[AMV] Amerikaanse politiek #569: Lyin' Ted - BBQ-stealin' O'Rourke

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Op zaterdag 20 oktober 2018 01:42 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

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'Tragic accident'

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Op zaterdag 20 oktober 2018 01:46 schreef Szura het volgende:

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Incident

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kylegriffin1 twitterde op zaterdag 20-10-2018 om 02:30:51 "The world should take note that it is the free press, not the Saudi government or the White House, that has doggedly searched for the truth about what happened to Mr. Khashoggi," Patrick Leahy said. "A free press is an essential check against tyranny." https://t.co/u9hM94YznX reageer retweet

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The Trump administration’s struggles to curtail illegal immigration have exposed a deep rift among the president and his top advisers, one that could lead to changes in the Cabinet and undermine the government’s response to a record surge of migrant families at the southern border.

Even as President Trump continues to consider immigration to be a political winner next month in helping turn out his conservative base for the midterm elections, tensions in the West Wing have reached a boiling point. A profane shouting match over immigration this week among top aides prompted Chief of Staff John F. Kelly to storm out of the White House and marked the culmination of weeks of mounting anxiety, several senior administration officials said.

Trump’s own escalating frustration has led him to excoriate aides for not taking more aggressive actions and to offer his own ideas, officials said. He has ruminated this week over the possibility of sending more soldiers to the border, even though thousands of National Guard troops have been deployed there since April with no evidence of a deterrent effect.

In the summer, the president was so upset by the border numbers that he proposed sealing the entire 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico border, including shuttering legal ports of entry, blocking trade flows and halting tourism and travel, according to the senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.

“Close the whole thing!” Trump demanded at one point during an Oval Office meeting, the officials said. He was talked out of it by advisers who highlighted the effect such a measure would have on more than $600 billion in U.S.-Mexico annual trade, as well as the potential damage to bilateral relations, according to the officials.

The worsening immigration numbers are particularly fraught for Trump, who centered much of his 2016 campaign around incendiary vows to build a border wall — which has not been built — and has begun focusing on immigrants as a dire threat in the final weeks before the Nov. 6 midterms.

Experts said the White House is straining under the same political dilemma that past administrations encountered in trying to manage the massive U.S. immigration system despite Congress’s inability to strike a comprehensive legislative reform package. Trump is hitting the limits of what he is legally able to do through executive authority, they said, and the United States has relatively few tools to deal with the gang violence, poverty and hunger propelling a mass exodus of Central American migrant families over the past five years.

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kylegriffin1 twitterde op zaterdag 20-10-2018 om 04:05:21 Reporter: "What evidence do you have that these are hardened criminals that are coming to the United States?"Trump: "Oh, please. Please. Don't be a baby. OK?" https://t.co/CpEewUIJwh reageer retweet

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The Trump administration is preparing to tell Russian leaders next week that it is planning to exit the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, in part to enable the United States to counter a Chinese arms buildup in the Pacific, according to American officials and foreign diplomats.

President Trump has been moving toward scrapping the three-decade-old treaty, which grew out of President Ronald Reagan’s historic meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986. While the treaty was seen as effective for years, Russia has been violating it at least since 2014 in an effort to menace other nations.

But the pact has also constrained the United States from deploying new weapons to respond to China’s efforts to cement a dominant position in the Western Pacific and to keep American naval forces at bay. Because China was not a signatory to the treaty, it has faced no limits on developing intermediate-range nuclear missiles, which can travel thousands of miles.

The White House said that no official decision had been made to leave the treaty, known as I.N.F., which at the time of its signing was considered a critical step in defusing Cold War tensions. But in the coming weeks, Mr. Trump is expected to sign off on the decision, which would mark the first time he has scrapped an arms control treaty, the American officials said.

Now that the treaty is largely in tatters, the question is whether the decision to leave it will accelerate the increasingly Cold War-like behavior among the three superpowers: the United States, Russia and China.

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rgoodlaw twitterde op zaterdag 20-10-2018 om 05:17:08 CIA has the audio tapes“CIA officials have listened to an audio recording ... If verified, the recording would make it difficult for the White House to accept the Saudi version that #Khashoggi’s death was effectively an accident.” https://t.co/bdYhTfuL4n reageer retweet

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Op zaterdag 20 oktober 2018 01:42 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

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'Tragic accident'

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Latest: President Trump said "I do" believe Saudi explanation is credible

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Ted Cruz just tried to do a Facebook Live but his staff seems to have no idea how an iPhone camera works — here’s two minutes of bizarreness https://t.co/vyol4pQqXx

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Op zaterdag 20 oktober 2018 07:15 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

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rgoodlaw twitterde op zaterdag 20-10-2018 om 05:17:08 CIA has the audio tapes“CIA officials have listened to an audio recording ... If verified, the recording would make it difficult for the White House to accept the Saudi version that #Khashoggi’s death was effectively an accident.” https://t.co/bdYhTfuL4n reageer retweet

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Op zaterdag 20 oktober 2018 10:09 schreef Ulx het volgende:

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Welke van de verschillende verklaringen?

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Op zaterdag 20 oktober 2018 10:22 schreef clumsy_clown het volgende:
Ach, het kan iedereen overkomen dat je in een vuistgevecht belandt en er toevallig een forensisch team met een zaag klaar staat, toch?

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Op zaterdag 20 oktober 2018 13:07 schreef Ulx het volgende:
De rechtse snowflakes huilen nu tranen met tuiten omdat Jim Acosta "Fuck off!" twitterde naar een of andere trumpfan. Beledigen mag je als Potus of Milo of whoever, maar voor hem gelden de hoge standaarden.
Wat een slappe bitches zijn dat toch ook. Laat ze lekker in hun safespace gaan grienen.

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Acosta twitterde op vrijdag 19-10-2018 om 18:28:03 Is this that “owning the libs” thing? https://t.co/VIX4Gwk3OM reageer retweet

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kylegriffin1 twitterde op zaterdag 20-10-2018 om 15:00:01 Putin gave his annual foreign policy speech on Thursday — and he used it to hail the end of a US-dominated world: 'Luckily this monopoly is disappearing. It’s almost done.' https://t.co/u9WwcwEqWe reageer retweet

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Russian president Vladimir Putin shrugged off worsening relations with the west and talked up Moscow’s burgeoning diplomatic friendships in Asia and the Middle East, as he hailed the end of a US-dominated unipolar world.

Giving his annual foreign policy address on Thursday, Mr Putin stressed Russia’s military clout and offered a range of handouts to Moscow’s allies. He said his country was always ready to talk despite a mounting list of accusations of impropriety against his regime from western countries.

“Building up tension and hysteria is not our way . . . We are not creating problems for anyone,” Mr Putin said. “I hope we can build dialogue.”

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was the start of western sanctions against Moscow that have been broadened since in response to its military actions in Syria, its alleged meddling in the US presidential election, and its alleged use of a chemical weapon to attack a former spy in the UK.

In a wide-ranging exposition at the annual Valdai forum, Mr Putin continually returned to the idea that US hegemony was the cause of many global ills — but that its twilight offered opportunities for Russia and its friends.

“Empires often think they can make some little mistakes . . . because they’re so powerful,” he said. “But when the number of these mistakes keeps growing, it reaches a level they cannot sustain.”

“A country can get the sense from impunity that you can do anything,” he told an audience at a ski resort close to the southern city of Sochi. “This is the result of the monopoly from a unipolar world . . . Luckily this monopoly is disappearing. It’s almost done.”

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twitter:

jonathanchait twitterde op zaterdag 20-10-2018 om 15:34:00 New reports show more and more evidence Michael Flynn ran a collusion channel to Russia for Trump's campaign https://t.co/upgnbTAkAh https://t.co/6LNtrXaSf7 reageer retweet

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The alliance between the Trump campaign and Russia had many nodes of contact. One of the least known, but potentially most significant, is the work that ran through Republican operative Peter W. Smith. Much of the reporting on Smith has been broken by The Wall Street Journal, and its accumulated reports are building an incriminating story.

Smith is a Chicago-based operative with a taste for the political dark arts, who set out in 2016 to obtain Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails, which he believed had been stolen by Russian hackers. Smith died under somewhat odd circumstances last year — he committed an apparent suicide days after being contacted by a reporter, citing an expiring life-insurance policy, but seemed to be in good spirits just hours before his death.

But the most important mystery involving Smith is how important his work was to the campaign, and where it led. When he met with a cybersecurity expert in 2016, Smith represented himself as working on behalf of Michael Flynn, Trump’s chief national security adviser during the campaign. Flynn, of course, had ties to Russia and was forced to resign very shortly after starting as national security adviser for lying about his contacts with Russia.

But Smith, unlike Flynn, was not a famous figure, and initially some people assumed that he might have been working on his own. The Journal has fleshed out Smith’s role, and every new report has suggested that his work was significant. An October 7 report found that Smith raised at least $100,000, from at least four donors, for his work on the emails. An October 10 follow-up confirmed that Smith and Flynn were in regular, close contact.

Today’s report is more explosive still. Investigators have evidence that Smith “may have had advance knowledge of details about the release of emails from a top Hillary Clinton campaign official by WikiLeaks,” according to the Journal.

If true, this would mean that Smith wasn’t merely attempting to get ahold of stolen Clinton emails. He got through to WikiLeaks and was, in some form, a channel of collusion between the hackers and the Trump campaign.

Flynn long ago started cooperating with Robert Mueller. So if Flynn discussed any of this information with Trump during the campaign, the special counsel probably knows about it.