quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 08:34 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:
https://www.politico.com/(...)el-cohen-flip-536926

De schrik zit er goed in daar..

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 08:44 schreef DustPuppy het volgende:

[..]

Ik zou het echt briljant vinden dat na al die Rusland beschuldigingen een affaire met een pornoster hem fataal wordt.

quote:

President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs are already claiming their first American victims. But it isn’t Chinese duties causing the damage ― at least, not yet. It’s Canadian ones.

Tariffs imposed by the U.S. Commerce Department on Canadian newsprint in January and increased in March have caused the price of the paper product to skyrocket as much as 32 percent, hitting an already cash-strapped newspaper industry. As a result, the Tampa Bay Times, which has won 12 Pulitzer Prizes, is being forced to lay off about 50 staffers, the Tampa Bay Business Journal reported Wednesday.

The paper’s CEO, Paul Tash, offered a frank assessment of the duties’ effect in a letter to readers published late last month, noting the Times uses 17,000 tons of newsprint a year. Thanks to Trump’s tariffs, the cost per ton of newsprint is now $800 instead of $600, upping the paper’s yearly bill by $3.4 million.

“Payroll is the only expense that is bigger than newsprint,” Tash wrote. “To help offset the extra expense of paper, publishers will eliminate jobs. Make no mistake: These tariffs will cause layoffs across American newspapers, including this one.”

SPOILER

Oddly, according to the News Media Alliance, an industry group, the higher duties weren’t even championed by most American producers of newsprint, most of whom have transitioned to other paper products as demand has plummeted.

Instead, Trump’s Commerce Department imposed the tariff at the urging of just one newsprint mill in the Pacific Northwest: North Pacific Paper, or Norpac. The company is owned by a New York hedge fund, One Rock Capital.

Norpac’s mill in Washington employs about 260 people. An estimated 600,000 American jobs are in the newspaper publishing and commercial printing industry, CNN estimates.

The company didn’t immediately respond to questions from HuffPost, including if there’s anything the company would like to tell staffers at the Tampa Bay Times who are losing their jobs because of its successful lobbying.

“What we’re seeing with the newsprint tariffs is not a government acting to try to better the economy for its citizens,” notes News Media Alliance President David Chavern. “Instead, it is ‘political arbitrage’ by one private investment group — where they are effectively looking to use the U.S. government to tax local and community newspapers across the United States in order to bolster their own bottom line.”

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 10:42 schreef brokjespoes het volgende:
Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! Bel de krant! O nee, dat kan niet meer, het krantenpapier is te duur geworden...

Trump’s Tariffs Are Costing American Jobs. Again. (HuffPo)

[..]

quote:

Op maandag 16 april 2018 23:59 schreef FlipjeHolland het volgende:
Je hoort trouwens ook niks meer over het repeal and replacen van Obamacare.

quote:

GOP Spending Against Obamacare Plummets In 2018 Elections (HuffPo; reading time: 6:57)

Since the Affordable Care Act’s passage in 2010, repealing Obamacare has been the driving issue for the Republican Party. GOP lawmakers voted to defund, change or repeal parts of the law at least 67 times while President Barack Obama was in office, and they promised voters that if they won control of the White House, they’d make the dream of full repeal come true.

Republicans received their chance in the 2016 elections, which handed the party control of both chambers of Congress and the White House. But they failed to get the job done last year as voters realized what they’d be losing and public opinion swung in favor of the law. The GOP has shown no signs of trying to take up repeal again this year.

Now, Republicans are giving up on Obamacare repeal as a campaign issue as well. Anti-Obamacare ad spending in the 2018 election cycle has plummeted compared to the same period in the previous three cycles. “The reality of the situation is that Republicans really don’t have much to say about health care at this point,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster who is president of Hart Research.

SPOILER

“What are they going to say on it?” admitted a Republican strategist who requested anonymity to speak openly and who previously worked at the National Republican Congressional Committee. “We’ll repeal Obamacare? I mean, what are they going to say that’s believable?”

Democratic spending on health care ads is slightly up from where it was in the past three election cycles during the same period. And Democratic strategists and candidates say that for them, health care will be front and center.

“We see health care as the defining issue of the 2018 midterms,” said David Bergstein, spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “The Republican health care agenda is incredibly toxic with voters of every political persuasion.”

For the first time in an election cycle since Obamacare’s passage, a majority of the public now approves of the health care law. Democrats now have a sizable advantage over the GOP on the issue, too. And in a recent HuffPost/YouGov poll, voters chose health care as one of their top issues.

Even a poll commissioned by America First Policies, a pro-Trump group, found that lowering the cost of health care is the top issue for many voters. Of the respondents who said health care is a top concern, only 34 percent said they want Obamacare repealed and replaced. Forty-seven percent wanted problems with the law to be fixed, while 15 percent said they want it to stay exactly as it is.

“One of the ironies of the Republican attack on the Affordable Care Act is it’s made it more popular in voters’ eyes, especially as voters have a chance to compare the Affordable Care Act to the Republican alternatives,” Garin said.

Republican attempts to repeal Obamacare met a wall of opposition last year as the details of GOP alternatives became clear and Americans realized what it would mean for people who now benefit from the law’s protections and financial assistance. As part of a broader mobilization against the Trump administration and its policies, Obamacare supporters showed up at town halls and protests around the country, leading to high-profile confrontations and pleas to keep the health care law in place.

Health care is one of the most personal of issues ― far more so than tax cuts, which is what Republicans apparently want to run on this cycle ― and Democrats are using it in powerful campaign ads. Health care costs are still a significant concern for people, and the GOP has largely dropped any efforts to make health care more affordable.

Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, cautioned that while there’s no doubt that people are concerned about health care costs, she’s not sure if that issue ― or any other particular issue ― will be what drives people to the polls in November. In political discussions, people talk more about how much they hate the divisiveness in the country, she said.

“I think it’s going to be interesting to see how Democrats can bring the health care issue in as an indictment of Republicans and their values, but also as an economic conversation at a time when a lot of this is being driven by this kind of larger mood in the country,” she said.

Republicans sense that health care is no longer an issue they own. Rep. Mike Bishop (R-Mich.) is in what should be a reliably Republican district, but in an election year that’s already bringing unexpected wins to Democrats, Bishop’s seat is considered a bellwether that could be up for grabs. Last year, his campaign site had a section about repealing Obamacare.

This year, Bishop’s “issues” page has no mention of health care. Stu Sandler, a campaign consultant for Bishop, told The Washington Post that the new site reflects the congressman’s accomplishments and that he hasn’t changed his position on Obamacare.

“I’m sure Republicans want to change the topic,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic consultant who works with groups on the health care issue. “If you asked the captain of the Titanic, he’d want to change directions too. But after you’ve already hit the iceberg, it’s too late.”

Tax cuts seem to be where Republicans are focusing their energy and pinning their 2018 hopes.

“I think running for the benefits of tax reform is where I’m going to focus my attention on speaking about why ... we should be the party in power and in control, and what that means for the American people,” Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said Tuesday when asked about health care in the midterms.

But so far, that measure ― which was supposed to be the highlight of the GOP legislative agenda ― isn’t resonating as much as the party would have liked. Toward the end of the heated special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District last month, Republicans largely abandoned ads touting their signature piece of legislation.

On Tuesday, House GOP leadership told its members that they needed to get out there and start talking more about the tax cut law, because right now, it’s not at the top of the public’s minds.

Republicans did run ads on Obamacare in the Pennsylvania special election, going after Democrat Conor Lamb for supporting the health care law. And Republican Rick Saccone supported repeal. But ultimately, it didn’t work. Lamb won in a district where the Republican incumbent (who resigned over a sexual misconduct scandal) had run unopposed in the previous two cycles. Trump won there by 20 percentage points as well.

A Democratic poll found that the health care message was a winning issue in the race, with a majority of voters opposed to what the Republicans wanted to do to the Affordable Care Act.

On the anti-Obamacare side, the American Action Network is running the greatest number of ads ― and spending the most money ($1,253,700) ― this cycle, according to the data compiled by Kantar Media/CMAG for HuffPost. On the pro-Obamacare side, the group Save My Care has the highest number of spots, while J.B. Pritzker, who just won Illinois’ Democratic gubernatorial primary, has spent the most money ($2,173,010).

Yet the ongoing efforts to undermine the law ― and how that affects voter sentiments ― are an X-factor in all of this. Last year’s GOP tax bill eliminated the financial penalty for people who don’t get insurance. Without that penalty in place, healthy people are less likely to buy insurance, causing premiums for those who keep insurance to rise.

At the same time, Republicans at both the state and federal levels are doing what they can to change the rules on the kinds of insurance available. This is expected to result in cheap but less generous plans for people in good health ― and more expensive premiums for people who want or need more comprehensive coverage, including those with pre-existing conditions.

The effects of some of these changes will become apparent this fall, right before Election Day, as consumers begin to learn what coverage for next year will cost.

Republicans will likely respond as they always have, making the argument Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) did in a closed-door event this month. The problem, they’ll say, is still with the law itself. Give Republicans more seats in Congress, and this time, they’ll actually repeal it.

quote:

Three right-wing militiamen from rural Kansas were found guilty on Wednesday in a 2016 plot to slaughter Muslim refugees living in an apartment complex in Garden City.

Patrick Stein, Gavin Wright and Curtis Allen were found guilty on charges of weapons of mass destruction and conspiracy against civil rights. Wright was also found guilty on a charge of lying to the FBI. The defendants will face a potential life sentence when they come back to court in late June.

The jury decided the case after slightly less than a day of deliberations. The three defendants showed little outward emotion as the verdicts were read. Afterward, defense attorneys comforted the defendants’ family members, who did not wish to speak to members of the media.

In closing arguments, attorneys for the defendants had accused the FBI of overstepping and targeting the group because of rhetoric that, while hateful, was protected by the First Amendment.

SPOILER

The prosecution’s case depended largely on secret recordings made by Dan Day, an FBI informant who masqueraded as a militia member, infiltrating the three men’s group for months. An undercover officer working on behalf of the FBI had also met with Stein, posing as an arms dealer who shared the group’s anti-Muslim beliefs and was willing to build them a bomb.

Jurors heard recording after recording of the men expressing a murderous hatred of Muslims, who they called “cockroaches.”

“The fucking cockroaches in this country have to go, period,” said Stein, who went by the code name “Orkin Man” in text messages with other militia members. “They are the fucking problem in this country right now. They are the threat in this country right now.”

In another recording, the men could be heard mapping out targets on Google Earth, dropping a “pin” labeled “cockroaches” over areas they knew to have a high concentration of Muslims. They eventually settled on a main target: a Garden City apartment complex that’s home to many Somali Muslim immigrants and the mosque where they worship.

The prosecution presented evidence that the men had started to collect explosive materials. Per the recordings made by Day, their plan was to detonate bombs at the apartment complex in November 2016. They wanted the explosions to occur during Muslim prayer times when more potential victims would be there, “packed in like sardines,” as Stein put it. The bomb’s shock waves, he hoped, would make “Jello out of their insides.”

Defense attorneys had attempted to characterize such comments as mere bluster. But prosecutors pre-empted this line of argument, in part, by calling another militia member to the stand.

Brody Benson, part of the Kansas Security Forces militia, held anti-Muslim beliefs himself. “Fucking Islam,” he wrote in a Facebook post in June 2016. “I’m done. Kill them all. Bring on the DOJ.”

But Benson testified that when he heard Stein talk about his plan to kill Somali immigrants in Garden City, he knew Stein was for real.

“I actually thought it was not just talk — it was more of an actual action, action,” Benson said in testimony. “I had a gut feeling that what was just banter back and forth, ranting and everything else, was turning into something more serious and concrete.”

“This isn’t a case about the thought police,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Anthony Mattivi said during closing arguments. “The defendants plotted to murder dozens of innocent men, women and children. They didn’t just talk. They’re not here because of their words.”

In his final comments to the jury, Mattivi focused on a recording of a discussion the men had about what type of shrapnel to pack their bomb with to inflict the most damage. Stein suggested blades for drywall knives. Allen said ball bearings. “Anything that will kill and maim,” Wright said.

The men were enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump, who vilified Muslims during his presidential campaign and has continued to do so while in office. During the plotting, Stein reportedly referred to then-candidate Trump as “the Man.” The men had planned their attack for after the 2016 election, so as not to hurt Trump’s chances of winning. Delaying the attack until then would avoid giving “any ammunition” to their political opponents, Stein said.

Trump had frequently spoken out against Muslim refugees in the runup to the 2016 election. Kansas’ top federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Stephen McAllister, brushed aside a question from HuffPost about what effect the now-president’s words had.

“I can’t say whether his rhetoric impacted the case or not,” McAllister, a Trump nominee, said. He later added that this case wasn’t about the rhetoric the defendants used, but about the bomb plot they agreed to participate in.

“I don’t view this as a prosecution of speech at all. This was a prosecution of speech coupled with actions,” McAllister said. “Just because you have some words involved doesn’t mean this was about speech. This was about actions, and their speech was to some extent evidence of the actions they were taking.”

The Justice Department’s national press office sent out a press release on the case featuring a quote from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, calling the jury verdict a “significant victory against domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and touting DOJ’s commitment to fighting both foreign and domestic terrorist threats.

“The defendants in this case acted with clear premeditation in an attempt to kill people on the basis of their religion and national origin. That’s not just illegal ― it’s immoral and unacceptable, and we’re not going to stand for it,” Sessions said. “Law enforcement saved lives in this case.”

Madihha Ahussain of the group Muslim Advocates praised Wednesday’s verdict, but said Americans must not ignore the “greater context” in which the plan unfolded.

“We cannot dismiss the disgusting rhetoric of these militiamen as mere ‘locker room talk’ as the defendants’ counsel argued. The stakes are simply too high,” Ahussain said. “Anti-Muslim rhetoric has led to an unprecedented spike in hate violence and mosque attacks, intense radicalization of white supremacists, and a shocking disregard for the lives of American Muslims.”

“This must not become the norm for American discourse,” Ahussain continued. “We must not be divided by hate, but, rather, stand together as a united nation to defend our ideals, values, and beliefs.”

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 11:28 schreef brokjespoes het volgende:
Vervolg op These Three "Angry White Men" Had A Plan To Kill Muslims. How Were They Radicalized?

Right-Wing Extremists Guilty In Terror Plot Against Muslim Refugees (HuffPo)

[..]

quote:

A Kansas federal judge ruled Wednesday that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) was in contempt of court for failing to follow her order to register voters who had signed up to vote at the DMV but had failed to present proof of citizenship.

U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson said Kobach had failed to comply with a 2016 preliminary injunction that blocked a Kansas law requiring people to provide proof of citizenship when they register to vote. The decision affected roughly 18,000 people whose registrations were being held up, and Robinson told Kobach to make sure those voters were fully registered. Kobach assured her that he would and that he would send out postcards to any affected voter.

Kansans usually get a postcard before an election informing them of their polling place, and those who didn’t get them before an election would likely have been confused, the plaintiffs said at the trial.

SPOILER

More than a year and a half later, the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the voters who challenged the Kansas law, filed a motion to hold Kobach in contempt, saying he had failed to send out the postcards and update the county election manual to reflect Robinson’s 2016 order. In a contentious hearing, Kobach said his office had orally instructed county clerks to send out the postcards but could not force them to do anything. Robinson was furious, saying that Kobach had assured her in court that he would send out the postcards.

Robinson imposed sanctions on Kobach on Wednesday, saying he had to pay the ACLU for attorney fees and that “any further remedial measures” would be decided when she ruled on the merits of the case.

The plaintiffs, a handful of eligible voters unable to get on the rolls, argue that the Kansas law, which went into effect in 2013, violates a 1993 federal law called the National Voter Registration Act. The federal law requires state motor vehicle agencies to offer people the chance to register to vote and only allows them to ask for the minimum amount of information necessary to do so. Robinson’s 2016 preliminary injunction put the law on hold and she oversaw a bench trial in the case in March. A final ruling is expected later this year.

Kobach defends the law as necessary to prevent noncitizens from voting in the state, but he has produced just 129 instances in which noncitizens attempted to vote in Kansas. The ACLU says the law is extremely restrictive and unnecessary.

“The Secretary of State’s Office will be appealing this decision,” said a Kobach spokesperson after the contempt ruling. “Secretary Kobach has no additional comment at this time.”

Robinson’s Wednesday order was scathing, and was particularly directed to Kobach, who made the unusual choice to represent his own office at the trial. She said that Kobach, who is running for governor of Kansas, had made disingenuous arguments to the court and suggested that her 2016 order was dynamic and not law. She also said Kobach had a history of “noncompliance” and “disrespect” for the court in the case. Kobach, who ran President Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission until it was disbanded in January, was fined $1,000 for making misleading statements to the court in the case last year.

“The judge found that Kris Kobach disobeyed the court’s orders by failing to provide registered voters with consistent information, that he willfully failed to ensure that county elections officials were properly trained, and that he has a ‘history of noncompliance and disrespect for the court’s decisions,’” Dale Ho, the ACLU’s top voting rights lawyer, who faced off against Kobach in court during the trial, said in a statement. “Secretary Kobach likes to talk about the rule of law. Talk is cheap, and his actions speak louder than his words.

Bryan Caskey, the state director of elections and a staffer in Kobach’s office, recently filed an affidavit in the case saying that he had instructed county election officials to send out the postcards and had orally done so before trial. Robinson said that was “too little, too late” to avoid a contempt finding. She noted that Kobach had maintained until the trial that he wasn’t obligated to send out the postcards. She said she didn’t find it credible that his staffer had orally instructed counties to send out the postcards before the trial.

Robinson also took Kobach to task for suggesting at the trial that it wasn’t his fault that his office didn’t ensure the postcards were sent out. She noted that he was the chief election official in the state and it was his responsibility to follow through on the orders of the court.

Kobach had said he complied with the court order because he sent out a separate notice from the court to the 18,000 affected voters ahead of the 2016 election informing them they could vote.

Robinson also criticized Kobach for failing to update the county’s election manual to reflect the fact that people applying to vote at the DMV don’t have to prove their citizenship. Caskey testified he was “too busy” to update the document in 2016 and Kobach’s office recently took it offline.

Kobach and his lawyers indicated that he didn’t need to update the document because of the preliminary injunction since it wasn’t the final law. Robinson said such a claim was nonsensical, given that it had been nearly two years since her initial preliminary injunction and that her order amounted to current law.

quote:

"Secretary Kobach likes to talk about the rule of law. Talk is cheap, and his actions speak louder than his words."

quote:

The General Accountability Office has already determined that Pruitt broke laws when he installed a privacy booth at exorbitant expense; the nonpartisan investigator has also been asked to look into the raises Pruitt gave to staff using an obscure legal loophole and his purges of the EPA’s advisory boards.


The House Oversight Committee asked Pruitt for a series of documents and witness interviews spanning many of his scandals.


The House Energy and Commerce Committee is now “seeking information on a flood of ethics questions and lavish spending” by Pruitt.


The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is investigating Pruitt’s use of multiple emails, and whether he evaded FOIA requests.


The White House said it would probe Pruitt’s relationship with an energy lobbyist who gave him a special deal on his condo rent.


The Office of Management and Budget will investigate Pruitt’s wasteful spending of $43,000 on a privacy booth.


The EPA Office of the Inspector General is currently conducting investigations into Pruitt over (1) his possible violation of anti-lobbying laws (2) his spending on security (3) his expensive privacy booth, and (4A) his travel, a probe which it subsequently (4B) expanded (4C) twice.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 13:49 schreef Re het volgende:
Pruitt ondertussen de meest onderzochte Administrator?

[..]

bron

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 10:45 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Elk nadeel heb z'n voordeel, zullen ze wel denken.

quote:

In the case of Amazon, Trump roasted the company for days on Twitter at the end of March, crushing its stock price. Since then he’s only asked for a review of Post Office contracts, including the one it has with Amazon. Investors consider the review unlikely to amount to anything. Fears of a full-bore assault on the online retail giant have evaporated and its shares are climbing again.

One of the wealthiest hedge fund managers in the world, who is a Trump supporter and did not want to be identified by name criticizing the president, said trading on any single Trump comment — whether Amazon or anything else — was ill advised given how quickly he can change positions or simply move on to another subject

(....)

Taro Aso, Japan’s finance minister, told reporters that he “would welcome” the United States' return (to TPP), “if it’s true.” But he added that Trump “is a person who could change temperamentally, so he may say something different the next day," Aso said, according to a Reuters report.

In Australia, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull echoed the sentiment and said it would be "great" to have Washington rejoin the pact. But, he added, “we’re certainly not counting on it."

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 14:46 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:
Cohen dropt zijn smaad & laster aanklachten tegen BuzzFeed en het bureau achter het Steele Dossier:

Cohen drops libel suits against BuzzFeed, Fusion GPS
https://www.politico.com/(...)usion-lawsuit-537327

"Dropping the suits could help Cohen avoid being questioned by lawyers from Fusion GPS or having to turn over evidence related to the case — both steps that could undercut his defense in the criminal probe."

Ra ra ra waarom zou hij er geen heil meer in zien?

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 19:52 schreef fliert het volgende:

[..]

Is dat een andere aanklacht als deze: https://saraacarter.com/b(...)j-on-steele-dossier/ ?

Ik zie soms door al die bomen het bos niet meer.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 19:58 schreef fliert het volgende:
Kansloos dus?

quote:

Inspector general referred findings on McCabe to U.S. attorney for consideration of criminal charges (WaPo)

The Justice Department inspector general referred its finding that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe repeatedly misled investigators who were examining a media disclosure to the top federal prosecutor in D.C. to determine whether McCabe should be charged with a crime, according to people familiar with the matter.

The referral to the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office occurred some time ago, after the inspector general concluded McCabe had lied to investigators or his own boss, then-FBI Director James B. Comey, on four occasions, three of them under oath.

It was not immediately clear how the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office responded to the referral, or whether prosecutors there are conducting their own investigation or believe criminal charges are appropriate. A referral to federal prosecutors does not necessarily mean McCabe will be charged with a crime.

The Justice Department, the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office and a spokeswoman for McCabe declined to comment Thursday.

Last week, Inspector General Michael Horowitz sent to Congress a report blasting McCabe. It says he inappropriately authorized the disclosure of sensitive information to the media, then lied repeatedly to investigators examining the matter. The report — which quickly became public, though it was not released by the inspector general — laid out in stunning detail allegations McCabe had deceived investigators about his role in approving the disclosure, even as he lashed out at others in the FBI for leaks.

McCabe, though, disputes many of the report’s findings and has said he never meant to mislead anyone.

Lying to federal investigators is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison, and some legal analysts speculated in the wake of the report that the inspector general seemed to be laying out a case for accusing McCabe of such conduct. The report alleged that one of McCabe’s lies “was done knowingly and intentionally” — which is a key aspect of the federal crime.

SPOILER

Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe from the FBI last month, just 26 hours before McCabe could retire, denying McCabe some of his retirement benefits and reigniting the political firestorm that has long surrounded the former FBI official. President Trump had repeatedly and publicly attacked McCabe, and McCabe alleged his termination was politically motivated.

“This attack on my credibility is one part of a larger effort not just to slander me personally, but to taint the FBI, law enforcement, and intelligence professionals more generally,” McCabe said in a statement on the night he was removed from the FBI. “It is part of this Administration’s ongoing war on the FBI and the efforts of the Special Counsel investigation, which continue to this day. Their persistence in this campaign only highlights the importance of the Special Counsel’s work.”

McCabe would later raise more than a half-million dollars for a legal-defense fund through a GoFundMe page. His firing was recommended by the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, based on the inspector general’s findings.

Separately this week, a group of 11 House Republicans asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Utah U.S. Attorney John Huber to explore whether McCabe — along with a host of other Justice Department officials — committed any crimes in their handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, the probe into Russia interference in the 2016 election and other matters. Sessions has tasked Huber with looking into a range of GOP concerns.

The referral from the Inspector General to the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office is thought to be far more serious, as inspector general investigators are nonpartisan lawyers and agents who probe wrongdoing for a living.

Ironically, Comey — who appointed McCabe to his post as the No. 2 official in the FBI — stressed in his book released this week the importance of telling the truth to federal investigators and holding accountable those who do not.

Comey wrote that as he weighed whether to charge Martha Stewart with such an offense in the early 2000s, he asked his deputy how many people in the U.S. had been indicted on charges of lying to federal investigators in the previous year. The deputy told him the answer was 2,000. Comey wrote that he told his staff to indict Stewart.

“People must fear the consequences of lying in the justice system or the system can’t work,” he wrote.

The disclosure of which McCabe was accused of authorizing came in October 2016, around the time Comey would announce the FBI was resuming its probe of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. At the time, Devlin Barrett — then a reporter at the Wall Street Journal — was preparing a story on the bureau’s handling of that case and another investigation into the Clinton family foundation. McCabe felt the story would portray him and the FBI unfairly, so he authorized two other FBI officials to give Barrett his account. Barrett now works for The Washington Post.

Background conversations with reporters in Washington are commonplace, and McCabe had the authority, as the FBI’s deputy director, to authorize them. But the inspector general came to conclude he was acting out of self interest, and that violated FBI policy.

Of particular concern was that McCabe effectively authorized the FBI to confirm an ongoing investigation into the Clinton Foundation, by revealing a phone call in which he pushed back against a Justice Department official who warned that the bureau should not be taking overt steps in the case close to an election. McCabe asked the official: “Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?”

The inspector general wrote Comey inquired with his deputy about the disclosure, and McCabe led him to believe he did not know who was responsible. McCabe’s team, though, disputes that, and says emails between the two “clearly show that Mr. McCabe specifically advised Director Comey that he was working with colleagues at the FBI to correct inaccuracies in the story before it was published, and that they remained in contact through the weekend while the work was taking place.”

Inspector general investigators came to believe Comey, and they alleged McCabe lied on three other occasions to them and the FBI’s inspection division. Comey said in an appearance on “The View” this week: “I still believe Andrew McCabe is a good person, but the inspector general found that he lied, and there’s severe consequences in the Justice Department for lying — as there should be throughout the government.”

quote:

Trump today, via pool: “Human trafficking is worse than it’s ever been in the history of the world.”

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 21:53 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Imgur zou het weer moeten doen ... testje:

[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 22:03 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Wat?

twitter:

business twitterde op donderdag 19-04-2018 om 21:36:18 Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein told Trump last week that he isn’t a target of any part of Mueller’s investigation, sources say https://t.co/FIZcWqzs57 https://t.co/ivpq0sgoxS reageer retweet

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op donderdag 19-04-2018 om 22:35:36 This is excellent news. It gives Rosenstein some job security (possibly short-lived) even as it means *absolutely nothing* for the certainty that Donald Trump will eventually face impeachable offenses. https://t.co/Owxmfzzi9t reageer retweet

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op donderdag 19-04-2018 om 22:37:27 2/ Essentially, this news story—and all its many predecessors in the same vein—is based on a popular misconception of what the word "target" means and when it is used. But hey, if it convinces Trump and gets him off the FBI's back, his imbecilic credulousness is a national asset. reageer retweet

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op donderdag 19-04-2018 om 22:39:26 3/ Meanwhile, Trump telling his top advisers that it's simply "not the right time" to fire Mueller and/or Rosenstein actually *confirms* that this *is* in the cards—and that they'll be fired as soon as Trump becomes a target. Which—hey!—maybe the FBI and DOJ *know*? LOL at Trump. reageer retweet

twitter:

esaagar twitterde op donderdag 19-04-2018 om 22:22:11 Comey says he did not have confidence in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, which prompted his leak and effort to spark a special counsel reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 23:08 schreef Monolith het volgende:
Qua fundraising gaat het ook nog niet echt lekker voor de Republikeinen:
https://www.politico.com/(...)2018-midterms-493823

quote:

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a combative former prosecutor and longtime ally of President Trump, told The Washington Post on Thursday that he has joined the president’s legal team dealing with the ongoing special counsel probe.

“I’m doing it because I hope we can negotiate an end to this for the good of the country and because I have high regard for the president and for Bob Mueller,” Giuliani said in an interview.

Giuliani, who joins a legal team that has struggled to recruit new members to its ranks, said he has been speaking with Trump for weeks about joining the group of legal advisers. He said he would work alongside Trump’s current attorneys, Jay Sekulow and Ty Cobb, who focus on the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He also said he will soon take a leave from his law firm, Greenberg Traurig.

Giuliani said he formalized his decision in recent days, including over dinner last week at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

SPOILER

Giuliani and Trump spoke on Thursday about legal strategy moving forward, along with Sekulow, who Giuliani described as a “good friend.” He added that he and Cobb spoke on Wednesday.

Giuliani declined to say whether Trump has made a final decision on whether to sit for an interview with Mueller and his investigators. Trump has been mulling for weeks whether to do so, veering between wanting to meet with Mueller to moving away from the idea, especially after the home and offices of his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, were raided this month.

“It’s too early for me to say that,” Giuliani said of whether a Mueller interview is unlikely to happen.

Giuliani also declined to discuss whether Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who has been under fire from conservatives and oversees the Russia probe, could be fired by the president in the coming weeks.

“I’m not involved in anything about those issues. My advice on Mueller has been this: He should be allowed to do his job, he’s entitled to do his job.”

The Daily Beast reported earlier Thursday that Giuliani was in talks with Trump about joining the legal team.

Giuliani said he would spend a “great deal of time” in Washington working with Trump, but would continue to live in New York.

Trump considered Giuliani to be attorney general and has said in recent weeks he needs a New York-based attorney. Many leading white-collar lawyers, such Theodore Olson, have declined Trump’s entreaties.

Trump is known to be a difficult client who does not listen to his lawyers’ advice, according to lawyers who are familiar with his conduct.

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op donderdag 19-04-2018 om 23:19:26 I'm so excited by this. Giuliani was a major election crook in October 2016, receiving and disseminating many illegal NYPD and FBI leaks (most false) to try to help Trump win. So yes, let's get him front and center so we can grill him daily on what he did. https://t.co/bmPYaqo5nP reageer retweet

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op donderdag 19-04-2018 om 23:23:08 So Trump has just hired, as his new attorney, an almost certain witness in the Mueller probe. That means he will be paying money to, and sharing his own confidential testimony with, a fellow Mueller witness. This is both Obstruction and Witness Tampering. But hey, who's counting? https://t.co/vPvvEvWX47 reageer retweet

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op donderdag 19-04-2018 om 23:25:14 2/ Understand what this allows Trump to do (or what he *thinks* it does): allows him to discuss the Russia case and the pre-election Clinton email hoaxes with Giuliani, synch up his testimony, then ensure Giuliani can't discuss those conversations with Mueller.He's transparent. reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 23:11 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Dat gaat met het vertrek van Ryan alleen maar minder worden. Die staat bekend als een fundraising kanon, maar nu hij speaker af is, is hij dat appeal nu wel kwijt.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 20:43 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
McCabe overigens mogelijk wel in de problemen met een referral van de DOJ inspector general naar een US attorney (ook geen aanklacht vooralsnog ) :

[..]

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 23:18 schreef Refragmental het volgende:

[..]

Gaat nog leuk worden. McCabe heeft al vaker aangegeven te gaan zingen en niet alleen tenonder wil gaan.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 23:18 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Ik denk niet dat Ryan heel veel impact heeft op fundraising voor lokale races. Je ziet nu in de special elections wel vaak dat de RNC nog bijspringt, maar dat is niet echt een optie bij de midterms.

twitter:

brookefoxnews twitterde op donderdag 19-04-2018 om 23:27:36 Trying to get all news in this tweet: #mccabe criminal referral; DAG Rosenstein tells POTUS he’s not part of SDNY #MichaelCohen probe; Rudy Giuliana joins POTUS legal team; #comeymemos will be sent to congressional committees; it’s 5:27pm. reageer retweet

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op donderdag 19-04-2018 om 23:39:43 Oh Rudy https://t.co/sm8LHqXLxw reageer retweet

What Did Giuliani Know About The FBI Email Review? | Hardball | MSNBC

quote:

However, in the burgeoning spirit of openness and diplomacy, Moon said Kim is willing to give up US troops' removal as a precondition for discussions over denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula.
"North Korea has expressed willingness to give up its nuclear program without making (a) demand that the (US Forces Korea) forces withdraw from the Korean Peninsula,"

twitter:

StevenJHarper1 twitterde op donderdag 19-04-2018 om 23:47:23 @SethAbramson Giuliani might rival Joe diGenova as the shortest-tenured member of Trump's legal team. Timing is everything: https://t.co/VWZHB6aoIM reageer retweet

quote:

A long-awaited U.S. Justice Department internal watchdog report on former FBI chief James Comey's public disclosures on Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state and whether FBI employees leaked information to try to hurt her 2016 presidential bid is expected to be issued next month.

The report from Michael Horowitz, the department's inspector general, arises from an investigation he launched about a week before Republican President Donald Trump, who defeated Democrat Clinton in the election, took office in January 2017.

In a letter last week to Republican Representative Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Horowitz said his office was "working diligently" to complete the report and expected to release it in May.

Horowitz's letter did not offer details of what will be in the report. In a Jan. 12, 2017 letter to five congressional committees, he enumerated 2016 election-related issues his office would look into.

Clinton has called the FBI investigation into her emails and Comey's public disclosures about it significant factors in her loss to Trump, who fired Comey as FBI director in May 2017.

The investigation will examine Comey's statements in August 2016 that no charges would be brought against Clinton and in October about the re-opening of the FBI investigation into her use of a private email server rather than a government server, potentially jeopardizing classified information.

The report also is expected to address whether active and retired FBI agents in New York leaked information about investigations of the Clinton Foundation charitable organization and the discovery of a trove of Clinton-related emails.

Law enforcement officials previously told Reuters the information was leaked to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, an adviser to the Trump campaign who subsequently discussed the contents on Fox News.

Horowitz's office also has sought to determine whether such leaks influenced Comey's decision 11 days before the election to announce the reopening of the Clinton email investigation. Law enforcement sources with knowledge of the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity, said at the time a fear of leaks from within his own agency helped prompt Comey to make that public disclosure.

Comey did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump and Comey have exchanged harsh criticism in the past week. Trump called Comey a "slime ball." Comey called Trump an unethical liar who is morally unfit to be president.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 23:50 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Als Giuliani deel uit maakte van Trumps campagne... maakt dat hem geen getuige voor Mueller? Kan Trump hem dan wel inhuren als advocaat in deze zaak?

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 00:00 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Win-win voor Trump. Ze kunnen hun verklaringen afstemmen en alle gesprekken blijven beschermd.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 00:05 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Het kan ook worden gezien als witness tampering.

quote:

Kushner Cos. Subpoenaed Over Tenant Records (WSJ)
Action relates to paperwork the company filed in New York about rent-regulated tenants

WASHINGTON—The real-estate company run by the family of White House adviser Jared Kushner in mid-March received a federal grand-jury subpoena for information related to paperwork the company filed in New York City concerning its rent-regulated tenants, according to people familiar with the matter.

The subpoena, part of an investigation by prosecutors in the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office, came shortly after an Associated Press article about the company having filed documents that said it had zero rent-regulated tenants, when in fact it had hundreds, an omission that relieved them of certain rules governing developers.

The Kushner Cos., where President Donald Trump’s son-in-law was chief executive before joining the administration, said at the time of the Associated Press article that the paperwork was done by a third party and that “if mistakes or violations are identified, corrective action is taken immediately.”

A spokeswoman for the company said Thursday that “Kushner Companies has nothing to hide and is cooperating fully with all legitimate requests for information, including this subpoena.” She added: “We believe that this subpoena, which has already been complied with, was issued based solely on an article that appeared in the press the day before it was issued.”

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, John Marzulli, said: “I can’t confirm or deny the existence of any subpoena or investigation.”

SPOILER

The subpoena adds to the mounting number of federal and state inquiries concerning the firm’s business. It seeks information on the identities of the third parties hired by the company to file documents with the New York City Department of Buildings and the city Department of Finance, according to a person familiar with it.

Though the filings occurred during a period when Mr. Kushner was CEO, none of the documents had his signature, the Associated Press reported.

The subpoena to the company, which is now run by Mr. Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, comes as it is also facing scrutiny on the same subject from the New York attorney general’s office, which has launched an inquiry into the matter, according to Eric Soufer, a spokesman for Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

As a part of that, attorneys from the Attorney General’s office have met with tenant representatives, Mr. Soufer said.

The New York City Council has also opened an investigation into the filings.

Since early last year, Brooklyn federal prosecutors, along with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, have also been reviewing Kushner Cos.’s use of a federal investment-for-visa program known as EB-5, The Wall Street Journal has reported. The company has since ceased using the EB-5 program to finance its projects. Kushner Cos. has said it did nothing improper with the program and is cooperating with legal requests for information.

And the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office is also investigating a $285 million loan the company received one month before the 2016 presidential election from Deutsche Bank AG , the Journal has reported. Kushner Cos. has said it “has cooperated and will continue to cooperate with any reasonable request for information.” A spokesman for Deutsche Bank declined to comment.

In that inquiry, prosecutors sent a document request in mid-November of last year to the Kushner Cos. asking for contracts and other information about the loan.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 00:00 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Win-win voor Trump. Ze kunnen hun verklaringen afstemmen en alle gesprekken blijven beschermd.

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 23:16 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:
Intussen is de communicatiestrategie van de RNC afgedaald tot het niveau zeurderige kleuter:

RNC sending 'Lyin Lion' mascot to follow Comey around on book tour
http://thehill.com/homene(...)tter_impression=true

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 23:50 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Als Giuliani deel uit maakte van Trumps campagne... maakt dat hem geen getuige voor Mueller? Kan Trump hem dan wel inhuren als advocaat in deze zaak?

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 00:16 schreef Whiskers2009 het volgende:

[..]

Dat is toch al gepost?

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 00:19 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Oh, waar kan ik het antwoord lezen?

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 00:21 schreef Whiskers2009 het volgende:

[..]

Die tweets van Seth toch? Wel zijn mening uiteraard.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 00:26 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Ah, heb daar overheen gelezen. Mogelijk dat die later aan de post zijn toegevoegd.

twitter:

DanaBashCNN twitterde op donderdag 19-04-2018 om 23:59:12 just talked to Giuliani who said his role on Trump team is limited. He worked with Mueller at DOJ & as NYC Mayor (Mueller at FBI) He hopes knowing Mueller can help bring the investigation to conclusion, saying it "needs a little push." How soon? "maybe a couple of weeks" reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 00:26 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Ah, heb daar overheen gelezen. Mogelijk dat die later aan de post zijn toegevoegd.

twitter:

RVAwonk twitterde op donderdag 19-04-2018 om 23:42:49 Here's Rudy Giuliani in Nov. 2016, admitting that the FBI had leaked information to the Trump campaign — giving them advanced warning about Comey's letter. https://t.co/6lOvlouFPl reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 00:33 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

DanaBashCNN twitterde op donderdag 19-04-2018 om 23:59:12 just talked to Giuliani who said his role on Trump team is limited. He worked with Mueller at DOJ & as NYC Mayor (Mueller at FBI) He hopes knowing Mueller can help bring the investigation to conclusion, saying it "needs a little push." How soon? "maybe a couple of weeks" reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 01:46 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Wat een BS, alsof Giuliani even gaat bepalen wanneer het onderzoek afgelopen is. Het onderzoek is afgelopen als alle feiten boven tafel zijn en alle sporen uitgezocht zijn. Niet eerder.

quote:

Former FBI director James Comey said Thursday if he could “change time” so that Anthony Weiner had never “been born.”

Comey made the comment about the former New York representative during an interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick.

“If I could change time, Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have used a private email server,” he said, according to The New Yorker’s live tweets of the event. “Anthony Weiner certainly wouldn’t have a laptop — maybe wouldn’t have even been born.”

twitter:

joshrogin twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 04:35:58 Comey tells @maddow he commissioned an internal FBI investigation into leaks to Giuliani about the Hillary investigation. Wow. reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 22:46 schreef Nintex het volgende:

twitter:

business twitterde op donderdag 19-04-2018 om 21:36:18 Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein told Trump last week that he isn’t a target of any part of Mueller’s investigation, sources say https://t.co/FIZcWqzs57 https://t.co/ivpq0sgoxS reageer retweet

Trump heeft gelijk. Het is een witch hunt.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 06:15 schreef Montov het volgende:

[..]

Hoe kan het een witch hunt zijn als hij geen target is?

Zijn criminele vrienden worden aangepakt en Trump reageert alsof hij zelf wordt aangepakt. Dat zegt genoeg over zijn betrokkenheid en pogingen om het onderzoek te saboteren.

Hoe zou een onwetend en onschuldig persoon zich gedragen wanneer blijkt dat je campagnemensen, familie en juridisch team zo moerassig als de pest zijn? Ik zou me verraden voelen door die zogenaamde vrienden. Trump voelt zich verraden door mensen die de waarheid achterhalen, openbaren en onderzoeken.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 09:02 schreef AnneX het volgende:
Smakelijk nieuws weer vannacht.

Deze kwam ik tegen https://www.msnbc.com/bri(...)t-know-1215264835609
Die begon ook al op te vallen...

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 08:48 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:
Nu Coney's memos door DoJ naar Congress zijn gestuurd zijn ze natuurlijk meteen gelekt zodat Nunes er niet maandenlang selectief informatie uit kan loslaten in de vorm van mistekenende werkstukjes. Comey's memo's zijn hier te lezen:
https://www.documentcloud(...)s-Comey-s-memos.html

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 11:19 schreef SureD1 het volgende:

[..]

Gezien Trump’s obsessie, moeten de pee pee tapes wel bestaan, elk gesprek met Comey komt hij er op terug!

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 09:04:36 39/ That Trump brings McCabe and the golden showers up in every conversation with Comey is legitimately insane—100% abnormal. That Putin and he discussed hookers—repeat, *Putin and Trump discussed hookers*—is shocking in part because we don't know when that conversation occurred. reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 11:19 schreef SureD1 het volgende:

[..]

Gezien Trump’s obsessie, moeten de pee pee tapes wel bestaan, elk gesprek met Comey komt hij er op terug!

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 11:44 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

* ril*

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 05:15:02 In closed-door meetings at the U.N., Trump officials pushed socially conservative views on women’s rights issues—like abstinence-based policies—further to the right than those expressed by most other countries present, including Russia, BuzzFeed reports. https://t.co/L0fELYbol1 reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 11:48 schreef Nintex het volgende:

Nee, ze hebben over wie ze nu weer genaaid hebben

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 11:28 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 09:04:36 39/ That Trump brings McCabe and the golden showers up in every conversation with Comey is legitimately insane—100% abnormal. That Putin and he discussed hookers—repeat, *Putin and Trump discussed hookers*—is shocking in part because we don't know when that conversation occurred. reageer retweet

Wel weer lekker op zijn Seth's met legitimately insane, repeat, *shocking*

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 12:21 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Twee wereldleiders die over hoertjes aan het keuvelen zijn... Het roept ook wel vraagtekens op.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 12:34:16 So General Michael Flynn’s life can be totally destroyed while Shadey James Comey can Leak and Lie and make lots of money from a third rate book (that should never have been written). Is that really the way life in America is supposed to work? I don’t think so! reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 12:21 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Twee wereldleiders die over hoertjes aan het keuvelen zijn... Het roept ook wel vraagtekens op.

quote:

Chris Christie is sparing no expense when it comes to his official portrait, which is being paid for with public funds. The former New Jersey Republican governor is commemorating his eight years in office, which ended in January, with a painting of himself by Australian artist Paul Newton. He signed an $85,000 contract for the work the month before his term ended.

The price is more than the state’s three previous governors paid for their portraits combined, reports The Record, which revealed the extravagant expenditure on Thursday. Newton has previously painted the portraits of Australian singer Kylie Minogue, Pope Benedict XVI and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.

In 2017, Christie was infamously snapped vacationing with his family on an otherwise vacant state-owned beach that he’d earlier closed due to a budget impasse. Some people on Twitter suggested that Christie, who also once spent more than $82,000 in public money on concessions at NFL games, should use photographs taken that beach day for his portrait instead:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 12:50:38 Nancy Pelosi is going absolutely crazy about the big Tax Cuts given to the American People by the Republicans...got not one Democrat Vote! Here’s a choice. They want to end them and raise your taxes substantially. Republicans are working on making them permanent and more cuts! reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 12:39 schreef Ulx het volgende:
De oelewapper is weer wakker.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 12:34:16 So General Michael Flynn’s life can be totally destroyed while Shadey James Comey can Leak and Lie and make lots of money from a third rate book (that should never have been written). Is that really the way life in America is supposed to work? I don’t think so! reageer retweet

Shadey?

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 12:57:12 Looks like OPEC is at it again. With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted! reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 12:57 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Trump verslaat de deep state.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 13:01 schreef DustPuppy het volgende:

[..]

Ben je nou gewoon random one-liners aan het roeptoeteren of?

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 13:00 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 12:57:12 Looks like OPEC is at it again. With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted! reageer retweet

The Trump-O-Meter staat op Bat Shit Crazy vandaag.

quote:

President Donald Trump floated the idea of jailing journalists to stop leaks from the White House, former FBI Director James Comey wrote in a memo last year in which he recalled an encounter with the president. The document was published by various news outlets on Thursday just hours after the Department of Justice released copies to congressional leaders.

“The president then wrapped up our conversation by returning to the issue of finding leakers,” Comey wrote in the document, dated Feb. 14, 2017. “I said something about the value of putting a head on a pike as a message. He replied by saying it may involve putting reporters in jail.”

″‘They spend a couple days in jail, make a new friend, and they are ready to talk,’” Comey recounted the president saying. “I laughed as I walked to the door Reince Priebus had opened.”

The New York Times first reported the encounter last May.

SPOILER

The Justice Department sent the memo copies to top lawmakers after some threatened to subpoena the agency to obtain them. Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd said the Justice Department decided to do so after determining their release “would not adversely impact any ongoing investigation.”

They were quickly leaked to various media outlets who published the redacted versions in full. They contained little information that hadn’t been made public during congressional testimony or in Comey’s new memoir, but they touched on a variety of topics reported since Comey’s firing last May.

Trump has long fought against the press, branding national media outlets like CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post as “fake news”

Late Thursday, Trump tweeted that Comey’s memos proved there was “NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION” regarding the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election.

“Also, he leaked classified information. WOW!” Trump wrote. “Will the Witch Hunt continue?”

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 12:39 schreef Ulx het volgende:
De oelewapper is weer wakker.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 12:34:16 So General Michael Flynn’s life can be totally destroyed while Shadey James Comey can Leak and Lie and make lots of money from a third rate book (that should never have been written). Is that really the way life in America is supposed to work? I don’t think so! reageer retweet

Shadey?

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 13:10 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Flynn heeft ook zitten lekken?

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 14:00:01 A federal appeals court has ruled that local governments don't need to provide certain types of help to federal immigration authorities in order to get federal grants, thereby preventing the Trump admin from denying funds to sanctuary cities. https://t.co/p0zOzw9J3E reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 13:00 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 12:57:12 Looks like OPEC is at it again. With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted! reageer retweet

The Trump-O-Meter staat op Bat Shit Crazy vandaag.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 14:02 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 14:00:01 A federal appeals court has ruled that local governments don't need to provide certain types of help to federal immigration authorities in order to get federal grants, thereby preventing the Trump admin from denying funds to sanctuary cities. https://t.co/p0zOzw9J3E reageer retweet

*ouch*

Dat zal Trump niet leuk vinden.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 14:13 schreef Falco het volgende:

[..]

Echt weer dom geneuzel dit. Door hoge olieprijzen wordt het aantrekkelijker voor oliemaatschappijen te investeren in nieuwe projecten en zodoende jobs te creëren. Die schaliegasprojecten zijn pas een beetje rendabel vanaf 50 dollar het vat.

Zie o.a. dit plaatje:
[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Op donderdag 19 april 2018 23:16 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
Giuliani says he is joining Trump’s legal team to ‘negotiate an end’ to Mueller probe

Donald Trump Gets Naughty with Rudy Giuliani in Drag - 2000

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 14:44 schreef kladderadatsch het volgende:

[..]

They go way back...

Donald Trump Gets Naughty with Rudy Giuliani in Drag - 2000

twitter:

RepAdamSchiff twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 14:51:45 The memos do not discuss collusion, Mr. President, but they do show you clearing the room and asking Director Comey to drop the Flynn case. Along with your repeated requests for loyalty and to “lift the cloud,” this is all evidence of potential obstruction. https://t.co/2DGF32doHp reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 14:28 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Maar hoe krijg je dan het land weer aan de steenkool?

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 14:56 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

RepAdamSchiff twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 14:51:45 The memos do not discuss collusion, Mr. President, but they do show you clearing the room and asking Director Comey to drop the Flynn case. Along with your repeated requests for loyalty and to “lift the cloud,” this is all evidence of potential obstruction. https://t.co/2DGF32doHp reageer retweet

Schiff legt het ook nog even uit.

James Comey: Rudy Giuliani Boasts Prompted Investigation Into FBI Leaks | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC

SPOILER

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 10:16:11 Great Comey interview by Maddow. Comey says he commissioned a probe of leaks to Giuliani by the NYC field office but was fired before he learned the result. Now he needs to explain who told the NYT that the leaks factored into his reasoning—he now says no. https://t.co/KMH89d6jBI reageer retweet

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 10:17:56 2/ So Comey is saying—bizarrely—that someone *falsely* leaked to the New York Times, the *day after* he sent his letter to Congress, that concerns about leaks from the New York field office were critical to Comey's decision to re-open the Clinton case. Who leaked that, and *why*? reageer retweet

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 10:20:27 3/ Comey's reply—leaks were irrelevant to my letter to Congress—echoes him being unwilling to say Clinton would be a better POTUS than Trump and his flailing defenses of the FBI. He may *think* he's being honest; he's playing politics. I don't think he even admits it to himself. reageer retweet

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 10:25:24 4/ Remember, too, that Comey won't/can't discuss why nothing was done on the Clinton case from October 3 to 26—and why he gave it no attention and (perhaps) McCabe didn't or was expecting others to. That's the *other* NYC field office shenanigan we'll hear more about eventually. reageer retweet

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 15:40:05 An analysis by The AP shows the nation's six big Wall Street banks saved at least $3,590,000,000 in taxes last quarter, thanks to the recently enacted Trump tax law. https://t.co/vGpOve277J reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 12:57 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Trump verslaat de deep state.

JONATHAN GREENBERG FULL INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS CUOMO - NEW DAY (4/20/2018)

quote:

In May 1984, an official from the Trump Organization called to tell me how rich Donald J. Trump was. I was reporting for the Forbes 400, the magazine’s annual ranking of America’s richest people, for the third year. In the previous edition, we’d valued Trump’s holdings at $200 million, only one-fifth of what he claimed to own in our interviews. This time, his aide urged me on the phone, I needed to understand just how loaded Trump really was.

The official was John Barron — a name we now know as an alter ego of Trump himself. When I recently rediscovered and listened, for first time since that year, to the tapes I made of this and other phone calls, I was amazed that I didn’t see through the ruse: Although Trump altered some cadences and affected a slightly stronger New York accent, it was clearly him. “Barron” told me that Trump had taken possession of the business he ran with his father, Fred. “Most of the assets have been consolidated to Mr. Trump,” he said. “You have down Fred Trump [as half owner] . . . but I think you can really use Donald Trump now.” Trump, through this sockpuppet, was telling me he owned “in excess of 90 percent” of his family’s business. With all the home runs Trump was hitting in real estate, Barron told me, he should be called a billionaire.

At the time, I suspected that some of this was untrue. I ran Trump’s assertions to the ground, and for many years I was proud of the fact that Forbes had called him on his distortions and based his net worth on what I thought was solid research.

But it took decades to unwind the elaborate farce Trump had built to project an image as one of the richest people in America. Nearly every assertion supporting that claim was untrue. Trump wasn’t just poorer than he said he was. Over time I have learned that he should not have been on the first three Forbes 400 lists at all. In our first-ever list, in 1982, we included him at $100 million, but Trump was actually worth roughly $5 million — a paltry sum by the standards of his super-monied peers — as a spate of government reports and books showed only much later.

The White House declined to comment for this story. The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment.

SPOILER

I was a determined 25-year-old reporter, and I thought that, by reeling Trump back from some of his more outrageous claims, I’d done a public service and exposed the truth. But his confident deceptions were so big that they had an unexpected effect: Instead of believing that they were outright fabrications, my Forbes colleagues and I saw them simply as vain embellishments on the truth. We were so wrong.

This was a model Trump would use for the rest of his career, telling a lie so cosmic that people believed that some kernel of it had to be real. The tactic landed him a place on the Forbes list he hadn’t earned — and led to future accolades, press coverage and deals. It eventually paved a path toward the presidency.

Malcolm Forbes came up with the idea of the Forbes 400 in 1981 and assigned me to spend a year traveling around the country and interviewing wealthy people and those who worked with them about one another. The most challenging sector was private real estate wealth. My grandfather had been an accountant to a number of major New York developers, so I had the advantage of knowing many of the players there. But the reporting was opaque, because so few of the relevant financial documents were public; we relied disproportionately on what people told us. As the project progressed, other experienced reporters and editors joined what would become the most successful annual special issue in Forbes history.

From the beginning, Trump was obsessed. The project could offer a clear, supposedly authoritative declaration of his status as a player, and while many of the super-rich wanted to keep their names off the ranking, Trump was desperate to scale it.

When I first contacted him for the inaugural issue, Trump pulled out all the stops to convince me that he was the wealthiest real estate developer in New York. At an afternoon-long meeting in his cavernous Fifth Avenue office, he argued that his family was worth more than $900 million and deserved to be higher on our list than any of the far more accomplished developers (with names like Rose and Rudin) who had spent generations building top-tier housing in the golden borough of Manhattan. His father, Fred Trump, was well known for building nearly all the apartments that the Trump Organization owned before Donald even joined the company, so it amazed me when Donald claimed that he, and not his father, possessed 80 percent of the 23,000 apartments he said they had in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. He added that these were almost debt free and worth $40,000 each.

I questioned his valuation. Trump shrugged and said, “Okay, then $20,000 each.” That would mean his family was worth some $500 million, still atop our list for New York real estate tycoons.

But that figure seemed high. I estimated the apartments to be worth about $9,000 each: They could not easily be converted to lucrative co-ops, and Trump had falsely described the location of the Queens buildings. He’d claimed they were in Forest Hills when, in fact, they were in the far less valuable Jamaica Estates neighborhood a few miles away. Since Donald’s new projects were still in development or unproven, the outer-borough apartments formed the basis of a Trump family net worth estimate of $200 million.

Six weeks after my initial interview, I received a call at my desk from Trump’s secretary and gatekeeper, Norma Foerderer . She said she wanted my work address so Trump could send me an invitation to a company party. Then she abruptly added: “Oh, Donald was just passing by! He said that he wanted to have a few words with you.”

I switched on my audio recorder — my normal practice — as Trump expressed his concern for what he called “your little article.” He invited me for a follow-up interview with him because, he said, because he was richer than the rest. “I don’t think that you have your facts 100 percent correct” about his standing vis-a-vis other New York developers. I was contemplating a too-low appraisal of his net worth, he said. “You had us down in a certain category, and then you mentioned other names, and there’s no contest, you know. I mean, there’s no contest. So I just wanted to mention that.”

Trump knew I had doubts about his assertions, so he had his lawyer, Roy Cohn, call me. Cohn spent most of his time threatening lawsuits, schmoozing with mobster clients and badgering reporters with off-the-record utterances that made his clients look good and their enemies look bad. Cohn surprised me at my Forbes desk that summer: “Jon Greenberg,” a scrappy voice bellowed, before I could connect my tape recorder. I took notes by hand. “This is Roy. Roy Cohn! You can’t quote me! But Donny tells me you’re putting together this list of rich people. He says you’ve got him down for just $200 million! That’s way too low, way too low! Listen, I’m Donny’s personal lawyer, but he said I could talk to you about this. I am sitting here looking at his current bank statement. It shows he’s got more than $500 million in liquid assets, just cash. That’s just Donald, nothing to do with Fred, and it’s just cash.” He concluded: “He’s worth more than any of those other guys in this town!”

I offered to have a messenger pick up the bank statement at his office. Cohn protested that the document was confidential. “Just trust me,” he said. I told him I wouldn’t take his word without seeing the paperwork. “It’s confidential!” Cohn yelled.

My Forbes editors and I spent many hours deliberating about where to place Trump. Based on what little we knew — his claims; a 1976 New York Times profile that said the Trump Organization owned 22,000 apartments; and Fred’s reputation for housing a generation of working-class New Yorkers in Brooklyn and Queens — we ranked Donald and Fred in the bottom tier among major real-estate developers, each with half of a $200 million apartment empire.

Even though I learned later that this was far more money than Donald possessed, it did not satisfy him for the following year’s edition. During his 1983 interview, Trump claimed that there were actually 25,000 apartments and that his net worth had ballooned because of the success of his new projects, Trump Tower and the Grand Hyatt Hotel on East 42nd Street, as well as a pending casino deal in Atlantic City.

Then Cohn called again, this time to say Trump was worth more than $700 million. I recorded our chat. He opened with an outrageous claim that Trump had personally received $250 million from the recent sale of a 50 percent interest in his new project to build a Harrah’s casino in Atlantic City. “A certain amount was cleared, say, around a hundred million,” Cohn said. “. . . But the balance was used by him to liquidate certain other things, which made his overall position very impregnable. Trump Tower has been going like a house afire, and the profits on that are much higher than had been anticipated, and the same is true with Grand Hyatt. On top of which he’s been in a series of private transactions, and he files with banks for between $700 to $750 million, as well as with Equitable” — Equitable Life Assurance, the company that financed Trump Tower — “which backs him in all of his deals.”

Again, Cohn refused to show me a statement, but armed with misinformation about Trump’s casino payout and claims about cash flow at other properties, I inflated his (and his father’s) net worth to $200 million each. In retrospect, Fred Trump was probably worth half that amount, and Donald, once again, should not have been on the list at all.

The next year I received two calls from “John Barron,” the fictitious Trump executive who told me that Donald had taken “in excess of 90 percent” ownership from Fred. He also suggested that Trump was on track to earn a $50 million profit every year from his first Atlantic City casino. And so, in 1984, we increased Donald’s net worth estimate to $400 million and left Fred in, for his last year on the Forbes 400, at $200 million. (Barron also bad-mouthed the competition, saying that developer George Klein had struck a “bad deal” to redevelop Times Square — a bid Trump had lost — and was “going to go down the tubes.”)

Although Trump, posing as Barron, asked Forbes to conduct the conversation off the record, I am publishing it here. I believe an intent to deceive — both with the made-up persona and the content of the call — released me from my good-faith pledge. In a 1990 court case, Trump testified that he had used false names in phone calls to reporters. In 2016, when The Washington Post published a similar recording, Trump denied it was him.

Fred Trump turned down my attempts to interview him for the Forbes 400. He allowed Donald to say whatever he wanted about the family’s business. In the only major interview he gave after Donald seized the limelight, Fred told the New York Times in 1983 that “Donald has a competitive spirit and I don’t want to compete with him. . . . He amazes me. He’s gone way beyond me, absolutely.”

Eventually, nearly every one of Trump’s pronouncements about his wealth unraveled.

The number of apartments was the first problem. The commonly cited figure — that his family owned 25,000 units — began with the mention of 22,000 apartments in that fawning 1976 New York Times profile. In 1988, after I left Forbes, I counted the units and found fewer than 8,000. (I was working briefly on a documentary about Trump that was never completed.) Another Forbes reporter that year, John Anderson, found the same thing. He called the Trump residential management organization, he told me then, and asked an executive named Harry Green how many apartments the company owned. “About 10,000,” Green told him, meaning that our 1982 family valuation of $200 million should have been just $90 million (below the cutoff at that time for inclusion on the list). A few minutes later, Green called Anderson back and corrected himself: Now there were 25,000 again.

Another brazen claim was that Trump, not his father, owned the company’s outer-borough apartments, which his father built beginning in the 1930s. Based on what Trump said during our 1982 and 1983 interviews, I’d assumed that Donald and Fred each owned half, resisting the son’s insistence that he had purchased 80 percent of the units or consolidated the holdings himself. Still, this comment went into the Forbes 400 records, and in 1985, after I left the project, Trump was estimated to be worth $600 million, and his father was off the list.

It would be decades before I learned that Forbes had been conned: In the early 1980s, Trump had zero equity in his father’s company. According to Fred’s will (portions of which appeared in a lawsuit), the father retained legal ownership of his residential empire until his death in 1999, at which point he left it to be divided between his four surviving children and some of his grandchildren. That explains why, after Trump went bankrupt in the early 1990s, he borrowed $30 million from his siblings, secured by an estimated $35 million share of his future inheritance, according to three sources in Tim O’Brien’s 2005 biography, “TrumpNation.” He could have used his own assets as collateral if he’d had any worth that amount, but he didn’t.

The most revelatory document describing Trump’s true net worth in the early ’80s was a 1981 report from the New Jersey Casino Control Commission. O’Brien obtained a copy for his book. Trump had applied for an Atlantic City casino license, and regulators were able to review his tax returns and personal and corporate debt, giving them the most accurate picture of his finances. They found that he had an income of about $100,000 a year, while his 1979 tax returns showed a $3.4 million taxable loss. Trump’s personal assets consisted of a $1 million trust fund that Fred Trump provided to each of his children and grandchildren, a few checking accounts with about $400,000 in them and a 1977 Mercedes 450SL. Nowhere did the report list an ownership stake in the Trump Organization’s residential apartments. Trump also possessed a few parcels of valuable but highly leveraged real estate, financed with $22.5 million in debt, all of it secured by his father’s assets. He did not own a safe deposit box or stocks in publicly traded companies. In sum, Trump was worth less than $5 million, not the $100 million that I reported in the first Forbes 400.

During our first interview in 1982, Trump informed me that he had bought the Barbizon Plaza Hotel and the adjoining 110 Central Park West for just $13 million, a steal. While I was in Trump’s office, a broker supposedly called to offer him $100 million for the property. Trump refused the offer while looking me in the eye; he pointed out that his net worth should include an equity boost of $87 million profit. I believed then that he used a staffer to stage the call, and I resisted the fictitious valuation. But the $13 million price tag for a valuable parcel was recorded in Forbes 400 files, and it soon showed up in other publications, such as New York magazine . It remains on Wikipedia today. Yet tucked away on Page 63 of the Casino Commission report was a section describing Trump’s purchase of the property for $65 million, facilitated by a $50 million loan to Trump by Chase Manhattan Bank. As with many of his buildings, Trump’s debt was far higher, and his true equity far lower, than he claimed.

Roy Cohn had told me that Trump received $250 million from Holiday Inn for its half-interest in the Atlantic City casino. But according to O’Brien, Trump’s actual income from the deal was a construction and management fee (not profit) of about $24 million, while Holiday Inn financed the construction of the $220 million casino.

Later attempts by Trump to paint himself as fantastically wealthy were also duplicitous. In 1989, Trump sent Forbes journalist Harry Seneker a statement of his $3.7 billion net worth. I have obtained the letter. It indicated $900 million in liquid assets. “I am more liquid than any major developer in the United States,” Trump wrote, inducing the magazine to increase Trump’s listing from $1 billion in 1988 to $1.7 billion in 1989.

But according to the New Jersey Casino Commission, which issued another report in 1991, by the end of 1990 Trump’s entire cash position — in both his business and personal accounts — was just $19 million. The amount was insufficient to pay the debt on his over-leveraged casino and real estate holdings while still covering his personal expenses of $1 million per month. His net worth, the commission estimated, was $205 million — less than 6 percent of what he’d told Forbes. In 1990, the magazine dropped Trump from the list and kept him off it for five years.

Forbes declined to comment for this article, but its top editor, Randall Lane, interviewed then-candidate Trump for the Forbes 400 in 2015 and wrote about the magazine’s long struggle to accurately assess his net worth in an article titled “Inside The Epic Fantasy That’s Driven Donald Trump For 33 Years .” Of the 1,538 tycoons who had been on the “Rich List” through the years, Lane wrote, “not one has been more fixated with his or her net worth estimate on a year-in, year-out basis than Donald J. Trump.”

I was a leading New York real estate reporter through the 1980s. I left the Forbes staff in 1983 but continued to freelance for the magazine while writing major investigative features as a contributing editor for the new Manhattan, Inc. magazine, as well as New York, Avenue and New York City Business. I knew all the key players. I thought I had a handle on this material.

But Trump was so competent in conning me that, until 35 years later, I did not know I had been conned. Instead, I have gone through my career in national media with a misinformed sense of satisfaction that, as a perceptive young journalist, I called Trump on his lies and gave Forbes readers who used the Rich List as a barometer of private wealth a more accurate picture of his finances than the one he was selling.

The joke was on me — and everyone else. Trump’s fabrications provided the basis for a vastly inflated wealth assessment for the Forbes 400 that would give him cachet for decades as a triumphant businessman.

In truth, almost nobody had a clear picture of Trump’s books. In 1990, Trump brought in Steve Bollenbach as a new chief financial officer to respond to lender concerns about his crippling debt. “When Bollenbach began delving into the organization’s finances, he got a surprise,” The Washington Post’s Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher write in “Trump Revealed,” their comprehensive 2016 biography. “The small staff on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower included three accountants. Each knew about pieces of the fraying empire — the casinos, for instance, or the condos. But no one knew the overall picture; there were no consolidated financial reports.”

In the absence of a functioning balance sheet, the list didn’t just make Trump feel like a winner, according to O’Brien; it may have provided some of the documentation he needed to borrow reckless sums of money — vast loans that he used, for years, to actually make him a winner. “The more often Forbes mentioned him, the more credible Donald’s claim to vast wealth became,” O’Brien said, arguing that Trump and the list were “mutually reinforcing”: “The more credible his claim to vast wealth became, the easier it was for him to get on the Forbes 400 — which became the standard that other media, and apparently some of the country’s biggest banks, used when judging Donald’s riches.”

Trump returned to the Rich List in 1996 with a reported net worth of $450 million and an editor’s note that he claimed to be worth $2 billion. He never fell off it again. In his book, O’Brien criticized Forbes for rewarding Trump’s fabrications, citing interviews with “three people with direct knowledge of Donald’s finances” who estimated his true net worth after debts to be “somewhere between $150 million and $250 million.” Trump, who had told O’Brien he was worth $6 billion, sued for libel — and lost. When he lost his appeal in 2011, a New Jersey appellate judge wrote, “The largest portion of Mr. Trump’s fortune, according to three people who had had direct knowledge of his holdings, apparently comes from his lucrative inheritance. These people estimated that Mr. Trump’s wealth, presuming that it is not encumbered by heavy debt, may amount to about $200 million to $300 million. That is an enviably large sum of money by most people’s standards but far short of the billionaires club.”

The opacity persists. In 2016, Trump’s presidential campaign put out a statement saying the candidate had a net worth “in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS.” But he has never released his tax returns, and he has said that the core Trump Organization asset is the ownership of his brand — an ineffable marketing claim that is impossible to substantiate or refute.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 16:35:52 Per pool, Trump has arrived at Trump International Golf Club in FL.This is Trump’s 108th day at a Trump golf club as president. reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 16:19 schreef Bernhard.von.Galen het volgende:

[..]

Serieuze vraag, geloof je dit echt? Los van de inhoud kom je niet over als een hele domme jongen.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 16:58 schreef Montov het volgende:

[..]

Nintex is een gokverslaafde pokerspeler die All-in is gegaan met een 2 en een Joker. Dan moet je tot het bittere einde blijven bluffen.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 16:58 schreef Montov het volgende:

[..]

Nintex is een gokverslaafde pokerspeler die All-in is gegaan met een 2 en een Joker. Dan moet je tot het bittere einde blijven bluffen.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 16:58 schreef Montov het volgende:

[..]

Nintex is een gokverslaafde pokerspeler die All-in is gegaan met een 2 en een Joker. Dan moet je tot het bittere einde blijven bluffen.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 17:19 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Een joker bij het pokeren?

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 17:39 schreef Montov het volgende:

[..]

De joker is een miljardair, dus hij zal weten hoe het spelletje werkt.
Ik wilde eerst nog kiezen voor een joker en een bisschop om er 4d schaken van te maken, maar het schaakstuk heet in het Nederlands een loper, dus dat was wat minder toepasselijk.

Ik ben gewoon niet goed genoeg om een fulltime Twitter komiek te worden, helaas.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 12:45 schreef Belabor het volgende:
Het zou niemand moeten verbazen, na het lekken van die opnames dat hij maar wat graag opschept over vrouwen bij het kruis grijpen.

Voor een man met zijn ego is er ook niks raars aan die mysoginie, past perfect in zijn persoonlijkheidskader.

Daarom (en om vele andere redenen) is deze man ook volledig ongeschikt als president. Maar goed, dat roep ik al sinds 2016 maar de Amerikanen zien dat blijkbaar anders.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 18:00 schreef Treinhomo het volgende:

[..]

I see what you did there.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 18:07 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:
Wat gaat er mis bij jouw quote?

Roland Verstappen Helemaal niets

twitter:

Breaking911 twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 17:50:14 The Democratic Party filed a federal lawsuit alleging a conspiracy by the Trump campaign, Russia and WikiLeaks to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. - Fox News reageer retweet

twitter:

thehill twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 18:04:04 JUST IN: Russia: Trump invited Putin to the White House https://t.co/Be0NwwT0OW https://t.co/muxtFzvegS reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 18:19 schreef Nintex het volgende:

twitter:

Breaking911 twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 17:50:14 The Democratic Party filed a federal lawsuit alleging a conspiracy by the Trump campaign, Russia and WikiLeaks to disrupt the 2016 presidential election. - Fox News reageer retweet

quote:

Under the law of the United States, civil discovery is wide-ranging and may seek disclosure of information that is reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.[4] This is a much broader standard than relevance, because it contemplates the exploration of evidence which might be relevant, rather than evidence which is truly relevant.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 20:54 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Wat zaken die ik me dan als leek afvraag: hoezo geen Trump zelf?

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 21:01 schreef Tchock het volgende:

[..]

Ik vermoed omdat er nog geen bewijs is dat Trump persoonlijk betrokken was. Je zou hem alleen maar de kans geven om dat te zeggen, maakt je zaak niet sterker. Daarnaast kom je dan in de sfeer van presidentiële immuniteit, al kan Trump daar geen beroep op doen voor zaken van voor hij president was.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 21:04 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Ja, op zich wel logisch eigenlijk ... je kunt moeilijk random mensen gaan aanklagen en om Trump zelf aan te klagen zonder dat je bewijs hebt dat hij onderdeel uitmaakte van de samenzwering zou potentieel een PR fiasco zijn.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 20:59 schreef crystal_meth het volgende:
De hack bracht al hun interne communicatie naar buiten, nu kunnen ze het Trump kamp hetzelfde aandoen. Met het discovery process kunnen ze veel meer te weten komen en openbaar maken dan wat Mueller's onderzoek zal opleveren.

[..]

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 18:22 schreef Mike het volgende:

[..]

Voor degenen die net als Nintex willen lachen om de hoeveelheid shit waarin de republikeinen zitten, hier is het hele document: https://www.lawfareblog.c(...)lection-interference

quote:

O'Brien Sues GOP Campaign
Lays Blame For Bugging on White House

By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 21, 1972; Page A01

Democratic National Chairman Lawrence F. O'Brien, apparently seizing on the break-in and attempted bugging of party headquarters here as a major campaign issue, attempted yesterday to lay responsibility for the incident at the door of the White House.

He said there is "a developing clear line to the white House," and cited what he called the "potential involvement" of special counsel to the President, Charles Colson.

O'Brien made his remarks as the Democratic National Committee filed a $l million suit in U.S. District Court here against the Committee for the re-election of the President, whose chief security agent was one of five men arrested at the break-in at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday.

President Nixon's campaign chairman, former Attorney General John N. Mitchell, again deplored the bugging incident, denied any party responsibility for it and called the law suit "another example of sheer demagoguery on the part of Mr. O'Brien."

In other developments yesterday:

• White House consultant and former CIA employee Howard E. Hunt, whose name was found in two of the suspects' address books, was reported to be a "good friend" of the suspects' first attorney, Douglas Caddy.
• Federal sources close to the investigation said that a diagram that could have been used in a past or future bugging attempt on Miami Beach headquarters on Sen. George S. McGovern was found among the suspects' belongings.
• Sources in the FBI said that agents were ordered to question Hunt yesterday, but the sources were unable to indicate if Hunt had been reached. This was the first indication that the government thought Hunt might have some information about the bugging.

Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.) charged yesterday that the Federal Reserve Board "ducked, misled, hid out, avoided calls" and gave him "the idiot treatment" in connection with his request that the board produce the name of the bank involved in issuing 58 $l00 bills seized from the five suspects.

Proxmire, ranking Democratic member of the Senate Banking Committee, said that the board's failure to act "suggests they have something to hide."

Banks are required to record details of any transaction involving sums over 5,000 or large federal reserve notes.

O'Brien charged that Mitchell attempted to make it appear that former CIA employee James W. McCord Jr., the security agent who was arrested Saturday, had ended his employment with the Nixon committee some months ago.

Until Monday McCord was the salaried security chief for the committee. Mitchell's first statement Sunday on McCord's employment with the committee was that McCord was employed months ago.

"We know that as of the moment of his arrest at gunpoint just l0 feet from where I now stand, Mr. McCord was in the pay of the Committee for the Re-election of the President," O'Brien said.

"If John Mitchell's reflex attempt to conceal that fact is any signal of what is to come from the Republican Party and administration, I fear we shall be long in getting at the truth."

O'Brien went on to call the incident a "cheap cloak-and-dagger intrigue at the national political level. We learned of this bugging attempt only because it was bungled. How many other attempts have there been? And just who was involved?"

He said the lawsuit was an attempt to force the issue into examination by the court. A Democratic spokesman said court hearings on the matter could begin in "the near future."

"I believe we are about to witness the ultimate test of this administration that so piously committed itself to a new era of law and order just four years ago." O'Brien said.

In a prepared statement, Mitchell called O'Brien's suit a "political stunt."

"This committee did not authorize and does not condone the alleged actions of the five men apprehended Saturday morning. We abhor such activity.

"The Committee for the Re-election of the President is not legally, morally or ethically accountable for actions taken without its knowledge and beyond the scope of its control." Mitchell said.

In yesterday's editions, The Post reported the existence of Hunt's name in the suspects' address books and that he functioned at the White House as an assistant to Colson.

A White House aide confirmed that Colson, who is said to handle delicate assignments for the president, was the man who brought hunt to the White House. The aide, who said Hunt was hired because of his CIA expertise, said Hunt worked on declassifying the Pentagon Papers and, most recently, on narcotics intelligence.

He said Hunt last worked for the White House on March 20.

Presidential spokesman Ronald Ziegler said yesterday morning, "I talked to Mr. Colson after reading The Washington Post story this morning, and he made it clear that he is in no way involved with this matter..." Later Ziegler told reporters that he was finished with any comment on the subject.:

Federal sources close to the bugging investigation said two large ballrooms scheduled to be used as Miami headquarters for McGovern during the Democratic Convention were diagrammed in another address book taken by authorities from the suspects' belongings.

The rough diagram, a sketch, shows the Regency and Mediterranean rooms at the Doral Hotel on the Ocean in Miami.

It also denotes the location of two emergency exits from the rooms. The word "May" was written by the diagram, apparently a reference to the month, the sources said.

Asked about the diagram yesterday, McGovern's convention coordinator, Owen Donley, confirmed that the rooms have been slated for use by McGovern convention staff since January.

Donley said one room would be used by the news media and the other for staff or delegate caucuses.

"If they wanted to bug the two rooms, it wouldn't bother anyone anyway. They are both public rooms in the hotel. We will hold staff caucuses there, but they will be mass meetings. There wouldn't be anything said there that wouldn't be said out on the street."

Donley said the McGovern campaign staff was exploring various antibugging methods before the Democratic National headquarters incident.

"We didn't suddenly become paranoid. We were paranoid beforehand. That is just part of convention procedure," Donley said. He indicated that antibugging precautions would be taken at the headquarters in Miami.

Hunt, the White House consultant, has a full-time job in the public relations firm of Robert R. Mullen Co., l700 Pennsylvania Ave, NW, directly across from Nixon's re-election headquarters and the chief White House offices.

Yesterday, Robert E. Bennett, president of the Mullen firm, said that Hunt was a "good friend" of the suspects' first attorney, Caddy.

Hunt and Caddy once shared an office at the Mullen firm, according to Bennet. Caddy was not employed there but acted as liaison with General Foods Corp. where he was employed.

In Superior Court here Saturday when the five suspects appeared for arraignment, Caddy was secretive and stayed in the background, bringing in another attorney to represent the five men.

Shortly after 3 a.m. Saturday, Caddy told a reporter, he received a call from the wife of Bernard L. Baker, one of the five men arrested. "She said that her husband told her to call me if he hadn't called her by 3 a.m. that it might mean trouble," Caddy said.

Caddy said he had met Barker once, a year ago, and that they had had a "sympathetic conversation."

Barker, who owns a real estate firm in Miami, has been active in anti-Castro activities and is reported to have played a role in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in l961.

In addition to McCord and Barker, the other three suspects are: Frank Surges, also known as Frank Florini, an American who served in Fiddle Castor's revolutionary army and has since been a leader in the anti-Castro movement in Miami: Virgilio R. Gonzalez, a locksmith; and Eugenio R. Martinez, a real estate salesman for Barker.

McCord was still being held in D.C. jail yesterday on $30,000 bond. The other four were being held there on $50,000 bond. All are charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communication.

Their attorney, Joseph A. Rafferty Jr., filed a motion yesterday seeking a reduction on the bond.

Meanwhile, yesterday Sen. Bob Dole, head of the Republican National Committee, denied as totally false reports that the Republicans had urged Spanish community leaders and other Republicans not to discuss the bugging incident with anyone.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 21:52 schreef Montov het volgende:

[..]

Hoeveel shit, en wat is de kans van slagen? Ik lees verder niet in die link, of kijk ik verkeerd?

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 21:07 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Ja, dat gaat een groot mediafeest worden. Enig idee wat nu de procedure gaat zijn en met wat voor termijn discovery zou gaan beginnen?

quote:

The DNC may well be hoping to use this new suit to surface more evidence of this, should it proceed to the discovery stage — but as of now, they don’t have the goods on any Trumpworld involvement with the hack and leak that damaged Democrats specifically. (Special counsel Robert Mueller is, of course, continuing to investigate the matter.)

quote:

Mr. Perez firmly denied that the lawsuit had a political purpose, but he appeared to allude at points to the possibility that civil litigation might bring to light damaging information about Mr. Trump and his associates.

The complaint is largely based on information that has previously been disclosed in news reports and subsequent court proceedings. But if the lawsuit proceeds, the president and his campaign aides could be forced to disclose documents and submit to depositions that require them to answer questions under oath.

To reach the discovery stage, lawsuits have to survive any motion to dismiss the litigation by the defendants.

Mr. Perez suggested, for instance, that Mr. Trump’s tax returns would reveal “shady conduct” if they were ever made public. Asked if part of the lawsuit’s aim was to force such disclosures, Mr. Perez demurred: “I haven’t given that any thought.”

quote:

Always a bad sign when the judge tells you that your motion has “gaping holes in it,” as the judge told the attys for MC and DJT this AM. I don’t know why they continue to hide what they know about the FBI raids. Time to come clean and let the chips fall where they may

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 12:39 schreef Ulx het volgende:
De oelewapper is weer wakker.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 20-04-2018 om 12:34:16 So General Michael Flynn’s life can be totally destroyed while Shadey James Comey can Leak and Lie and make lots of money from a third rate book (that should never have been written). Is that really the way life in America is supposed to work? I don’t think so! reageer retweet

Shadey?

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 22:46 schreef Vis1980 het volgende:

[..]

Het grappige is dat dit juist the American dream is.

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 23:03 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Dit volg ik niet helemaal... je denkt dat de American dream is zelf oneerlijk groot te worden en de kleintjes te verpulveren oid?

quote:

Op vrijdag 20 april 2018 23:12 schreef Vis1980 het volgende:

[..]

sorry, het ging mij meer om het stukje: "...making lots of money with a third rate book.Is that really the way life in America is supposed to work?"

Maar inderdaad het 'liegen' over het hoofd gezien. Al maakt dat vaak niet heel veel uit, het doel is uiteindelijk veel geld verdienen.

quote:

TRUMP FUNDRAISER OFFERED RUSSIAN GAS COMPANY PLAN TO GET SANCTIONS LIFTED FOR $26 MILLION (The Intercept)

SHORTLY AFTER PRESIDENT Donald Trump was inaugurated last year, top Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy offered Russian gas giant Novatek a $26 million lobbying plan aimed at removing the company from a U.S. sanctions list, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.

Broidy is a Trump associate who was deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee until he resigned last week amid reports that he had agreed to pay $1.6 million to a former Playboy model with whom he had an affair. But in February 2017, when he laid out his lobbying proposal for Novatek, he was acting as a well-connected businessman and longtime Republican donor in a bid to help the Russian company avoid sanctions imposed by the Obama administration. The 2014 sanctions were aimed at punishing Russia for annexing Crimea and supporting pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine.

In February 2017, Broidy sent a draft of the plan by email to attorney Andrei Baev, then a Moscow- and London-based lawyer who represented major Russian energy companies for the firm Chadbourne & Parke LLP. Baev had already been communicating with Novatek about finding a way to lift U.S. sanctions.

Broidy proposed arranging meetings with key White House and congressional leaders and generating op-eds and other articles favorable to the Russian company, along with a full suite of lobbying activities to be undertaken by consultants brought on board. Yet even as he offered those services, Broidy was adamant that his company, Fieldcrest Advisors LLC, would not perform lobbying services but would hire others to do it. He suggested that parties to the deal sign a sweeping non-disclosure agreement that would shield their work from public scrutiny.

The plan is outlined in a series of emails and other documents obtained by The Intercept. Broidy and Baev did not dispute the authenticity of the exchanges but said the deal was never consummated.

SPOILER

In March, Bloomberg News reported that Broidy “offered last year to help a Moscow-based lawyer” — Baev — “get Russian companies removed from a U.S. sanctions list.” The news outlet did not identify the Russian firms or provide details of that proposal.

“At the time when I was a partner of Chadbourne & Parke LLP I had very preliminary discussions with Elliott Broidy with regard to possible engagement of him as a strategic consultant with regard to a possible instruction by one of my corporate clients. This instruction has never materialized,” Baev told The Intercept in an email. “Nor did I or Chadbourne provide any services to any other individual or entity in connection with any attempt to remove any Russian company or an individual from the US sanctions list.”

Broidy told The Intercept through a spokesperson that Baev had approached him about the proposal, but that Broidy had decided not to go through with it for political reasons. “At the time Mr. Baev had approached us he was then a managing partner of a major U.S. law firm and the new Administration had indicated an interest in normalizing relations with Russia and potentially easing sanctions,” Broidy told The Intercept in a statement provided by his spokesperson. “Subsequently, the geopolitical landscape changed and I made the decision not to pursue it.”

Baev was introduced to Broidy in October 2016, before Trump was elected. At the time, Broidy was serving as a top fundraiser for the Trump campaign; he would later become vice chair of Trump’s inaugural committee before transitioning to his most recent position at the RNC.

Broidy began sharing drafts of his lobbying plan with Baev by December. That month, he also sent Baev a Wall Street Journal article headlined “France Poised for Pro-Russia Pivot.”

The article describes how François Fillon and Marine Le Pen, the center-right and far-right candidates, respectively, during the 2017 French presidential election, both opposed punitive sanctions levied by French President François Hollande against Russia for its activity in eastern Ukraine. “With U.S. President-elect Donald Trump also promising friendlier relations with Moscow, Western agreement on sanctions against Russia could crumble,” the article says. Fillon and Le Pen were eventually defeated by France’s current president, Emmanuel Macron.

As the discussions continued, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and others began pushing legislation that would take the decision on whether to lift sanctions out of Trump’s hands and put Congress in control, a development that Novatek apparently recognized as a threat given that Broidy’s power to affect policy lay in his presumed influence with Trump.

In January 2017, Baev wrote to Broidy asking whether McCain’s bill would put their efforts at risk. “The client is asking how our road map would be affected by a new bill sponsored by Senator McCain to codify the existing sanctions and to impose new ones as a matter of federal law which the Administration will not be in a position to lift without consent of the US Congress. What are your thoughts on this?”

Broidy responded: “We need to convince McCain to abandon or water down the bill while we push the admin and other members of Senate to water down and vote no. Not a game changer.

In a proposal dated February 23, 2017, Broidy told Baev that he had found “many influential experts, lobbyists, and attorneys” who were “willing and able to work immediately on your behalf and on behalf of Novatek.” The document, marked “strictly-confidential, attorney client privilege,” lays out a plan for a two-year influence campaign that Broidy claimed could dilute McCain’s bill and lift sanctions by February 2019.

The plan outlines a 25-step “Roadmap” that includes getting buy-in from congressional Foreign Relations committees, as well as outreach to the White House, the Treasury, and the Commerce, State, and Justice departments.

It also lists “issues for Congress” that would have to be overcome in order to implement the plan, including progress on agreements to resolve the situation in Ukraine. Congress would also “need information as to whether Russia did indeed hack DNC and attempt to influence US Presidential election,” according to the document.

Broidy added: “Congress would require agreement with Russia that Russia will not do so again.”

Broidy proposed a one-time fee of $500,000 to Fieldcrest, followed by monthly payments starting at $300,000 and eventually rising to $500,000. He proposed an additional monthly $300,000 for “attorneys, lobbyists, experts and other consultants that Fieldcrest Advisors will recommend.” The documents include a chart estimating the expenses for the next three years:
Baev told The Intercept that the conversations were preliminary in nature and that he and Broidy spoke of their own volition. “Neither I nor Chadbourne & Parke LLP has ever been instructed by any Russian company or individual to represent them in connection with this matter,” he said in an email. “For ethical reasons, I cannot address whether I was asked to perform any such services, but whether I or the firm was contacted or not, we were never engaged to perform these services and never performed them.”

The documents show, however, that Novatek asked Baev to discuss retaining Broidy to help the company get off the sanctions list, and Novatek appears to have specifically referenced Broidy’s proposal in doing so. In February, Baev had received a letter from Denis Solovev, the director of communications for Novatek, marked “confidential.”

“I am authorized by the management of Novatek to contact you and express our interest in your services related to removing Novatek from the US sanctions list,” wrote Solovev. “We would like to discuss with you your proposed road map.”

Throughout the documents and correspondence, Broidy articulates a desire to avoid publicly registering under the Lobbying Disclosure Act or the Foreign Agent Registration Act — laws that require influence peddlers to be transparent about who is funding their lobbying campaigns, and, in the case of FARA, whom they are speaking to. In an effort to avoid such disclosures, Broidy proposed that he and his consulting company, Fieldcrest, would “advise on the creation of an appropriate team” and “provide advice and manage coordination of the team.” “Fieldcrest is not a ‘lobbyist’ or registered ‘foreign agent’ and … at no time would be acting in such capacities,” Broidy noted in his outline, which also suggests that each team member be required to sign a confidentiality and non-disparagement form.

One hiccup came when Broidy sought legal advice about the plan. Elliot Berke, an attorney and managing partner at Berke Farah LLP, reviewed Broidy’s proposal and flagged the avoidance of lobbying registration as a problem. “Fieldcrest offers a somewhat detailed ‘Roadmap,’ which in and of itself could be viewed as providing strategic advice to influence US policy,” Berke wrote to Broidy in February, suggesting that he may have already run afoul of FARA. “The fee amounts and scope also would not support a claim that Fieldcrest’s activities would be limited to non-FARA-registrable administrative activities.” Berke also noted that “some of the characterizations” in the plan “could be construed to suggest that Fieldcrest has already engaged in registrable activity.”

Berke closed the letter: “Not the conclusion you were hoping for, I know, but happy to discuss more next week.”

Broidy consulted Berke Farah to ensure that his plan was legal, and the answer he received was a factor in the decision not to move forward with the agreement, according to his statement to The Intercept. “As with any matter, I took early steps to ensure that any proposed engagement, if one had gone forward, was in compliance with all applicable laws, which is why I consulted with my attorneys. As I’ve consistently stated though, I did not wish to be a lobbyist or FARA agent and would have declined any engagement requiring such steps.”

Berke did not respond to a request for comment from The Intercept.

Broidy has worked to funnel money into the U.S. political system for others, however. Last month, the Associated Press reported that Broidy received millions of dollars from George Nadar, a witness in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and a close confidant of Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. AP reported that Broidy received that money weeks before he made personal donations to congressional campaigns in an effort to shape a bill critical of Qatar, which the United Arab Emirates is currently blockading. The New York Times also reported that Broidy was reimbursed by Nadar after he funded an October conference that was highly critical of Qatar, which was confirmed by documents obtained by The Intercept. The UAE has contracts with a private security company Broidy owns that are worth “hundreds of millions of dollars,” according to the Times.

Broidy has blamed Qatar for the hack and disclosure of his emails. His attorney wrote a public letter to the Qatari ambassador to the U.S. blaming the Gulf nation for spreading “false and stolen information about him,” and claiming that Broidy had “irrefutable forensic evidence tying Qatar to this unlawful attack.” Broidy has since filed a lawsuit seeking damages from the Qatari government.

The Qatari Embassy did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment. The documents were provided to The Intercept anonymously.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 00:35 schreef Evertjan het volgende:
Heeft Trump toch maar goed geregeld

quote:

Sessions told White House that Rosenstein’s firing could prompt his departure, too

Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently told the White House he might have to leave his job if President Trump fired his deputy, Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the exchange.

Sessions made his position known in a phone call to White House counsel Donald McGahn last weekend, as Trump’s fury at Rosenstein peaked after the deputy attorney general approved the FBI’s raid April 9 on the president’s personal attorney Michael Cohen.

Sessions’s message to the White House, which has not previously been reported, underscores the political firestorm that Trump would invite should he attempt to remove the deputy attorney general. While Trump also has railed against Sessions at times, the protest resignation of an attorney general — which would be likely to incite other departures within the administration — would create a moment of profound crisis for the White House.

In the phone call with McGahn, Sessions wanted details of a meeting Trump and Rosenstein held at the White House on April 12, according to a person with knowledge of the call. Sessions expressed relief to learn that their meeting was largely cordial. Sessions said he would have had to consider leaving as the attorney general had Trump ousted Rosenstein, this person said.

Another person familiar with the exchange said Sessions did not intend to threaten the White House but rather wanted to convey the untenable position that Rosenstein’s firing would put him in.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Rosenstein’s status remains uncertain, but the pressure he is facing seemed to subside after last week.

Last summer, when it appeared Trump was going to fire Sessions or pressure him to resign, Republican lawmakers and conservative advocacy groups rallied to Sessions’s side and warned the president not to move against him.

Trump had told senior officials last week that he was considering firing Rosenstein, who was confirmed by the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support last year. Since then, alumni of the Justice Department have rallied to Rosenstein’s defense.

As of Friday afternoon, more than 800 former Justice Department employees had signed an open letter calling on Congress to “swiftly and forcefully respond to protect the founding principles of our Republic and the rule of law” if Trump were to fire the deputy attorney general, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III or other senior Justice Department officials. The group MoveOn.org has sought to organize nationwide protests if such an event were to occur.

Rosenstein, on behalf of the Justice Department, is set to argue a sentencing case, Chavez-Meza v. United States, before the Supreme Court on Monday. Appearing before the high court has long been a professional goal, people close to Rosenstein say.

A senior administration official said Sessions does not like the way Rosenstein has been treated by the president and had expressed such concerns for months. He has regularly sought guidance from the White House about Rosenstein’s standing with the president and asked about his interactions with Trump, this official said.

But Sessions has had little ability to do anything about it, given his own shaky standing with Trump for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, this official said. Trump has, at times, referred to Sessions as “Mr. Magoo” and Rosenstein as “Mr. Peepers,” a character from a 1950s sitcom, according to people with whom the president has spoken.

The relationship between Sessions and Rosenstein — and their staffs — has been strained at times over the first year of the Trump administration. But people familiar with Sessions’s thinking say that he has said several times that he would find it difficult to remain as attorney general if Trump fired for no good reason the veteran prosecutor in Baltimore that Sessions chose to be his deputy. The two men, along with Solicitor General Noel Francisco, were spotted in February dining together at a restaurant near the Justice Department, generating some speculation that they were attempting a display of solidarity.

Rosenstein, the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, is tasked with running the day-to-day operations of the sprawling agency of 113,000 employees who work for the FBI; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Bureau of Prisons; U.S. attorneys offices; and Main Justice, the agency’s headquarters. But from the time he was confirmed in May of last year, the investigation into possible coordination during the 2016 presidential campaign between Trump associates and agents of the Russian government has overshadowed everything he has done.

James M. Trusty, a partner at Ifrah Law and a friend of Rosenstein’s, said the deputy attorney general “went into the job with a pretty fatalistic view,” but he “probably didn’t know it was going to be this much of a storm.”

“I remember him joking at his going-away party that nine months was the average tenure for the deputy attorney general,” Trusty said.

A wall of photographs outside Rosenstein’s fourth-floor office at the Justice Department illustrates the high-stress and political nature of the deputy attorney general’s position. President Barack Obama’s first deputy attorney general, David Ogden, stepped down from the job after less than a year. One of President Bill Clinton’s deputy attorneys general, Philip B. Heymann, lasted 10 months.

Trusty, who said he had spoken with Rosenstein about three weeks ago, said Rosenstein had kept his views on the situation largely private and had not sought surrogates or anyone else to press his case.

“I think he tends to view things in a very long-range way, kind of a this-too-shall-pass philosophy about the slings and arrows that will come at you,” Trusty said.

A month after Rosenstein became deputy attorney general, he was criticized for his role in the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey. Rosenstein authored a critical memo lambasting Comey for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and the White House later used the document as a pretext to remove the FBI director. After a few days, though, Trump said he was thinking about the Russia investigation when he fired Comey. Comey has said in recent days he believed Rosenstein “acted dishonorably” and could not be trusted.

At that point, Rosenstein was overseeing the Russia investigation because Sessions had recused himself. On May 17, about a week after the Comey firing, Rosenstein announced that he had appointed Mueller as special counsel to conduct the Russia investigation.

Rosenstein took the action without first consulting Sessions and notified him when he was at the White House meeting with Trump. The decision took Trump by surprise and greatly angered him.

A person close to the White House and the Justice Department said Sessions has “vacillated, I think, from being concerned about the deputy leaving or being fired and recognizing that Rosenstein has not been a friend of either him or the department.”

During the past year, Rosenstein has been involved in several policy issues in the Justice Department, as well as complex prosecutions involving cybercrimes and the first charges against Chinese-based fentanyl manufacturers and distributors.

But Russia continues to consume his days. This week, two of Trump’s top legislative allies and leading members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus met with Rosenstein and pressed him for more documents about the conduct of law enforcement officials involved in the Russia probe. They warned him that he could face impeachment proceedings or an effort to hold him in contempt of Congress if he did not satisfy Republican demands for more documents.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op zaterdag 21-04-2018 om 00:34:26 Just heard the Campaign was sued by the Obstructionist Democrats. This can be good news in that we will now counter for the DNC Server that they refused to give to the FBI, the Wendy Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton Emails. reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 01:00 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:
Die rechtszaak van de democraten, is dat niet gewoon een publiciteitsstunt? Wat hopen ze hiermee te gaan bereiken? Er is nog onvoldoende bewijs om een rechtszaak te winnen, toch?

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 01:02 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Ze willen net als de vorige keer, een schadevergoeding.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 01:02 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op zaterdag 21-04-2018 om 00:34:26 Just heard the Campaign was sued by the Obstructionist Democrats. This can be good news in that we will now counter for the DNC Server that they refused to give to the FBI, the Wendy Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton Emails. reageer retweet

Wendy

quote:

The Trump administration will shift federal funding aimed at reducing teen pregnancy rates to programs that teach abstinence.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced Friday the availability of grants through the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, (TPPP) a grant program created under former President Obama that funds organizations and programs working to reduce teen pregnancy rates.

Trump's HHS announced, however, that unlike under the Obama administration, grants will be geared toward organizations that teach abstinence education to teens instead of the comprehensive sex ed approach the previous administration supported.

One of the programs uses a "sexual risk reduction model," which is designed to reduce sexual risk behaviors.

The other program uses a "sexual risk avoidance model," which teaches teens to avoid sex completely.

"Projects will clearly communicate that teen sex is a risk behavior for both the physical consequences of pregnancy and sexual transmitted infections; as well as sociological, economic and other related risks," the funding announcement reads. "Both risk avoidance and risk reduction approaches can and should include skills associated with helping youth delay sex as well as skills to help those youth already engaged in sexual risk to return toward risk-free choices in the future."

SPOILER

In total, tier one will award up to $61 million in funds, ranging from $200,000 to $500,000 per year.

The second tier solicits applications to develop and test "new and innovative strategies" to prevent teen pregnancy while improving adolescent health and addressing "youth sexual risk holistically by focusing on protective factors."

The changes represent a major change to the way the federal government treats teen pregnancy.

The Obama administration mostly awarded TPP grants to organizations that taught comprehensive sex education, which can include teaching teens about contraception and abstinence.

But the Trump administration has been shifting toward abstinence programs since hiring several HHS employees who support the approach, including Valerie Huber, the chief of staff for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health, which oversees the TPP program.

Prior to coming to HHS, Huber led Ascend, a national abstinence education advocacy group.

The administration cut short grants for 81 TPP grantees last summer, arguing the programs, which focused mostly on comprehensive sex ed, were ineffective at curbing teen pregnancy rates.

Those grantees would be able to receive funding if they shifted the focus of their programs toward abstinence.

Democrats argue the changes are ideological and will jeopardize record-low teen pregnancy rates in the U.S.

“Both Democrats and Republicans have supported investing in evidence-based approaches to preventing teen pregnancy, so it is disappointing — and deeply concerning — that the Trump-Pence Administration is doing everything it can to undermine these investments in ways that take us in the absolutely wrong direction on this issue," said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Senate Health Committee. "These changes show yet again that the Trump-Pence Administration’s priority is imposing its extreme, backwards ideology, no matter what that means for women, families, and communities.”

In a funding announcement released Friday, the administration announced two tiers of funds for the TPP program.

In the first, grantees would have to follow one of two abstinence programs to receive funding.

quote:

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has begun dismissing hundreds of civil rights complaints under a new protocol that allows investigators to disregard cases that are part of serial filings or that they consider burdensome to the office.

Department officials said the new policy targeted advocates who flooded the office with thousands of complaints for similar violations, jamming its investigation pipeline with cases that could be resolved without exhausting staff and resources. But civil rights advocates worry that the office’s rejection of legitimate claims is the most obvious example to date of its diminishing role in enforcing civil rights laws in the nation’s schools.

Liz Hill, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said the new provision was part of the office’s revision of its manual that lays out procedures for processing civil rights cases. The goal of the new manual, which took effect last month, is to help the office better manage its docket, investigations and resolutions, she said.

Among the changes implemented immediately is a provision that allows the Office for Civil Rights to dismiss cases that reflect “a pattern of complaints previously filed with O.C.R. by an individual or a group against multiple recipients,” or complaints “filed for the first time against multiple recipients that” place “an unreasonable burden on O.C.R.’s resources.”

So far, the provision has resulted in the dismissal of more than 500 disability rights complaints.

SPOILER

Catherine E. Lhamon, who led the Office for Civil Rights under the Obama administration, said the new provision undermined the mission of the office. Unlike the Justice Department, the Education Department cannot pick and choose the cases it pursues. If the office has evidence that the law has been violated, it must open a case.

“The thing that scares me is when they get to say ‘we won’t open some cases because it’s too much for us,’ or ‘we don’t like complainant,’ or ‘it’s not our week to work on that,’ you start to change the character of the office,” Ms. Lhamon said.

But Debora L. Osgood, a lawyer who worked for 25 years at the Office for Civil Rights and now consults with and represents schools on civil rights matters, praised the change. She said the provision showed that the agency was “essentially taking the reins back for control of its complaint docket.”

Ms. Osgood said that in her experience, one person could clog the pipeline in each of the agency’s 12 regional offices, limiting investigators’ ability to respond to other complaints. It often frustrated investigators who prided themselves on being able to resolve complaints promptly, she said.

“In effect, it turned over the decision-making about how the agency would use many of its resources to a single individual, rather than to agency officials and staff charged with the responsibility for implementing the agency’s stated mission,” she said.

According to the Education Department, 41 percent of the 16,720 complaints filed in the 2016 fiscal year came from three people. The next year, of the 12,837 total cases, 23 percent of them did.

The department calls the complainants “frequent fliers.”

Marcie Lipsitt is proud to be one of them.

In the last two years, Ms. Lipsitt, a disability rights advocate in Michigan, has filed more than 2,400 complaints with the office against schools, departments of education, colleges and universities, libraries and other educational institutions across the country that have websites that people who are deaf or blind or who struggle with fine motor skills cannot navigate.

“No one even knew about this issue until I started filing,” Ms. Lipsitt said. “I didn’t want to get anybody in trouble. I just wanted to raise awareness.”

She has secured more than 1,000 agreements with institutions that committed to bringing their websites into compliance with the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities and requires that electronic and information technologies be accessible to them.

In recent weeks, Ms. Lipsitt said, she has received notice that more than 500 cases, including active and open investigations, were dismissed. Each letter cited the new provision as the reason. The department will instead work with colleges on complying with web accessibility laws.

“But I won’t stop,” Ms. Lipsitt vowed, “because if I do, the story goes away.”

The new manual also eliminates an appeals process for Office for Civil Rights decisions — department officials said it usually resulted in the same outcome — and says complaints can no longer be filed on the basis of journal articles and news media reports. The manual also drops all mention of investigators’ looking into “systemic issues.” However, the department said that the new provision would not apply to class-action-like complaints filed by groups.

The changes worry civil rights groups, which point out that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has already rescinded guidances meant to protect students against sexual assaults on campuses and black and transgender students against bias.

Neena Chaudhry, associate general counsel and senior adviser of education at the National Women’s Law Center, said that by filing dozens of complaints in recent decades, the group has been able to secure equal scholarship money and increased sports opportunities for female athletes. Now, as the organization shifts its focus to sexual assault, the department may prove less responsive.

Rachel M. Kleinman, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said that the new manual was “yet another avenue for O.C.R. to not seriously investigate systemic race discrimination.”

The group has filed complaints on behalf of large groups of black students it believes were being disproportionately affected by law enforcement policies. Already, one case has been closed by the DeVos administration, and the department declined to conduct a broader analysis.

“They seem to be closing all of the pathways for students to have their rights enforced by the federal government,” Ms. Kleinman said.

Ms. DeVos’s Office for Civil Rights has maintained that it wants to be more efficient and effective than it was under the Obama administration, which was known for its aggressive enforcement and broad investigations but was also accused of being overzealous and leaving cases languishing for years.

Ms. Osgood said such changes would be welcomed by the colleges and universities that she assists with federal civil rights investigations. She said the changes showed that the department was willing to work with schools in a “more reasonable, more nimble and more expeditious manner.”

The department did not say how its investigators would determine that a case would place an “unreasonable burden” on its resources. However, just weeks after the new manual took effect, Congress allocated $8.5 million more in funding to the Office for Civil Rights, which Ms. DeVos had sought to cut, in order for the office to manage its caseload.

Ms. Lhamon said that, in her time in the office, she sought out ways to manage large volumes of cases that stemmed from one complainant, and she acknowledged that her office struggled with timely responses. But she said she could not come up with any measure that would not shortchange an investigation.

“There’s not a limitation on justice, and there’s not a limitation on how we perceive injustice,” Ms. Lhamon said. “To say you’ve reached your quota is to say that there’s somehow a cap on the number of children who might be harmed.”

quote:

Keith Davidson, the former attorney for two women who were paid to keep quiet about their alleged affairs with Donald Trump, has been contacted by federal authorities investigating Trump attorney Michael Cohen and is cooperating with them, a spokesman for Davidson confirmed.

Davidson was asked to provide “certain limited electronic information” for the probe led by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, spokesman Dave Wedge said. “He has done so and will continue to cooperate to the fullest extent possible under the law,” Wedge said in a statement Friday.

Shortly before the 2016 election, Davidson negotiated a confidentiality agreement with Cohen under which porn star Stormy Daniels was paid $130,000.

Davidson also represented Karen McDougal, a Playboy centerfold, in the $150,000 agreement she struck in August 2016 with the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., for the rights to her story. AMI never published the story.

SPOILER

Both Daniels and McDougal have filed lawsuits to get out of their non-disclosure agreements. Earlier this week, McDougal settled with AMI — whose chief executive, David Pecker, is a friend of Trump — and is no longer bound by her contract with the tabloid publisher.

FBI agents raided Cohen’s Manhattan office last week, as well as his home and a hotel room. According to people with knowledge of the case, he is under federal investigation for bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations. The inquiry includes payments to women whose stories about Trump could have damaged his presidential campaign.

Stephen Ryan, an attorney for Cohen, has called the raid “inappropriate and unnecessary,” saying Cohen has “cooperated completely with all government entities.” Trump called the raid a “disgraceful situation” and an “attack on our country.”

According to CNN, the records seized from Cohen included tapes that he recorded of conversations with Davidson. Wedge said that the lawyer never consented to any recordings of his conversations with Cohen and that if such tapes exist, “Davidson will pursue all his legal rights under the law.”

Davidson has hired Miami attorney Michael D. Padula, who specializes in white-collar crime.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 00:36 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Wat heeft hij goed geregeld? Noord-Korea die een test stopzet en nog met ICBMs zit?

quote:

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, announced early Saturday that his country no longer needed to test nuclear weapons or long-range missiles and would close a nuclear test site.

“The nuclear test site has done its job,” Mr. Kim said in a statement carried by North Korea’s state media.

Mr. Kim’s announcement came just days before a scheduled summit meeting with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea; Mr. Kim is also planning to meet with President Trump soon. It was the second time in two days that he made what appeared to be a significant concession to the United States but in reality cemented the status quo. North Korea already had stopped testing its weapons.

Mr. Kim made no mention in his latest remarks of dismantling the nuclear weapons and long-range missiles North Korea has already built. On the contrary, he suggested he was going to keep them.

SPOILER

Still, Mr. Trump welcomed what Mr. Kim said. “North Korea has agreed to suspend all Nuclear Tests and close up a major test site,” the president said in a Twitter message. “This is very good news for North Korea and the World — big progress! Look forward to our Summit.”

Mr. Moon’s office also praised the announcement. “We view the North’s decision as a significant step toward the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula the world has wished for,” said Yoon Young-chan, a spokesman for Mr. Moon.

Despite the enthusiasm, American officials have watched Mr. Kim with a mix of satisfaction and wariness.

The North Korean leader’s move could be tactical — putting the United States on the defensive in advance of talks on its nuclear arsenal. By extending an olive branch, American officials said, North Korea is putting pressure on the United States to accept a deal before Mr. Kim agrees to give up North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

Mr. Kim could also be trying to drive a wedge between the United States and South Korea, since President Moon has put great emphasis on ending more than six decades of conflict on the Korean Peninsula.

On Thursday, Mr. Moon said Mr. Kim had made a similar gesture, saying the North no longer insisted on the withdrawal of American troops from the Korean Peninsula. But White House officials privately dismissed the remarks, saying removal of the troops was never on the table.

Caution toward Mr. Kim’s peace overtures also punctuated the reaction of officials from Japan, which North Korea has long threatened with missile strikes. The defense minister, Itsunori Onodera, who was visiting Washington when Mr. Kim announced the suspension of nuclear and missile tests, said the move was “not sufficient” because it did not clearly state whether the suspension included the short and midrange missiles that could hit Japan.

Mr. Onodera also emphasized that a suspension was far short of denuclearization. “What the international community expects is that North Korea abandon all weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles in a complete verifiable and irreversible manner,” he said. “It is not a time to relax pressure by the international community, but we must keep applying pressure with an aim that they abandon their nuclear weapons and missiles.”

In a statement after a meeting of the Central Committee of his ruling Workers’ Party, Mr. Kim said his country required no further nuclear and long-range missile tests because it had already achieved a nuclear deterrent. It was now time to focus on rebuilding the economy, he said.

“From April 21, North Korea will stop nuclear tests and launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles,” the Korean Central News Agency said, quoting Mr. Kim.

It also said the North would “shut down a nuclear test site in the country’s northern side to guarantee transparency in suspending nuclear tests.”

To officials and analysts in South Korea, Mr. Kim’s decision to shut down his country’s only known nuclear test site, in Punggye-ri in northeastern North Korea, and his moratorium on long-range missile tests, are some of the “trust-building steps” that they have hoped Mr. Kim would take to help improve the mood for dialogue in Washington.

Mr. Kim spent last year conducting a series of nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests, raising tensions and a risk of war with the United States. But he has initiated a dramatic about-face since January with a sequence of diplomatic maneuvers, including a summit meeting with President Xi Jinping of China in Beijing last month in his first trip abroad as leader, and his invitations to Mr. Moon and Mr. Trump for summit talks.

Analysts in the region are deeply divided over Mr. Kim’s motives. Some argue that Mr. Kim just wanted to use negotiations to buy time and ease international sanctions, never intending to abandon his nuclear weapons. But others say that Mr. Kim would eventually give up his nuclear arsenal if he were provided with the right incentives, such as security guarantees, like a peace treaty and normalized ties with Washington, and the economic aid he needs to rebuild his economy.

His latest announcement came one day after North and South Korea installed what officials said was the first-ever hotline between their top leaders, another sign of improving relations on the divided Korean Peninsula.

Mr. Moon was expected to use the hotline, which was installed in his office, to talk with Mr. Kim before the two leaders hold their summit meeting on the Korean border next Friday. But no date has been set for their first call.

The two Koreas have run a telephone hotline at the so-called truce village of Panmunjom — the site for the inter-Korean meeting — for years. Duty officers from both sides man their telephones at Panmunjom daily in case one side calls the other. The line has been cut off at times when bilateral relations have soured, but communications there have been restored.

But the two countries have never run a direct hotline linking their top leaders’ offices, officials said.

The hotline telephones were installed on Mr. Moon’s desk in Seoul, the South’s capital, and in the State Affairs Commission in Pyongyang, the North’s capital.

When Mr. Moon’s special envoys met with Mr. Kim in Pyongyang last month, the two Koreas agreed to install the hotline and arrange for Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon to use the phone before their summit meeting. In the same meeting, Mr. Kim said he was willing to negotiate with the United States on abandoning his country’s nuclear weapons.

President Trump recently dispatched the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, to meet with Mr. Kim to lay the groundwork for their meeting, which will be the first-ever summit meeting between the two nations.

South Korean officials hope the hotline will improve communications between the top leaders and pave the way for improved ties between the two Koreas. The hotline could also be used to avert unintended armed clashes between the sides, they said.

“Now, if working-level talks are deadlocked and if our officials act like arrogant blockheads, President Moon can just call me directly and the problem will be promptly solved,” Mr. Kim was quoted as telling the visiting South Korean envoys last month.

On Friday, aides to Mr. Moon and Mr. Kim officially opened the line and checked the connection for about four minutes, said Youn Kun-young, director for the government situation room at Mr. Moon’s presidential Blue House.

During the line check, a South Korean and a North Korean caller briefly discussed the weather, according to Mr. Moon’s office.

“The connection was very good,” Mr. Youn said. “It was as if talking to a neighbor right next door.”

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op zaterdag 21-04-2018 om 05:13:07 James Comey illegally leaked classified documents to the press in order to generate a Special Council? Therefore, the Special Council was established based on an illegal act? Really, does everybody know what that means? reageer retweet

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op zaterdag 21-04-2018 om 05:21:13 "Special Council"? No. No idea what that means.Unless it's when Steve Bannon and Erik Prince get together two weeks before the 2016 presidential election and, with your blessing, hatch a plot to peddle fake Clinton emails as part of a Breitbart domestic disinformation campaign. https://t.co/1Wttb4ELKU reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 06:48 schreef Montov het volgende:
Was er een paar maanden geleden ook niet een incident waardoor de nucleaire installatie half ontploft was en daarmee onbruikbaar, dat NK nu hoopt te kunnen onderhandelen omdat ze toch al niet verder kunnen opbouwen van hun arsenaal?

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 03:59 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
Trump admin announces abstinence-focused overhaul of teen pregnancy program

[..]

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 01:12 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Maar ze kunnen dat nog helemaal niet onderbouwen.. waarom gaan ze nu het onderzoek voor de voeten lopen? Ik vind het geen verstandige zet.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 08:21 schreef Nibb-it het volgende:

[..]

De witte middelbare achterban vindt dit prachtig.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 04:30 schreef crystal_meth het volgende:

[..]

Trump is impulsief, luistert niet naar z'n adviseurs, is gevoelig voor vleierij. Kim denkt misschien dat ie met Trump meer kan bereiken dan met een normale president. Kan me zelfs voorstellen dat Trump een betere relatie met Kim dan met Moon ontwikkelt: hij maakt zich meer druk over de handelsbalans dan over mensenrechten, de militaire aanwezigheid in Z Korea kost hem geld, en de Z Koreanen hebben een handelsoverschot tov de VS. N Korea daarentegen heeft economisch niets te betekenen, en als Trump bvb voedselhulp belooft in ruil voor ontwapening scoort ie meteen bij de Amerikaanse boeren...

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 04:11 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
...a new protocol that allows investigators to disregard cases that are part of serial filings or that they consider burdensome to the office.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 03:59 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
...programs that teach abstinence.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 11:42 schreef brokjespoes het volgende:

[..]

Dit zinnetje alleen al... *ril* *bibber*

[..]

Dat hoef je ze niet te leren, dat kunnen ze al.

Je kunt er beter voor zorgen dat er bv 's winters in Alaska ook nog andere dingen te doen zijn dan slapen, zuipen, vechten en neuken.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op zaterdag 21-04-2018 om 01:00:10 Trump has, at times, referred to Sessions as “Mr. Magoo” and Rosenstein as “Mr. Peepers,” a character from a 1950s sitcom, people with whom the president has spoken tell WaPo. https://t.co/c2R8Y3cXbL reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 12:33 schreef Nintex het volgende:

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op zaterdag 21-04-2018 om 01:00:10 Trump has, at times, referred to Sessions as “Mr. Magoo” and Rosenstein as “Mr. Peepers,” a character from a 1950s sitcom, people with whom the president has spoken tell WaPo. https://t.co/c2R8Y3cXbL reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 08:21 schreef Nibb-it het volgende:

[..]

De witte middelbare achterban vindt dit prachtig.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 11:42 schreef brokjespoes het volgende:

[..]

Dit zinnetje alleen al... *ril* *bibber*

[..]

Dat hoef je ze niet te leren, dat kunnen ze al.

Je kunt er beter voor zorgen dat er bv 's winters in Alaska ook nog andere dingen te doen zijn dan slapen, zuipen, vechten en neuken.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 14:17 schreef OllieA het volgende:

[..]

Je zou toch denken dat pro-lifers voor seksuele voorlichting en anticonceptie zijn, zodat gezinnen gepland kunnen worden, en er kinderen worden gekregen wanneer die zeer gewenst zijn.
Ik begrijp dat slordige denken van die puriteinen niet...

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 01:00 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:
Die rechtszaak van de democraten, is dat niet gewoon een publiciteitsstunt? Wat hopen ze hiermee te gaan bereiken? Er is nog onvoldoende bewijs om een rechtszaak te winnen, toch?

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 09:46 schreef AnneX het volgende:

Al het (amerikaanse) nieuws volgen is toch ook een overbelaste dagtaak.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 14:50 schreef brokjespoes het volgende:
Toch zijn er volgens ultraconservatieve bronnen wel degelijk aanwijzingen dat abstinentietherapie helpt:

[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 14:32 schreef crystal_meth het volgende:

[..]

Dat bevordert losbandig gedrag, een zonde.

quote:

This week, the Virginia state Legislature passed a bill that would require women to have an ultrasound before they may have an abortion. Because the great majority of abortions occur during the first 12 weeks, that means most women will be forced to have a transvaginal procedure, in which a probe is inserted into the vagina, and then moved around until an ultrasound image is produced. Since a proposed amendment to the bill—a provision that would have had the patient consent to this bodily intrusion or allowed the physician to opt not to do the vaginal ultrasound—failed on 64-34 vote, the law provides that women seeking an abortion in Virginia will be forcibly penetrated for no medical reason. I am not the first person to note that under any other set of facts, that would constitute rape under the federal definition.*

quote:

http://www.slate.com/arti(...)_medical_reason.html

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 14:55 schreef OllieA het volgende:

[..]

Religie en vrouwvijandigheid... Tja, en dan krijg je dus dit soort zaken (artikel uit 2012):

[..]

[..]

Crisis Pregnancy Centers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 14:57 schreef Tchock het volgende:

[..]

Er worden allerlei vuile tactieken uit de kast getrokken. Vrouwen verplichten om een echo te ondergaan voor abortus is daar één van. Het doel is om de vrouw het kloppende hartje te laten zien etc zodat ze moreel bezwaard raakt om nog afstand te doen van het ongeboren kind.

John Oliver had er ook een interessant item over vorige week:

Crisis Pregnancy Centers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Echt weerzinwekkend.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 14:55 schreef OllieA het volgende:

[..]

Religie en vrouwvijandigheid... Tja, en dan krijg je dus dit soort zaken (artikel uit 2012):

[..]

[..]

quote:

Herziene NVOG-richtlijn ‘Zwangerschapsafbreking tot 24 weken'

De intake kent drie onderdelen:
1.anamnese waarin een gesprek over de besluitvorming (paragraaf 1.a.), echoscopie van de
zwangerschap (paragraaf 1.b.) en laboratoriumonderzoek (paragraaf 1.c.), waaronder
bloedgroep/rhesus en seksueel overdraagbare aandoeningen.
2.informatie over de soorten procedures, inclusief de kans op complicaties.
3.bespreking van de nazorg. Het gesprek over procedure en nazorg vindt bij voorkeur plaats na verifiëring van de diagnose intacteintra-uteriene zwangerschap en de termijn

1.b. Echoscopisch onderzoek
•Voorafgaand aan de behandeling
Echoscopisch onderzoek heeft als doel een intra-uteriene graviditeit aan te tonen, de zwangerschapsduur te verifiëren en meerlingzwangerschap, mola, EUG of niet-intacte zwangerschap uit te sluiten. Het is belangrijk de vrouw te vragen of zij het echobeeld van haar zwangerschap wil zien. Het zien van de echobeelden in het eerste trimester wordt over het algemeen ervaren als positief en heeft nagenoeg geen invloed op de besluitvorming. Als zij het echobeeld niet wil zien, moet dit buiten haar gezichtsveld blijven. Bewaar wel een foto in het dossier; soms blijken vrouwen deze achteraf toch te willen zien (zie ook link naar NGvA richtlijn ‘begeleiding’

1.c. Laboratoriumonderzoek
•Bloedgroep/rhesus
Bij zwangerschapsafbrekingen dient de rhesusfactor bekend te zijn, behoudens bij vrouwen die een zwangerschapsafbreking voor 7 weken ondergaan.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 15:12 schreef crystal_meth het volgende:

[..]

Maarre:

[..]

http://nvog-documenten.nl(...)4%20weken%5B1%5D.pdf

De verplichte wachttijd van 5 dagen die in België en Nederland geldt wordt in de VS ook als een onaanvaardbare belemmering gezien.

quote:

More "News of the Weak" ...

MUELLER SAYS THAT UNTIL YESTERDAY HE HAD ALMOST FORGOTTEN TO INVESTIGATE GIULIANI

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The independent counsel, Robert Mueller, told reporters that, prior to news reports on Thursday, he had “almost forgotten” to investigate the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

“Like most Americans, I had totally forgotten about Rudy Giuliani’s existence,” he said. “But then when he popped up on the news I was, like, ‘Hold on—shouldn’t we be investigating him?’ ”

Mueller was at a loss to explain why he had failed to investigate Giuliani earlier. “I have no idea how it could have slipped my mind,” he said. “His role in Trump’s campaign was as fishy as all get-out.”

He said that other members of his team were “poking fun” at him for not deciding to investigate Giuliani before Thursday. “I mean, think about it: how do you do a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign and leave Rudy out of it?” he said. “I’ve got to say, I’m pretty darn embarrassed about the whole thing.”

When asked for an estimate of when the Russia inquiry might wrap up, Mueller responded, “I honestly can’t say. I was hoping to bring it to a close in the next month or two, but now that we’re also investigating Rudy Giuliani, God only knows how long it’ll take.”

twitter:

Scaramucci twitterde op zaterdag 21-04-2018 om 15:25:00 The Mayor is back.! It’s time to resolve and settle all outstanding issues. Great things happening around the country and there will be tons of good news overseas. @POTUS @realDonaldTrump Let’s get there together. https://t.co/dF0oOMYzcV reageer retweet

quote:

The New York Times and a third rate reporter named Maggie Haberman, known as a Crooked H flunkie who I don’t speak to and have nothing to do with, are going out of their way to destroy Michael Cohen and his relationship with me in the hope that he will “flip.” They use....


...non-existent “sources” and a drunk/drugged up loser who hates Michael, a fine person with a wonderful family. Michael is a businessman for his own account/lawyer who I have always liked & respected. Most people will flip if the Government lets them out of trouble, even if....


...it means lying or making up stories. Sorry, I don’t see Michael doing that despite the horrible Witch Hunt and the dishonest media!

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 16:11 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Trump is shitting bricks.

[..]

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 16:29 schreef AnneX het volgende:
Wat ik mij (ook) afvraag, zou Melania dit allemaal meekrijgen in haar gouden toren?
Zij zat lachend aan tafel met Abe.

quote:

A biographer of Donald Trump says the president’s habit of lying can be traced back to his school days. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael D’Antonio, who wrote the 2016 book The Truth About Trump, on Friday told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the president has been fabricating stories since childhood.

“This is Donald, really going back to his school days when he was a boy, he insisted to others that he had hit home runs he had never hit in ball games,” D’Antonio said. The author made the comments while discussing reports that Trump previously tried to deceive journalists by using false names in phone interviews.

Trump “left the New York Military Academy declaring himself the greatest baseball player in New York state and it just went on and on and on,” D’Antonio said. “He was named the ladies man at a school that had no young women at it, so you tell me, he has been doing this forever.”

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 16:35 schreef brokjespoes het volgende:
Het maakte niet uit hoe klein of onbelangrijk iets was... hij moest en zou er over liegen

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 15:16 schreef OllieA het volgende:

[..]

Tja, dat kan toch ook met een (externe) buikecho?

quote:

Afhankelijk van de zwangerschapsduur en dikte van de buikwand van de moeder wordt de echo uitwendig (via de buik) of inwendig (via de vagina) gemaakt.

quote:

This week, the Virginia state Legislature passed a bill that would require women to have an ultrasound before they may have an abortion. Because the great majority of abortions occur during the first 12 weeks, that means most women will be forced to have a transvaginal procedure,

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 16:51 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Is eigenlijk al uberhaupt bekend waar Cohen concreet van verdacht werd?

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 16:31 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Cohen heeft geen keuze dan meewerken. Die wil echt geen decennia de cel in. Trump kan hem geen pardon geven want dan roept men Cohen gewoon op als getuige en door het pardon kan hij zichzelf niet belasten dus geen 5th....

quote:

Trump also complained this week about Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, saying the judge had proved too liberal in recent cases, according to administration officials who heard about the complaints. Associates said he was incensed that Gorsuch had voted against the administration on an immigration case and said it renewed his doubts that Gorsuch would be a reliable conservative. One top Trump adviser played down the comments as unhappiness with Gorsuch’s decision rather than with Gorsuch broadly.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 17:33 schreef Ulx het volgende:
https://www.washingtonpos(...)tter_impression=true

[..]

Nog een paar zaken waarin Gorsuch niet doet wat Trump zou willen en ik denk dat er dan tweets komen over termlimits voor SC rechters.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 17:24 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Dat lijkt me machtsmisbruik.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 17:46 schreef Reya het volgende:

[..]

Trump die aan machtsmisbruik doet, je kunt het je inderdaad niet voorstellen.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 17:52 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Dan lijkt me een pardon niet geldig. Dat gaat de vraag of dat mag door naar het SC. Die vraag is iets als "Mag een President actief ingrijpen in lopende rechtzaken om zijn eigen belangen veilig te stellen?".

Ik denk dat het SC dan gaat oordelen van niet.

twitter:

maggieNYT twitterde op zaterdag 21-04-2018 om 18:26:38 A few things - Trump is referring to @NunbergSam in his tweet. He’s too aware of what Stone could do to him to be that direct. Also, Trump has been abusive to all his staffers at various points, but continues to greet @CLewandowski_ better than most https://t.co/coxNMRVCUl reageer retweet

twitter:

PreetBharara twitterde op zaterdag 21-04-2018 om 18:43:15 Donald Trump is afraid of Roger Stone? https://t.co/0pqSQu1LRK reageer retweet

twitter:

maggieNYT twitterde op zaterdag 21-04-2018 om 18:47:42 For years https://t.co/IdvM2QP1j4 reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 16:50 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Dit is wat Trump net zo kwaad maakte.

quote:

Amnesty International heeft in Amsterdam de Ambassador of Conscience Award uitgereikt aan American Football-speler Colin Kaepernick. Die knielde twee jaar geleden tijdens het spelen van het Amerikaanse volkslied voor een wedstrijd, in plaats van te blijven staan. Zijn stille protest tegen politiegeweld en discriminatie is sindsdien regelmatig herhaald door football-spelers, soms tot woede van de Amerikaanse president Trump.

"Niet alleen in de Verenigde Staten is Kaepernick een groot voorbeeld voor zijn strijd tegen discriminatie en politiegeweld, maar ook in Nederland en de rest van de wereld", zei directeur Eduard Nazarski van Amnesty Nederland. "Hij laat zien dat je met een ogenschijnlijk simpel gebaar een grote beweging op gang kan brengen."

Amnesty reikt de mensenrechtenprijs ieder jaar uit aan activisten die zich volgens de organisatie op een bijzondere manier inzetten voor mensenrechten. Eerder ging de prijs naar Nelson Mandela, de Pakistaanse kinderrechtenactivist Malala en zangeres Alicia Keys.

Amnesty Nederland bestaat dit jaar vijftig jaar.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 19:15 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

En welke juridische argumenten denk je daarvoor te hebben?

quote:

A presidential pardon, particularly a pre-emptive pardon like the one Ford gave to Nixon, which would prevent future prosecution, would have the same effect. So if the president granted someone such a pardon, and then that person was subpoenaed to testify, they would be in no danger of prosecution, and therefore would not be able to assert their 5th amendment right not to answer a question on the witness stand.

Edit: It's worth noting pardons apply only to federal crimes, not state crimes, so if testifying were to place the recipient of a presidential pardon at risk if state prosecution, the 5th amendment would still apply.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 19:15 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

En welke juridische argumenten denk je daarvoor te hebben?

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 20:56 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Dat het machtsmisbruik, obstruction of justice en/of witness tampering lijkt te zijn als de POTUS met een getuige zo'n deal sluit.

Het hoeft ook niet uit te maken als hij Cohen een pardon geeft, men zou direct op staatsniveau Cohen kunnen oproepen te getuigen. Mogelijkheden genoeg volgens mij.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op zaterdag 21-04-2018 om 21:02:05 Sylvester Stallone called me with the story of heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson. His trials and tribulations were great, his life complex and controversial. Others have looked at this over the years, most thought it would be done, but yes, I am considering a Full Pardon! reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 21:13 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Party of law and order Maareh, ja, kennelijk wil hij aan iemand duidelijk maken dat het er mogelijk toch wel in zou zitten dat hij niet hoeft te praten.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op zaterdag 21-04-2018 om 21:02:05 Sylvester Stallone called me with the story of heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson. His trials and tribulations were great, his life complex and controversial. Others have looked at this over the years, most thought it would be done, but yes, I am considering a Full Pardon! reageer retweet

quote:

Born on March 31, 1878, in Galveston, Texas, Johnson became a rising star in the realms of boxing. He won the Texas State Middleweight title as a professional athlete, and later he became the World Colored Heavyweight Championship between 1903-1908. But his biggest prize came on December 26, 1908, when he defeated Tommy Burns for the World Heavyweight Championship. He defeated the defending champion in 14 rounds until authorities had to intervene and stop the bout.

His rise occurred in the midst of the Jim Crow era, where the lynching of black men was all too common. Boxing businesspeople were hoping to find the "Great White Hope" to defeat the black boxer. Former world heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries was capable of beating Johnson in Havana, Cuba, on April 1915 in the 26th round, the New York Post reported.

But his relationships with white women made him a notorious man at the time. In 1913, he was accused of transporting a white woman for "immoral purposes" according to The Chicago Tribune. Persecutors cited the Mann Act, a federal law that sought to prevent the trafficking of women for prostitution. An all-white jury found him guilty, and Johnson was sentenced to a year in prison.

To date, his criminal record has not been cleared.

http://www.newsweek.com/j(...)xing-champion-896275

twitter:

mkraju twitterde op zaterdag 21-04-2018 om 15:14:00 On the day the political world comes together to mourn a former First Lady, Trump falsely says he doesn’t speak to @maggieNYT and unfairly attacks her, defames a person by calling him “drugged up,” and tries to convince his personal lawyer from flipping. Then heads to golf course https://t.co/zasRrbPAqn reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 22:40 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
President Trump won't attend Barbara Bush funeral, to 'avoid disruptions'

Melania is er wel

[ afbeelding ]

twitter:

mkraju twitterde op zaterdag 21-04-2018 om 15:14:00 On the day the political world comes together to mourn a former First Lady, Trump falsely says he doesn’t speak to @maggieNYT and unfairly attacks her, defames a person by calling him “drugged up,” and tries to convince his personal lawyer from flipping. Then heads to golf course https://t.co/zasRrbPAqn reageer retweet

quote:

The Washington Post said I refer to Jeff Sessions as “Mr. Magoo” and Rod Rosenstein as “Mr. Peepers.” This is “according to people with whom the president has spoken.” There are no such people and don’t know these characters...just more Fake & Disgusting News to create ill will!

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 22:44 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 22:43 schreef Falco het volgende:

[..]

Voor het eerst in lange tijd dat je Melania oprecht ziet lachen

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 22:06 schreef brokjespoes het volgende:
Trump weet al dat Johnson zwart is?

meer info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Johnson_(boxer)

(volgens een biograaf van Trump is Johnson overigens exact het soort man aan wie Trump nou juist een gloeiende hekel heeft )

.
het "misdrijf" in kwestie:

[..]

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 22:43 schreef Falco het volgende:

[..]

Voor het eerst in lange tijd dat je Melania oprecht ziet lachen

quote:

Op zondag 22 april 2018 00:06 schreef la_perle_rouge het volgende:

[..]

Want begrafenissen zijn kei-leuk

quote:

In Message to Trump, Europe and Mexico Announce Trade Pact

WASHINGTON — The European Union and Mexico on Saturday announced a major update to their existing free trade pact signed nearly two decades ago, a development that will allow almost all goods, including agricultural products, to move between Europe and Mexico duty-free.

The deal, which has yet to be formally signed, is expected to increase trade in dairy, pork, services, digital goods and medicines between the economies. It will also give Mexico greater access to an advanced consumer market, as negotiations with the Trump administration over the modernization of the North American Free Trade Agreement still appear to be on uncertain ground.

And it sends a message to Mr. Trump that some of America’s closest trading partners are moving ahead with deals of their own — potentially leaving American exporters on the losing end in foreign markets.

In its announcement, Mexico said the agreement would help modernize its existing commercial relationship.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, said in a statement that “trade can and should be a win-win process and today’s agreement shows just that.” He added, “With this agreement, Mexico joins Canada, Japan and Singapore in the growing list of partners willing to work with the E.U. in defending open, fair and rules-based trade.”

The European Union and Mexico said that they had reached an agreement in principle on the most important elements of the agreement, with some technical details yet to be resolved. They are aiming to finalize it by year’s end, after which it must be ratified by the European Parliament and Mexican Senate.

SPOILER

The original trade pact, signed in 1997, was relatively narrow, mainly eliminating tariffs on cars and machinery. The deal came into force in 2000 and was the first free trade pact between Europe and a Latin American country.

Since then, the European Union has added 13 members, and the internet has dramatically changed global business. In May 2016, the countries started negotiations to update the pact. The revised deal adds in a variety of new rules governing agricultural goods, telecommunications, digital trade, intellectual property, climate change, anti-corruption measures, finance and energy.

The deal is particularly notable for giving Mexico access to another wealthy market similar to the United States. The European Union is Mexico’s second-biggest export market after the United States. Yet it is a distant second to the United States, where roughly 80 percent of Mexican exports go.

Mr. Trump has called those close economic ties into question by starting an ambitious renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Nafta negotiators say they may be close to finalizing a deal in the coming weeks. But much uncertainty remains, as the United States, Mexico and Canada continue to advocate for vastly different measures.

Fredrik Erixon, director of the European Centre for International Political Economy, a Brussels-based research organization, said that Mr. Trump’s aggressive posture on trade had pushed Mexico toward negotiations with Europe.

“The E.U. has for at least 10 years been knocking on the door of Mexico to upgrade the trade agreement, and is only very recently that they have come along,” he said. “It’s perfectly obvious that what has prompted them to change their minds is Donald Trump.”

Both Europe and Mexico have actively been pushing forward with new trade deals amid a global resurgence of skepticism about the benefits of free trade.

Mexico remains part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multicountry trade deal that President Trump criticized and withdrew from on his fourth day in office. The remaining members, including Canada, Japan, Australia and Chile, signed a deal without the United States in March. Mexico is also negotiating with Argentina and Brazil, and has sought out potential alternatives to purchases of American grain and meat if Nafta were to fall apart.

The European Union now has close ties with both of America’s Nafta partners, after a new pact with Canada went into force in September.

quote:

[...]
The fake claim seems to have first appeared in public in a Wikipedia biography of Pompeo, which was changed anonymously in December 2016. Pompeo has never repeated it himself, but he and the CIA have never corrected the prominent error.

The Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New Yorker reported incorrectly last month that Pompeo was an Army officer who served in the 1991 Gulf War. South Carolina Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy cited his Gulf War service in an April 12 letter expressing his support for Pompeo's nomination as Secretary of State, and Florida senator Marco Rubio referred to his service in the Gulf in a Senate session in January last year.

[...]

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 22:43 schreef Falco het volgende:

[..]

Voor het eerst in lange tijd dat je Melania oprecht ziet lachen

quote:

Donald Trump may have chosen not to attend Barbara Bush’s funeral on Saturday, but social media users still found a way to talk about him in his absence.

After the president’s wife Melania Trump was spotted smiling and sharing a laugh with Barack Obama before the service in Houston, it didn’t take long before social media users began to joke about how even though she was at a funeral, she appeared to be having a good time away from her husband.

“Melania looks happier at a funeral than she has in ages. Wouldn’t you too if you went from being with Donald every day to sitting next to Barack?” wrote one social media user.

One of Hillary Clinton’s aides Philippe Reines added, “Obama is a funny guy, but that’s a woman craving distance from a monster being reminded what dignity looks like.”

[..]

quote:

Op zondag 22 april 2018 00:48 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Eh ja, dat was bij mij ietsje anders ... althans, dat wil zeggen ... tijdens de plechtigheid is lachen geen gemeengoed, maar vooraf of achteraf een geintje, ook tijdens het zittend wachten op de plechtigheid in een dergelijke setting is denk ik niet ongewoon, zeker niet aangezien zowel Obama als Melania Trump haar niet of nauwelijks kenden (Obama zal haar zeker wel gekend hebben, over Melania ben ik minder zeker).

quote:

Op zondag 22 april 2018 00:06 schreef la_perle_rouge het volgende:

[..]

Want begrafenissen zijn kei-leuk

SPOILER

quote:

Almost everyone I’ve talked to says, ‘We’re going to move to Houston.’ What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them.

quote:

Op zondag 22 april 2018 01:52 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Melania zat bij de begrafenis van Barbara Bush naast Barack Obama.

Mevrouw Trump kan dus ook trollen.

quote:

Op zondag 22 april 2018 12:53 schreef Ulx het volgende:
B-b-b-but Obama!

quote:

Op zondag 22 april 2018 13:02 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Maar goed, weinig kan tippen aan de bijnaam 'mentally deranged US dotard' waar Kim Jong-Un mee kwam, dus hij heeft nog wat te leren.

quote:

As I predicted, panic has set in at the WH. So much so, that we now have bogus tweets aimed at kissing Mr. Cohen's a** and giving him a false sense of security and friendship with the hope that he doesn't tell the truth and bring the house of cards down. Too little too late.

quote:

My Dear Friend: Don’t you remember how I demeaned you to others and made you look like a fool? How I always over-charged you for the real estate? How I never defended you? How I abandoned you when I won and blew you off? Now that is true love Michael, and you know it! Now shush.

quote:

James Comey’s Memos are Classified, I did not Declassify them. They belong to our Government! Therefore, he broke the law! Additionally, he totally made up many of the things he said I said, and he is already a proven liar and leaker. Where are Memos on Clinton, Lynch & others?

quote:

Op zondag 22 april 2018 13:08 schreef martijnde3de het volgende:
Mitt Romney will face primary after setback in run for US Senate

Former Republican presidential candidate fails to win enough votes to secure candidacy at party convention in Utah. Instead he was edged out by state lawmaker Mike Kennedy, who got 51% to Romney’s 49 percent. Voters will decide between the two in a 26 June primary.

https://www.theguardian.c(...)in-run-for-us-senate

quote:

Op zondag 22 april 2018 13:32 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Dus als ik het goed begrijp is Comey een leugenaar die verzinsels roeptoetert, maar die verzinsels zijn wel staatsgeheim?

[..]

https://twitter.com/realD(...)774054651301888?s=20

quote:

Things were already looking bad when, several people told me, Chelsea Clinton popped the Champagne. It was just after 9 p.m. on election night and she was having her hair and makeup done in the family’s suite at the Peninsula hotel. She stopped to pour what someone said was Veuve Clicquot into everyone’s glasses, figuring that in a couple of hours Donald Trump’s run of early victories in red states (West Virginia, Oklahoma, Alabama) would end and the map would turn back in her mom’s favor.

Three hours later, the Rust Belt was awash in red, and somebody had to tell Hillary Clinton.

SPOILER

Robby Mook, the drained and deflated campaign manager, told his boss she was going to lose. She didn’t seem all that surprised.

“I knew it. I knew this would happen to me,” she said, now within a couple of inches of Mr. Mook’s ashen face. “They were never going to let me be president.”

In July 2013, Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, put me on the “Hillary beat” ahead of the 2016 election. It was 649 days before Mrs. Clinton would announce she was running for president again, 1,226 days before she would lose to Mr. Trump.
Every major life decision in my 20s and 30s — when to get married, where to buy an apartment, whether to freeze my eggs until after the election — had revolved around a single looming question: What about Hillary Clinton?

I figured that if anyone knew whom Mrs. Clinton was referring to with that insidious “they” that, like some invisible army of adversaries (real and imagined), wielded its collective power and caused her to lose the most winnable presidential election in modern history, it was me.

They were the vast-right wing conspiracy. They were the patriarchy that could never let an ambitious former first lady finally shatter “that highest, hardest glass ceiling.” They were the people of Wisconsin and James Comey. They were white suburban women who would rather vote for a man who bragged about sexual assault than a woman who seemed an affront to who they were.

And yes, they were political reporters (“big egos and no brains,” she called us) hounding her about her emails and transfixed by the spectacle of the first reality TV show candidate.

It’s dizzying to realize that without even knowing it, you’ve ended up on the wrong side of history. Months after the election, every time I heard the words “Russia” and “collude,” this realization swirled in my head, enveloping everything.

And the strange thing is, Oct. 7, 2016, started just like any other day.

The Times newsroom had been quiet that afternoon. Then, around 4 p.m., I heard “Oh, my God,” and “Oh, God,” and “Jesus Christ” float from cubicle to cubicle until my largely agnostic colleagues sounded like a Sunday church choir. The Washington Post had published video of the Republican nominee for president bragging about sexually assaulting women.

I stared into my screen, as frozen as the paused image of Mr. Trump and Billy Bush stepping off the bus, the unknowing actress in the fuchsia halter dress waiting to greet them.

I was still in this haze at 4:32 p.m. when WikiLeaks tweeted a link to emails from the Gmail account of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, including excerpts from her speeches to Wall Street firms.

Mrs. Clinton’s refusal to release the speeches had been such a cause célèbre in the Democratic primary that I regularly saw protesters holding signs that said, “I’d rather be at home reading your Goldman Sachs speeches.” Now the juicy parts of this most sought-after trove of documents had landed in our laps.

But it wasn’t a scoop. It was more like a bank heist.

Editors and reporters huddled to discuss how to handle the emails. Everyone agreed that since the emails were already out there — and of importance to voters — it was The Times’s job to “confirm” and “contextualize” them. I didn’t argue that it appeared the emails were stolen by a hostile foreign government that had staged an attack on our electoral system. I didn’t push to hold off on publishing them until we could have a less harried discussion. I didn’t raise the possibility that we’d become puppets in Vladimir Putin’s master plan. I chose the byline.

In December, after the election, my colleagues in Washington wrote a Pulitzer-winning article about how the Russians had pulled off the perfect hack. I was on the F train on my way to the newsroom when I read it. I had no new assignment yet and still existed in a kind of postelection fog that took months to lift. I must’ve read this line 15 times: “Every major publication, including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence.”

The Bernie Bros and Mr. Trump’s Twitter trolls had called me a donkey-faced whore and a Hillary shill, but nothing hurt worse than my own colleagues calling me a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence. The worst part was, they were right.

A few weeks before Election Day, I was stuck in my cubicle poring over John Podesta’s emails. I wanted to be on the road. “I just feel like the election isn’t happening in my cubicle,” I said. “But it’s over,” an editor replied, reminding me that the Times’s Upshot election model gave Mrs. Clinton a 93 percent chance of winning. The ominous “they” who would keep the glass ceiling intact didn’t look that powerful then.

Until the last day on the road, though, it never really felt like a winning campaign. Not that I thought Mr. Trump would win. I believed in the data. Yet I couldn’t shake the nagging sensation that no matter how many people I’d met in black churches and union halls and high school gyms around the country who told Hillary Clinton their problems, no matter how many women chanted, “Deal me in!” in unison, she wouldn’t win.

I looked around at a get-out-the-vote rally in Akron, Ohio. It was just over a month until Election Day. Dozens of empty chairs sat in the press area. Extension cords dangled unused off folding tables. Cherry pickers set up to give photographers an aerial shot sat idle.

I had to remind myself that there was a time, during the Harkin Steak Fry, the political event of the year for Democrats, in the fall of 2014, before Mrs. Clinton was even a candidate and while Mr. Trump was still a reality TV star, when she had been the media’s obsession. Two hundred reporters had stampeded across the lawn for a glimpse of the most irresistible, dramatic story of what Salon called the “horribly dull political year to come.”

The first woman with a real shot at the presidency, then able to capture the world’s attention with a single flip of sirloin, hardly registered by the time voting approached.

I always figured that this was just how Hillary Clinton would win. It was the painful logic always at work for her: She was expected to project the iron of a commander in chief, the warmth of a best girlfriend and the charisma of a drinking buddy. And if she had somehow done all of that, there would still be some essential quality she lacked, in many people’s minds, because we simply had no template for a female president. The long-suffering feminist heroine would make history not in a festooned lovefest but in a dreary, mechanical slog.

By late fall, the traveling press — called “the Girls on the Bus” since on any given day, of our cohort of about 20 regular reporters, as many as 18 of us were women — were calling it Hillary’s Death March to Victory.

She went through the motions. “Hello [insert swing-state city here]!”

She did a whole riff on making lists. “I have a plan for just about everything,” she said. “You know, maybe this is a woman thing. We make lists, right? I love making lists. And then I love crossing things off!”

If I had to identify a single unifying force behind Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, it was her obvious desire to get the whole thing over with. “This election is 10 days away,” she said at a rally in Des Moines. “Eleven, but we’re more than halfway through today.”

When I started covering Mrs. Clinton in 2007 for The Wall Street Journal, she’d been a hands-on senator constantly in touch with her upstate constituents. But by her second campaign, she seemed like Rip Van Winkle, awake again after her stint as secretary of state to find a vastly different country. She’d missed the rise of the Tea Party. She’d missed the Occupy Wall Street movement and the rage over health care and bank bailouts and the 1 percent.

And in early 2015, when her advisers told her that people no longer wanted to be called middle class — a data point that seemed a fundamental shift in the American psyche and as clear a sign as any that there was something stirring in this election — Hillary Clinton saw only a linguistic challenge.

Her consultants contemplated what to call this curious specimen of 121 million Americans who were technically middle class. Everyday Americans! It even sounded like Walmart’s Everyday Low Prices.

“Everyday Americans need a champion and I want to be that champion,” Mrs. Clinton repeated this corporate catchphrase for several months until her campaign tested 84 possible replacement slogans.

It didn’t take long before we’d turned Everydays into a proper noun. When the traveling press needed to get past the barricades to talk to voters, it was “C’mon, my editors need me to quote some Everydays.” Or when a line of women snaked around outside an event in North Charleston, S.C., we’d ask the campaign, “What’s the crowd count on the Everydays who couldn’t get inside?”

Even the Brooklyn campaign headquarters weren’t immune. When Chelsea Clinton requested a private plane to fly to an event, Mr. Podesta shrugged. “She’s not an Everyday American,” he said.

Now we have an administration with hardly an everyday American in it. We are all living through the chaos of the Trump presidency, and Robert Mueller continues to dig into the possibility of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Hillary Clinton has settled into a surreal life of speaking at women’s conferences. I’ve started to see the “they” she spoke about on election night differently.

They were Facebook algorithms and data breaches. They were Fake News drummed up by Vladimir Putin’s digital army. They were shadowy hackers who stole her campaign chairman’s emails hoping to weaken our democracy with Mr. Podesta’s risotto recipe. And they were The Times and me and all the other journalists who covered those stolen emails.

Of course, these outside forces wouldn’t have mattered or weighed so heavily on me, on the country, had Hillary Clinton, her campaign and her longtime aides — the same box of broken toys who’d enabled all of her worst instincts since the 1990s — not let the election get so close in the first place. The Russians, after all, didn’t hack into her calendar and delete the Wisconsin rallies.

I never told anyone this, but one time when I’d been visiting the Brooklyn campaign headquarters I found an iPhone in the women’s restroom. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to belong to Mr. Podesta’s assistant because when I picked it up, a flood of calendar alerts for him popped up. I placed it on the sink counter, went into the stall, came out and washed my hands. I left the phone sitting there, worried that if I turned it in, even touched it again, aides would think I had snooped. This seemed a violation that would at best get my invitation to the headquarters rescinded and at worst get me booted off the beat for unethical behavior.

I can’t explain why, in the heat of breaking news, I thought covering John Podesta’s hacked emails was any different.

^{by Amy Chozick}

quote:

Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) has sponsored several bills that would have benefited a drug company in which he is the lead shareholder, a Daily Beast investigation has found.

Collins is also trying to make changes to a government program that would save the company millions of dollars if its drug is approved by the FDA.

Collins’s office says he doesn’t believe his bills represent a conflict of interest, but he is already accused by independent Office of Congressional Ethics of violating House ethics rules and U.S. securities law for his dealings with the drug company.(...)

quote:

Op zaterdag 21 april 2018 22:43 schreef Falco het volgende:

[..]

Voor het eerst in lange tijd dat je Melania oprecht ziet lachen

quote:

President Donald Trump commemorated Earth Day on Sunday by applauding his administration’s efforts to roll back key environmental protections.

twitter:

AJEnglish twitterde op zondag 22-04-2018 om 17:15:07 "Is he even a human?"North Koreans on Donald Trump https://t.co/qosiYeE5qV https://t.co/OQg8teAqDz reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op zondag 22-04-2018 om 20:43:38 Funny how all of the Pundits that couldn't come close to making a deal on North Korea are now all over the place telling me how to make a deal! reageer retweet

quote:

Op zondag 22 april 2018 21:26 schreef Nintex het volgende:
In Noord Korea zien ze de God emperor als een gevaarlijke wolf.

quote:

Op zondag 22 april 2018 17:58 schreef FlipjeHolland het volgende:

[..]

Iedereen weet toch dat Donnie en trophy wife Melania een schijnhuwelijk hebben? Waarschijnlijk blijft ze bij die mafketel totdat Barron oud genoeg is en poetst ze daarna de plaat.

quote:

Op zondag 22 april 2018 22:04 schreef Mula het volgende:

[..]

Nee joh, totdat ze de prenup ongeldig kan laten verklaren!

quote:

Fox News host who said Trump’s fixer ‘knows real estate’ has a portfolio that includes support from Department of Housing and Urban Development, a fact he did not mention when interviewing secretary Ben Carson last year

When Sean Hannity was named in court this week as a client of Donald Trump’s embattled legal fixer Michael Cohen, the Fox News host insisted their discussions had been limited to the subject of buying property.

“I’ve said many times on my radio show: I hate the stock market, I prefer real estate. Michael knows real estate,” Hannity said on television, a few hours after the dramatic hearing in Manhattan, where Cohen is under criminal investigation.

Hannity’s chosen investment strategy is confirmed by thousands of pages of public records reviewed by the Guardian, which detail a real estate portfolio of remarkable scale that has not previously been reported.

The records link Hannity to a group of shell companies that spent at least $90m on more than 870 homes in seven states over the past decade. The properties range from luxurious mansions to rentals for low-income families. Hannity is the hidden owner behind some of the shell companies and his attorney did not dispute that he owns all of them.

SPOILER

Dozens of the properties were bought at a discount in 2013, after banks foreclosed on their previous owners for defaulting on mortgages. Before and after then, Hannity sharply criticised Barack Obama for the US foreclosure rate. In January 2016, Hannity said there were “millions more Americans suffering under this president” partly because of foreclosures.

Hannity, 56, also amassed part of his property collection with support from the US Department for Housing and Urban Development (Hud), a fact he did not disclose when praising Ben Carson, the Hud secretary, on his television show last year.

Christopher Reeves, Hannity’s real estate attorney, said in an email he would “struggle to find any relevance” in Hannity’s property holdings, which he said were highly confidential.

“I doubt you would find it very surprising that most people prefer to keep their legal and personal financial issues private,” said Reeves. “Mr Hannity is no different.”

Spokespeople for Hud and Fox News declined to comment on the record.

The real estate holdings linked to Hannity are spread across more than 20 shell companies formed in Georgia. Each of the companies uses a variant of the same name, which combines the initials of Hannity’s children. Public records show the companies have bought up dozens of properties in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, New York, North Carolina, Texas and Vermont.

Among the most valuable are two large apartment complexes in Georgia that Hannity bought in 2014 for $22.7m. The developments are in the cities of Perry and Brunswick, which have higher poverty rates and lower median incomes than the US averages. One- and two-bedroom units in Hannity‍‍‍’s apartment complexes are available to rent for $735 to $1,065 per month, according to brochures.

The Georgia purchases were funded with mortgages for $17.9m that Hannity obtained with help from Hud, which insured the loans under a program created as part of the National Housing Act. The loans, first guaranteed under the Obama administration, were recently increased by $5m with renewed support from Carson’s department.

Hannity, who is reportedly paid $36m per year for his television and radio shows, was criticised this week following Cohen’s court hearing, after it became clear he had defended Cohen and Trump on the air without disclosing that he also consulted Cohen for legal services.

He also declined to note his financial interest when he hosted Carson on Fox News last June for a discussion about Hud and housing. Hannity praised privatisation plans pushed by Trump and Carson.

“I know you’ve done a good job,” Hannity told Carson.

Hannity complained during the discussion that home ownership in the US was at a 51-year low – a false claim he has made several times on air – and criticised the state of public housing.

“I like the idea of them owning the place,” Hannity said of people who receive housing assistance. “Well, that’s the real ideal,” said Carson.

The shell companies used to buy the properties are registered to the offices of Henssler Financial, a wealth management firm outside Atlanta. Bill Lako, a principal at the firm, has appeared on Hannity’s radio show as an expert on money issues.

Lako recently wrote an article for the show’s website berating Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating ties between Trump’s 2016 election campaign and Russia, without noting his ties to Hannity. He did not respond to an email.

When Lako appeared on Hannity’s radio show last month, Hannity disclosed that he was a Henssler client. He joked to Lako that the company took him on as a “charity case” when he worked in Georgia, but “now I’m the best client you have”.

The Georgia mortgages supported by Hud were guaranteed as part of a program aimed at protecting investors such as Hannity who buy rental apartment buildings. The government promises to cover losses if borrowers default on their mortgages. Borrowers pay an insurance premium to Hud in return. Bigger loan guarantees are available if the building houses low-income families.

Paperwork relating to the agreements with Hud, which was filed to county authorities, named Hannity as the principal of the shell companies used to buy the apartment complexes and to borrow the funds. Hannity personally signed several of the documents. A Hud source said Hannity was identified in non-public filings as the 100% owner of the apartment complexes.

Late last month, Hannity’s mortgages were replaced with loans for $22.9m that were rewritten with Carson’s Hud and a new bank. There was no indication that Carson was personally involved in the process. Carson does, however, have the authority to allow Hannity from 2019 to convert the rental complexes into condominiums for sale, which could be lucrative for the television host.

The shell companies used to buy the properties are limited liability companies (LLCs). Like in most states, they are not required to disclose their owners to Georgia regulators. LLCs are popular among well-known figures such as Hannity who wish to keep their business arrangements private.

But the Guardian obtained records in which Hannity signed deeds and other documents on behalf of four of the LLCs, sometimes being named as principal or manager. Four more of the shell companies have owned properties in which public records say Hannity or members of his family have lived.

Hannity also uses a separate company with a similar name to handle contracts relating to his syndicated radio show, according to records filed in two federal court cases. Georgia records say Hannity was chief executive, chief financial officer and secretary of this company before Lako took over the titles during 2016.

In other cases, only the relevant LLC’s name and a contact at Henssler Financial were identified in the real estate paperwork, meaning that it could not be confirmed whether Hannity was the hidden owner.

The list of properties bought by the Hannity-linked companies includes multimillion-dollar homes used by Hannity. It also features single-family units priced as low as $50,000 in relatively poor suburbs. In at least two cases, batches of homes were bought simultaneously at a discount, after they were repossessed by banks from their previous owners in foreclosure proceedings.

The entire portfolio connected to Hannity comprises at least 877 residential units, which were bought for a total of just under $89m. Another seven properties bought by the companies over recent years have subsequently been sold on for more than $4m, according to public records.

When Hannity this week stressed that his business relationship with Cohen related to real estate, he pointedly denied that it involved any financial settlements with other people.

Cohen previously arranged for a $130,000 payment to Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic actor known as Stormy Daniels, who alleged she had sex with Trump. Cohen also helped Elliott Broidy, a prominent Republican fundraiser, pay $1.6m to a woman who said she had become pregnant during an affair.

Hannity said he had only “occasional brief conversations” with Cohen. He made varying statements about whether Cohen was compensated, initially stating that he had not been billed but later saying: “I might have handed him 10 bucks.”

In footage unearthed this week that was broadcast on Fox News in January last year, Hannity mentioned having discussed an unidentified $2bn property venture in Dubai with Cohen.

“I said, ‘I’m interested in that deal myself,’” said Hannity.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op maandag 23-04-2018 om 03:30:58 The claim that Mike Pompeo was deployed or fought in the Gulf War has been repeated by, among others, 51 members of Congress, led by Trey Gowdy, voicing their support for his appointment as Secretary of State. But the CIA confirms Pompeo was not deployed. https://t.co/tQMXAHf0Wf reageer retweet

quote:

Op zondag 22 april 2018 12:59 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Weet niet of ik het geloof. Trump's nicknames zijn doorgaans beter en origineler.

quote:

Mueller team said to be amused as Giuliani pledges to end Russia probe

Investigators inside the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller reacted with a mixture of skepticism and laughter at Rudy Giuliani’s claim that he will negotiate a swift end to Mueller’s probe of President Donald Trump and his alleged involvement in possible Russian election meddling and obstruction of justice, FOX Business has learned.

Giuliani, the latest addition to the president’s legal team, has stated both to associates and to reporters in recent days that he will be reaching out to Mueller with the intention of ending the probe into Trump’s conduct and that he will achieve this goal in a matter of weeks, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

As the former New York City mayor’s remarks made their way to Mueller’s investigators, they were said to be “amused,” according to one person with direct knowledge of the matter. Mueller’s team has signaled that its probe of Russia’s possible meddling in the 2016 presidential election is exploring new avenues presented by at least two cooperating witnesses and that there is little Giuliani can do to force Mueller’s hand, these people add.

“If Rudy comes to Mueller trying to negotiate anything short of a presidential guilty plea, he will likely be met by deaf ears,” said a lawyer who follows the case from Washington.

A spokeswoman for Giuliani hadn’t return calls and email messages requesting comment. A spokesman for the special prosecutor declined to comment.


“Giuliani’s great, but I don’t think he’s going to move the dial one way or another,” Chris Swecker, a white-collar criminal attorney and former assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said in an interview with Neil Cavuto on FOX Business. “I know how Mueller operates. He’s not going to let anyone stampede him into it early or bring this case to an early conclusion.”

Swecker, however, did say he believes the Mueller investigation is coming to a conclusion.

“I do think something’s going to happen in the next month or two,” Swecker said.

Mueller has put off the sentencing until later this month of two former Trump aides charged in the Mueller probe: Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign aide George Papadopoulos.

“This leads me to believe he is keeping his witnesses on ice until the next indictment,” Swecker added. “Working your way up the food chain to the next level … related to Russia collusion … I don’t think the president is going to get brought into this, but I do think there is something else coming.”

Swecker cited as possible targets of criminal prosecution Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son who met with Russian operatives promising compromising information on Hillary Clinton, his father’s Democratic opponent during the 2016 campaign, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and currently a White House adviser, who also appeared at that meeting.

http://foxbusiness.com/po(...)-to-end-russia-probe

quote:

Op maandag 23 april 2018 09:51 schreef speknek het volgende:
Ben benieuwd wat Mueller denkt te bereiken met stoppen bij Don Jr. Die krijgt toch een pardon. Misschien gewoon de naam besmeuren? Ik denk dat ie wel tot aan Don sr moet om iemand in de rechtzaal te krijgen.

quote:

Op maandag 23 april 2018 09:51 schreef speknek het volgende:
Ben benieuwd wat Mueller denkt te bereiken met stoppen bij Don Jr. Die krijgt toch een pardon. Misschien gewoon de naam besmeuren? Ik denk dat ie wel tot aan Don sr moet om iemand in de rechtzaal te krijgen.

quote:

WASHINGTON -- Congressional Republicans and conservative leaders rallied around President Trump Friday, attempting to minimize political damage after Trump shot down a man in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York City.

“I’m not going to put myself in the position of having to respond to every presidential shooting,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a hastily called press conference at the Capitol, surrounded by members of his leadership team. “I just happen to think it’s important to keep our focus where it belongs, on enacting a conservative, pro-growth agenda that regular Americans care about, such as tax cuts for the rich and the repeal of Medicare.”

Privately, however, at least some Republican members expressed concern about the long-term political impact of such incidents, especially with midterms looming in less than seven months.

“I think that each elected Republican has to make a series of decisions, day in and day out, about whether they find the president's conduct acceptable and to what extent it's appropriate to work with him,” as one frustrated GOP congressman put it, demanding anonymity so he could speak freely. “This shooting is fine for Trump -- he’s not on the ballot this fall -- but he’s putting the rest of us in a really tough position.”

The reaction was similar among Senate Republicans.

“I think we should criticize the president when he’s done something wrong, and applaud him when he’s done something right,” said U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who nonetheless refused to condemn the shooting directly. “The president and I are scheduled to play golf together next week,” Graham said. “If I have concerns -- and I’m not saying I do -- I think it’s more appropriate to express them to the president in private.”

Others, however, were more blunt. Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee and Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona quickly introduced a resolution warning the president of potential censure should he again pull out a gun and shoot somebody. They withdrew that measure after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear that he would not bring it to a floor vote, calling it “divisive”and “unnecessary.”

“I’ve been assured by people in the White House that there are no plans to shoot anybody else, at least not at this point,” McConnell said.

The victim, attorney Michael Avenatti, was shot twice in the back as he left the studios of NBC News at Rockefeller Center after an interview. According to doctors at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital, Avenatti is expected to recover with no permanent damage to his mouth or other, less vital organs.

At a regularly scheduled White House press briefing Thursday, spokesperson Sarah Sanders referred all questions about the shooting to the president’s private attorneys.

“Look, I know you folks in the mainstream media are looking for every opportunity to criticize this president, who continues to accomplish amazing things for the American people,” Sanders said. “The economy is stronger than it’s been in ages, ISIS is on the run, the remaking of the judiciary. That’s all far more important than any distractions the media likes to throw out there.”

Sanders also refused to rule out the possibility of Trump issuing an immediate pardon for himself, as first proposed by famed legal scholar Alan Dershowitz.

Despite network TV video of Trump emerging from the presidential limousine, gun in hand, other prominent Trump supporters are questioning whether the shooting occurred at all. Fox News host Sean Hannity used his entire Thursday night segment to explore secret links between Hillary Clinton and Avennati, describing the attorney as a “paid crisis actor” as well as “a clear descendant of immigrants.” According to Hannity, the attack has all the earmarks of a “false flag” operation choreographed by the FBI.

“This is the deep state at work, undermining our democracy, my friends,” Hannity told his audience. “This is an unelected part of your government, looking to overturn a duly elected president. Don’t think this a coincidence -- it is the biggest scandal in American history.”

According to an overnight Quinnipiac poll, 68 percent of Republicans now agree that the shooting never happened. A similar poll from Rasmussen put the number at 93 percent.

quote:

Op zondag 22 april 2018 21:53 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
Trump moet vooral hoog van de toren blijven blazen. Daarmee versterkt hij de onderhandelingspositie van de Noord-Koreanen. Hij wekt immers de indruk dat een deal al praktisch in kannen en kruiken is. Daardoor kan hij niet met lege handen huiswaarts keren zonder gezichtsverlies te lijden.

quote:

President Trump recently tweeted, “The United States, under my administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our ‘Thank you, America?’ ”

President Trump has often criticized Americans for not being grateful enough. Now he has chastised the whole world as a thankless lot of humanity — a globe of ingrates.

Mr. Trump’s obsession with gratitude is a regular feature of his unscripted remarks and speeches. When people thank him, he likes them. But when slighted, he is quick to criticize unappreciative offenders. He has attacked Puerto Rican leaders as “politically motivated ingrates”; demanded public thanks from his cabinet and members of Congress; wants people to thank him for stock market gains; and excoriated a corporation as failing to thank him when he approved a project to its benefit.

Last December, a pro-Trump “super PAC” expressed its gratitude with a commercial, “Thank you, President Trump,” that expressed appreciation to him for, among other things, “letting us say ‘Merry Christmas’ again.”

Gratitude is central to Mr. Trump’s politics. He demands it of his followers, his cabinet and, indeed, of all citizens. He deploys gratitude against his enemies and critics to embarrass and shame. Being grateful is not an option. It is a requirement.

Donald Trump has made “thank you” divisive.

SPOILER

Yet gratitude has always been political. Sometimes it is used toward good political ends (such as public celebrations of thanksgiving). More often, however, authoritarian leaders have used gratitude to control critics and consolidate power.

The misuse of gratitude in politics goes back a long way — ancient Rome mastered it. In that empire, structured as an economic and political pyramid, a few people at the top held most of the wealth and power. At the bottom, where most people barely survived, there was very little. What held this inherently unjust system together? There was, of course, a feared army. But there was also something else: a social structure based on a particular form of gratitude.

The emperor Caesar was believed to be “lord and savior.” He owned everything, the benefactor who distributed his gifts and favors (“gratia” in Latin) at will. Even if you were a slave with a single piece of bread to eat, that bread was considered a gift of the emperor’s.

Caesar’s gifts, however, were not free. They were transactional. When you received from Caesar, you were expected to return gratitude, your “gratia,” through tributes, tithes, taxes, loyalty and military service. Until you returned appropriate thanks, you were in Caesar’s debt. If you failed to fulfill your obligation, you were an “ingrate,” which was a political crime punishable by the seizure of your property, prison, exile or execution.

Rome’s power was built on benefactors and beneficiaries bound by reciprocal obligations of gratitude. It worked, but it was easily corrupted. Lower classes incurred huge debts of gratitude that could never be repaid, functionally enslaving them. Ancient philosophers urged benefactors to eschew corrupted gratia and instead give freely from a desire for the common good. Benevolent gratitude, they insisted, was a virtue. Sadly, it was also rare.

Western societies inherited Roman ideas of gratitude. Medieval rulers tried (and failed) to Christianize political gratitude, but Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith rejected quid pro quo. They argued that reciprocal gratitude was bad for politics, but also believed that benevolent gratitude was necessary for moral democracy. It was a nuanced and difficult position to achieve. The temptations of corrupted gratitude kept creeping back into Western politics.

Understanding this helps explain Donald Trump. He has always depicted himself as a benefactor: “I alone can fix it.” During the primaries, he boasted that he received no outside gifts or contributions, thus debts of gratitude would never control him. He criticized conventional forms of payback, promising to distribute social largess to the “right” people, rid the system of undeserving beneficiaries and restore upward mobility in a social pyramid. No more corporations, no more politicians. He would be the ultimate benefactor. He would make America great again from the top.

This helps explain why the Russia inquiry makes Mr. Trump angry. The suggestion that he benefited from anyone, much less a foreign government, undermines his self-image as unassailable benefactor. He never receives. He gives as he wills, and to whom he chooses. “Receivers,” like the poor, immigrants, women and persons of color, are considered weaker beings, consigned to the lower ranks of his social pyramid, and who, failing to reciprocate his paternalistic generosity, are chided for a lack of thanks.

There is, however, an alternative to the pyramid of gratitude: a table. One of the enduring images of American self-understanding is that of a Thanksgiving table, where people celebrate abundance, serve one another and make sure all are fed. People give with no expectation of return, and joy replaces obligation.

This vision of gratitude is truly virtuous, sustains the common good, ensures a circle of equality, and strengthens community. Instead of Mr. Trump’s gratitude-as-duty politics, what our country needs is a new vision of an American table of thanks.

^{by Diana Butler Bass}

quote:

Op maandag 23 april 2018 12:46 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:
Meer dan een biljoen door de wc gespoeld:

Still Waiting for the Tax-Cut Boost

The U.S. economy slowed down in the first quarter. That isn’t a surprise, but considering the stimulus hitting the economy it counts as disappointment.

https://www.wsj.com/artic(...)cut-boost-1524475800

quote:

Op maandag 23 april 2018 12:57 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Goeie move om de belastingen te verlagen op het moment dat de economie goed liep. Echt slim.

En nu?

twitter:

MichaelAvenatti twitterde op maandag 23-04-2018 om 13:23:01 How do we know that Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump are in full panic mode? Because they have now called in the propaganda machine and people masquerading as journalists to do their dirty work for them. Why can’t they handle us directly? I thought they were tough guys? #pathetic #basta reageer retweet

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op maandag 23-04-2018 om 13:30:01 Senior administration officials and senators from both parties on the Veterans Affairs Committee are growing increasingly concerned that Ronny Jackson, Trump's new VA Secretary pick, may not get confirmed. https://t.co/tcfeo1Dzfa reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 23-04-2018 om 15:15:19 Hard to believe Obstructionists May vote against Mike Pompeo for Secretary of State. The Dems will not approve hundreds of good people, including the Ambassador to Germany. They are maxing out the time on approval process for all, never happened before. Need more Republicans! reageer retweet

quote:

Op maandag 23 april 2018 15:27 schreef brokjespoes het volgende:
People are still waiting for Donald Trump to congratulate the unarmed black man who had no specialist training whatsoever, yet singlehandedly stopped the Tennessee Waffle House shooting last Sunday.

Still nothing in 5.... 4.... 3....

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 23-04-2018 om 15:44:46 Despite the Democrat inspired laws on Sanctuary Cities and the Border being so bad and one sided, I have instructed the Secretary of Homeland Security not to let these large Caravans of people into our Country. It is a disgrace. We are the only Country in the World so naive! WALL reageer retweet

quote:

Op maandag 23 april 2018 15:48 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 23-04-2018 om 15:44:46 Despite the Democrat inspired laws on Sanctuary Cities and the Border being so bad and one sided, I have instructed the Secretary of Homeland Security not to let these large Caravans of people into our Country. It is a disgrace. We are the only Country in the World so naive! WALL reageer retweet

Waar heeft hij het over?

quote:

WALL

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 23-04-2018 om 15:51:17 Mexico, whose laws on immigration are very tough, must stop people from going through Mexico and into the U.S. We may make this a condition of the new NAFTA Agreement. Our Country cannot accept what is happening! Also, we must get Wall funding fast. reageer retweet

quote:

Op maandag 23 april 2018 15:51 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

[..]

Over die karavanen die Mexico al tegenhoudt.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op maandag 23-04-2018 om 16:30:19 Jessica Drake, an adult-film star, says Stormy Daniels told her twice that she was threatened by someone to stay silent about her alleged affair with Trump. Drake also claims she refused a $10,000 offer to have sex with Trump. https://t.co/FtWPoIMXHK reageer retweet

quote:

Op maandag 23 april 2018 17:22 schreef speknek het volgende:
Evangelicals hebben geen moeite met mensen in een nazikostuum als decent folks te zien, maar een onzedig iemand in Adamskostuum wordt een stuk lastiger, dus waarschijnlijk is de GOP nog druk aan het bedenken hoe ze deze terroristische white supremacy daad dan wel positief moeten spinnen.

twitter:

NYDailyNews twitterde op maandag 23-04-2018 om 17:12:18 This morning, @realDonaldTrump took time to complain about Democrats, NAFTA and immigration.There have been zero tweets about the #WaffleHouse victims or the courageous black man, James Shaw, Jr., whose heroism may have prevented a further loss of life. reageer retweet

twitter:

SallyDeal4 twitterde op zondag 22-04-2018 om 21:55:06 .@realDonaldTrump I just happened to notice you've not tweeted out thoughts & prayers for the 4 people who were shot & killed with an assault rifle at a TN #WaffleHouse. No doubt many lives were saved by James Shaw Jr., an UNARMED hero. No praise for him? ?#BanAssaultWeapons reageer retweet

twitter:

4everNeverTrump twitterde op zondag 22-04-2018 om 21:26:26 Wayne LaPierre, 2012: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun."Today: A good guy with no gun, James Shaw Jr., stopped the #WaffleHouse shooter. reageer retweet