueller that Trump wasn’t at the Trump Tower meeting,” Giuliani told CNN, adding that "Don Jr. says he wasn’t there.”
He added on Fox: “He did not participate in any meeting about the Russia transaction. . . . And the other people at the meeting that he claims he had without the president about it say he was never there.”
Giuliani also argued that collusion isn't even a crime.
“I don’t even know if that’s a crime — colluding with Russians,” Giuliani said on CNN. “Hacking is the crime. The president didn’t hack. He didn’t pay for the hacking.”
And on Fox: “I have been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime. Collusion is not a crime.”
11. January 16, 2019: Trump didn’t collude, but no guarantees on others in the campaign
The exchange with Cuomo:
GIULIANI: I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign --
CUOMO: Yes, you have.
GIULIANI: I have no idea -- I have not. I said the president of the United States. There is not a single bit of evidence the president of the United States committed the only crime you could commit here -- conspired with the Russians to hack the DNC.
CUOMO: First of all, crime is not the bar of accountability for a president. It’s about what you knew --
GIULIANI: Well, he didn’t collude with Russia either!
CUOMO: -- what was right, and what was wrong, and what did you deceive about? Those are going to be major considerations.
GIULIANI: The president did not collude with the Russians.
(CROSSTALK)
CUOMO: He said nobody had any contact, tons of people had contact. Nobody colluded, the guy running his campaign --
GIULIANI: He didn’t say nobody --
CUOMO: -- was working on an issue at the same time as the convention.
GIULIANI: He said he didn’t. He didn’t say nobody. How would you know that nobody in your campaign --
CUOMO: He actually did say that, Rudy. He said, nobody, and then he said, as far as I know.
(CROSSTALK)
GIULIANI: Well, as far as he knows, it’s true.
Dear Donald: You're over
Cyrano - demo underground
12/31/18
Dear Donald:
Try to get this. Try to grasp the words. Try what you're not used to. Try thinking.
Yeah, I know that thinking is hard for you, so I'll use small words.
Most people are onto you. Most voters are onto you. The world is onto you.
It's difficult to look at yourself and figure out who/what you are. So let me try to explain yourself to you.
You love only yourself. You want to be admired and loved by all. You want to win regardless of any stupid game you're playing.
You want your name on anything/everything of value that is built anywhere in the world. Actually, you "need" it more than you want it. It's who and what you are.
You want to be worshiped by every human being on the planet.
Well, Donald, I love breaking bad news to you. The fact is that you are despised by most people on planet Earth. And the reason for that is that you are a prick of the first order. You have no sympathy, empathy, or even a faint wisp of caring about anyone other than yourself.
The reality that children have died on the border is a crime against humanity that will stick to you forever. The fact that you have encouraged American fascism and homegrown Nazis is a stench that will stick to you forever. The fact that you are, perhaps, the worst human being who has ever occupied the White House is a disgrace that can never be eradicated and that will cling to you forever.
I have no idea whether or not you are insane. And I don't give a shit if you are or aren't. All I, and most people on Earth want to see, is you gone from power.
Allow me to make this as clear as possible. You are one major dick and a horrible human being. You've written your own history. And it's really fucking ugly. My wish is that you live long enough to see all of humanity view you as a dim-witted, mean-spirited, horrendous, grotesque villain.
Try to get this. Try to grasp the words. Try what you're not used to. Try thinking.
Yeah, I know that thinking is hard for you, so I'll use small words.
Most people are onto you. Most voters are onto you. The world is onto you.
It's difficult to look at yourself and figure out who/what you are. So let me try to explain yourself to you.
You love only yourself. You want to be admired and loved by all. You want to win regardless of any stupid game you're playing.
You want your name on anything/everything of value that is built anywhere in the world. Actually, you "need" it more than you want it. It's who and what you are.
You want to be worshiped by every human being on the planet.
Well, Donald, I love breaking bad news to you. The fact is that you are despised by most people on planet Earth. And the reason for that is that you are a prick of the first order. You have no sympathy, empathy, or even a faint wisp of caring about anyone other than yourself.
The reality that children have died on the border is a crime against humanity that will stick to you forever. The fact that you have encouraged American fascism and homegrown Nazis is a stench that will stick to you forever. The fact that you are, perhaps, the worst human being who has ever occupied the White House is a disgrace that can never be eradicated and that will cling to you forever.
I have no idea whether or not you are insane. And I don't give a shit if you are or aren't. All I, and most people on Earth want to see, is you gone from power.
Allow me to make this as clear as possible. You are one major dick and a horrible human being. You've written your own history. And it's really fucking ugly. My wish is that you live long enough to see all of humanity view you as a dim-witted, mean-spirited, horrendous, grotesque villain.
Trump has a story of how his presidency’s going. Here’s what the numbers say.
It's not pretty.
RYAN KORONOWSKI - thinkprogress
DEC 26, 2018, 9:00 AM
According to Donald Trump, who was elected president just over two years ago, his administration is among the greatest in history, with the greatest economy in American history and a nation finally respected again. As he told Bob Woodward this summer, “nobody’s ever done a better job than I’m doing as president.”
The United Nations could not hold back a laugh in September when Trump said in a speech: “In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”
This lofty rhetoric certainly seems farcical as 2018 draws to a close with government (controlled by the president’s party) shut down, markets in free-fall, and allies abroad fearing an increasingly unpredictable president.
With such a schism in reality — between the president and his supporters who think things are going fine and critics alarmed by each new tweet and headline — numbers are often helpful to get some objective truth.
Here is the truth of how the Trump administration is doing, looking at the numbers.
$55.5 billion: Highest trade deficit in a decade
Trump said the trade deficit would drop like never before:
“The trade deficit was only $84 billion when Bill Clinton was first inaugurated. So, we’ve taken from $84 billion, which is a lot of money, to now $800 billion. And going up, going fast unless I become president. You will see a drop like you’ve never seen before. You have never seen before.”
---
3.9 million: Number of children without health insurance
When MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asked candidate Trump in 2017, “So all Americans will get health care of some sort?” Trump said:
“We’re going to take care of them. We’re going to take care of them. We have to take care of them. Now, that’s not single payer. That’s not anything. That’s just human decency.”
The reality is much darker.
For the first time in almost a decade, the rate of uninsured children in the United States increased, according to a study from Georgetown’s Center for Children and families. The report found that 276,000 more kids didn’t have coverage in 2017 than in 2016, raising the total to 3.9 million. That’s 5 percent of all people under the age of 18, compared to 4.7 percent the year before.
---
0: miles of new border wall
Trump has said multiple times that he has already begun constructing his border wall, despite constant fights with Congress to appropriate the money to his administration.
“A lot of the wall is built,” he said this month in the Oval Office. “It’s been very effective.”
---
3.3 million: The number of acres of conserved land for which Trump eliminated protections
Trump said:
“We’re going to conserve our beautiful natural habitats, reserve, and so important, we’re going to take care of those habitats. We’re going to take care of our reserves. And we’re gonna take such great care of our resources. Our resources are vital. We’re gonna take care of those resources.”
---
27 percent: World’s confidence in American leadership at historic low
Trump routinely says that America is more respected now than in the past:
“We are respected again, I can tell you that. We are respected again. A lot of things have happened. We’re respected again.”
---
45 percent: Highest opposition to Supreme Court nominee
Trump said his second nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, was the most deserving person in the country: “There is no one in America more qualified for this position, and no one more deserving.”
---
Trump has also nominated more unqualified lower court judges than anyone in recent history. That’s six judges — four district and two appellate — who have earned “not qualified” ratings from the American Bar Association.
This compares to zero from the Obama administration, one from the George W. Bush administration, three from the Clinton administration, and none from George H.W. Bush’s administration. Four of Trump’s not qualified nominees have been confirmed.
15.4: Gigawatts of capacity in coal plant retirements — a record
Trump said during the campaign he would revitalize the coal industry:
“Coal is coming back. Clean coal is coming back, 100 percent… We’re going to bring the coal industry back 100 percent.”
Trump may have said he was bringing the coal industry back, but two years in, the industry is still on a steady decline. Over the last three decades, the coal industry lost around 100,000 jobs, and the last two years have barely moved the needle.
Demand for coal is also not rising — a recent report found that in 2018, more coal-fired electricity generation capacity will be shut down than ever before — 15.4 gigawatts, to be precise.
78.6: Lower life expectancy
Trump said, simply, as a candidate:
“If I win, all of the bad things happening in the U.S. will be rapidly reversed!”
Here’s one statistic that has not improved since he took office. In 2017, life expectancy fell a tenth of a year to 78.6 years, partially due to trends like a rising suicide rate and the opioid crisis.
2.7 percent: Greenhouse gas emissions saw their biggest jump worldwide in 2018
Trump said in 2015:
“And you know what I want to do? I want really immaculate air.”
But the air is not getting cleaner.
After years of relatively small growth, global greenhouse gas emissions rose steeply from 2017 to 2018.
---
17 investigations
It’s not just the Mueller investigation — there are actually 17 total investigationstargeting Trump and his businesses, according to a count that appeared in Wired.
The special prosecutor is looking at Russian 2016 election interference, WikiLeaks, Middle Eastern influence, Paul Manafort, Trump Tower Moscow, obstruction of justice, and inappropriate contact between Russia and the Trump campaign as well as the Trump transition team.
There are several other investigations into the Trump Organization, the Trump Inaugural Committee, SuperPAC funding, foreign lobbying, by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. And several other state attorneys general are investigating other parts of the Trump galaxy.
The United Nations could not hold back a laugh in September when Trump said in a speech: “In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”
This lofty rhetoric certainly seems farcical as 2018 draws to a close with government (controlled by the president’s party) shut down, markets in free-fall, and allies abroad fearing an increasingly unpredictable president.
With such a schism in reality — between the president and his supporters who think things are going fine and critics alarmed by each new tweet and headline — numbers are often helpful to get some objective truth.
Here is the truth of how the Trump administration is doing, looking at the numbers.
$55.5 billion: Highest trade deficit in a decade
Trump said the trade deficit would drop like never before:
“The trade deficit was only $84 billion when Bill Clinton was first inaugurated. So, we’ve taken from $84 billion, which is a lot of money, to now $800 billion. And going up, going fast unless I become president. You will see a drop like you’ve never seen before. You have never seen before.”
---
3.9 million: Number of children without health insurance
When MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asked candidate Trump in 2017, “So all Americans will get health care of some sort?” Trump said:
“We’re going to take care of them. We’re going to take care of them. We have to take care of them. Now, that’s not single payer. That’s not anything. That’s just human decency.”
The reality is much darker.
For the first time in almost a decade, the rate of uninsured children in the United States increased, according to a study from Georgetown’s Center for Children and families. The report found that 276,000 more kids didn’t have coverage in 2017 than in 2016, raising the total to 3.9 million. That’s 5 percent of all people under the age of 18, compared to 4.7 percent the year before.
---
0: miles of new border wall
Trump has said multiple times that he has already begun constructing his border wall, despite constant fights with Congress to appropriate the money to his administration.
“A lot of the wall is built,” he said this month in the Oval Office. “It’s been very effective.”
---
3.3 million: The number of acres of conserved land for which Trump eliminated protections
Trump said:
“We’re going to conserve our beautiful natural habitats, reserve, and so important, we’re going to take care of those habitats. We’re going to take care of our reserves. And we’re gonna take such great care of our resources. Our resources are vital. We’re gonna take care of those resources.”
---
27 percent: World’s confidence in American leadership at historic low
Trump routinely says that America is more respected now than in the past:
“We are respected again, I can tell you that. We are respected again. A lot of things have happened. We’re respected again.”
---
45 percent: Highest opposition to Supreme Court nominee
Trump said his second nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, was the most deserving person in the country: “There is no one in America more qualified for this position, and no one more deserving.”
---
Trump has also nominated more unqualified lower court judges than anyone in recent history. That’s six judges — four district and two appellate — who have earned “not qualified” ratings from the American Bar Association.
This compares to zero from the Obama administration, one from the George W. Bush administration, three from the Clinton administration, and none from George H.W. Bush’s administration. Four of Trump’s not qualified nominees have been confirmed.
15.4: Gigawatts of capacity in coal plant retirements — a record
Trump said during the campaign he would revitalize the coal industry:
“Coal is coming back. Clean coal is coming back, 100 percent… We’re going to bring the coal industry back 100 percent.”
Trump may have said he was bringing the coal industry back, but two years in, the industry is still on a steady decline. Over the last three decades, the coal industry lost around 100,000 jobs, and the last two years have barely moved the needle.
Demand for coal is also not rising — a recent report found that in 2018, more coal-fired electricity generation capacity will be shut down than ever before — 15.4 gigawatts, to be precise.
78.6: Lower life expectancy
Trump said, simply, as a candidate:
“If I win, all of the bad things happening in the U.S. will be rapidly reversed!”
Here’s one statistic that has not improved since he took office. In 2017, life expectancy fell a tenth of a year to 78.6 years, partially due to trends like a rising suicide rate and the opioid crisis.
2.7 percent: Greenhouse gas emissions saw their biggest jump worldwide in 2018
Trump said in 2015:
“And you know what I want to do? I want really immaculate air.”
But the air is not getting cleaner.
After years of relatively small growth, global greenhouse gas emissions rose steeply from 2017 to 2018.
---
17 investigations
It’s not just the Mueller investigation — there are actually 17 total investigationstargeting Trump and his businesses, according to a count that appeared in Wired.
The special prosecutor is looking at Russian 2016 election interference, WikiLeaks, Middle Eastern influence, Paul Manafort, Trump Tower Moscow, obstruction of justice, and inappropriate contact between Russia and the Trump campaign as well as the Trump transition team.
There are several other investigations into the Trump Organization, the Trump Inaugural Committee, SuperPAC funding, foreign lobbying, by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. And several other state attorneys general are investigating other parts of the Trump galaxy.
Here’s the bizarre story behind Trump’s bungled attempt to build a high-rise in Moscow
Travis Gettys - raw story
29 NOV 2018 AT 10:43 ET
Pissident Donald Trump may have endangered his presidency and American democracy with his business dealings in Russia — but he has nothing to show for it.
His longtime attorney revealed Thursday in federal court that he had lied to Congress by saying the Trump Tower Moscow deal fell apart in January 2016, and admitted the project remained under negotiation until June 2016.
Trump signed a letter of intent in October 2015, after launching his improbably successful presidential campaign, but the back story for the project shows how the president aligned himself with sketchy characters to pursue the ill-fated project.
The former real estate developer and reality TV star spent decades cultivating relationships in Russia, but he never actually built anything there, and The Atlantic‘s Julia Ioffe tried to find out why in a September 2017 investigative report.
What she found, in short, is that Trump isn’t nearly as good a businessman as he likes to brag.
“Trump wants everything and he’s dealing with the Russians, who aren’t stupid,” said one Western real estate investor in Moscow. “If you want everything from the Russians, they’re not going to give it to you. Trump’s way of negotiating is to ask for every f*cking thing. The Russians have a different philosophy of negotiation: He who asks is the weak party.”
Other big-name hotel brands have built in Moscow, but they actually run those businesses in addition to licensing their names — which was all Trump offered.
“Trump wants a fee for branding and doesn’t put money in, so most developers’ in Moscow responses are, ‘So what the f*ck do we need him for?’” said a person familiar with the licensing negotiations.
Donald Trump Jr. summed up the complex back story by admitting Russia “really is a scary place.”
The younger Trump told a trade publication in 2008, when he revealed “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” that Trump Organization was concerned about the payoffs necessary to do business in Russia, where corruption is rampant and bribes are necessary.
“Moscow is like New York in many ways, just way more corrupt,” said one Western real estate developer in Russia, who asked for anonymity to avoid upsetting his foreign partners. “To pull a building out of the ground, you need so many permits, so many authorizations — the mind reels. And all of it is so corrupt, it’s insane.”
Ioffe, who was born in Moscow and came to the U.S. with her parents at 7, said the Trump Organization would have needed a capable and connected local partner to obtain all the necessary permits.
Trump worked with Aras Agalarov — whose son was involved in arranging the campaign meeting between Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer — in 2013, but that deal fell apart over a scandal in Kyrgyzstan and amid Russian economic woes.
The future president instead relied on Felix Sater, a Russian-American convicted felon with mob ties who also worked as an FBI informant.
Sater started traveling to Moscow on Trump’s behalf in 2004, and three years later also started advising the self-described Donald Trump of Russia, Sergei Polonsky, over the objections of the developer’s lieutenants.
“I would never hire somebody like that,” said Alexey Kunitsin, who was then chairman of the board at Polonsky’s company. “You can’t trust him in any way, not in a professional setting, not in a personal setting — you could see it very clearly. He was telling constant crazy stories, wild fantasies about all the people he knew. He was not a balanced dude. He’s very emotional and gets into conflicts very easily.”
Sater gained a reputation as a “bullsh*tter” and raised suspicions with his colorful tales of profligate spending, and Moscow developers didn’t trust him or take him seriously.
Those developers also didn’t trust Trump, who was an outsider without the necessary political protection to do business in Moscow.
Sater seems to have hoped that might change after Trump announced his presidential campaign, according to emails recently obtained by the New York Times that show him bragging to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen that he had lined up financing for Trump Tower from VTB — a bank under U.S. sanctions.
“I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Sater said in one email, and Trump signed a non-binding letter of attempt in fall 2015 to pursue the project.
However, that deal too went nowhere because Sater lacked the right connections and because Russia’s economy was still staggering under U.S. sanctions imposed the year before.
Cohen tried to revive the project in 2016 by trying to contact the players Sater had bragged about but instead sent an email to a top Putin lieutenant using his general email listed on the Kremlin website, and the official declined to respond.
Moscow developers described Cohen’s action as more of a rookie mistake than evidence of high-level contacts — and they told The Atlantic it shows why Trump never got anything built in Russia.
“That is like the stupidest, most absurd thing ever,” said one Western real estate developer. “The Russians that (Trump) associates with, I would never do business with. I’ve been involved with Russia for 25 years.”
The developer offered a withering criticism of Trump’s business acumen, given his famous name that’s become synonymous with a certain type of luxury.
“A genuine developer could’ve done a lot with that brand,” the developer said.
His longtime attorney revealed Thursday in federal court that he had lied to Congress by saying the Trump Tower Moscow deal fell apart in January 2016, and admitted the project remained under negotiation until June 2016.
Trump signed a letter of intent in October 2015, after launching his improbably successful presidential campaign, but the back story for the project shows how the president aligned himself with sketchy characters to pursue the ill-fated project.
The former real estate developer and reality TV star spent decades cultivating relationships in Russia, but he never actually built anything there, and The Atlantic‘s Julia Ioffe tried to find out why in a September 2017 investigative report.
What she found, in short, is that Trump isn’t nearly as good a businessman as he likes to brag.
“Trump wants everything and he’s dealing with the Russians, who aren’t stupid,” said one Western real estate investor in Moscow. “If you want everything from the Russians, they’re not going to give it to you. Trump’s way of negotiating is to ask for every f*cking thing. The Russians have a different philosophy of negotiation: He who asks is the weak party.”
Other big-name hotel brands have built in Moscow, but they actually run those businesses in addition to licensing their names — which was all Trump offered.
“Trump wants a fee for branding and doesn’t put money in, so most developers’ in Moscow responses are, ‘So what the f*ck do we need him for?’” said a person familiar with the licensing negotiations.
Donald Trump Jr. summed up the complex back story by admitting Russia “really is a scary place.”
The younger Trump told a trade publication in 2008, when he revealed “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” that Trump Organization was concerned about the payoffs necessary to do business in Russia, where corruption is rampant and bribes are necessary.
“Moscow is like New York in many ways, just way more corrupt,” said one Western real estate developer in Russia, who asked for anonymity to avoid upsetting his foreign partners. “To pull a building out of the ground, you need so many permits, so many authorizations — the mind reels. And all of it is so corrupt, it’s insane.”
Ioffe, who was born in Moscow and came to the U.S. with her parents at 7, said the Trump Organization would have needed a capable and connected local partner to obtain all the necessary permits.
Trump worked with Aras Agalarov — whose son was involved in arranging the campaign meeting between Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer — in 2013, but that deal fell apart over a scandal in Kyrgyzstan and amid Russian economic woes.
The future president instead relied on Felix Sater, a Russian-American convicted felon with mob ties who also worked as an FBI informant.
Sater started traveling to Moscow on Trump’s behalf in 2004, and three years later also started advising the self-described Donald Trump of Russia, Sergei Polonsky, over the objections of the developer’s lieutenants.
“I would never hire somebody like that,” said Alexey Kunitsin, who was then chairman of the board at Polonsky’s company. “You can’t trust him in any way, not in a professional setting, not in a personal setting — you could see it very clearly. He was telling constant crazy stories, wild fantasies about all the people he knew. He was not a balanced dude. He’s very emotional and gets into conflicts very easily.”
Sater gained a reputation as a “bullsh*tter” and raised suspicions with his colorful tales of profligate spending, and Moscow developers didn’t trust him or take him seriously.
Those developers also didn’t trust Trump, who was an outsider without the necessary political protection to do business in Moscow.
Sater seems to have hoped that might change after Trump announced his presidential campaign, according to emails recently obtained by the New York Times that show him bragging to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen that he had lined up financing for Trump Tower from VTB — a bank under U.S. sanctions.
“I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Sater said in one email, and Trump signed a non-binding letter of attempt in fall 2015 to pursue the project.
However, that deal too went nowhere because Sater lacked the right connections and because Russia’s economy was still staggering under U.S. sanctions imposed the year before.
Cohen tried to revive the project in 2016 by trying to contact the players Sater had bragged about but instead sent an email to a top Putin lieutenant using his general email listed on the Kremlin website, and the official declined to respond.
Moscow developers described Cohen’s action as more of a rookie mistake than evidence of high-level contacts — and they told The Atlantic it shows why Trump never got anything built in Russia.
“That is like the stupidest, most absurd thing ever,” said one Western real estate developer. “The Russians that (Trump) associates with, I would never do business with. I’ve been involved with Russia for 25 years.”
The developer offered a withering criticism of Trump’s business acumen, given his famous name that’s become synonymous with a certain type of luxury.
“A genuine developer could’ve done a lot with that brand,” the developer said.
Cowardice is the real source of Donald Trump’s perpetual lying and narcissistic insensitivity to others
By Michael Winship, Common Dreams - COMMENTARY - raw story
27 NOV 2018 AT 15:38 ET
Our president is a coward.
This may not come as news to you.
But as we cascade toward the latter half of his first and, God hope it, only term, Donald Trump’s craven fearfulness is worth a reminder simply because of its vast continuing implications for our country and the world.
Of course, there’s the surface narcissistic indifference and insensitivity to others, in particular his disregard for members of the military and veterans, despite his many tweeted proclamations of support and gratitude.
This disrespect was made manifest in early November during the 100th anniversary celebrations of the armistice that ended World War I. His well-known fear of wet head kept him indoors, a no show both on one of the days he was in France and later at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. Panic at the prospect of a bad hair day apparently took precedence over Veterans’ Day.
Not since the first month of his administration has Trump made a visit to pay his respects at Dover Air Force Base, where the bodies of America’s war dead are returned home. According to Bob Woodward in his book, Fear, the commander-in-chief was “clearly rattled” by that one experience and won’t go back. Duty and sacrifice just aren’t his thing.
And although he loudly has supported more defense spending, unlike his predecessors, it’s no surprise that Trump has yet to visit any of our troops deployed abroad in combat zones. “In modern times, we expect presidents to do that much more than in the old days when travel was more difficult,”historian Michael Beschloss told The Washington Post. “When Trump doesn’t come anywhere close to meeting the expectation, it makes people wonder why.”
Despite his self-professed “unbelievably busy schedule,” (including 154 visits to golf resorts, mostly his own, since Inauguration Day), the president now says that a visit will happen, although no date has been set. Yet Josh Dawsey and Paul Sonne at The Post quote a former White House official: “He’s never been interested in going. He’s afraid of those situations. He’s afraid people want to kill him.”
Acting out his timorous bully tendencies, Trump has lashed out at those possessing the courage he lacks, insulting Gold Star families, the late senator and former POW John McCain and recently, retired Navy SEAL and Special Operations commander Bill McRaven.
So, as opposed as you and I may be to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else our armed forces are placed in harm’s way—including the Mexican border, where their presence is political, gratuitous and unlawful—there’s no denying that the commander-in-chief’s graceless apathy, even antipathy, have done nothing but create ill will.
Worse and scarier, according to The New York Times, “[T]op Defense Department officials say that Mr. Trump has not fully grasped the role of the troops he commands, nor the responsibility that he has to lead them and protect them from politics.”
Beyond his personal cowardice (including his seeming, non-Apprentice-like inability to fire anyone face-to-face), an overall paranoia about the world beyond his bubble leaves him ignorant and unwilling to face inconvenient truths. That’s why conspiracy theories are so reassuring to Trump and his followers – there’s always some larger force at work that makes it easy to shirk responsibility and blame someone –anyone – else.
It’s part of what keeps him from confronting the awful and incontrovertible reality of climate change, his administration trying to bury on the day after Thanksgiving that stunning, 1656-page assessment from thirteen federal agencies. As per The Times, “The report puts the most precise price tags to date on the cost to the United States economy of projected climate impacts: $141 billion from heat-related deaths, $118 billion from sea level rise and $32 billion from infrastructure damage by the end of the century, among others.”
Trump’s response? “I don’t believe it.”
Look, too, at his refusal to listen to the tape of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey. “It’s a suffering tape, it’s a terrible tape,” Trump told Fox’s Chris Wallace. “I’ve been fully briefed on it. There’s no reason for me to hear it.”
That denial is a singular metaphor for the president’s gutless inability to confront Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or his father Saudi King Salman over the killing – or any of Saudi Arabia’s grotesque and cruel violations of human rights. Despite overwhelming evidence presented to him by the intelligence community, “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t,” was Trump’s response when asked if the crown prince was complicit in Khashoggi’s death. It was an answer eerily reminiscent of his “very fine people on both sides” comments in the wake of the fatal neo-Nazi riot in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Much of his cowardice is egged on by avarice and amoral political calculation, as our chief executive evaluates everything by price and values nothing by standards of common sense, common decency or the greater common good. Living in a constant greed-fueled state of fear and suspicion, Trump sidles up to dictators abroad. He only attacks our democratic allies, who sensibly, so far, have valued the length and durability of our friendships over the short-term ravings of an uninformed and intolerant autocrat.
Like his fellow totalitarian Putin and others, he brooks no dissent or opposition and views the facts as daggers pointed straight at his heart. Trump is so afraid to face the truth that he makes up lies to comfort himself, fabrications that give him an excuse to take no action—or to take actions so heinous we’ll be trying to recover from them for decades to come.
This may not come as news to you.
But as we cascade toward the latter half of his first and, God hope it, only term, Donald Trump’s craven fearfulness is worth a reminder simply because of its vast continuing implications for our country and the world.
Of course, there’s the surface narcissistic indifference and insensitivity to others, in particular his disregard for members of the military and veterans, despite his many tweeted proclamations of support and gratitude.
This disrespect was made manifest in early November during the 100th anniversary celebrations of the armistice that ended World War I. His well-known fear of wet head kept him indoors, a no show both on one of the days he was in France and later at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. Panic at the prospect of a bad hair day apparently took precedence over Veterans’ Day.
Not since the first month of his administration has Trump made a visit to pay his respects at Dover Air Force Base, where the bodies of America’s war dead are returned home. According to Bob Woodward in his book, Fear, the commander-in-chief was “clearly rattled” by that one experience and won’t go back. Duty and sacrifice just aren’t his thing.
And although he loudly has supported more defense spending, unlike his predecessors, it’s no surprise that Trump has yet to visit any of our troops deployed abroad in combat zones. “In modern times, we expect presidents to do that much more than in the old days when travel was more difficult,”historian Michael Beschloss told The Washington Post. “When Trump doesn’t come anywhere close to meeting the expectation, it makes people wonder why.”
Despite his self-professed “unbelievably busy schedule,” (including 154 visits to golf resorts, mostly his own, since Inauguration Day), the president now says that a visit will happen, although no date has been set. Yet Josh Dawsey and Paul Sonne at The Post quote a former White House official: “He’s never been interested in going. He’s afraid of those situations. He’s afraid people want to kill him.”
Acting out his timorous bully tendencies, Trump has lashed out at those possessing the courage he lacks, insulting Gold Star families, the late senator and former POW John McCain and recently, retired Navy SEAL and Special Operations commander Bill McRaven.
So, as opposed as you and I may be to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else our armed forces are placed in harm’s way—including the Mexican border, where their presence is political, gratuitous and unlawful—there’s no denying that the commander-in-chief’s graceless apathy, even antipathy, have done nothing but create ill will.
Worse and scarier, according to The New York Times, “[T]op Defense Department officials say that Mr. Trump has not fully grasped the role of the troops he commands, nor the responsibility that he has to lead them and protect them from politics.”
Beyond his personal cowardice (including his seeming, non-Apprentice-like inability to fire anyone face-to-face), an overall paranoia about the world beyond his bubble leaves him ignorant and unwilling to face inconvenient truths. That’s why conspiracy theories are so reassuring to Trump and his followers – there’s always some larger force at work that makes it easy to shirk responsibility and blame someone –anyone – else.
It’s part of what keeps him from confronting the awful and incontrovertible reality of climate change, his administration trying to bury on the day after Thanksgiving that stunning, 1656-page assessment from thirteen federal agencies. As per The Times, “The report puts the most precise price tags to date on the cost to the United States economy of projected climate impacts: $141 billion from heat-related deaths, $118 billion from sea level rise and $32 billion from infrastructure damage by the end of the century, among others.”
Trump’s response? “I don’t believe it.”
Look, too, at his refusal to listen to the tape of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey. “It’s a suffering tape, it’s a terrible tape,” Trump told Fox’s Chris Wallace. “I’ve been fully briefed on it. There’s no reason for me to hear it.”
That denial is a singular metaphor for the president’s gutless inability to confront Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or his father Saudi King Salman over the killing – or any of Saudi Arabia’s grotesque and cruel violations of human rights. Despite overwhelming evidence presented to him by the intelligence community, “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t,” was Trump’s response when asked if the crown prince was complicit in Khashoggi’s death. It was an answer eerily reminiscent of his “very fine people on both sides” comments in the wake of the fatal neo-Nazi riot in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Much of his cowardice is egged on by avarice and amoral political calculation, as our chief executive evaluates everything by price and values nothing by standards of common sense, common decency or the greater common good. Living in a constant greed-fueled state of fear and suspicion, Trump sidles up to dictators abroad. He only attacks our democratic allies, who sensibly, so far, have valued the length and durability of our friendships over the short-term ravings of an uninformed and intolerant autocrat.
Like his fellow totalitarian Putin and others, he brooks no dissent or opposition and views the facts as daggers pointed straight at his heart. Trump is so afraid to face the truth that he makes up lies to comfort himself, fabrications that give him an excuse to take no action—or to take actions so heinous we’ll be trying to recover from them for decades to come.
Here are all the Trump projects where Ivanka and her dad misled real estate buyers
Pro Publica - raw story
18 OCT 2018 AT 06:39 ET
A pattern of deception ran through the Trumps’ real estate deals since the mid-2000s. Not only were the Trumps more than the mere licensors they claimed to be, extracting millions in fees from nearly every facet of these projects, but they often misled buyers and investors on key information — such as the level of sales and the Trumps’ role and investment in the deals. (Read our full investigation.) The Trump Organization did not respond to our questions, and the White House didn’t have a comment.
Projects Where a Trump Family Member Overstated Sales Numbers
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Claim: Donald Trump claimed $365 million in sales in a 2007 letter to The Wall Street Journal.
Reality: Trump reported $290 million in a 2009 project audit.
Result: Never built.
FORT LAUDERDALE
Claim: Trump announced the hotel/condo was “pretty much sold out” in April 2006, according to a broker who attended the presentation.
Reality: 62 percent of units were sold as of July 2006, according to bank records that emerged in a court case.
Result: Entered foreclosure. Trump’s name removed before construction completed.
LAS VEGAS
Claim: Condos “sold out,” Trump told The Associated Press in 2005
Reality: About 25 percent of units were sold by 2011, according to press accounts.
Result: Built.
PANAMA
Claim: “It’s a 1,000-unit building, we’ve sold over 90 percent of it,” Ivanka told Portfolioin 2008.
Reality: As of three months later, 79 percent of the units were pre-sold, according to Moody’s.
Result: Built, but went bankrupt; Trump name removed.
SOHO
Claim: In 2008, Ivanka told reporters that 60 percent of units had sold.
Reality:A Trump partner’s affidavit revealed that 15 percent had been sold at the time.
Result: Built, but went bankrupt; Trump name removed.
TAMPA
Claim: The building “sold out,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal in 2007.
Reality: The developers failed to sell a minimum of 70 percent of units, according to a Trump company letter that year, which deemed that a violation of its contract.
Result: Never built.
TORONTO
Claim: In a 2009 interview, Ivanka referred to the property as “virtually sold out.”
Reality: 24.8 percent of units had sold, according to a 2016 bankruptcy filing by the developers.
Result: Built, but went bankrupt; Trump name removed.
Projects Where the Trumps Suggested They Were Developers, Partners or Equity Owners (They Weren’t)BAJAMore than 50 buyers claimed Ivanka said the Trump Organization was a developer on the project at a 2007 sales event, according to a lawsuit quoted by Univision.
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
“I am excited to be building Trump at Cap Cana,” Trump was quoted saying in a 2007 press release, according to Univision.
FORT LAUDERDALE
Trump called the hotel and tower “my latest development” in a letter announcing the project.
REPUBLIC OF GEORGIA
“TRUMP INVESTS IN GEORGIA” read banners for the project, according to The New Yorker. Asked by a Fox anchor what he was “investing in,” Trump responded, “I’m doing a big development” in Georgia.
PANAMA
“I am honored to develop this extraordinary high rise with my partner Roger Khafif of the K Group,” Trump said in a 2009 marketing statement.
TAMPA
Trump claimed an ownership stake in a news article at the time, stating it was less than 50 percent, then adding: “But it’s a substantial stake. I recently said I’d like to increase my stake but when they’re selling that well they don’t let you do that.”
WAIKIKI
In the final episode of season five of “The Apprentice,” Trump announced the project on national TV, saying “that’s why I’m building the magnificent Trump Hotel and Tower Waikiki.” In 2007, he told The Wall Street Journal: “This building is largely owned by me and being developed by me.”
Projects Where a Trump Family Member Overstated Sales Numbers
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Claim: Donald Trump claimed $365 million in sales in a 2007 letter to The Wall Street Journal.
Reality: Trump reported $290 million in a 2009 project audit.
Result: Never built.
FORT LAUDERDALE
Claim: Trump announced the hotel/condo was “pretty much sold out” in April 2006, according to a broker who attended the presentation.
Reality: 62 percent of units were sold as of July 2006, according to bank records that emerged in a court case.
Result: Entered foreclosure. Trump’s name removed before construction completed.
LAS VEGAS
Claim: Condos “sold out,” Trump told The Associated Press in 2005
Reality: About 25 percent of units were sold by 2011, according to press accounts.
Result: Built.
PANAMA
Claim: “It’s a 1,000-unit building, we’ve sold over 90 percent of it,” Ivanka told Portfolioin 2008.
Reality: As of three months later, 79 percent of the units were pre-sold, according to Moody’s.
Result: Built, but went bankrupt; Trump name removed.
SOHO
Claim: In 2008, Ivanka told reporters that 60 percent of units had sold.
Reality:A Trump partner’s affidavit revealed that 15 percent had been sold at the time.
Result: Built, but went bankrupt; Trump name removed.
TAMPA
Claim: The building “sold out,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal in 2007.
Reality: The developers failed to sell a minimum of 70 percent of units, according to a Trump company letter that year, which deemed that a violation of its contract.
Result: Never built.
TORONTO
Claim: In a 2009 interview, Ivanka referred to the property as “virtually sold out.”
Reality: 24.8 percent of units had sold, according to a 2016 bankruptcy filing by the developers.
Result: Built, but went bankrupt; Trump name removed.
Projects Where the Trumps Suggested They Were Developers, Partners or Equity Owners (They Weren’t)BAJAMore than 50 buyers claimed Ivanka said the Trump Organization was a developer on the project at a 2007 sales event, according to a lawsuit quoted by Univision.
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
“I am excited to be building Trump at Cap Cana,” Trump was quoted saying in a 2007 press release, according to Univision.
FORT LAUDERDALE
Trump called the hotel and tower “my latest development” in a letter announcing the project.
REPUBLIC OF GEORGIA
“TRUMP INVESTS IN GEORGIA” read banners for the project, according to The New Yorker. Asked by a Fox anchor what he was “investing in,” Trump responded, “I’m doing a big development” in Georgia.
PANAMA
“I am honored to develop this extraordinary high rise with my partner Roger Khafif of the K Group,” Trump said in a 2009 marketing statement.
TAMPA
Trump claimed an ownership stake in a news article at the time, stating it was less than 50 percent, then adding: “But it’s a substantial stake. I recently said I’d like to increase my stake but when they’re selling that well they don’t let you do that.”
WAIKIKI
In the final episode of season five of “The Apprentice,” Trump announced the project on national TV, saying “that’s why I’m building the magnificent Trump Hotel and Tower Waikiki.” In 2007, he told The Wall Street Journal: “This building is largely owned by me and being developed by me.”
Making us proud to be Americans!!!
Trump Statuettes Spotted On Brooklyn Sidewalks.
A treat for our canine friends
The Planners Of The Trump Tower Meeting Moved Millions, And Mueller Is Now Investigating
Documents show suspicious transfers began six days before the controversial meeting.
Anthony Cormier
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Jason Leopold
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on September 21, 2018, at 10:45 a.m. ET
On June 3, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. received one of the most striking emails of the presidential campaign, offering dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s “support for Mr. Trump.”
Trump Jr. responded 17 minutes later: “if it’s what you say I love it.”
That email led to a meeting at Trump Tower that has become a central focus of the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
But the very day that email was sent, another exchange was taking place behind the scenes.
Documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News show that $3.3 million began moving on June 3 between two of the men who orchestrated the meeting: Aras Agalarov, a billionaire real estate developer close to both Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump, and Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze, a longtime Agalarov employee once investigated for money laundering.
That money is on top of the more than $20 million that was flagged as suspicious, BuzzFeed News revealed earlier this month, after the money ricocheted among the planners and participants of the Trump Tower meeting. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, which has been investigating whether any individuals colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election, is examining the suspicious transactions, four federal law enforcement officials said. A spokesperson for Mueller’s office declined to comment.
Although the documents do not directly link the $3.3 million to the meeting, they show that officials at three separate banks raised red flags about the funds. Many of the transfers seemed to have no legitimate purpose, bankers noted. Kaveladze quickly moved money to other accounts he controlled, and appeared to use some of it to make payments on Agalarov’s behalf — including more than $700,000 to pay off American Express charges.
Scott Balber, an attorney for Agalarov and Kaveladze, said each of these transactions was legitimate and there is nothing improper with their financial activity. Balber explained that Agalarov sent funds to Kaveladze, an employee, to pay various business or personal expenses in the US.
“What is suspicious, or insidious, about a billionaire who pays his employee in the US to pay his business or domestic bills?” Balber said. “This looks like complete nonsense.”
“It’s obvious the events of June 2016 have been a focal point of the special counsel’s investigation, various congressional inquiries, tremendous media attention and the like,” Balber said. “We are in the lens of that reality, so it doesn’t surprise me that there’s been some flyspecking, some gross overreporting by a number of financial institutions. They won’t be criticized for overreporting suspicious activity.”
None of these transactions was discovered until 2017, after the New York Times revealed the Trump Tower meeting. Shortly after those reports, investigators asked financial institutions to look back at their accounts to learn how money flowed among the people who planned and attended the meeting: Agalarov; Kaveladze; Agalarov’s pop star son, Emin; their employee, Rob Goldstone, who sent the original email to Trump Jr.; and others.
To unearth connections between some of their accounts, banks took an extraordinary step: They invoked a provision of the Patriot Act — a post-9/11 law that included new tools to track money laundering and terrorist financing. That provision, rarely used in the Trump-Russia investigation, allowed the banks to share information about customers with one another.
Three financial institutions — Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley — discovered the $3.3 million that flowed from Agalarov to Kaveladze.
They also learned that Kaveladze had given different banks radically different descriptions of one of his main companies, Corsy International. To JP Morgan Chase, Kaveladze said Corsy was a “transportation equipment and supplies merchant wholesaler.” He told Citibank it was a “music promotion company.” Agalarov gave yet another description to Morgan Stanley, calling the firm a “service provider” for his vast real estate company, Crocus Group.
Balber, the attorney, said that there are two separate businesses, both named “Corsy International,” that Kaveladze controlled. One is based in California and is involved in “procurement” issues related to Agalarov’s business empire. The other is based in New York and is largely involved with the music career of Emin Agalarov.
That lack of transparency made it difficult for bankers to know the true purpose of the funds into the company’s accounts. Examiners also became concerned with how Kaveladze handled the money.
On June 3, the day of the email exchange with Donald Trump Jr., Kaveladze began depositing checks into his JP Morgan Chase Platinum business checking account in California. He used three different branches in Huntington Beach, California, and the five checks totaled about $397,000. Each originated with Agalarov and referred to “compensation Amex expenses.”
Then on June 6, Agalarov started sending checks through an account at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management to Kaveladze’s company.
Those funds totaled about $971,000.
When they reviewed these accounts, bank examiners became suspicious because it was unclear exactly how the money was supposed to be used.
For instance, at JP Morgan Chase, Kaveladze transferred money from one of his companies’ accounts to another and ultimately sent 24 payments over 15 months to American Express for a total of $725,000 — a red flag to bankers because they said it appeared Kaveladze was making the payments for Agalarov. The documents do not say what expenses were charged to American Express, and three federal law enforcement agents said investigators are still trying to figure it out. Balber said these transactions were legitimate personal and business expenses for Agalarov.
The details unearthed by bankers were compiled in “suspicious activity reports” sent to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which shared them with other law enforcement agencies investigating Russian interference.
Suspicious activity reports are not evidence of wrongdoing, but they can provide valuable information to investigators looking into possible money laundering, fraud, tax evasion, or other financial misconduct.
During their reviews in 2017, some banks noticed behavior that they had not previously flagged. Bank of America, for example, noted about $7.8 million that was sent from Corsy International to another of Kaveladze’s businesses, Promomed, between 2012 and 2014. Bankers said they were concerned that by transferring funds from one company to another, Kaveladze was trying to obscure the original source of the money.
Citibank went far back into its accounts to search for suspicious activity by Kaveladze and the Agalarov family. Examiners “elevated” about $11.9 million in transactions that began in 2015, largely because the transactions originated in “high-risk jurisdictions,” or locations that are known as havens for money laundering, and because the funds were sent for “unknown purposes.”
Kaveladze had popped up on Citibank’s radar in September 2015, when he applied for a $100,000 line of credit for Corsy International. At that time, he told bankers that the company had $8 million in sales the previous year and that it had about $240,000 in available funds — but when Citibank investigated further, examiners learned that Corsy International’s account was actually overdrawn.
Citibank denied the loan.
Balber, Kaveladze’s attorney, said that his client did nothing improper, and that he doesn’t recall telling the bank about Corsy International’s available funds.
All three banks cited a 2000 report by the Government Accountability Office, in which Kaveladze was investigated as part of a Russian money laundering scheme. Kaveladze, that report found, established more than 2,000 corporations in Delaware for Russian real estate brokers, then set up US bank accounts for them. The brokers used these accounts to transfer about $1.4 billion, the report found.
Kaveladze was never charged with a crime and called the GAO’s inquiry a “witch hunt.”
Trump Jr. responded 17 minutes later: “if it’s what you say I love it.”
That email led to a meeting at Trump Tower that has become a central focus of the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
But the very day that email was sent, another exchange was taking place behind the scenes.
Documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News show that $3.3 million began moving on June 3 between two of the men who orchestrated the meeting: Aras Agalarov, a billionaire real estate developer close to both Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump, and Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze, a longtime Agalarov employee once investigated for money laundering.
That money is on top of the more than $20 million that was flagged as suspicious, BuzzFeed News revealed earlier this month, after the money ricocheted among the planners and participants of the Trump Tower meeting. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, which has been investigating whether any individuals colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election, is examining the suspicious transactions, four federal law enforcement officials said. A spokesperson for Mueller’s office declined to comment.
Although the documents do not directly link the $3.3 million to the meeting, they show that officials at three separate banks raised red flags about the funds. Many of the transfers seemed to have no legitimate purpose, bankers noted. Kaveladze quickly moved money to other accounts he controlled, and appeared to use some of it to make payments on Agalarov’s behalf — including more than $700,000 to pay off American Express charges.
Scott Balber, an attorney for Agalarov and Kaveladze, said each of these transactions was legitimate and there is nothing improper with their financial activity. Balber explained that Agalarov sent funds to Kaveladze, an employee, to pay various business or personal expenses in the US.
“What is suspicious, or insidious, about a billionaire who pays his employee in the US to pay his business or domestic bills?” Balber said. “This looks like complete nonsense.”
“It’s obvious the events of June 2016 have been a focal point of the special counsel’s investigation, various congressional inquiries, tremendous media attention and the like,” Balber said. “We are in the lens of that reality, so it doesn’t surprise me that there’s been some flyspecking, some gross overreporting by a number of financial institutions. They won’t be criticized for overreporting suspicious activity.”
None of these transactions was discovered until 2017, after the New York Times revealed the Trump Tower meeting. Shortly after those reports, investigators asked financial institutions to look back at their accounts to learn how money flowed among the people who planned and attended the meeting: Agalarov; Kaveladze; Agalarov’s pop star son, Emin; their employee, Rob Goldstone, who sent the original email to Trump Jr.; and others.
To unearth connections between some of their accounts, banks took an extraordinary step: They invoked a provision of the Patriot Act — a post-9/11 law that included new tools to track money laundering and terrorist financing. That provision, rarely used in the Trump-Russia investigation, allowed the banks to share information about customers with one another.
Three financial institutions — Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley — discovered the $3.3 million that flowed from Agalarov to Kaveladze.
They also learned that Kaveladze had given different banks radically different descriptions of one of his main companies, Corsy International. To JP Morgan Chase, Kaveladze said Corsy was a “transportation equipment and supplies merchant wholesaler.” He told Citibank it was a “music promotion company.” Agalarov gave yet another description to Morgan Stanley, calling the firm a “service provider” for his vast real estate company, Crocus Group.
Balber, the attorney, said that there are two separate businesses, both named “Corsy International,” that Kaveladze controlled. One is based in California and is involved in “procurement” issues related to Agalarov’s business empire. The other is based in New York and is largely involved with the music career of Emin Agalarov.
That lack of transparency made it difficult for bankers to know the true purpose of the funds into the company’s accounts. Examiners also became concerned with how Kaveladze handled the money.
On June 3, the day of the email exchange with Donald Trump Jr., Kaveladze began depositing checks into his JP Morgan Chase Platinum business checking account in California. He used three different branches in Huntington Beach, California, and the five checks totaled about $397,000. Each originated with Agalarov and referred to “compensation Amex expenses.”
Then on June 6, Agalarov started sending checks through an account at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management to Kaveladze’s company.
Those funds totaled about $971,000.
When they reviewed these accounts, bank examiners became suspicious because it was unclear exactly how the money was supposed to be used.
For instance, at JP Morgan Chase, Kaveladze transferred money from one of his companies’ accounts to another and ultimately sent 24 payments over 15 months to American Express for a total of $725,000 — a red flag to bankers because they said it appeared Kaveladze was making the payments for Agalarov. The documents do not say what expenses were charged to American Express, and three federal law enforcement agents said investigators are still trying to figure it out. Balber said these transactions were legitimate personal and business expenses for Agalarov.
The details unearthed by bankers were compiled in “suspicious activity reports” sent to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which shared them with other law enforcement agencies investigating Russian interference.
Suspicious activity reports are not evidence of wrongdoing, but they can provide valuable information to investigators looking into possible money laundering, fraud, tax evasion, or other financial misconduct.
During their reviews in 2017, some banks noticed behavior that they had not previously flagged. Bank of America, for example, noted about $7.8 million that was sent from Corsy International to another of Kaveladze’s businesses, Promomed, between 2012 and 2014. Bankers said they were concerned that by transferring funds from one company to another, Kaveladze was trying to obscure the original source of the money.
Citibank went far back into its accounts to search for suspicious activity by Kaveladze and the Agalarov family. Examiners “elevated” about $11.9 million in transactions that began in 2015, largely because the transactions originated in “high-risk jurisdictions,” or locations that are known as havens for money laundering, and because the funds were sent for “unknown purposes.”
Kaveladze had popped up on Citibank’s radar in September 2015, when he applied for a $100,000 line of credit for Corsy International. At that time, he told bankers that the company had $8 million in sales the previous year and that it had about $240,000 in available funds — but when Citibank investigated further, examiners learned that Corsy International’s account was actually overdrawn.
Citibank denied the loan.
Balber, Kaveladze’s attorney, said that his client did nothing improper, and that he doesn’t recall telling the bank about Corsy International’s available funds.
All three banks cited a 2000 report by the Government Accountability Office, in which Kaveladze was investigated as part of a Russian money laundering scheme. Kaveladze, that report found, established more than 2,000 corporations in Delaware for Russian real estate brokers, then set up US bank accounts for them. The brokers used these accounts to transfer about $1.4 billion, the report found.
Kaveladze was never charged with a crime and called the GAO’s inquiry a “witch hunt.”
Trump admits Fox News hosts influenced his decision to declassify key Russia documents
"The great Lou Dobbs, the great Sean Hannity, the wonderful great Jeanie Pirro."
FRANK DALE - thinkprogress
SEP 19, 2018, 6:25 PM
Any doubt about the feedback loop between President Donald Trump and FoxNews can be put to rest, as the president credited Fox’s Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Jeanine Pirro for his decision to declassify key Russia documents in an interview with The Hill released on Wednesday.
As ThinkProgress reported on Tuesday, Trump’s declassification of materials relating to the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was made “at the request of” top congressional Republicans, including Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who was a member of the Executive Committee for Trump’s White House transition.
Despite concerns about potential national security issues resulting from Trump’s actions, especially since neither the Department of Justice nor FBI were reportedly involved in the decision, the president praised Fox News and Fox Business hosts for making the recommendation to him during a conversation with Hill.tv’s John Solomon and Buck Sexton.
“I have been asked by so many people that I respect, please — the great Lou Dobbs, the great Sean Hannity, the wonderful great Jeanie Pirro. (laughs)
No, she takes it so personally. And that’s not, let’s say they like me. But this is beyond liking me. They know that this is one of the great scandals in the history of our country.”
Trump also mentioned Fox News’ Gregg Jarrett when he was asked about the declassification of Russia documents earlier in the interview.
“You know Gregg Jarrett wrote a book called the Russian Hoax. It actually is a hoax. I call it a witch hunt, but it’s a hoax. Beyond a witch hunt.”
Hannity first referenced Trump’s ability to declassify Russia documents on the July 23 episode of his Fox News show, according to Media Matters’ Nick Fernandez. Hannity and Dobbs have discussed the subject at least a dozen separate times on their shows since then.
Trump’s mention of how Fox News influenced his decision to declassify documents was not included in The Hill’s article about the interview, which contained a note that “brief segments where the president went off the record or made personal observations unrelated to the interview” were removed. However, the names of Hannity, Dobbs, Pirro, and Jarrett appear in the transcript released later on Wednesday.
Solomon, who conducted the interview for Hill.tv, has a long history of twisting the truth to defend Trump.
As ThinkProgress reported on Tuesday, Trump’s declassification of materials relating to the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was made “at the request of” top congressional Republicans, including Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who was a member of the Executive Committee for Trump’s White House transition.
Despite concerns about potential national security issues resulting from Trump’s actions, especially since neither the Department of Justice nor FBI were reportedly involved in the decision, the president praised Fox News and Fox Business hosts for making the recommendation to him during a conversation with Hill.tv’s John Solomon and Buck Sexton.
“I have been asked by so many people that I respect, please — the great Lou Dobbs, the great Sean Hannity, the wonderful great Jeanie Pirro. (laughs)
No, she takes it so personally. And that’s not, let’s say they like me. But this is beyond liking me. They know that this is one of the great scandals in the history of our country.”
Trump also mentioned Fox News’ Gregg Jarrett when he was asked about the declassification of Russia documents earlier in the interview.
“You know Gregg Jarrett wrote a book called the Russian Hoax. It actually is a hoax. I call it a witch hunt, but it’s a hoax. Beyond a witch hunt.”
Hannity first referenced Trump’s ability to declassify Russia documents on the July 23 episode of his Fox News show, according to Media Matters’ Nick Fernandez. Hannity and Dobbs have discussed the subject at least a dozen separate times on their shows since then.
Trump’s mention of how Fox News influenced his decision to declassify documents was not included in The Hill’s article about the interview, which contained a note that “brief segments where the president went off the record or made personal observations unrelated to the interview” were removed. However, the names of Hannity, Dobbs, Pirro, and Jarrett appear in the transcript released later on Wednesday.
Solomon, who conducted the interview for Hill.tv, has a long history of twisting the truth to defend Trump.
Trump said that condemning Charlottesville neo-Nazis was ‘the biggest fUcking mistake I’ve made’: Bob Woodward
Brad Reed - RAW STORY
04 SEP 2018 AT 11:50 ET
Bob Woodward’s new book on President Donald Trump — titled “Fear: Inside the Trump White House” — is filled with explosive revelations about Trump’s presidency.
One of the most explosive has to do with the president’s handling of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in the summer of 2017, in which the president said that there were “very fine people” on “both sides” of the demonstration.
According to a leaked excerpt obtained by the Washington Post, Trump deeply resented being forced to come out and specifically condemn white nationalists after being advised by aides that he needed to do so to make clear that he was opposed to racism.
“That was the biggest f*cking mistake I’ve made,” Trump told advisers shortly after giving a speech that condemned Nazis, according to Woodward’s sources, who also say Trump called the speech “the worst” he’d ever given.
Woodward also reports that former Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn, who is Jewish, threatened to resign after Trump’s Charlottesville performance, but was convinced to stay aboard by the president, who accused him of “treason” for thinking of stepping down.
Chief of staff John Kelly, whom Woodward also reports believes Trump is an “idiot,”told Cohn that he was similarly horrified by Trump’s performance and also considered resigning from his post.
RELATED: Trump’s staff staged a ‘coup’ to stop him from destroying nation: Woodward
Pr*sdent’s own staff staged a quiet “coup” to prevent “a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world,” according to a new book by Pulitzer-winning Watergate reporter Bob Woodward.
One of the most explosive has to do with the president’s handling of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in the summer of 2017, in which the president said that there were “very fine people” on “both sides” of the demonstration.
According to a leaked excerpt obtained by the Washington Post, Trump deeply resented being forced to come out and specifically condemn white nationalists after being advised by aides that he needed to do so to make clear that he was opposed to racism.
“That was the biggest f*cking mistake I’ve made,” Trump told advisers shortly after giving a speech that condemned Nazis, according to Woodward’s sources, who also say Trump called the speech “the worst” he’d ever given.
Woodward also reports that former Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn, who is Jewish, threatened to resign after Trump’s Charlottesville performance, but was convinced to stay aboard by the president, who accused him of “treason” for thinking of stepping down.
Chief of staff John Kelly, whom Woodward also reports believes Trump is an “idiot,”told Cohn that he was similarly horrified by Trump’s performance and also considered resigning from his post.
RELATED: Trump’s staff staged a ‘coup’ to stop him from destroying nation: Woodward
Pr*sdent’s own staff staged a quiet “coup” to prevent “a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world,” according to a new book by Pulitzer-winning Watergate reporter Bob Woodward.
Trump was involved in scuttling FBI building across from Trump’s DC Hotel: Inspector General report
Bob Brigham - raw story
27 AUG 2018 AT 16:19 ET
The Inspector General of the General Services Administration on Monday released an in-depth report showing President Donald Trump was involved in scuttling plans by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to build a new headquarters.
The president was mentioned over three dozen times in the report.
The Inspector General report found that GSA Administrator Emily Murphy’s testimony before Congress on the scandal, “was incomplete and may have left the misleading impression that she had no discussions with the President or senior White House officials in the decision-making process about the project.”
The Trump administration invoked executive privilege to prevent the inspector general from learning exactly what was said when President Trump allegedly intervened in the rebuilding process.
The FBI plan would have created a large construction zone across the street from Trump’s luxury DC hotel.
The investigation was initiated by Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), the Vice Ranking Member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
“This IG report demonstrates that Administration officials obscured the White House’s involvement in the FBI headquarters project,” Connolly concluded.
“When we began this investigation, the prospect that President Trump was personally involved in the government-led redevelopment of a property in close proximity to the Trump Hotel was dismissed as a conspiracy theory,” he added. “Now, the president’s involvement in this multi-billion-dollar government procurement which will directly impact his bottom line has been confirmed by the White House Press Secretary and government photographs.”
Connolly also urged further investigation.
“This IG report is only the beginning. We must develop a comprehensive understanding of the President’s involvement in this procurement and what it has cost the United States in terms of both national security and taxpayer dollars. I am calling on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee to convene immediate hearings on this matter and to subpoena any GSA officials who are suspected of misleading Congress,” he demanded.
Read the full report (PDF).
The president was mentioned over three dozen times in the report.
The Inspector General report found that GSA Administrator Emily Murphy’s testimony before Congress on the scandal, “was incomplete and may have left the misleading impression that she had no discussions with the President or senior White House officials in the decision-making process about the project.”
The Trump administration invoked executive privilege to prevent the inspector general from learning exactly what was said when President Trump allegedly intervened in the rebuilding process.
The FBI plan would have created a large construction zone across the street from Trump’s luxury DC hotel.
The investigation was initiated by Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA), the Vice Ranking Member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
“This IG report demonstrates that Administration officials obscured the White House’s involvement in the FBI headquarters project,” Connolly concluded.
“When we began this investigation, the prospect that President Trump was personally involved in the government-led redevelopment of a property in close proximity to the Trump Hotel was dismissed as a conspiracy theory,” he added. “Now, the president’s involvement in this multi-billion-dollar government procurement which will directly impact his bottom line has been confirmed by the White House Press Secretary and government photographs.”
Connolly also urged further investigation.
“This IG report is only the beginning. We must develop a comprehensive understanding of the President’s involvement in this procurement and what it has cost the United States in terms of both national security and taxpayer dollars. I am calling on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee to convene immediate hearings on this matter and to subpoena any GSA officials who are suspected of misleading Congress,” he demanded.
Read the full report (PDF).
Trump's future
Here’s how the Russian mob used cash from a multi-billion dollar gas scam to get their hooks into Trump
Travis Gettys - raw story
16 AUG 2018 AT 08:55 ET
President Donald Trump got his start laundering money for the Russian mob more than 30 years ago as part of one of the biggest scams in U.S. history, according to a new book.
Investigative reporter Craig Unger has described Trump Tower as a “cathedral to money laundering,” and his new book — “House of Trump, House of Putin” — examines the depth of the president’s relationship with the Russian mafia, which he says has no meaningful distinction from the country’s intelligence agencies.
Unger traces the links between Trump and the Russian mob back to at least 1984, when a Soviet refugee David Bogatin was looking for a place to stash the millions he was raking in from a gasoline tax scam he was running with the Colombo crime family.
That scam, the largest of its kind in American history, was busted up by federal investigators as part of Operation Red Daisy, which resulted in the indictment of 15 Russian nationals and 10 others for evading more than $140 million in fuel excise taxes.
Bogatin and two associates, Michael Markowitz and Lev Persits, approached Michael Franzese, the son of a notorious underboss in the Colombo organization, in 1980 asking for protection for their own network of sketchy gas stations.
“These Russians were having trouble collecting money owed them,” Franzese later recalled. “They were also having problems obtaining and holding on to the licenses they needed to keep the gas tax scam going.”
Franzese, the son of mob enforcer John “Sonny” Franzese, was not initially impressed by the Russians — he mocked Markowitz’s disco-styled attire and thought Bogatin looked more like an accountant than a mafioso — but agreed to work for them in exchange for 75 percent of their take in the scheme, Unger wrote.
The lopsided deal proved spectacularly successful for both sides, as profits soared to $100 million a month and more than $1 billion a year — but the conspirators needed a place to launder their ill-gotten cash.
“After seven years in New York, Bogatin had stashed away enough money to buy real estate anywhere he wanted,” Unger wrote. “For roughly a decade, thousands of Russian Jews like him had been pouring into Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. But Bogatin had his eyes on something more prestigious.”
Bogatin became fixated on a “garish” 58-story building that had opened a year before — Trump Tower — and he paid $6 million in cash from his fuel tax scheme for five apartments there.
Unger tracked more than 1,300 similar cash transactions at Trump Tower over the next three decades involving mobsters that ensnared the future president in the closely tied web of Russian spies and mobsters.
“Russian Mafia and Russian intelligence operatives successfully targeted, compromised, and implanted either a willfully ignorant or an inexplicably unaware Russian asset in the White House as the most powerful man on earth,” Unger concludes.
“In doing so, without firing a shot, the Russians helped put in power a man who would immediately begin to undermine the Western Alliance,” he added, “which has been the foundation of American national security for more than 70 years; who would start massive trade wars with America’s longtime allies; fuel right‐wing anti‐immigrant populism; and assault the rule of law in the United States.”
Investigative reporter Craig Unger has described Trump Tower as a “cathedral to money laundering,” and his new book — “House of Trump, House of Putin” — examines the depth of the president’s relationship with the Russian mafia, which he says has no meaningful distinction from the country’s intelligence agencies.
Unger traces the links between Trump and the Russian mob back to at least 1984, when a Soviet refugee David Bogatin was looking for a place to stash the millions he was raking in from a gasoline tax scam he was running with the Colombo crime family.
That scam, the largest of its kind in American history, was busted up by federal investigators as part of Operation Red Daisy, which resulted in the indictment of 15 Russian nationals and 10 others for evading more than $140 million in fuel excise taxes.
Bogatin and two associates, Michael Markowitz and Lev Persits, approached Michael Franzese, the son of a notorious underboss in the Colombo organization, in 1980 asking for protection for their own network of sketchy gas stations.
“These Russians were having trouble collecting money owed them,” Franzese later recalled. “They were also having problems obtaining and holding on to the licenses they needed to keep the gas tax scam going.”
Franzese, the son of mob enforcer John “Sonny” Franzese, was not initially impressed by the Russians — he mocked Markowitz’s disco-styled attire and thought Bogatin looked more like an accountant than a mafioso — but agreed to work for them in exchange for 75 percent of their take in the scheme, Unger wrote.
The lopsided deal proved spectacularly successful for both sides, as profits soared to $100 million a month and more than $1 billion a year — but the conspirators needed a place to launder their ill-gotten cash.
“After seven years in New York, Bogatin had stashed away enough money to buy real estate anywhere he wanted,” Unger wrote. “For roughly a decade, thousands of Russian Jews like him had been pouring into Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. But Bogatin had his eyes on something more prestigious.”
Bogatin became fixated on a “garish” 58-story building that had opened a year before — Trump Tower — and he paid $6 million in cash from his fuel tax scheme for five apartments there.
Unger tracked more than 1,300 similar cash transactions at Trump Tower over the next three decades involving mobsters that ensnared the future president in the closely tied web of Russian spies and mobsters.
“Russian Mafia and Russian intelligence operatives successfully targeted, compromised, and implanted either a willfully ignorant or an inexplicably unaware Russian asset in the White House as the most powerful man on earth,” Unger concludes.
“In doing so, without firing a shot, the Russians helped put in power a man who would immediately begin to undermine the Western Alliance,” he added, “which has been the foundation of American national security for more than 70 years; who would start massive trade wars with America’s longtime allies; fuel right‐wing anti‐immigrant populism; and assault the rule of law in the United States.”
Trump- Putin Summit
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trump funnies
When an Idiot is in charge!!!
trump family values
Donald Trump’s grandfather Friedrich Trump ran a restaurant, bar, and brothel in British Columbia.
America's Criminal-in-Chief
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But her emails
trade fool!!!
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Trump Confirms His “Shithole” Racism By Saying He Wants Immigrants From Non-White Countries Out
By Jason Easley on Tue, Jan 16th, 2018 at 3:20 pm
politicus usa
Trump responded that he wanted immigrants from other non-white parts of the world out of the United States when he was asked about his immigration views in the White House.
Here is the transcript via the White House as provided to PoliticusUSA:
Q Mr. President, did you say that you want more people to come in from Norway? Did you say that you wanted more people coming in from Norway?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
Q Is that true, Mr. President?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: I want them to come in from everywhere — everywhere. Thank you very much, everybody.
Q Just the Caucasian or white countries, sir? Or do you want people to come in from other parts of the world?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Out.
Why would Trump answer out if that isn’t what he wants to see happen to immigrant who come to the United States from non-white majority countries? Trump’s entire immigration policy has been focused on deporting black and brown skinned people, so his one word answer was not a surprise.
Republicans and the administration have never denied that Trump wants non-white immigrants out of the country. They claim that he didn’t use the word “shithole,” but there has never been a firm denial that Trump holds a racist view of African countries.
Trump’s own answer confirmed that it doesn’t matter what Republicans pretend like they didn’t hear, this president is bigoted and intends to deport non-white immigrants.
Here is the transcript via the White House as provided to PoliticusUSA:
Q Mr. President, did you say that you want more people to come in from Norway? Did you say that you wanted more people coming in from Norway?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
Q Is that true, Mr. President?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: I want them to come in from everywhere — everywhere. Thank you very much, everybody.
Q Just the Caucasian or white countries, sir? Or do you want people to come in from other parts of the world?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Out.
Why would Trump answer out if that isn’t what he wants to see happen to immigrant who come to the United States from non-white majority countries? Trump’s entire immigration policy has been focused on deporting black and brown skinned people, so his one word answer was not a surprise.
Republicans and the administration have never denied that Trump wants non-white immigrants out of the country. They claim that he didn’t use the word “shithole,” but there has never been a firm denial that Trump holds a racist view of African countries.
Trump’s own answer confirmed that it doesn’t matter what Republicans pretend like they didn’t hear, this president is bigoted and intends to deport non-white immigrants.
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Trump getting up at the crack of 11 ... after spending the morning in bed watching TV
By Mark Sumner - daily kos
Monday Jan 08, 2018 · 7:30 AM PST
Over the past week, multiple stories have appeared about Trump’s mental decline. His evaporating vocabulary. His dwindling attention span. His shriveling comprehension.
But while those losses are hard to prove without Trump actually going through with his offer to take an IQ test—which seems extremely unlikely—Axois reports that there’s one other thing that Trump is doing … littlely.
President Trump is starting his official day much later than he did in the early days of his presidency, often around 11am, and holding far fewer meetings, according to copies of his private schedule shown to Axios. This is largely to meet Trump’s demands for more “Executive Time,” which almost always means TV and Twitter time alone in the residence, officials tell us.
This news of Trump’s extremely abbreviated morning session comes a week after we learned about Trump’s senior discount evening plans.
"If (Trump) was not having his 6:30 dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls -- the phone was his true contact point with the world -- to a small group of friends, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another."
So, Donald Trump spends at least 17 hours of each day in his PJs. His presidenting schedule has apparently been reduced to a 11-4 interval between parking himself back in front of the bedroom TV.
The schedule says Trump has "Executive Time" in the Oval Office every day from 8am to 11am, but the reality is he spends that time in his residence, watching TV, making phone calls and tweeting. Trump comes down for his first meeting of the day, which is often an intelligence briefing, at 11am.
Which means Trump has plenty of time for the Gorilla Channel (which is a joke) and Fox & Friends (which is a different kind of joke). Read More
But while those losses are hard to prove without Trump actually going through with his offer to take an IQ test—which seems extremely unlikely—Axois reports that there’s one other thing that Trump is doing … littlely.
President Trump is starting his official day much later than he did in the early days of his presidency, often around 11am, and holding far fewer meetings, according to copies of his private schedule shown to Axios. This is largely to meet Trump’s demands for more “Executive Time,” which almost always means TV and Twitter time alone in the residence, officials tell us.
This news of Trump’s extremely abbreviated morning session comes a week after we learned about Trump’s senior discount evening plans.
"If (Trump) was not having his 6:30 dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls -- the phone was his true contact point with the world -- to a small group of friends, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another."
So, Donald Trump spends at least 17 hours of each day in his PJs. His presidenting schedule has apparently been reduced to a 11-4 interval between parking himself back in front of the bedroom TV.
The schedule says Trump has "Executive Time" in the Oval Office every day from 8am to 11am, but the reality is he spends that time in his residence, watching TV, making phone calls and tweeting. Trump comes down for his first meeting of the day, which is often an intelligence briefing, at 11am.
Which means Trump has plenty of time for the Gorilla Channel (which is a joke) and Fox & Friends (which is a different kind of joke). Read More
NARCO-A-LAGO: MONEY LAUNDERING AT THE TRUMP OCEAN CLUB PANAMA
You can download the PDF version of this report here.
From Global Witness: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
“Every other country goes into these places and they do what they have to do… It’s a horrible law and [the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act] should be changed.”
In the early 2000s, a series of bankruptcies meant Donald J. Trump was shunned by most lenders. Struggling for credit, he started selling his name to high-end real estate projects. This report examines in detail the criminal connections that propelled one such project – the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama – and how this case bears some of the same disturbing hallmarks as other Trump developments.
Since he became President of the United States, numerous investigations and articles have probed Trump’s business dealings and his alleged links to criminals and other shadowy characters. It is understood that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation under the Department of Justice will also examine his real estate business. This is important because it seems likely that, following his various bankruptcies, at least a part of Trump’s business empire has been built on untraceable funds, some apparently linked to Russian criminal networks.
Trump may not have deliberately set out to facilitate criminal activity in his business dealings. But, as this Global Witness investigation shows, licensing his brand to the luxurious Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama aligned Trump’s financial interests with those of crooks looking to launder ill-gotten gains. Trump seems to have done little to nothing to prevent this. What is clear is that proceeds from Colombian cartels’ narcotics trafficking were laundered through the Trump Ocean Club and that Donald Trump was one of the beneficiaries.
One key player in the laundering of drug money at the Trump Ocean Club was notorious fraudster David Eduardo Helmut Murcia Guzmán, whom a U.S. court subsequently sentenced to nine years for laundering millions of dollars' worth of illicit funds, including narcotics proceeds, through companies and real estate.
Another was Murcia Guzmán’s business associate, Alexandre Henrique Ventura Nogueira, who brokered nearly a third of the 666 pre-construction unit sales at the Trump Ocean Club and claims to have sold 350-400 units overall. Ventura Nogueira’s sales brokerage was critical to ensuring the project’s lift-off and Trump’s ability to earn tens of millions of dollars.
The warning signs were there from the outset. The Trump Ocean Club, one of Trump’s most lucrative licensing deals to date, was announced in 2006 and launched in 2011, a period when Panama was known as one of the best places in the world to launder money. Whole neighborhoods in Panama City were taken over by organized crime groups, and luxury developments were built with the purpose of serving as money laundering vehicles.
Moreover, investing in luxury properties is a tried and trusted way for criminals to move tainted cash into the legitimate financial system, where they can spend it freely. Once scrubbed clean in this way, vast profits from criminal activities like trafficking people and drugs, organized crime, and terrorism can find their way into the U.S. and elsewhere. In most countries, regulation is notoriously lax in the real estate sector. Cash payments are subject to hardly any scrutiny, giving opportunistic and unprincipled developers free rein to accept dirty money.
In the case of the Trump Ocean Club, accepting easy – and possibly dirty – money early on would have been in Trump’s interest; a certain volume of pre-construction sales was necessary to secure financing for the project, which stood to net him $75.4 million by the end of 2010. Trump received a percentage of the financing he helped secure, and a cut on the sale of every unit at the development.
He and his family have made millions of dollars more from management fees and likely continue to profit from the Trump Ocean Club. Eager for the project’s success, Trump and his children have participated directly in marketing, management, and even project design. According to broker Ventura Nogueira, Trump’s daughter Ivanka attended at least 10 meetings with him and project developer Roger Khafif.
A large number of those involved with the Trump Ocean Club in its early phase were Russian and Eastern European citizens or diaspora members. In an interview with NBC and Reuters, Ventura Nogueira said that 50 percent of his buyers were Russian, and that some had “questionable backgrounds.” He added that he found out later that some were part of the Russian Mafia.
Since the Russian government’s alleged interference in the 2016 election, a lot has been made of Trump’s heavy reliance on funds from Russia for his licensing deals. Trump relying on funds from Russia is not in itself a problem – some of these funds are no doubt from legitimate sources. What is deeply problematic, however, is the fact that some of this money appears to have come from criminal networks.
Donald Trump has incessantly promoted himself as a successful and viable businessman, and this was critical to his success in the 2016 presidential election. But this report presents evidence that this façade was built, at least in part, on ventures used to launder cash generated by criminal activities. Trump’s unscrupulous business dealings and blindness to potential illegality raise serious questions about his suitability to govern the most powerful country in the world.
The dubious dealings of Trump the businessman also raise questions about the commitment of Trump the President to tackling crime and corruption. Trump got elected by repeatedly pledging to “drain the swamp”, but in the nine months since his inauguration he has actually taken steps that could worsen corruption in the U.S. and internationally. Indeed, one of his administration’s few legislative successes to date has been to overturn the implementing regulation of a ground-breaking anti-corruption law.[...]
“Every other country goes into these places and they do what they have to do… It’s a horrible law and [the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act] should be changed.”
In the early 2000s, a series of bankruptcies meant Donald J. Trump was shunned by most lenders. Struggling for credit, he started selling his name to high-end real estate projects. This report examines in detail the criminal connections that propelled one such project – the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama – and how this case bears some of the same disturbing hallmarks as other Trump developments.
Since he became President of the United States, numerous investigations and articles have probed Trump’s business dealings and his alleged links to criminals and other shadowy characters. It is understood that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation under the Department of Justice will also examine his real estate business. This is important because it seems likely that, following his various bankruptcies, at least a part of Trump’s business empire has been built on untraceable funds, some apparently linked to Russian criminal networks.
Trump may not have deliberately set out to facilitate criminal activity in his business dealings. But, as this Global Witness investigation shows, licensing his brand to the luxurious Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama aligned Trump’s financial interests with those of crooks looking to launder ill-gotten gains. Trump seems to have done little to nothing to prevent this. What is clear is that proceeds from Colombian cartels’ narcotics trafficking were laundered through the Trump Ocean Club and that Donald Trump was one of the beneficiaries.
One key player in the laundering of drug money at the Trump Ocean Club was notorious fraudster David Eduardo Helmut Murcia Guzmán, whom a U.S. court subsequently sentenced to nine years for laundering millions of dollars' worth of illicit funds, including narcotics proceeds, through companies and real estate.
Another was Murcia Guzmán’s business associate, Alexandre Henrique Ventura Nogueira, who brokered nearly a third of the 666 pre-construction unit sales at the Trump Ocean Club and claims to have sold 350-400 units overall. Ventura Nogueira’s sales brokerage was critical to ensuring the project’s lift-off and Trump’s ability to earn tens of millions of dollars.
The warning signs were there from the outset. The Trump Ocean Club, one of Trump’s most lucrative licensing deals to date, was announced in 2006 and launched in 2011, a period when Panama was known as one of the best places in the world to launder money. Whole neighborhoods in Panama City were taken over by organized crime groups, and luxury developments were built with the purpose of serving as money laundering vehicles.
Moreover, investing in luxury properties is a tried and trusted way for criminals to move tainted cash into the legitimate financial system, where they can spend it freely. Once scrubbed clean in this way, vast profits from criminal activities like trafficking people and drugs, organized crime, and terrorism can find their way into the U.S. and elsewhere. In most countries, regulation is notoriously lax in the real estate sector. Cash payments are subject to hardly any scrutiny, giving opportunistic and unprincipled developers free rein to accept dirty money.
In the case of the Trump Ocean Club, accepting easy – and possibly dirty – money early on would have been in Trump’s interest; a certain volume of pre-construction sales was necessary to secure financing for the project, which stood to net him $75.4 million by the end of 2010. Trump received a percentage of the financing he helped secure, and a cut on the sale of every unit at the development.
He and his family have made millions of dollars more from management fees and likely continue to profit from the Trump Ocean Club. Eager for the project’s success, Trump and his children have participated directly in marketing, management, and even project design. According to broker Ventura Nogueira, Trump’s daughter Ivanka attended at least 10 meetings with him and project developer Roger Khafif.
A large number of those involved with the Trump Ocean Club in its early phase were Russian and Eastern European citizens or diaspora members. In an interview with NBC and Reuters, Ventura Nogueira said that 50 percent of his buyers were Russian, and that some had “questionable backgrounds.” He added that he found out later that some were part of the Russian Mafia.
Since the Russian government’s alleged interference in the 2016 election, a lot has been made of Trump’s heavy reliance on funds from Russia for his licensing deals. Trump relying on funds from Russia is not in itself a problem – some of these funds are no doubt from legitimate sources. What is deeply problematic, however, is the fact that some of this money appears to have come from criminal networks.
Donald Trump has incessantly promoted himself as a successful and viable businessman, and this was critical to his success in the 2016 presidential election. But this report presents evidence that this façade was built, at least in part, on ventures used to launder cash generated by criminal activities. Trump’s unscrupulous business dealings and blindness to potential illegality raise serious questions about his suitability to govern the most powerful country in the world.
The dubious dealings of Trump the businessman also raise questions about the commitment of Trump the President to tackling crime and corruption. Trump got elected by repeatedly pledging to “drain the swamp”, but in the nine months since his inauguration he has actually taken steps that could worsen corruption in the U.S. and internationally. Indeed, one of his administration’s few legislative successes to date has been to overturn the implementing regulation of a ground-breaking anti-corruption law.[...]
Trump’s appearance in Panama Papers revealed
International Business Times
25 NOV 2017 AT 08:12 ET
From Raw Story: The instance of President Donald Trump’s appearance in the Panama Papers – the massive trove of leaked documents, reveals in detail how the world’s richest people hide their business dealings from scrutiny and taxation.
A real estate deal from the early 1990s is the first instance of President Trump’s name being mentioned in the Panama Papers.
An investigative reporter, Jake Bernstein, Friday afternoon flagged the discovery that involves the purchase and subsequent sale of a unit at the newly constructed Trump Palace on the Upper East Side in the 1990s. This deal involved a Panamanian company named Process Consultants, Inc., that purchased a 16th floor condo at the Trump skyscraper in 1991.
Process Consultants was owned through bearer shares. These share certificates indicate that whoever physically possessed the papers owned the company. The bearer shares could be used to transfer assets completely anonymously and were favorite tools among money launderers.
Three year after the purchase in 1994, the Process Consultants decided to sell this condo at the Trump Palace. Trump Corporation was the exclusive broker for this. According to a contract document, which provided the details of an agreement, the apartment was sold for apartment for $395,000. However, later, the price appeared to have been cut down to $355,000. It is believed a woman from Hong Kong, whose name has appeared in other leaked documents had purchased the apartment, reported the New York daily News.
However, the New York City Department of Finance online database Automated City Registered Information System has information on the apartment only after 2005, which pointed out during this time, the condo was owned by a Brazilian from Sao Paolo. He sold the unit for $795,400, that year.
But with most Panama Papers revelations, there has been no indication of who is actually behind Process Consultants or from where that person’s money came. According to the New York Daily News, using bearer shares doesn’t prove that Process Consultants was involved in something dubious, the quick turnover seems to be a characteristic of money laundering.
The publication reported that if Trump’s company knowingly facilitated the condo sale for the purpose of laundering money then the president himself could land in difficulty.
As part of his investigation into Russian election meddling, special prosecutor Robert Mueller had been looking into Trump’s sprawling real estate empire. It's unclear if the Process Consultants deal is of interest in the probe.
The Trump condo contract is one among the thousands of documents that were leaked in 2015 from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that sold anonymous shell companies around the globe and had created more than 160,000 offshore entities by the year 2008. Some of the world’s richest people were able to conduct dubious business deals by hiding behind the law firm’s offshore companies.
The founders behind Mossack Fonseca were arrested after the massive leak. The firm is under investigation across the world.
Last month, the Paradise Papers leak revealed Trump’s Commerce Secretary Wibur Ross had been involved in doing million dollar business deals with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov.
A real estate deal from the early 1990s is the first instance of President Trump’s name being mentioned in the Panama Papers.
An investigative reporter, Jake Bernstein, Friday afternoon flagged the discovery that involves the purchase and subsequent sale of a unit at the newly constructed Trump Palace on the Upper East Side in the 1990s. This deal involved a Panamanian company named Process Consultants, Inc., that purchased a 16th floor condo at the Trump skyscraper in 1991.
Process Consultants was owned through bearer shares. These share certificates indicate that whoever physically possessed the papers owned the company. The bearer shares could be used to transfer assets completely anonymously and were favorite tools among money launderers.
Three year after the purchase in 1994, the Process Consultants decided to sell this condo at the Trump Palace. Trump Corporation was the exclusive broker for this. According to a contract document, which provided the details of an agreement, the apartment was sold for apartment for $395,000. However, later, the price appeared to have been cut down to $355,000. It is believed a woman from Hong Kong, whose name has appeared in other leaked documents had purchased the apartment, reported the New York daily News.
However, the New York City Department of Finance online database Automated City Registered Information System has information on the apartment only after 2005, which pointed out during this time, the condo was owned by a Brazilian from Sao Paolo. He sold the unit for $795,400, that year.
But with most Panama Papers revelations, there has been no indication of who is actually behind Process Consultants or from where that person’s money came. According to the New York Daily News, using bearer shares doesn’t prove that Process Consultants was involved in something dubious, the quick turnover seems to be a characteristic of money laundering.
The publication reported that if Trump’s company knowingly facilitated the condo sale for the purpose of laundering money then the president himself could land in difficulty.
As part of his investigation into Russian election meddling, special prosecutor Robert Mueller had been looking into Trump’s sprawling real estate empire. It's unclear if the Process Consultants deal is of interest in the probe.
The Trump condo contract is one among the thousands of documents that were leaked in 2015 from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that sold anonymous shell companies around the globe and had created more than 160,000 offshore entities by the year 2008. Some of the world’s richest people were able to conduct dubious business deals by hiding behind the law firm’s offshore companies.
The founders behind Mossack Fonseca were arrested after the massive leak. The firm is under investigation across the world.
Last month, the Paradise Papers leak revealed Trump’s Commerce Secretary Wibur Ross had been involved in doing million dollar business deals with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov.
The Trump Family Made Millions from Drug Cartels and the Russian Mafia in Panama City: Report
Maybe we should start calling the president's Florida estate "Mar-a-Narco."
By Liz Posner / AlterNet November 17, 2017, 9:04 AM GMT
Robert Mueller has some new material to work with as he continues his investigation of the Trump administration's ties to Russia. A new report shows that for 10 years, a Trump property in Panama City collected millions of dollars from the Russian mafia and Colombian drug cartels. An investigation from Global Witness, an international NGO that probes corruption and money laundering, reveals how the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower turned a blind eye to crime lords looking for a safe haven to stash their blood money.
The property, which the lead broker Alexandre Ventura Nogueira describes as “Ivanka Trump’s baby,” listed units for three times the going rate in Panama City, thanks to the Trump name. Nogueira worked closely with the Trump family; he claims he attended at least 10 meetings with Ivanka Trump, who challenged him to sell 100 units in the building.
“The agreement was, I had a week to sell 100 units,” Nogueira told Reuters. “I said, ‘I’m going to do better, I’m going to sell without telling (the buyers) the price.'”
Nogueira later fled Panama after he was arrested for unrelated charges of real estate fraud. From his European asylum, he told NBC that at least half of his Trump Ocean Club customers were Russians, including some with “questionable backgrounds." Only later did he learn of their ties to Russian organized crime circles.
NBC reports that Mauricio Ceballos, a former prosecutor in Panama who investigated Trump’s business associates for financial crimes, called the Trump Ocean Club “a vehicle for money laundering.”
Among the shady buyers are:
By 2010, Donald Trump had made approximately $74.2 million through his association with the hotel. From 2014-2017, he was paid as much as $13.9 million.
As Global Witness explains:
“The warning signs were there from the outset. The Trump Ocean Club, one of Trump’s most lucrative licensing deals to date, was announced in 2006 and launched in 2011, a period when Panama was known as one of the best places in the world to launder money. Whole neighborhoods in Panama City were taken over by organized crime groups, and luxury developments were built with the purpose of serving as money laundering vehicles.
“Moreover, investing in luxury properties is a tried and trusted way for criminals to move tainted cash into the legitimate financial system, where they can spend it freely. Once scrubbed clean in this way, vast profits from criminal activities like trafficking people and drugs, organized crime, and terrorism can find their way into the U.S. and elsewhere.”
The Trump Organization has shrugged off responsibility in a statement following the news, but legal experts say it should have done its due diligence into the backgrounds of buyers. Arthur Middlemiss, a former Manhattan assistant district attorney and a former head of the global anti-corruption program at JPMorgan, blames the Trumps directly:
“Those who do business there should perform due diligence on others involved in their ventures. If they fail to do so, they risk being liable under U.S. law of turning a blind eye to wrongdoing.”
The property, which the lead broker Alexandre Ventura Nogueira describes as “Ivanka Trump’s baby,” listed units for three times the going rate in Panama City, thanks to the Trump name. Nogueira worked closely with the Trump family; he claims he attended at least 10 meetings with Ivanka Trump, who challenged him to sell 100 units in the building.
“The agreement was, I had a week to sell 100 units,” Nogueira told Reuters. “I said, ‘I’m going to do better, I’m going to sell without telling (the buyers) the price.'”
Nogueira later fled Panama after he was arrested for unrelated charges of real estate fraud. From his European asylum, he told NBC that at least half of his Trump Ocean Club customers were Russians, including some with “questionable backgrounds." Only later did he learn of their ties to Russian organized crime circles.
NBC reports that Mauricio Ceballos, a former prosecutor in Panama who investigated Trump’s business associates for financial crimes, called the Trump Ocean Club “a vehicle for money laundering.”
Among the shady buyers are:
- David Murcia Guzmán, founder of a large Colombian marketing company, who purchased 10 units in the Trump Ocean Club. Guzmán is now in U.S. custody, convicted of laundering money on behalf of drug cartels, and will be extradited to Colombia. Guzmán also has financial ties to the terrorist organization FARC.
- Louis Pargiolas, who pleaded guilty in 2009 in Miami to conspiracy to import cocaine.
- Stanislav Kavalenka, a Russian national charged in Canada for compelling women into prostitution.
- Arkady Vodovozov, convicted in Israel of kidnapping, according to Reuters.
By 2010, Donald Trump had made approximately $74.2 million through his association with the hotel. From 2014-2017, he was paid as much as $13.9 million.
As Global Witness explains:
“The warning signs were there from the outset. The Trump Ocean Club, one of Trump’s most lucrative licensing deals to date, was announced in 2006 and launched in 2011, a period when Panama was known as one of the best places in the world to launder money. Whole neighborhoods in Panama City were taken over by organized crime groups, and luxury developments were built with the purpose of serving as money laundering vehicles.
“Moreover, investing in luxury properties is a tried and trusted way for criminals to move tainted cash into the legitimate financial system, where they can spend it freely. Once scrubbed clean in this way, vast profits from criminal activities like trafficking people and drugs, organized crime, and terrorism can find their way into the U.S. and elsewhere.”
The Trump Organization has shrugged off responsibility in a statement following the news, but legal experts say it should have done its due diligence into the backgrounds of buyers. Arthur Middlemiss, a former Manhattan assistant district attorney and a former head of the global anti-corruption program at JPMorgan, blames the Trumps directly:
“Those who do business there should perform due diligence on others involved in their ventures. If they fail to do so, they risk being liable under U.S. law of turning a blind eye to wrongdoing.”
the criminal administration!!!
The wealthy men in Trump's inner circle with links to tax havens
The president promised to bring trillions of dollars back to the US, but many around him are no strangers to the offshore world
Jon Swaine and Ed Pilkington in New York
Sunday 5 November 2017 13.00 EST
From The Guardian: On the election trail in 2016, Donald Trump promised tax reforms to tempt major US companies back onshore and “bring back trillions of dollars from American businesses that is now parked overseas”.
As the first anniversary of his election victory looms this week, Trump and fellow Republicans are trying to drive those tax reforms through Congress.
On 1 November, Trump reiterated his commitment.
“Finally, our plan will bring back trillions of dollars from offshore … that will come pouring back into our country that will be put to work and will be spent by our companies that could never get the money back for many years. Bring the money back. We’re rebuilding America.”
But Trump is surrounded by wealthy individuals who have legally either sheltered their own investments or presided over policies to keep company profits or clients’ funds out of reach in tax havens.
Gary Cohn
Trump’s chief economic adviser, who is the driving force behind the White House tax reform effort, is no stranger to offshore finance. The leaked documents reveal that for various periods between 2002 and 2006, Cohn was president or vice-president of 22 separate entities in Bermuda for Goldman Sachs....
Rex Tillerson
The US secretary of state is named in the leaked files as a director of an offshore firm used in a multibillion-dollar oil and gas venture in the Middle East that became embroiled in controversy.
Tillerson was a director of Marib Upstream Services Company, incorporated in Bermuda in 1997. The company was tied to ExxonMobil, the American oil and gas corporation that Tillerson later led as chief executive. At the time, Tillerson was president of ExxonMobil’s Yemen division....
Steven Mnuchin
The US Treasury secretary’s former bank financed offshore private jets for wealthy clients, including a billionaire Yemeni businessman whose son is wanted for rape and murder in the UK.
CIT Bank, where Mnuchin was deputy chairman, provided customers with financing structures for personal aircraft priced at tens of millions of dollars, which customers used to legally avoid sales taxes and other charges....
Randal Quarles
The Trump administration’s most senior banking watchdog appears in the Paradise Papers in connection with an offshore bank that is under investigation by US authorities for possible tax evasion.
Quarles, Trump’s vice-chairman for supervision at the Federal Reserve, is named in the files as an officer of two firms incorporated in the Cayman Islands by the Carlyle Group, the private equity giant where Quarles was a partner until 2013.
The files detail transactions between one of Quarles’s offshore vehicles and Butterfield, a Bermuda-based bank in which Carlyle had led a $550m investment in 2010. That stake was one of several in distressed banks bought up by a new specialist team at Carlyle, including Quarles, following the 2008 financial crisis...
Jon Huntsman
Trump’s new US ambassador to Russia helped lead a previously undisclosed offshore company, according to the leaked files.
Huntsman, the former Utah governor, was listed as a director of HICI International Sales Corporation in a confidential filing to authorities in Barbados, where the company was formed in 1999. The offshore vehicle was set up to carry out overseas sales for Huntsman ICI, an industrial chemicals branch of Huntsman Corporation.
The filing said HICI was owned by Huntsman ICI Holdings LLC in the US, where Huntsman was vice-chairman and manager. In 2000, Huntsman ICI reported making a $151m profit on revenues of $4.4bn....
Kenneth Juster
Trump’s ambassador to India benefited from the offshore business of his former investment company and its billion-dollar purchase of a shipping corporation.
Juster is named in the Paradise Papers as a beneficial owner of a Bermuda-based branch of Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm where he was a partner before joining the Trump administration...
Carl Icahn
Icahn, a friend and former adviser to Trump, owns a $250m mining company spread across three tax havens and structured in a way that limits the information it must disclose to US authorities.
The leaks detail how Icahn holds a controlling stake in Ferrous Resources, a Brazilian mining company officially based on the Isle of Man. It in turn owns a pair of holding companies in Luxembourg and Malta, which operate iron mines in Brazil.
All three jurisdictions offer low- or zero-tax regimes for corporations, making them destinations of choice for foreign businesses seeking to legally lower their tax bills. A report in 2015 by Citizens for Tax Justice said Icahn operated 20 subsidiaries in offshore tax havens....
Tom Barrack
The chairman of Trump’s inaugural committee leads a $58bn real estate investment trust that channels some of its profits to the low- or no-tax jurisdictions of Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands and Lebanon.
Barrack, who has described himself as one of the president’s “closest friends for 40 years”, appears in the Paradise Papers through offshore subsidiaries of Colony NorthStar, of which he is CEO...
Jay Clayton
Trump’s SEC chairman received income from a hedge fund based in the Cayman Islands.
Clayton disclosed to the government ethics office before taking up the SEC job that he received income from Mount Kellett Capital Partners (Cayman) LP, the offshore subsidiary of a US hedge fund. A proposed structure chart in the leaked Appleby files shows a complex web of ties that were created between the Cayman Islands offshoot, its head company, and other offshore subsidiaries....
Ben Carson
A biotechnology company headed by Carson, Trump’s housing and urban development (HUD) secretary, set up offshore firms that could have reduced its tax bill.
The Paradise Papers contain files on two subsidiaries of Vaccinogen in Bermuda that date from Carson’s time as chairman of the Baltimore-based biotechnology company. The offshore vehicles were established as holding companies for “intellectual property related to the treatment of cancer and other diseases”, according to the files...
(complete article)
As the first anniversary of his election victory looms this week, Trump and fellow Republicans are trying to drive those tax reforms through Congress.
On 1 November, Trump reiterated his commitment.
“Finally, our plan will bring back trillions of dollars from offshore … that will come pouring back into our country that will be put to work and will be spent by our companies that could never get the money back for many years. Bring the money back. We’re rebuilding America.”
But Trump is surrounded by wealthy individuals who have legally either sheltered their own investments or presided over policies to keep company profits or clients’ funds out of reach in tax havens.
Gary Cohn
Trump’s chief economic adviser, who is the driving force behind the White House tax reform effort, is no stranger to offshore finance. The leaked documents reveal that for various periods between 2002 and 2006, Cohn was president or vice-president of 22 separate entities in Bermuda for Goldman Sachs....
Rex Tillerson
The US secretary of state is named in the leaked files as a director of an offshore firm used in a multibillion-dollar oil and gas venture in the Middle East that became embroiled in controversy.
Tillerson was a director of Marib Upstream Services Company, incorporated in Bermuda in 1997. The company was tied to ExxonMobil, the American oil and gas corporation that Tillerson later led as chief executive. At the time, Tillerson was president of ExxonMobil’s Yemen division....
Steven Mnuchin
The US Treasury secretary’s former bank financed offshore private jets for wealthy clients, including a billionaire Yemeni businessman whose son is wanted for rape and murder in the UK.
CIT Bank, where Mnuchin was deputy chairman, provided customers with financing structures for personal aircraft priced at tens of millions of dollars, which customers used to legally avoid sales taxes and other charges....
Randal Quarles
The Trump administration’s most senior banking watchdog appears in the Paradise Papers in connection with an offshore bank that is under investigation by US authorities for possible tax evasion.
Quarles, Trump’s vice-chairman for supervision at the Federal Reserve, is named in the files as an officer of two firms incorporated in the Cayman Islands by the Carlyle Group, the private equity giant where Quarles was a partner until 2013.
The files detail transactions between one of Quarles’s offshore vehicles and Butterfield, a Bermuda-based bank in which Carlyle had led a $550m investment in 2010. That stake was one of several in distressed banks bought up by a new specialist team at Carlyle, including Quarles, following the 2008 financial crisis...
Jon Huntsman
Trump’s new US ambassador to Russia helped lead a previously undisclosed offshore company, according to the leaked files.
Huntsman, the former Utah governor, was listed as a director of HICI International Sales Corporation in a confidential filing to authorities in Barbados, where the company was formed in 1999. The offshore vehicle was set up to carry out overseas sales for Huntsman ICI, an industrial chemicals branch of Huntsman Corporation.
The filing said HICI was owned by Huntsman ICI Holdings LLC in the US, where Huntsman was vice-chairman and manager. In 2000, Huntsman ICI reported making a $151m profit on revenues of $4.4bn....
Kenneth Juster
Trump’s ambassador to India benefited from the offshore business of his former investment company and its billion-dollar purchase of a shipping corporation.
Juster is named in the Paradise Papers as a beneficial owner of a Bermuda-based branch of Warburg Pincus, a private equity firm where he was a partner before joining the Trump administration...
Carl Icahn
Icahn, a friend and former adviser to Trump, owns a $250m mining company spread across three tax havens and structured in a way that limits the information it must disclose to US authorities.
The leaks detail how Icahn holds a controlling stake in Ferrous Resources, a Brazilian mining company officially based on the Isle of Man. It in turn owns a pair of holding companies in Luxembourg and Malta, which operate iron mines in Brazil.
All three jurisdictions offer low- or zero-tax regimes for corporations, making them destinations of choice for foreign businesses seeking to legally lower their tax bills. A report in 2015 by Citizens for Tax Justice said Icahn operated 20 subsidiaries in offshore tax havens....
Tom Barrack
The chairman of Trump’s inaugural committee leads a $58bn real estate investment trust that channels some of its profits to the low- or no-tax jurisdictions of Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands and Lebanon.
Barrack, who has described himself as one of the president’s “closest friends for 40 years”, appears in the Paradise Papers through offshore subsidiaries of Colony NorthStar, of which he is CEO...
Jay Clayton
Trump’s SEC chairman received income from a hedge fund based in the Cayman Islands.
Clayton disclosed to the government ethics office before taking up the SEC job that he received income from Mount Kellett Capital Partners (Cayman) LP, the offshore subsidiary of a US hedge fund. A proposed structure chart in the leaked Appleby files shows a complex web of ties that were created between the Cayman Islands offshoot, its head company, and other offshore subsidiaries....
Ben Carson
A biotechnology company headed by Carson, Trump’s housing and urban development (HUD) secretary, set up offshore firms that could have reduced its tax bill.
The Paradise Papers contain files on two subsidiaries of Vaccinogen in Bermuda that date from Carson’s time as chairman of the Baltimore-based biotechnology company. The offshore vehicles were established as holding companies for “intellectual property related to the treatment of cancer and other diseases”, according to the files...
(complete article)
Here are the 5 biggest links connecting Trump to Manafort and Russian money laundering
Brad Reed
30 OCT 2017 AT 11:51 ET
From Raw Story: The Trump White House is claiming victory in the wake of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s indictment on money laundering charges on the grounds that the indictment did not specifically mention Manafort’s work in the Trump campaign in 2016.
However, the nature of the charges against Manafort serves as a basis for establishing links between President Donald Trump and the Russian mob.
Here are the five biggest links that connect Trump, Manafort and Russian organized crime operations.
However, the nature of the charges against Manafort serves as a basis for establishing links between President Donald Trump and the Russian mob.
Here are the five biggest links that connect Trump, Manafort and Russian organized crime operations.
- The indictment against Manafort alleges he was laundering money he earned from his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. Specifically, the indictment states that, “in order to hide Ukraine payments from United States authorities, from approximately 2006 through at least 2016, Manafort and Gates laundered money through scores of United States and foreign corporations, partnerships and bank accounts.”
- Long before he ran Trump’s campaign, Manafort lived in an apartment in Trump Tower. Manafort first purchased an apartment in Trump Tower in 2006, which WNYC notes was right around the time that his lobbying firm signed a $10 million contract with a Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska — the same man whom Manafort agreed to give personal briefings about the state of Trump’s presidential campaign to in 2016.
- In 2013, the FBI obtained a search warrant to eavesdrop on what it believed to be a massive Russian money laundering operation — and which also happened to be running out of Trump Tower. As ABC News reported earlier this year, the investigation into the operation led “to a federal grand jury indictment of more than 30 people, including one of the world’s most notorious Russian mafia bosses, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov.”
- Another figure allegedly involved in the Russian money laundering business is Felix Sater — a longtime Trump associate. Sater’s financial relationship with Trump dates back to at least 2003, when the Trump Organization rented out office space to Sater’s former company. Even though Trump initially tried to distance himself from Sater after news of his criminal past came to light in 2007, he subsequently tapped Sater in 2010 to scout out real estate. This is notable because Sater is reportedly cooperating with an investigation into money laundering that used American properties to help hide money.
- Sater’s company, Bayrock Capital, also operated out of Trump Tower — and may have used Trump properties to launder Russian money. A Bloomberg report from earlier this year reveals that a former Bayrock insider, Jody Kriss, now claims that Sater’s firm was all an elaborate money laundering operation. In 2007, Trump teamed with Bayrock to secure funding for the Trump Soho hotel via FL Group, an Icelandic bank that was regularly used by Russians to launder money.
*IN 1927, 1,000 WHITE-ROBED KLANSMEN RIOTED IN QUEENS. TRUMP'S FATHER WAS ARRESTED IN THAT INCIDENT.
bigtree
From Demo. Underground: Joy Reid @JoyAnnReid 3h3 hours ago
...this story creeps out of the memory hole, and gains new and chilling resonance.
Donald Trump's father was arrested at Ku Klux Klan riot in New York in 1927, records reveal
_____The predication for the Klan to march, according to a flier passed around Jamaica beforehand, was that “Native-born Protestant Americans” were being “assaulted by Roman Catholic police of New York City.” “Liberty and Democracy have been trampled upon,” it continued, “when native-born Protestant Americans dare to organise to protect one flag, the American flag; one school, the public school; and one language, the English language.”
It's not clear from the context what role Fred Trump played in the brawl. The news article simply notes that seven men were arrested in the “near-riot of the parade,” all of whom were represented by the same lawyers. Update: A contemporaneous article from the Daily Star notes that Trump was detained “on a charge of refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so.”
When news of the old report surfaced last year, Donald Trump vehemently denied his father's arrest. “He was never arrested. He has nothing to do with this. This never happened. This is nonsense and it never happened,” he said to the Daily Mail. “This never happened. Never took place. He was never arrested, never convicted, never even charged. It's a completely false, ridiculous story. He was never there! It never happened. Never took place.”
...It's worth noting that Trump's comments came one day after another Klan brawl, this time in Anaheim, Calif. Thirteen people were arrested and three were stabbed after a Klan rally turned violent. And it's worth noting, too, as did Jonathan Chait at New York magazine, that Trump's claim to “know nothing” about white supremacists echoes the language of the 19th-century “Know Nothing” party — a nativist group that supported only Protestants for public office...
read: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/charlottesville-latest-donald-trump-father-fred-arrested-ku-klux-klan-kkk-rally-riot-queens-new-york-a7891701.html
...this story creeps out of the memory hole, and gains new and chilling resonance.
Donald Trump's father was arrested at Ku Klux Klan riot in New York in 1927, records reveal
_____The predication for the Klan to march, according to a flier passed around Jamaica beforehand, was that “Native-born Protestant Americans” were being “assaulted by Roman Catholic police of New York City.” “Liberty and Democracy have been trampled upon,” it continued, “when native-born Protestant Americans dare to organise to protect one flag, the American flag; one school, the public school; and one language, the English language.”
It's not clear from the context what role Fred Trump played in the brawl. The news article simply notes that seven men were arrested in the “near-riot of the parade,” all of whom were represented by the same lawyers. Update: A contemporaneous article from the Daily Star notes that Trump was detained “on a charge of refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so.”
When news of the old report surfaced last year, Donald Trump vehemently denied his father's arrest. “He was never arrested. He has nothing to do with this. This never happened. This is nonsense and it never happened,” he said to the Daily Mail. “This never happened. Never took place. He was never arrested, never convicted, never even charged. It's a completely false, ridiculous story. He was never there! It never happened. Never took place.”
...It's worth noting that Trump's comments came one day after another Klan brawl, this time in Anaheim, Calif. Thirteen people were arrested and three were stabbed after a Klan rally turned violent. And it's worth noting, too, as did Jonathan Chait at New York magazine, that Trump's claim to “know nothing” about white supremacists echoes the language of the 19th-century “Know Nothing” party — a nativist group that supported only Protestants for public office...
read: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/charlottesville-latest-donald-trump-father-fred-arrested-ku-klux-klan-kkk-rally-riot-queens-new-york-a7891701.html
no shit
pbmus -demo. underground
Donald Trump admitted in 2007 that he had invested in Russia
In a deposition in 2007, Trump said something he and his family would later deny repeatedly
MATTHEW ROZSA
From Salon: Pr*sident Donald Trump may want the headaches associated with the Russia scandal to go away, but a new report has drawn attention to yet another controversial aspect of Trump’s relationship with that country’s financial elite.
Although Trump told NBC in May, “I am not involved in Russia,” he admitted in a 2007 deposition that a real estate development firm known as the Bayrock Group had brought Russian investors to Trump Tower to discuss investing in Moscow, according to a report by Bloomberg.
“It’s ridiculous that I wouldn’t be investing in Russia,” Trump said. “Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment.”
Bloomberg also reported that one of the principals at Bayrock is businessman Felix Sater, who reportedly has ties to organized crime in both the United States and Russia. Although Trump has repeatedly insisted that he is only passingly acquainted with Sater, former Bayrock employees insist that Sater often met with Trump at his business empire’s New York City headquarters and guided Trump’s children around Moscow.
They also report that Sater is still in contact with the president and some of his advisers. It is worth noting that the Bayrock Group itself also had an office located in Trump Tower.
While the president likes to downplay his business ties to Russia, his son Donald Trump Jr. once admitted to a real estate conference in 2008 that Trump built a tower in Panama for wealthy Russian clients, according to a report by Time.
“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia,” Trump told the crowd.
Although Trump told NBC in May, “I am not involved in Russia,” he admitted in a 2007 deposition that a real estate development firm known as the Bayrock Group had brought Russian investors to Trump Tower to discuss investing in Moscow, according to a report by Bloomberg.
“It’s ridiculous that I wouldn’t be investing in Russia,” Trump said. “Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment.”
Bloomberg also reported that one of the principals at Bayrock is businessman Felix Sater, who reportedly has ties to organized crime in both the United States and Russia. Although Trump has repeatedly insisted that he is only passingly acquainted with Sater, former Bayrock employees insist that Sater often met with Trump at his business empire’s New York City headquarters and guided Trump’s children around Moscow.
They also report that Sater is still in contact with the president and some of his advisers. It is worth noting that the Bayrock Group itself also had an office located in Trump Tower.
While the president likes to downplay his business ties to Russia, his son Donald Trump Jr. once admitted to a real estate conference in 2008 that Trump built a tower in Panama for wealthy Russian clients, according to a report by Time.
“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia,” Trump told the crowd.
taking the former leader of the free world for a stroll!!
charlyvi - from Demo Underground
On this President's Day, congratulations to James Buchanan on finally moving out of the bottom spot in the presidential rankings.
Thanks to Ignorant Americans, this Loser is now "President"
America's Next GOP Presidential Traitor joining Nixon, Reagan, Bush 1 & 2
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Trump's Cabinet, etc
the trailer trash adminstration
(archives - for description & news of swamp members)
Puerto Rico salutes Trump...
DonViejo
From Demo Underground: Pendejo =
adjective
stupid
estúpido, pendejo, bruto, atontado, estulto, bozal
noun
motherfucker
hijo de puta, pendejo, coño
coward
cobarde, gallina, temeroso, pendejo, asqueroso, rajado
berk
imbécil, idiota, pendejo
Word Origin and History for berk. n. "fool," 1936, abbreviation of Berkshire Hunt (or Berkeley Hunt), rhyming slang for cunt but typically applied only to contemptible persons, not to the body part. This is not an objective, anatomical term, neither does it imply coitus.
adjective
stupid
estúpido, pendejo, bruto, atontado, estulto, bozal
noun
motherfucker
hijo de puta, pendejo, coño
coward
cobarde, gallina, temeroso, pendejo, asqueroso, rajado
berk
imbécil, idiota, pendejo
Word Origin and History for berk. n. "fool," 1936, abbreviation of Berkshire Hunt (or Berkeley Hunt), rhyming slang for cunt but typically applied only to contemptible persons, not to the body part. This is not an objective, anatomical term, neither does it imply coitus.
white house concerns
trump: the "escape from la" pr*sident
PRESIDENT TRUMP:
CHILD MOLESTER, RACIST, SEXIST, CRIMINAL, KLAN SYMPATHIZER, MAFIA ASSOCIATE, TAX FRAUD, FASCIST, RUSSIAN MOLE
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Trump exhibits the same level of gravitas as, say, a spoiled child wearing a cardboard crown from Burger King. His tacky, garish displays of wealth, his clownish stab at a normal head of hair, and his ridiculously ill-fitting suits utterly fail to convey a basic sense of taste, much less gravitas. The other day, for example, Trump referred to third-party candidate Evan McMullin as “Evan McMuffin.” Petty insults like this one (along with “Crooked Hillary,” “Crazy Bernie,” “Lyin’ Ted,” etc.) convey a level of gravitas equal to purple-nurples during recess. And while Trump insists that he’ll be a very, very terrific president and, literally, the greatest jobs president God ever created, no one with a sense of history who believes he’s going to be any of those things.
tough guy!!!
Hillary Weighs In
Demo Underground
John Adams: “Obsta principiis, nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”
trump - i never did it
