SPOILER

Vice President - Mike Pence

Het kabinet
Secretary of State - Mike Pompeo
Secretary of Treasury - Steven Mnuchin
Secretary of Defense - General Jim 'Mad Dog' Mattis
Attorney General - Jeff Sessions
Secretary of the Interior - Ryan Zinke
Secretary of Agriculture - Sonny Perdue
Secretary of Commerce - Wilbur Ross
Secretary of Labor - Alexander Acosta
Secretary of Health and Human Services - Alex Azar
Secretary of Housing & Urban Development - Ben Carson
Secretary of Transportation - Elaine Chao
Secretary of Energy - Rick Perry
Secretary of Education - Betsy DeVos
Secretary of Veterans Affairs - Ronny Jackson??? Robert Wilkie (Acting)
Secretary of Homeland Security - Kirstjen Nielsen

Cabinet-level officials:
White House Chief of Staff - John F. Kelly
Trade Representative - Robert Lighthizer
Director of National Intelligence - Dan Coats
Ambassador to the UN - Nikki Haley
Director of the Office of Management & Budget - Mick Mulvaney
Director of the Central Intelligence Agency - Gina Haspel
Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency - Scott Pruitt
Administrator of the Small Business Administration - Linda McMahon

Andere kopstukken:
Ivanka Trump (Advisor to the President), Jared Kushner (Senior Adviser Strategic Planning), Stephen Miller (Senior Adviser Policy), John Bolton (National Security Adviser), Kellyanne Conway (Counselor), Donald McGahn (White House Counsel), Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Press Secretary), Christopher Wray (Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation), Robert Mueller (Special Counsel), Rod Rosenstein (United States Deputy Attorney General).

Verdwenen of voormalige kopstukken:
Kabinet: Tom Price (HHS), David Shulkin (VA), Rex Tillerson (State)
DOJ/FBI: Sally Yates, James Comey, Preet Bharara, Andrew McCabe
Communicatie WH: Mike Dubke, Sean Spicer, Anthony Scaramucci, Hope Hicks
Adviseurs enzo: Michael Flynn, Herbert McMaster, Reince Priebus, Rob Porter, Gary Cohn, Steve Bannon, John McEntee

SPOILER: juni

SPOILER: juni

SPOILER: juni

quote:

Michael Cohen paid a mysterious tech company $50,000 'in connection with' Trump's campaign

Christina Wilkie | @christinawilkie

*President Donald Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, made a previously unreported payment of $50,000 to a tech company in connection with Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

*The document detailing the payment does not say which company Cohen paid the money to, or what, exactly, the company did for him.

*The payment suggests that Cohen may have been doing more for Trump, and for the Trump campaign, than had been previously known.

President Donald Trump's longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars during the summer and fall of 2016 to silence two women who claimed they'd had sexual relationships with the married
candidate.

But silence is not all that Cohen appears to have purchased in order to help his boss win the White House.

Buried in the legal documents released Tuesday as part of Cohen's guilty plea on eight felony counts, there was a new, previously unreported payment Cohen made in 2016 to help Trump: $50,000 for work that prosecutors say Cohen "solicited from a technology company during and in connection with the campaign."

The documents do not identify which tech company Cohen paid the money to, or what, exactly, the company did for him. But the mere existence of the previously unknown payment suggests that Cohen may have been doing more for Trump, and for the Trump campaign, than simply paying off women.

Furthermore, the way that Cohen reported the $50,000 expense to the Trump Organization in January 2017 suggests the money may not have been paid out through traditional financial channels.

According to prosecutors, Cohen presented Trump executives with bank records for several of the expenses he incurred on Trump's behalf. But for his $50,000 payment to a tech company, Cohen provided no paperwork, just a handwritten sum at the top of one of the other bank documents.

The Trump Organization would later say that the $50,000 was a "payment for tech services." However, prosecutors say the $50,000 "was in fact related to work Cohen had solicited from a technology company during and in connection with the campaign."

SPOILER

A spokesman for the Trump Organization did not respond to questions from CNBC Wednesday about the payment. Trump's campaign, likewise, did not answer questions about whether it knew Cohen had paid a tech company $50,000 to aid in Trump's election bid.

Cohen's lawyer, Lanny Davis, also did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the money, and the White House did not respond to questions about whether the president was aware that Cohen was paying a tech company for election help.

It's not clear exactly when Cohen spent the money, only that it was during the campaign. And without knowing precisely what it was for, it's difficult to tell whether Cohen violated the law by not reporting it as a campaign expense.
The Trump campaign in 2016 had a savvy digital operation run by a relatively unknown online marketing specialist named Brad Parscale. Today, Parscale holds the top job on Trump's 2020 campaign team.

Cohen is not believed to have played any part in the official digital operations of the Trump 2016 campaign, nor did Cohen ever have a formal staff position on the campaign itself.
All of which only deepens the mystery of exactly what tech services Cohen was buying to help Trump's campaign.

In the 24 hours since Cohen pleaded guilty Tuesday, Davis, his lawyer, has repeatedly said that his client knows things that would be of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating the Russian attack on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Central to that investigation is the question of whether the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government to sway the election in Trump's favor.

Cohen "is happy to tell the special counsel all that he knows, not just about the obvious possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election … but also, knowledge about the computer crime of hacking and whether or not Mr. Trump knew ahead of time about that crime and even cheered it on," Davis said during an appearance on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show" on Tuesday night.

Despite Davis' cryptic clues, there is nothing so far to indicate that the $50,000 in services that Cohen bought from the anonymous tech company were in any way related to the Russian cyber crimes and theft of emails that damaged Trump's Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

It is also unclear whether the special counsel has interviewed Cohen yet. A Mueller spokesman declined to comment.

twitter:

AmandaLeeAP twitterde op woensdag 22-08-2018 om 23:44:07 Call into our newsroom just now: "At some point we're just gonna start shooting you fucking assholes." reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 00:19 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

AmandaLeeAP twitterde op woensdag 22-08-2018 om 23:44:07 Call into our newsroom just now: "At some point we're just gonna start shooting you fucking assholes." reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 00:29 schreef Zwoerd het volgende:
Ik vraag me af of Trumps approval ratings binnenkort weer onder de 40% gaan duiken. Die zitten toch alweer een hele poos op het hoogste niveau sinds zn eerste 3 maanden.

https://projects.fivethir(...)ings/?ex_cid=rrpromo

quote:

Op woensdag 22 augustus 2018 20:07 schreef Nintex het volgende:
De Democraten zijn ook gewoon stuk. Tijd voor een nieuwe partij

twitter:

MattWolking twitterde op woensdag 22-08-2018 om 16:25:28 Asked about Mollie Tibbetts being murdered by an illegal immigrant, Elizabeth Warren says "I know this is hard" for her family, but they "have to remember" that we need to focus on "real problems" like illegal immigrants not being able to see to their kids https://t.co/RLLKw9ezGx reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 00:11 schreef FlipjeHolland het volgende:
Het is wel grappig dat Trump nog steeds denkt de aandacht te kunnen afleiden door over 'Crooked Hillary' en Obummer te beginnen. Best sneu dat die twee zo'n obsessie zijn voor deze dementerende man.

twitter:

Ali_H_Soufan twitterde op donderdag 23-08-2018 om 01:43:05 Unlike Cohen, ‘Brave’ Manafort cannot flip without potentially double-crossing Putin and his oligarchs. Flipping on Trump is nothing compare to double-crossing Putin. reageer retweet

twitter:

CNNSitRoom twitterde op donderdag 23-08-2018 om 00:59:26 What evidence does Michael Cohen have that the President knew in advance of the controversial 2016 Trump Tower meeting?“At this juncture, I can only say that [Cohen] was present during a discussion with [Donald Trump Jr.] and [Trump],” Lanny Davis says https://t.co/l6v501rujQ reageer retweet

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op donderdag 23-08-2018 om 02:30:11 People who have known Trump for years pointed out to the NYT that he has never been as cornered — or as isolated — as he is right now, and that he is at his most dangerous when he feels backed against the wall.https://t.co/1UWZVEfbpL reageer retweet

quote:

In the hours after two of President Trump’s former advisers delivered his administration potentially grave legal setbacks, the mood inside the White House was grim, a return to a trench-warfare mentality borne out of muscle memory. But there remained a pervasive belief, rightly or wrongly, that things have looked this bad before.

That was little consolation to advisers who admitted they had no strategy for countering the news that Mr. Trump’s former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, had admitted in federal court that Mr. Trump directed him to arrange payments to two women during the 2016 campaign to silence them from talking publicly about affairs they said they had with Mr. Trump. Nor was there a plan, according to interviews with half a dozen current and former aides, to put a spin on the conviction of Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager, on eight counts of financial fraud.

The only option was to follow Mr. Trump’s lead. The president, returning to a well-worn tactic of scouring media reports for any opportunity that would allow him to seize the news cycle again, decided not to cancel a planned sit-down with Fox News on Wednesday.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, was left to repeatedly refer to the president’s past comments on the matter.

“He did nothing wrong,” Ms. Sanders said at least three times in a briefing to reporters, a sentiment that White House employees have told themselves in private conversations. “There are no charges against him.”

But this time, advisers noticed that the president, a man who has in the past relished the idea of leading his troops into political battle, seemed subdued. He appeared to realize the serious nature of what had just taken place, and yet his relative calm — contrasted with his more typical lashing out when he is anxious — unnerved some of his aides.

“We started with collusion,” the president mused, according to several people who witnessed Mr. Trump’s somber mood. “How did we end up here?”

SPOILER

Well into the president’s second year, Mr. Trump’s aides have learned to weather, deflect or completely ignore developments that critics of the administration viewed as insurmountable. This spring, aides faced near constant questions about how the White House doled out security clearances. In May, the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said that Mr. Trump had reimbursed Mr. Cohen for payments to one of the women, Stephanie Clifford, a pornographic film actress, contradicting the president’s prior claim that he had no knowledge of them.

This summer, the White House has faced a self-inflicted firestorm over its immigration policies, which led to thousands of family separations at the border; questions about why Mr. Trump stood by Scott Pruitt, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, who faced more than a dozen investigations into his spending and management practices before eventually resigning in July; and Mr. Trump’s cozy, widely criticized news conference with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Helsinki, Finland.

On Wednesday, several aides dismissed the news about Mr. Cohen as just another bad headline lacking the silver bullet that they say the special counsel would need to prove that the president conspired with Russian officials.

Mr. Trump spent the early hours of Wednesday tweeting — he called the convicted Mr. Manafort a “brave man” who, unlike Mr. Cohen, “refused to ‘break’” or “make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’’’ He also monitored headlines, as he did after his news conference with Mr. Putin. In the interview with Fox News, he asserted that money for the payments to the women had come not from his campaign, but from his own accounts.

“I don’t know if you know,” Mr. Trump said during the interview, “but I tweeted about the payments. But they didn’t come out of the campaign.” Campaign finance laws still prohibit Mr. Trump from making unreported payments related to the campaign, regardless of where they came from. Neither payment was disclosed to the Federal Election Commission.

On Air Force One on Tuesday night on the way back from a rally in West Virginia, Mr. Trump repeatedly minimized the news, telling aides that the legal developments were not about him, but about Mr. Manafort and Mr. Cohen. He also groused over the optics of the rally, telling a person close to him that the crowd seemed flat and that some chairs were empty.

By Wednesday, Mr. Trump’s lawyers were arguing privately that Mr. Cohen’s admission and guilty plea to violating campaign finance laws was a punch but not a knockout blow, and were assessing what options they had for fighting back. They stressed that Mr. Cohen had said repeatedly in previous accounts that Mr. Trump was not aware of his payment to Ms. Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels.

In an interview, Mr. Giuliani said that he had spoken at length with Mr. Trump, but that the president had wanted to move on from legal tangles to other topics — including the golf game that Mr. Giuliani was playing at a course in Scotland on Wednesday.

Mr. Giuliani said the two had discussed the political fallout should Mr. Trump grant a pardon to Mr. Manafort.

“Yesterday’s plea and Manafort’s conviction, none of it had to do with collusion, none of it has to do with obstruction,” Mr. Giuliani said, echoing much of what the president has said in public and in private. “He really thinks Manafort has been horribly treated.”

He added that Mr. Trump’s team was looking at the possibility of making public at least one recording of Mr. Cohen speaking to journalists about his payments to Ms. Clifford, in which he said he made the payments on his own initiative to spare the Trump family pain.

People who have known Mr. Trump for years pointed out that he has never been as cornered — or as isolated — as he is right now, and that he is at his most dangerous when he feels backed against the wall. They pointed to his reaction after the “Access Hollywood” tape of him boasting of grabbing women’s genitals was released in October 2016. Mr. Trump responded by parading Bill Clinton’s female accusers in front of Hillary Clinton at the presidential debate in St. Louis, and acted like a man with nothing to lose.

This dynamic has led Mr. Trump to publicly praise — and privately muse about pardoning — Mr. Manafort. Mr. Trump has exercised his pardon power several times since he took office, including for Joe Arpaio, the anti-immigration sheriff in Arizona, and Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative writer who was prosecuted for campaign finance violations. One official said that there was a list of people Mr. Trump has said he would like to consider for pardons or commutations, but that Mr. Manafort’s name had never been on the list.

Mr. Giuliani said in the interview that a pardon for Mr. Manafort was not under consideration.

Ms. Sanders said that, to her knowledge, Mr. Trump had not discussed the idea of pardoning Mr. Manafort. Several of Mr. Trump’s advisers said that he was uncertain about the political fallout and was not quite ready to do so.

Mr. Manafort, 69, is in the meantime facing another trial next month on seven charges, including obstruction of justice, failure to register as a foreign agent and conspiracy to launder money.

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op donderdag 23-08-2018 om 01:10:41 Three hours ago this case was put forward as the centerpiece of the GOP midterm strategy... on illegal immigration. Damn you, facts! Why must you get in the way of a political party exploiting a family's grief for political gain (even after family members begged them *not* to)? https://t.co/9BlkXfVQrJ reageer retweet

quote:

The lawyer representing the man accused of murdering a 20-year-old Iowa college student said Wednesday that his client was in the U.S. legally and called President Trump "sad and sorry" for weighing in on the case.

The Des Moines Register reported that Cristhian Bahena Rivera's attorney filed a court document Wednesday that said the defendant was working legally in the U.S., contradicting law enforcement officials who said the defendant was an undocumented immigrant.

The court filing comes a day after Rivera, 24, was charged with the murder of Mollie Tibbetts, a University of Iowa student.

In the court document, attorney Allen Richards accused the government of wrongly promoting the idea that Rivera was in the U.S. illegally. He also criticized Trump for discussing Tibbetts's death during a rally on Tuesday night.

"Sad and sorry Trump has weighed in on this matter in national media which will poison the entire possible pool of jury members," Richards wrote, citing Trump's comments on the case.

Despite the lawyer's claims, both U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) maintained that Rivera is not in the country legally.

SPOILER

"A search of records by USCIS revealed Rivera did not make any DACA requests nor were any grants given," a spokesman said in a statement, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. "We have found no record in our systems indicating he has any immigration status."

An ICE spokesperson referred to Rivera as an "illegal alien from Mexico."

Rivera has lived in Iowa between four and seven years and worked at Yarrabee Farms during that time, according to The Des Moines Register. The newspaper noted that the company is owned by Eric Lang, the brother of prominent Republican Craig Lang.

Craig Lang confirmed to the attorney that Rivera was in Iowa legally, according to Wednesday's court filing.

"Craig Lang supports Cristhian’s right to be in this jurisdiction and for the government to support any other idea of status publicly flies in the face of such statement," Richards wrote.

Law enforcement officials had stated Tuesday that Rivera was an undocumented immigrant, fueling outrage from politicians like Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) who say the U.S. immigration system is not strict enough.

Many GOP lawmakers, including Iowa's two Republican senators, have suggested that the country's immigration laws played a role in the murder.

"As Reynolds said, ‘our immigration system allowed a predator like this to live in our community,’" Sens. Chuck Grassley (R) and Joni Ernst (R) said in a statement. "Too many Iowans have been lost at the hands of criminals who broke our immigration laws. We cannot allow these tragedies to continue."

The White House later published a video on Twitter of families who have been "permanently separated" because a family member was killed by an immigrant in the country illegally.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op donderdag 23-08-2018 om 04:18:54 I have asked Secretary of State @MikePompeo4USA to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews reageer retweet

South Africa begins seizing land from white farmers

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 04:28 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op donderdag 23-08-2018 om 04:18:54 I have asked Secretary of State @MikePompeo4USA to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews reageer retweet

South Africa begins seizing land from white farmers

WHUT?!

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 07:27 schreef Kaneelstokje het volgende:

[..]

Wat is er?

Dit zit er al maanden aan te komen. De Russen en Australiërs hebben al aangeboden om Boeren op te nemen.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 09:10 schreef Kaneelstokje het volgende:
Sorry, was vergeten in welk forumdeel ik zat.

FUCK TRUMP

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 07:06 schreef Szura het volgende:
Volgens deze vrouw - een MAGA-figuur - was er één iemand die een unanieme veroordeling op alle aanklachten tegen Manafort tegenhield:

http://www.foxnews.com/po(...)g-on-all-counts.html

quote:

"Er was één dwarsligger", zei Paula Duncan, een van de andere juryleden, woensdagavond (lokale tijd) tegen Fox News. "We probeerden allemaal haar naar de papieren bewijzen te laten kijken. We hebben het haar keer op keer uitgelegd en ze zei dat ze nog steeds gerede twijfel had."

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 09:43 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:

[..]

Waarom zouden we hier een of andere discussie gaan voeren over de situatie van de Boeren in Zuid-Afrika?

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 07:06 schreef Szura het volgende:
Volgens deze vrouw - een MAGA-figuur - was er één iemand die een unanieme veroordeling op alle aanklachten tegen Manafort tegenhield:

http://www.foxnews.com/po(...)g-on-all-counts.html

quote:

WASHINGTON — The Education Department is considering whether to allow states to use federal funding to purchase guns for educators, according to multiple people with knowledge of the plan.

Such a move appears to be unprecedented, reversing a longstanding position taken by the federal government that it should not pay to outfit schools with weapons. And it would also undermine efforts by Congress to restrict the use of federal funding on guns. As recently as March, Congress passed a school safety bill that allocated $50 million a year to local school districts, but expressly prohibited the use of the money for firearms.

SPOILER

But the department is eyeing a program in federal education law, the Student Support and Academic Enrichment grants, that makes no mention of prohibiting weapons purchases. That omission would allow the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, to use her discretion to approve any state or district plans to use grant funding for firearms and firearm training, unless Congress clarifies the law or bans such funding through legislative action.

“The department is constantly considering and evaluating policy issues, particularly issues related to school safety,” said Liz Hill, a spokeswoman for the Education Department. “The secretary nor the department issues opinions on hypothetical scenarios.”

The $1 billion student support program, part of the Every Student Succeeds Act, is intended for academic and enrichment opportunities in the country’s poorest schools and calls for school districts to use the money toward three goals: providing a well-rounded education, improving school conditions for learning and improving the use of technology for digital literacy.

Department officials acknowledged that should the Education Department carry out the proposal, it would appear to be the first time that a federal agency has authorized the purchase of weapons without a congressional mandate, according to people familiar with the discussions. And while no such restrictions exist in the federal education law, it could undermine the grant program’s adoption of “drug and violence prevention,” which defines a safe school environment as free of weapons.

In its research, the Education Department has determined that the gun purchases could fall under improving school conditions, people familiar with the department’s thinking said. Under the current guidelines for that part of the grant, the department encourages schools to increase access to mental health counseling, establish dropout prevention programs, reduce suspensions and expulsions and improve re-entry programs for students transitioning from the juvenile justice system.

But the department began exploring whether to expand the use of the support grants after the school shootings in Parkland, Fla., and Santa Fe, Tex., prompted states to inquire about alternatives. Department officials were considering whether to issue guidance on the funding before the start of the new school year, but have been weighing the political and legal ramifications, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The proposal by the Education Department is almost certain to spur backlash. The Trump administration’s call to arm educators in an effort to prevent school shootings has faced overwhelming criticism from educators, lawmakers and law enforcement officials.

The measure would also break from decades-old practice in how funding is doled out for the purposes of school security.

Guidance for grants distributed by the Homeland Security Department that are intended for “school preparedness,” for example, notes that weapons and ammunition are not permitted. And after the Parkland shooting, Congress added a rule prohibiting the use of grants for firearms or firearm training in the Stop School Violence Act, under which the Justice Department will grant funds to school districts.

In weighing the proposal, the Education Department has also taken into account that school shootings were not a consideration when Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, according to people familiar with the discussions. Three of the remaining architects of the law — Representative Robert C. Scott, Democrat of Virginia, and Senators Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, and Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington State — have all opposed the idea of arming teachers.

The student support grant was created from funds from other programs that were collapsed in the Every Student Succeeds Act that addressed issues like mental health, violence prevention, bullying and harassment.

The Trump administration has twice moved to eliminate the grant program from its budget. But as Congress drafted a spending bill in the months after the Parkland shooting, advocates pointed to the program as emblematic of a successful approach to school safety. Congress instead increased funding for the grants by $700 million in the bill passed this year.

After the Parkland shooting, the Trump administration convened a federal commission on school safety, led by Ms. DeVos, to examine topics like mental and behavioral health resources, building security and the role of law enforcement in schools.

The commission has held several public hearings where educators and advocates from across the country have asked for expanded support staff and services, including school counselors, and additional security measures. Members of the commission have also visited school districts, like in rural Arkansas, where armed employees can be found at schools in areas not easily reached by law enforcement. The commission plans to issue recommendations by the end of the year.

In June, Ms. DeVos said the commission would not consider the role of guns in school shootings, but she later indicated that the panel would look narrowly at specific issues, including age limits for firearm purchases.

Last month, Ms. DeVos’s assistant secretary for the office of elementary and secondary education, Jason Botel, reiterated that point in a congressional hearing.

That prompted Representative Donald M. Payne Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, to question the Education Department. In a letter to Mr. Botel, he asked if the department was planning to arm teachers.

But the department issued a statement saying that it did not plan to do so because “this is a function appropriately reserved for the states.”

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 10:24 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Wie zegt dat zij het niet zelf is? Met haar MAGA petje.

Wel raar, ik had gedacht dat ze wel een onafhankelijke groep mensen als jury zouden selecteren. Als zelfs zo iemand Manafort zo schuldig als het maar kan vindt..

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 10:24 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Wie zegt dat zij het niet zelf is? Met haar MAGA petje.

Wel raar, ik had gedacht dat ze wel een onafhankelijke groep mensen als jury zouden selecteren. Als zelfs zo iemand Manafort zo schuldig als het maar kan vindt..

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 09:10 schreef Kaneelstokje het volgende:
Sorry, was vergeten in welk forumdeel ik zat.

FUCK TRUMP

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 10:43 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Dat hij/zij Manafort niet schuldig wilde verklaren hoeft natuurlijk niet te betekenen dat ze niet onafhankelijk is.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 10:43 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Dat hij/zij Manafort niet schuldig wilde verklaren hoeft natuurlijk niet te betekenen dat ze niet onafhankelijk is.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 07:06 schreef Szura het volgende:
Volgens deze vrouw - een MAGA-figuur - was er één iemand die een unanieme veroordeling op alle aanklachten tegen Manafort tegenhield:

http://www.foxnews.com/po(...)g-on-all-counts.html

quote:

She described a tense and emotional four days of deliberations, which ultimately left one juror holding out. Behind closed doors, tempers flared at times, even though jurors never explicitly discussed Manafort’s close ties to Trump.

“It was a very emotionally charged jury room – there were some tears,” Duncan said about deliberations with a group of Virginians she didn’t feel included many “fellow Republicans.”

A political allegiance to the president also raised conflicted feelings in Duncan, but she said it ultimately didn’t change her decision about the former Trump campaign chairman.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 10:58 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Nee, dat is waar, maar het gaat hier om een zaak tegen de voormalig campagne manager van Trump. De zaak is dus direct aan hem gelieerd. Dan vind ik het raar dat iemand die zo'n die hard Trump supporter is door de jury selectie is gekomen. Los van die ene hold out.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 10:58 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Nee, dat is waar, maar het gaat hier om een zaak tegen de voormalig campagne manager van Trump. De zaak is dus direct aan hem gelieerd. Dan vind ik het raar dat iemand die zo'n die hard Trump supporter is door de jury selectie is gekomen. Los van die ene hold out.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 11:09 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Mwoah, als je gewoon integere mensen vindt maakt hun politieke kleur niet zo gek veel uit.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 11:10 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Die vrouw zei zelf "ik wilde niet dat hij schuldig was". Dat is toch geen open blik om aan zo'n proces te beginnen? Dan ben je al bevooroordeeld vanaf het begin.

Stel je voor dat een rechter in Nederland zo een proces begint.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 11:10 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Die vrouw zei zelf "ik wilde niet dat hij schuldig was". Dat is toch geen open blik om aan zo'n proces te beginnen? Dan ben je al bevooroordeeld vanaf het begin.

Stel je voor dat een rechter in Nederland zo een proces begint.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 11:13 schreef Refragmental het volgende:

[..]

We hebben onlangs nog een flinke discussie gehad over bevooroordeeld zijn (Peter Strzok), was toen geen enkel probleem kan ik me nog herinneren.
Waarom nu dan wel?

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 11:14 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Want Strzok zat in de jury van een rechtszaak? Wat is dit nou weer voor een bullshit man.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 11:13 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Ja, maar als je daarna zegt 'maar niemand staat boven de wet' geeft dat ook weer aan dat je de wet laat prevaleren boven je persoonlijke mening. Je kan best hopen dat iemand onschuldig is, maar als je gewoon eerlijk je werk doet hoeft die mening je oordeel niet te kleuren.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 11:15 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Dan hebben ze een van de weinige MAGA fanatici gevonden die blijkbaar wel wetshandhaving en gehersenspoelde Trump aanbidding van elkaar kunnen handhaven. Nogal een flink risico mee genomen.

Als straks Don Jr. achter het bankje staat, zou je het dan ook oké vinden dat een jury lid met rood petje op elke dag naar de rechtbank komt?

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 11:18 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Al die juryleden worden gewoon vooraf ondervraagd en moeten worden goedgekeurd door beide partijen. Als beide advocaten met deze jury akkoord zijn gegaan mag je gewoon aannemen dat haar politieke kleur geen enkele invloed heeft op haar vermogen om onafhankelijk in de jury te zitten.

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 11:20 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Ja, ik snap het proces wel. Maar ik blijf het raar vinden dat Muellers team die vrouw in de jury okay vond.

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 11:20 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Ja, ik snap het proces wel. Maar ik blijf het raar vinden dat Muellers team die vrouw in de jury okay vond.

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 11:18 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Al die juryleden worden gewoon vooraf ondervraagd en moeten worden goedgekeurd door beide partijen. Als beide advocaten met deze jury akkoord zijn gegaan mag je gewoon aannemen dat haar politieke kleur geen enkele invloed heeft op haar vermogen om onafhankelijk in de jury te zitten.

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 11:24 schreef clumsy_clown het volgende:

Neemt niet weg dat ik een jury de grootst mogelijke onzin vind. In een zaak als deze bijvoorbeeld, zit er tijdens het jury-beraad niemand bij die bijvoorbeeld onduidelijkheden voor de jury op kan lossen, terwijl ze door stapels aan ingewikkeld bewijsmateriaal moet kammen. Voor leken is het dan bijzonder moeilijk om een juist beeld te krijgen van het geheel.

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 11:28 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Dit is ook wel een beetje het grootste probleem dat ik heb met jury's.

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 13:13 schreef speknek het volgende:
[ afbeelding ]

Mensen lijken grommend te accepteren dat het geen nothingburger witch hunt is.

(ik dacht dat het fox news kijkers waren, maar het lijkt meer een generieke poll)

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 13:13 schreef speknek het volgende:
[ afbeelding ]

Mensen lijken grommend te accepteren dat het geen nothingburger witch hunt is.

(ik dacht dat het fox news kijkers waren, maar het lijkt meer een generieke poll)

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 13:23 schreef heywoodu het volgende:

[..]

Van 48 naar 59 ná al de shit van deze week?

Oh wacht, approve over het onderzoek

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 14:18 schreef speknek het volgende:
Nieuwe TIME cover

[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Donald Trump has suggested that cooperating with the government in a criminal case in exchange for a reduced sentence “almost ought to be illegal” while warning that impeaching him would cause an economic crash, in a TV interview on Thursday.

[...]

“If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor,” adding that Americans would see economic “numbers that you wouldn’t believe in reverse”. In characteristic ebullient style, he also doubted it will happen.

“I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who’s done a great job,” he said in an interview with the conservative Fox News channel.

[...]

Trump claimed people who decide to cooperate with the government “make up stories” and “just make up lies”.

He went on: “I’ve known all about flipping – for 30 or 40 years I’ve been watching flippers … I’ve had many friends involved in this stuff … you get 10 years in jail but if you say bad things about somebody, in other words make up stories if you don’t know, they just make up lies … and now they go from 10 years to they’re a national hero.”

[...]

But even as Trump accused Cohen of making up the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, he said in the same interview that he knew of the payments and also that he had made them.

“They didn’t come out of the campaign, they came from me. And I tweeted about it. You know, I put – I don’t know if you know but I tweeted about the payments. But they didn’t come out of the campaign.

“But they weren’t – that’s not a – it’s not even a campaign violation. If you look at President Obama, he had a massive campaign violation but he had a different attorney general and they viewed it a lot differently.”

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 14:46 schreef DustPuppy het volgende:

[..]

Wat wordt de volgende vraag ik me dan af.

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 14:46 schreef DustPuppy het volgende:

[..]

Wat wordt de volgende vraag ik me dan af.

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 15:43 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Afvoerputje

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 14:18 schreef speknek het volgende:
Nieuwe TIME cover

[ afbeelding ]

Not just misleading. Not merely false. A lie. | Fact Checker

quote:

The first denial that Donald Trump knew about hush-money payments to silence women came four days before he was elected president, when his spokeswoman Hope Hicks said, without hedging, “We have no knowledge of any of this.”

The second came in January of this year, when his attorney Michael Cohen said the allegations were “outlandish.” By March, two of the president’s spokesmen — Raj Shah and Sarah Huckabee Sanders — said publicly that Trump denied all the allegations and any payments. Even Cohen’s attorney, David Schwartz, got in on the action, saying the president “was not aware of any of it.”

In April, Trump finally weighed in, answering a question about whether he knew about a payment to porn star Stephanie Clifford, who uses the stage name Stormy Daniels, with a flat “no.”

It’s now clear that the president’s statement was a lie — and that the people speaking for him repeated it.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Donald Trump’s presidency has been his loose relationship with facts. As of the beginning of this month, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker had documented 4,229 false or misleading claims from the president — an average of nearly 7.6 a day.

Trump’s allies have defended the president by suggesting that facts are debatable. Early in his presidency, one aide famously said he was operating with “alternative facts.” On Aug. 19, Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani declared: “Truth isn’t truth.”

How to characterize Trump’s statements has become its own pitched political battle, with many of the president’s critics demanding that they be called “lies.” The Fact Checker has been hesitant to go that far, as it is difficult to document whether the president knows he is not telling the truth.

On Aug. 22, Sanders said during a White House briefing that it was “a ridiculous accusation” to say the president has lied to the American people.

But this week’s guilty plea by Cohen offers indisputable evidence that Trump and his allies have been deliberately dishonest at every turn in their statements regarding payments to Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal.

Here is the definitive story of a Trump lie:

SPOILER

The initial lie: ‘no knowledge’

Nov. 4, 2016: The Wall Street Journal reports days before the election that the National Enquirer agreed to pay $150,000 to McDougal, a former Playboy centerfold model, for an account of an alleged affair with Trump but did not publish it, part of a “catch and kill” operation.

The publisher of the National Enquirer, American Media Inc., issues a statement: “AMI has not paid people to kill damaging stories about Mr. Trump.” Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks says: “We have no knowledge of any of this.”

What we know now: In August 2015, Cohen; David Pecker, the chairman of AMI; and “one or more members of the campaign” forged an agreement under which AMI would deal with negative stories about Trump’s “relationships with women” by purchasing the stories and then not publishing anything, according to the criminal information filed by federal prosecutors in the Cohen case. (In court, Cohen said he took action “at the request of the candidate” and knew it was illegal.) In August 2016, McDougal was paid $150,000 by AMI for the rights to her story -- which the National Enquirer never published.

More revelations, more disinformation

Jan. 12, 2018: The Wall Street Journal exposes the $130,000 payment to Daniels. Cohen and the White House sidestep questions about the payment but deny that an affair between Daniels and Trump ever took place. “This is now the second time that you are raising outlandish allegations against my client," Cohen tells the Journal. "You have attempted to perpetuate this false narrative for over a year; a narrative that has been consistently denied by all parties since at least 2011.”

Jan. 18: White House spokesman Raj Shah dodges questions about Daniels by telling reporters: “This matter was asked and answered during the campaign, and anything else could be directed to Michael Cohen.”

The lie evolves: Cohen made the payments on his own

Feb. 13: Cohen tells the New York Times he used his own funds to pay Daniels. “Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly,” he says. “The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.”

What we know now: Cohen, in pleading guilty to two felony violations of campaign finance law, said he was reimbursed by the Trump Organization. Court filings showed that the company “grossed up” the payments to cover Cohen’s taxes and added a bonus, for a total of $420,000 in payments, according to the criminal information.

Trump’s spokesmen keep saying he ‘was not aware of any of it'

March 7: White House press secretary Sanders asserts that the president told her he was unaware of the payments. “I’ve had conversations with the president about this,” she says. “There was no knowledge of any payments from the president, and he’s denied all of these allegations.” She adds: “Anything beyond that, I would refer you to the president’s outside counsel.”

March 9: Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s lawyer, discloses emails showing that Cohen used his Trump Organization email address when he arranged the $130,000 wire transfer. Cohen tells ABC News that he used his own funds: “The funds were taken from my home equity line and transferred internally to my LLC account in the same bank.” He says the use of the Trump Organization email address meant nothing because “I basically used it for everything.”

March 26: After Daniels appears on CBS’s “60 Minutes” to describe the alleged affair, White House spokesman Raj Shah sidesteps a question about whether the Trump campaign violated campaign finance laws, referring reporters to Cohen. “The president strongly, clearly and consistently denied the underlying claims,” he adds.

March 28: David Schwartz, an attorney for Cohen, tells CNN that Trump was completely unaware of the payment. “The president was not aware of the agreement. At least Michael Cohen never told him about the agreement. I can tell you that,” he says. Asked whether Trump was aware of the money, Schwartz affirms: “He was not aware of any of it.”

What we know now: Cohen, in making his guilty plea, said he worked “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office,” referring to Trump, to make payments to thwart McDougal and Daniels from telling their stories.

March 29: Schwartz tells NBC News that Trump “100 percent” did not reimburse Cohen.

Trump weighs in: ‘I don’t know’

April 5: Trump flatly tells reporters he did not know about the $130,000 payment.

Reporter: “Did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?”

Trump: “No, no.”

Reporter: “Then why did Michael Cohen make [the payment], if there was no truth to her allegations?”

Trump: “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael’s my attorney, and you’ll have to ask Michael.”

Reporter: “Do you know where he got the money to make that payment?”

Trump: “No. I don’t know.”

What we know now: Every answer was false. Trump knew about the payment, he knew Cohen made the payment as part of an effort to kill damaging stories, and he knew Cohen was reimbursed.

The lie shifts again: Trump ‘did know about the general arrangement’

April 26: The White House spin starts to shift after Cohen’s office is raided by federal prosecutors on April 9. Trump tells Fox News: “Michael would represent me, and represent me on some things. He represents me — like with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal, he represented me.”

May 2: Giuliani tells Fox News that Trump paid Cohen back for the $130,000 payment, but it could not be considered a campaign finance violation.

“They funneled it through the law firm, and the president repaid it,” Giuliani says, adding that it “is going to turn out to be perfectly legal. That money was not campaign money. Sorry, I’m giving you a fact now that you don’t know. It’s not campaign money, no campaign finance violation.”

Giuliani suggests Trump was largely in the dark about what the money was used for. "He didn’t know about the specifics of it, as far as I know. But he did know about the general arrangement, that Michael would take care of things like this,” he says.

May 3: Trump tweets about the supposed arrangement. “Mr. Cohen, an attorney, received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA,” he says, adding: “Money from the campaign, or campaign contributions, played no roll [sic] in this transaction.”

What we know now: This was a lie. Cohen did not get repaid through a monthly retainer. He sought reimbursement for the payment, and the Trump Organization agreed to pay $420,000, at a monthly rate of $35,000, according to court filings. The company then falsely listed the payments in its books as a retainer for legal work. “In truth and in fact, there was no such retainer agreement, and the monthly invoices Cohen submitted were not in connection for any legal services he had provided in 2017,” prosecutors wrote.

The lie unravels

May 4: Giuliani releases a statement in which he claims the payment to Daniels was intended only to “protect the president’s family” from painful publicity about an alleged affair and that “it would have been done in any event, whether he was a candidate or not.”

What we know now: The deal with Daniels was part of an arrangement to shield Trump from negative stories that was hatched by Cohen, AMI and the Trump campaign shortly after he started running for president, according to court filings.

July 24: Cohen attorney Lanny Davis releases a recording that Cohen had secretly made of a conversation with Trump two months before the election, in which the two discussed the arrangement with the National Enquirer to pay $150,000 to McDougal.

Aug. 21: Cohen, in court, implicates Trump by admitting that the hush-money payments had been intended to help the campaign. The payment to Daniels was deemed an excessive campaign contribution by Cohen — and the McDougal payment from AMI violated a ban on corporate donations to campaigns.

Epilogue

Aug. 22: In a Fox News interview, Trump sought to reframe the issue. He insisted that the payments had not been a “campaign violation.” The payments “didn’t come out of the campaign,” he said. “They came from me.”

After months of denial and deception, Trump was still not telling the truth.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 15:08 schreef Sloggi het volgende:
“If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor,” adding that Americans would see economic “numbers that you wouldn’t believe in reverse”. In characteristic ebullient style, he also doubted it will happen.

“I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who’s done a great job,” he said in an interview with the conservative Fox News channel.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 15:08 schreef Sloggi het volgende:

[..]

https://www.theguardian.c(...)-against-impeachment

Only the best quotes.

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 17:23 schreef la_perle_rouge het volgende:

[..]

Een vos en zijn streken: dit komt sterk overeen met zijn dreigementen eind jaren '80 aan de banken dat ze ongekende verliezen zouden lijden als ze Taj en Trump Castle Casino Ressort niet zouden helpen redden.
https://washingtonspectator.org/trump-finance-regulators/
https://archive.org/details/templesofchanceh00john (dat is een boek, waard om eens goed te lezen)

The Politics of Fear: Charting the Rise of Populist Movements – Public Lecture, February 2018

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 17:38 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Het klinkt als een poging tot chantage.

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 18:36 schreef Wombcat het volgende:

[..]

Dat, maar ook: als hij dit soort uitingen doet, begint hij zich zo langzamerhand dus wel echt zorgen te maken.

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 17:38 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Het klinkt als een poging tot chantage.

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 17:53 schreef AnneX het volgende:
Graag zou ik eens een glimp opvangen, van wat er leeft in Pence’s hoofd ( en hart en ziel) ...

quote:

David Pecker, the chief executive of the company that publishes the National Enquirer, was granted immunity by federal prosecutors for providing information about Michael Cohen and Donald Trump in the criminal investigation into hush-money payments for two women during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.

In exchange for immunity, Mr. Pecker, CEO of American Media, Inc., has met with prosecutors and shared details about payments Mr. Cohen arranged in an effort to silence two women who alleged sexual encounters with Mr. Trump, including Mr. Trump’s knowledge of the deals, some of the people said. Prosecutors have indicated that Mr. Pecker won’t be criminally charged for his participation in the deals, the people said.

Mr. Pecker has previously said he is a longtime friend of Messrs. Trump and Cohen.

Prosecutors have indicated Dylan Howard, chief content officer of American Media, also won’t be criminally charged in the Cohen investigation, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Mr. Pecker’s assistance appeared to have informed the charging documents made public on Tuesday as part of Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea to eight criminal charges, including campaign-finance violations tied to the payments.

During his guilty-plea hearing, Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, said that at Mr. Trump’s direction, he broke federal laws on campaign contributions by coordinating payments to the two women for the purpose of suppressing negative information about Mr. Trump and influencing the 2016 election.

American Media executives were involved in both hush-money deals that formed the basis of Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea to campaign-finance violations, prosecutors said. One was a $130,000 payment to Stephanie Clifford—a former porn actress who goes professionally by Stormy Daniels—to keep her from publicly discussing an alleged affair with Mr. Trump.

The second was a $150,000 payment made to former Playboy model Karen McDougal for her exclusive story of an alleged extramarital affair with Mr. Trump, a story that was purchased by American Media in August 2016 at Mr. Cohen’s urging, and then never published.

The immunity status of Mr. Pecker was first reported by Vanity Fair. The Wall Street Journal published Wednesday that Mr. Pecker provided information to prosecutors.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 18:45 schreef Hyperdude het volgende:
[ afbeelding ]

Tricky Donald

quote:

President Donald Trump says he gets his legal advice from watching tv

(..)

When asked about former Trump Organization attorney Cohen’s legal problems, the president responded that the counts that his long-time friend pleaded guilty to weren’t actually crimes. “By the way, he pled to two counts which aren’t a crime which nobody understands,” he said. The president then claimed that he knew these weren’t crimes because “I watched a number of shows, sometimes you get good information by watching shows, those two counts aren’t a crime.”

The president has been criticized for his excessive dependence on TV programs like Fox News. Some reports say the president gets in about eight hours of screen time each day.

https://www.newsweek.com/(...)ent-tv-shows-1087243

quote:

Jeff Sessions fires back at Trump after president insults him

Attorney General Jeff Sessions pushed back against President Donald Trump on Thursday, saying in a statement that the Department of Justice will not be "improperly influenced by political considerations" hours after Trump attacked him on television.

"I took control of the Department of Justice the day I was sworn in, which is why we have had unprecedented success at effectuating the President's agenda," Sessions said in the statement, which was posted on Twitter by Justice Department spokesperson Sarah Isgur Flores.

Earlier in the day Trump said that Sessions "never took control of the Justice Department" during an interview on Fox & Friends, and criticized the former Alabama senator for recusing himself from the department's investigation into links between Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.

Sessions "took the job and then he said, 'I'm going to recuse myself.' I said what kind of a man is this?" Trump said in the interview.

Bron: CNBC

quote:

Key Republicans Signal Trump May Fire Sessions After Election

Two key Republican senators signaled to President Donald Trump that he could replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions after the midterm elections in November, a move that would open the way for firing Robert Mueller or constraining his probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

“The president’s entitled to an attorney general he has faith in, somebody that’s qualified for the job, and I think there will come a time, sooner rather than later, where it will be time to have a new face and a fresh voice at the Department of Justice,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who may be in line to head the Judiciary Committee next year, told reporters Thursday. “Clearly, Attorney General Sessions doesn’t have the confidence of the president.”

(..)

Graham warned against acting against Sessions before the election, calling that possibility “a nonstarter.” That “would create havoc” with Senate efforts to confirm Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and with the midterm elections in November, he said.

That represents a significant shift from Graham’s stance a year ago, when he warned Trump publicly that if he fired Sessions “there will be holy hell to pay.”

Senator Chuck Grassley, the current Judiciary chairman, also changed his position on Thursday, saying in an interview that he’d be able to make time for hearings for a new attorney general after saying in the past that the panel was too busy to tackle that explosive possibility.

(..)

Bron: Bloomberg

quote:

South Africa‘s government pushed back against Mr. Trump’s tweet on its own Twitter account.

“South Africa totally rejects this narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past,” it said. It added that “South Africa will speed up the pace of land reform in a careful and inclusive manner that does not divide our nation.”

South African Foreign Minister Lindiwe Sisulu said she instructed her department to seek clarification from the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria on Mr. Trump’s “unfortunate comments” based on “false information.” A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy confirmed the request for clarification but declined to comment further.

WSJ

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 17:53 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

[..]

Populism: the politics of fear

The Politics of Fear: Charting the Rise of Populist Movements – Public Lecture, February 2018

twitter:

joshgerstein twitterde op donderdag 23-08-2018 om 19:59:40 NEW: Verdict form confirms Manafort jury had single holdout n 10 hung counts Doc: reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 21:25 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Kennelijk was Manafort bijna nog op 2 meer punten schuldig bevonden:

twitter:

joshgerstein twitterde op donderdag 23-08-2018 om 19:59:40 NEW: Verdict form confirms Manafort jury had single holdout n 10 hung counts Doc:[ afbeelding ] reageer retweet

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 21:28 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Bijna op alle aanklachten toch?

Alleen iemand die de paper trail niet meer snapte en toen maar zei dat ze twijfelde.

Neem bij dit soort zaken dan een jury van 12 accountants ofzo.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 15:08 schreef Sloggi het volgende:
“If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor,” adding that Americans would see economic “numbers that you wouldn’t believe in reverse”. In characteristic ebullient style, he also doubted it will happen.

“I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who’s done a great job,” he said in an interview with the conservative Fox News channel.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 22:25 schreef la_perle_rouge het volgende:
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show

https://www.msnbc.com/rac(...)family-1304666179927

Dat is nog eens een liefdadigheidsinstelling, die Trump Foundation.

quote:

2018 legal actions by New York State

On June 14, 2018, the new New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood filed a civil lawsuit against the foundation, alleging that it had engaged in "extensive unlawful political conduct" and accused Donald Trump of using the foundation "as his personal checkbook".[122][10] The lawsuit seeks $2.8 million in restitution and the dissolution of the Foundation.[123] Named in the suit are Donald Trump, the Trump Foundation, and three of his adult children: Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Jr.[124] The suit says that Trump himself made all decisions about disbursement of foundation funds, noting that the nominal board of directors didn't have a meeting for 18 years. It alleges that Trump illegally used the foundation to settle his personal legal debts and to support his presidential campaign.[125]. The office also referred possible legal violations to the Federal Election Commission and the IRS.[31]

In July 2018 the New York State Governor's chief counsel announced that it was ready to provide the state's Attorney General's office with a referral to the state's Division of Taxation and Finance. Such a referral could lead to criminal criminal prosecution under state law. Such a referral is required because the AG's office cannot receive a referral from its own office by law[10]

The New York Times reported on August 22, 2018 that Michael Cohen had received a subpoena for documents related to the Trump Foundation. This came the day after Cohen had pleaded guilty to charges that implicated Trump in campaign finance violations.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op donderdag 23-08-2018 om 23:00:28 Elijah Cummings: "I just find it phenomenal that we could have someone like Mr. Cohen ... come in and testify under oath, in federal court that the president directed him to commit crimes, and then the Republicans sit around and act like nothing big happened." @MSNBC reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 23:44 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
Tekenend idd...

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op donderdag 23-08-2018 om 23:00:28 Elijah Cummings: "I just find it phenomenal that we could have someone like Mr. Cohen ... come in and testify under oath, in federal court that the president directed him to commit crimes, and then the Republicans sit around and act like nothing big happened." @MSNBC reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 23:57 schreef la_perle_rouge het volgende:

[..]

Ik vind het eerder onbegrijpelijk. Er moeten toch _{(oorspronkelijk???)} ook heel veel door en door fatsoenlijke mensen bij die Republikeinen hebben gezeten, waar zijn die gebleven? Laten die nou echt stilzwijgend en zelfs applaudisserend toe dat hun partij met het uur ongeloofwaardiger wordt?

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 23:57 schreef la_perle_rouge het volgende:

[..]

Ik vind het eerder onbegrijpelijk. Er moeten toch _{(oorspronkelijk???)} ook heel veel door en door fatsoenlijke mensen bij die Republikeinen hebben gezeten, waar zijn die gebleven? Laten die nou echt stilzwijgend en zelfs applaudisserend toe dat hun partij met het uur ongeloofwaardiger wordt?

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 23:57 schreef la_perle_rouge het volgende:

[..]

Ik vind het eerder onbegrijpelijk. Er moeten toch _{(oorspronkelijk???)} ook heel veel door en door fatsoenlijke mensen bij die Republikeinen hebben gezeten, waar zijn die gebleven? Laten die nou echt stilzwijgend en zelfs applaudisserend toe dat hun partij met het uur ongeloofwaardiger wordt?

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 00:10:23 The National Enquirer kept a safe containing documents on hush money payments and other damaging stories it killed as part of its relationship with Trump leading up to 2016 election, people familiar with the arrangement told The AP. https://t.co/SOWwFKNzV9 reageer retweet

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 00:20:09 Interesting. Fearful the Trump docs might be used against American Media, David Pecker and his chief content officer removed them from the safe in the weeks before Trump's inauguration, according to the AP. https://t.co/l3lJL8D3mc reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 23:43 schreef la_perle_rouge het volgende:
Voor wie niet slapen kan, deze kilometer tekst op wikipedia is ook aardig up to date https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_J._Trump_Foundation

(Ik wilde wel eens weten wat die liefdadige instelling allemaal deed, behalve een soort afboekingspost zijn om over bepaalde inkomsten geen belasting te hoeven betalen.)

[..]

quote:

Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 00:40 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 00:10:23 The National Enquirer kept a safe containing documents on hush money payments and other damaging stories it killed as part of its relationship with Trump leading up to 2016 election, people familiar with the arrangement told The AP. https://t.co/SOWwFKNzV9 reageer retweet

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 00:20:09 Interesting. Fearful the Trump docs might be used against American Media, David Pecker and his chief content officer removed them from the safe in the weeks before Trump's inauguration, according to the AP. https://t.co/l3lJL8D3mc reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 00:56 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Vroeger had je een of meerdere artikelen waarin dit dan te lezen was. Nu heb je tweets waarin verwezen wordt naar zichzelf of hetzelfde artikel waarin dan in de tweet de mening of hoofdzaak gegeven wordt volgens die persoon, terwijl in zo'n artikel juist altijd zoveel meer nuance zit.

Ikzelf maak er ook veel gebruik van, maar is het maatschappelijke debat niet veel armer geworden hierdoor?

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 01:01 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

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Het lijkt me juist wel handig voor mensen die niet de tijd hebben om alle artikelen te lezen en het artikel is toch gewoon beschikbaar? Zie het probleem niet zo.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 01:02 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Ja, voor je eigen update is het makkelijker, maar voor het onderlinge overleg om meningen te vormen niet zo?

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 01:04 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

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Heb jij FOK-users nodig om die artikelen te duiden dan?

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 01:06 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Nee, en ik snap ook niet waarom je mn positie belachelijk probeert te maken.

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Lawyers for alleged Russian agent Maria Butina accused of violating court rules

The lawyer for Maria Butina, an alleged Russian agent who was recently indicted by the Justice Department, is being accused of violating court rules by talking to the press about her case.

In a new letter to attorney Robert Driscoll and entered into federal court in Washington on Thursday, prosecutors say they have “concerns” about his “apparent ongoing violations” of local criminal rules that set limits on what both the government and defense counsel can say publicly.

“Despite this clear prohibition, the government has encountered multiple recent instances of you in the press commenting about the merits and evidence of this case,” prosecutors wrote, citing comments Driscoll made in articles published in July and August in Politico, the Washington Post, and RT.

Butina was arrested in Washington on July 15 and charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act by acting as an unregistered Russian agent within the United States. Her work at the direction of a high-level Russian official, believed to be Aleksandr Torshin, began as early as 2015 and continued until at least February 2017.

Prosecutors note that Driscoll’s comments were made despite a warning from the judge, when they alerted U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan at a status hearing last month about comments he had already made to the press.

At the time, Chutkan said she would hold off on issuing a gag order, but told Driscoll: “Do you think it’s in your client’s interest to have her case tried in the press?”

“Your comments in the press since that hearing appear to have been made without any regard to the court’s admonition,” prosecutors said Thursday, adding that they could ask for a gag order if his comments continue.

Prosecutors allege that Butina had attempted to create a “backchannel” of communications between Republicans and Russian officials, by developing relationships with conservatives inside the National Rifle Association, the National Prayer Breakfast, and other religious organizations.

Butina has pleaded not guilty, and is currently being held in an Alexandria, Va., jail — right outside Washington — after federal magistrate judge Deborah Robinson ordered her detained pending trial.

At a press briefing Thursday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow demands the U.S. drop the charges against her.

"We demand that all necessary assistance is provided to Maria Butina and politically motivated charges are dropped," Zakharova reportedly said. "We hope that the global community will pay attention to the U.S. law enforcement agencies’ actions against the Russian citizen that humiliate human dignity."

The Russian Embassy in Washington has also accused the U.S. of mistreating Butina in custody.

“It seems as if Washington is trying to force her to cooperate with the investigation by making her living conditions as difficult as possible,” the embassy tweeted last week.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 02:03 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 01:15:02 Prosecutors in the case against Mariia Butina have sent a letter to her defense attorney saying that he's violating local court rules about making statements about the case—and they may seek relief from the Court if he continues. https://t.co/EHa37c2Ntx reageer retweet

twitter:

ColinKahl twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 00:38:03 <THREAD> BOMBSHELL from @adamentous & @RonanFarrow: A memo circulating in the Trump NSC in early 2017 alleging a vast conspiracy of former Obama officials may be linked to efforts by the Israeli firm Black Cube to target me, @brhodes, & our families. https://t.co/EWUzhJwKer 1/ reageer retweet

quote:

In early 2017, some of Donald Trump’s advisers concluded that they faced a sophisticated threat responsible for “coordinated attacks” on the new Administration. They circulated a memo, titled “The Echo Chamber,” which read like a U.S. military-intelligence officer’s analysis of a foreign-insurgent network. Instead of being about enemies in a distant war zone, however, the network described in the memo consisted of former aides to President Barack Obama.

The memo claimed that the “communications infrastructure” that the Obama White House used to “sell Obamacare and the Iran Deal to the public” had been moved to the private sector, now that the former aides were out of government. It called the network the Echo Chamber and accused its members of mounting a coördinated effort “to undermine President Trump’s foreign policy” through organized attacks in the press against Trump and his advisers. “These are the Obama loyalists who are probably among those coordinating the daily/weekly battle rhythm,” the memo said, adding that they likely operated a “virtual war room.” The memo lists Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national-security adviser to President Obama, as “likely the brain behind this operation” and Colin Kahl, Vice-President Joe Biden’s former national-security adviser, as its “likely ops chief.” Rhodes and Kahl both said in interviews that the allegations are false and no such organization exists.

The memo is unsigned and undated, and Trump Administration officials familiar with it offered conflicting accounts of who authored it and whether it originated inside or outside the White House. The officials said that it was circulated within the National Security Council and other parts of the Trump White House in early 2017. They said the memo may have had additional pages. A National Security Council spokesperson declined to comment.

SPOILER

Some of the same conspiracy theories expressed in the memo appear in internal documents from an Israeli private-intelligence firm that mounted a covert effort to collect damaging information about aides to President Obama who had advocated for the Iran deal. In May, 2017, that firm, Black Cube, provided its operatives with instructions and other briefing materials that included the same ideas and names discussed in the memo. The Black Cube documents obtained by The New Yorker referred to Rhodes and Kahl, arguing that they were using allies in the media to undermine the Trump Administration. The Black Cube documents use the term “echo chamber” five times, including in a document describing the operatives’ directive as “Investigating the Rhodes’ / Kahl ‘Eco-chamber.’ ” The same document states that “Rhodes and Kahl are suspected to make use of privileged access and information leveraging it against the incumbent administration.”

The British newspaper the Observer revealed the existence of the operation in May, and The New Yorker identified the firm as Black Cube, an organization that Harvey Weinstein had hired to collect information on women accusing him of sexual abuse and journalists trying to expose the allegations. Black Cube has declined to answer questions about who hired it to collect damaging information on Rhodes and Kahl, citing client confidentiality. In a statement, the firm said that “Black Cube does not get involved in politics, and has no relation whatsoever to the Trump administration, to Trump aides, to anyone close to the administration, or to the Iran Nuclear deal. Black Cube is not aware of the documents mentioned in this article, neither their contents.” A source familiar with the operation has maintained that the investigation of Rhodes and Kahl was part of Black Cube’s work for a private-sector client in the shipping industry, pursuing commercial interests. But the memo, circulated at senior levels in the White House, shows just how deeply the Echo Chamber conspiracy theory had penetrated business and politics, and suggests a commonality of interests between Black Cube’s unidentified client and parts of the Trump Administration.

Whether those behind the memo had any connection to Black Cube’s work remains unclear. The allegations against Rhodes and Kahl appeared in articles published by Breitbart and other conservative Web sites in 2016 and 2017, fuelled by a May, 2016, Times Magazine profile in which Rhodes was quoted using the phrase “echo chamber” to describe his and other officials’ advocacy for the Iran nuclear deal. A profile of Rhodes compiled by Black Cube quotes the Times Magazine story. (In a recent memoir, Rhodes said, “all I was describing was the most routine aspect of communications work. Briefing people. Disseminating fact sheets.”)

Conspiracy theories of this kind appear to have thrived in the Trump White House, which was divided into factions that often used media leaks to undermine their rivals and compete for influence with the President. Those in the White House and on the National Security Council staff who aligned themselves with Steve Bannon, who left Breitbart to serve as Trump’s chief strategist, perceived former Obama Administration officials and so-called holdovers (career professionals who remained in the White House after Trump’s Inauguration) as obstacles to advancing their agenda and potential sources of leaks aimed at undermining them. In private meetings, Bannon’s allies in the power struggle, some of whom had military backgrounds, said they were eager to fight back.

The Black Cube documents show a similar focus on the lines of communication between Obama-era officials and the press. The firm compiled a list of nine reporters and commentators it claimed were part of the Echo Chamber, including The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, the New York Times’ Max Fisher, and NBC News’s Andrea Mitchell. Fisher is described as having “heavily advocated” for the Iran deal and “placed himself at the service of Rhodes’ ‘Eco-chamber,’ ” while Mitchell is at one point identified as being a “vessel for Rhodes’ ‘eco-chamber.’ ” The reporters disputed that characterization. “It’s my first time hearing of this, and it’s obviously ridiculous,” Mitchell said. Fisher, who described the effort as “weird and misguided,” said, “I don't really understand what they were hoping to accomplish.” In an e-mail, Goldberg added, “This is one of the stupider conspiracy theories circulating through a city currently drowning in stupid conspiracy theories.”

Black Cube also assembled a list of six additional journalists and commentators it described as being “close to Rhodes vessels of his message.” Operatives approached targeted individuals to elicit potentially damaging statements about Rhodes and Kahl. At least one of those conversations, with a commentator on the list, Trita Parsi, was secretly recorded. Operatives also used false identities and front companies to try to dupe targets, including Rhodes’s and Kahl’s wives, into unwittingly sharing information.

Both the memo and Black Cube documents reference attacks in the press on Sebastian Gorka, a former deputy assistant to President Trump. In a section titled “Gorka Allegations,” the Black Cube documents reference allegations that he was anti-Semitic and affiliated with Nazi groups, which Rhodes mentioned in a tweet on one occasion. (Gorka has disputed the allegations.) The memo identifies the former Obama Administration officials purported to be in the Echo Chamber as “the people who would be behind coordinated attacks such as the one against Seb Gorka.” Later, it cites an article Kahl wrote in Foreign Policy, which questioned whether Gorka had a top-secret security clearance.

The memo also claims that other former Obama Administration officials are part of the Echo Chamber. Jake Sullivan, a former adviser to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, is identified as one of the leaders of the Echo Chamber. The former Obama Administration officials Tommy Vietor, Ned Price, Jon Favreau, Jon Finer, and Dan Pfeiffer are all listed as “likely operations officers.” Many of those former officials have publicly criticized Trump’s foreign policies, but Rhodes and Kahl said there was no “Echo Chamber,” “network,” “ops chief,” or “virtual war room.”In a statement, Rhodes described the memo as “a bizarre effort to validate ‘deep state’ conspiracy theories” and said that, “given Trump’s many efforts to intimidate and malign his critics, it’s worth asking how his White House and outside enablers acted on this strange memo.” In an e-mail, Kahl added that “the NSC’s role is to staff the President and coordinate the interagency on foreign affairs. It is not the NSC’s role to conduct military-style network analysis of domestic opponents.”


The memo obtained by The New Yorker has been reproduced below.

The Echo Chamber

The communications infrastructure that the Obama admin used to sell Obamacare and the Iran Deal to the public (“Echo Chamber”) has been shifted from the White House into the private sector, and is now being used to undermine President Trump’s foreign policy. Some of the members of this network refer to themselves as “the resistance.”

They are the same Obama loyalists using the same media outlets and same allied journalists to promote their narrative of US foreign policy. Many of the figures in this network were focused on selling Obama's Iran Deal, so there is something of a Middle East/Iran slant to the network's membership.

Likely Leadership: Responsible for higher-level strategy and higher-level fundraising. Probably also responsible for senior-level political outreach with major Democrat donors (e.g., Tom Nides and Alan Solow) and members of Congress.

• Ben Rhodes. Likely the brain behind this operation.
-Former Deputy NSA for Strat Comms.
-Wife Ann Norris is PDAS for legislative affairs in the State Dept.

• Jake Sullivan. Former NSA to VP Biden; now on the faculty at Yale.
-Was foreign policy chief to Hillary Clinton's campaign.
-Was director of policy planning for Clinton at State Dept.
-With Ben Rhodes, co-authored the Benghazi talking points.

Likely Operations Officers: These are the Obama loyalists who are probably among those coordinating the daily/weekly battle rhythm—i.e., the "War Room." These are the ones who are probably among those coordinating the daily/weekly battle rhythm—i.e., the “War Room.” These are the ones who are likely reaching out to reporters to plant stories and then using a comms infrastructure to amplify those stories on listservs and in social media. These are the people who would be behind coordinated attacks such as the one against Seb Gorka. These people have also had very close working and personal relationships going back to the Obama campaign of 2007-2008. Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau were roommates in DC during the Obama admin, for example.

• Colin Kahl (likely ops chief). Former NSA to VP Biden. Now on the faculty at Georgetown.
-Very active on Twitter and on TV.
-Kahl is the likely coordinator of this group and of the virtual “war room.” We can surmise this because he is the author of last resort: i.e., when an attack is not gaining traction via articles or social media posts written by others, Colin weighs in directly himself, as in the article he wrote that demanded to know whether Seb Gorka had a security clearance or not.

• Tommy Vietor, former deputy to Ben Rhodes.

• Ned Price, former deputy to Ben Rhodes.
-Wrote article in February saying he was resigning from the CIA because of his disgust with President Trump’s policies—a preplanned article.

• Jon Favreau, former Obama speechwriter.

• Jon Finer, former senior advisor to Sec Kerry and former Director of Policy Planning at State Dept. Also former journalist.

• Dan Pfeiffer, former communications advisor to Obama.

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 04:33:46 Read this and remember that Jacob Zamel--the founder of Black Cube's rival in Israel, PsyGroup--met with Trump Jr. in Trump Tower on August 3, 2016. The meeting was set up and attended by Erik Prince; George Nader was there, too. What was Zamel selling? A domestic psy-ops campaign. https://t.co/uQXHOg2UVL reageer retweet

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 04:35:39 2/ Trump Jr.'s response to being offered a massive domestic fake news campaign to help his dad win the election? "Very interested." I think we're going to be hearing much more about that meeting--as what Zamel offered was much less controversial than what *Nader* offered Trump Jr. reageer retweet

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 04:36:18 3/ Did I mention Nader is cooperating with Mueller? reageer retweet

quote:

Eric Swalwell told @maddow tonight that the House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a meeting tomorrow on Hillary Clinton's emails. The day after Michael Cohen's plea agreement, that's what was scheduled.

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Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) reportedly said the death of Iowa college student Mollie Tibbetts could be politically advantageous to Republicans heading into the November midterm elections.

"If Mollie Tibbetts is a household name by October, Democrats will be in deep trouble," he told Axios in an article published Wednesday. "If we can be blocked by Manafort-Cohen, etc., then GOP could lose [the House] badly."(....)

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 22:59 schreef speknek het volgende:

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Dus in een maand tijd zijn we gegaan van

"Het is niet waar", naar
"Als het waar is, is het niet crimineel", naar
"Als het crimineel is, is het niet erg", naar
"Als het erg is, is het resultaat nog veel erger".

Hij gaat lekker Donnie!

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 05:03 schreef Ulx het volgende:

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Het is lachwekkend. Die HJC is gewoon een parodie geworden. Wat een sneue bende.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 07:17 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

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Je meent toch niet dat het nog steeds over die emails gaat, hè?

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 07:33 schreef Ulx het volgende:

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Het is erg belangrijk.Stel dat Cruz en O'Rourke gaan debatteren over windenergie in Texas, dan is het handig als Cruz ineens kan roepen:" But her emails!". Dan is Beto meteen stil.

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Critics fear Trump’s attacks are doing lasting damage to the justice system

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Taken together, critics said, the president’s actions demonstrate his shifting, inconsistent principles when it comes to law enforcement and suggest a dangerous lack of understanding about the criminal justice system that is likely to have repercussions well beyond the White House.

“When people at the top show contempt for law and contempt for the legal process, that’s bound to trickle down,” said Pamela Karlan, a Stanford University law professor.

In recent months, Republicans have increasingly lost confidence in the Justice Department and the FBI. One lawmaker accused of crimes, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), has modeled his response on Trump’s, describing Justice as “the Democrats’ arm of law enforcement” this week after he and his wife were charged with spending more than $250,000 in campaign funds on family vacations and other personal expenses.

In the interview with “Fox & Friends,” which was recorded Wednesday and aired in full Thursday morning, Trump decried the long-established practice of “flipping,” in which a person accused of a crime is offered leniency by prosecutors in exchange for becoming a cooperating witness.

The practice is one of the most powerful tools investigators use to dismantle secretive, insular criminal organizations, including gangs, and to uncover other crimes. Advisers said Trump’s remarks were largely out of pique with Cohen.

“For 30, 40 years I’ve been watching flippers,” Trump told Fox News Channel’s Ainsley Earhardt. He added: “It almost ought to be outlawed.”

The remarks drew rebukes from both Democrats and Republicans, including Giuliani.

“When it’s done right, it’s fine,” Giuliani said, noting that prosecutors offer witnesses leniency for their cooperation in criminal probes and that it’s a valuable tool for getting to the truth if they do it properly.

“It’s one of the tools prosecutors use,” he added. “Then it gets tested by a jury. You can’t stop that.”

Alberto R. Gonzales, who was attorney general under President George W. Bush, and Neal Katyal, solicitor general under President Barack Obama, both said it was a necessary tool.

“If President Trump’s views were the law, literally thousands of criminals would be on the street today,” Katyal wrote in an email.

(..)

Bron: WaPo

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 07:49 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

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Je kan een hoop zeggen, maar Manafort en Cohen hadden geen illegale mailserver thuis staan. Dus dan valt het allemaal wel mee.

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Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 01:30 schreef monkyyy het volgende:

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Ze had ook kunnen zeggen:
This is an incredibly insensitive attempt to use a young person’s death for political purposes and you should be ashamed. It’s too early to talk about immigration and we offer our thoughts and prayers to her and her family.

quote:

Op donderdag 23 augustus 2018 04:21 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op donderdag 23-08-2018 om 01:10:41 Three hours ago this case was put forward as the centerpiece of the GOP midterm strategy... on illegal immigration. Damn you, facts! Why must you get in the way of a political party exploiting a family's grief for political gain (even after family members begged them *not* to)? https://t.co/9BlkXfVQrJ reageer retweet

Man charged with killing Iowa college student was in U.S. legally, lawyer says

[..]

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 09:27 schreef IkStampOpTacos het volgende:

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Toevallig dat haar dood gepushed werd, niet echt.

https://www.independent.c(...)tm_source=reddit.com

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 06:06 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Oh wacht, we hadden het over het diep zinken van de GOP....

http://thehill.com/blogs/(...)nt-could-help-gop-in

Newt Gingrich is blij met twee vermoorde studenten Iowa, want dat kan de Republikeinen helpen bij de verkiezingen.

[..]

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 09:43 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

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Dit gaat vast weer zo'n Seth Rich dingetje worden, waarbij de familie Fox en co smeekt om op te houden met het misbruiken van de dood van hun dochter en het verspreiden van samenzweringen, zonder dat er gevolg aan gegeven wordt.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 10:12 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

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Misschien heeft de dader ooit wel als stagiair bij de Clinton Foundation gewerkt, dat zou helemaal fijn zijn.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 10:45 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:

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Misschien heeft de dader ooit wel eens een folder van de Clinton-campagne in ontvangst genomen. Dat tekent de kwaadaardigheid van de Democraten.

twitter:

tedlieu twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 10:07:53 MOST SUCCESSFUL SPECIAL COUNSEL EVER! reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 11:57:15 Target CEO raves about the Economy. “This is the best consumer environment I’ve seen in my career.” A big statement from a top executive. But virtually everybody is saying this, & when our Trade Deals are made, & cost cutting done, you haven’t seen anything yet! @DRUDGE_REPORT reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 12:04:45 Our Economy is setting records on virtually every front - Probably the best our country has ever done. Tremendous value created since the Election. The World is respecting us again! Companies are moving back to the U.S.A. reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 12:17:34 “Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.” Jeff, this is GREAT, what everyone wants, so look into all of the corruption on the “other side” including deleted Emails, Comey lies & leaks, Mueller conflicts, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr...... reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 12:18 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 12:17:34 “Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.” Jeff, this is GREAT, what everyone wants, so look into all of the corruption on the “other side” including deleted Emails, Comey lies & leaks, Mueller conflicts, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr...... reageer retweet

eh? Wut?

Dus omdat Sessions zegt dat Trump zich niet met zijn zaken moet bemoeien zegt Trump dat dat een goed idee is en bemoeit zich vervolgens met de zaken van Sessions' ministerie.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 12:28:37 ....FISA abuse, Christopher Steele & his phony and corrupt Dossier, the Clinton Foundation, illegal surveillance of Trump Campaign, Russian collusion by Dems - and so much more. Open up the papers & documents without redaction? Come on Jeff, you can do it, the country is waiting! reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 13:10:13 Ex-NSA contractor to spend 63 months in jail over “classified” information. Gee, this is “small potatoes” compared to what Hillary Clinton did! So unfair Jeff, Double Standard. reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 13:12 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Ik heb vernomen dat de genoemde dame iets met emails deed.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 13:10:13 Ex-NSA contractor to spend 63 months in jail over “classified” information. Gee, this is “small potatoes” compared to what Hillary Clinton did! So unfair Jeff, Double Standard. reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 13:29 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Zou hij door hebben welke informatie Reality Winner gelekt heeft? Het was iets met Rusland ...

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 13:31 schreef Monolith het volgende:

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De eerste keer dat ik over die kwestie las vroeg ik me af welke reality show ze gewonnen had.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 13:33 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Heh ja, ik had echt moeite met het parsen van nieuwsberichten totdat ik besefte dat dit haar naam was.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 13:34 schreef Monolith het volgende:

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Het is maar goed dat Harry Mens zijn dochter niet Slimste heeft genoemd.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 13:44 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:
Zou Trump soms geen telefoonnummer van Sessions hebben? Dat hij daarom dit allemaal in het openbaar doet?

quote:

President Donald Trump reportedly offered to buy Italian sovereign bonds during a White House meeting last month with Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.

According to Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Trump offered to help finance Italy's 2019 public borrowing, when the Rome treasury is scheduled to issue about 400 billion euros ($462 billion) worth of debt.

Italy recorded a government debt equivalent to more than 130 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) in 2017, but has been able to keep repayments down thanks to the interest lowering effect of the European Central Bank's asset purchase program.

But that program is set to end in December and political instability in Italy, along with the country's wavering commitment to the European Union, have seen Italian borrowing costs spike to levels not seen since 2014.

The news report added that while Rome is increasingly desperate to replace the private investors who are fleeing Italian bonds, it is unclear how the U.S. could step in to guarantee the debt.

And on the question of why the U.S. administration would act as an anchor buyer of Italian bonds, the paper quoted Christopher Wood, analyst of the financial letter "Greed and Fear," who suggested Trump may be keen to sow division within the EU.

"Trump could not have made it more clear that he supports the cause of those in Italy who want to leave the euro," Wood said.

For more on Trump's reported offer to buy Italian public debt, click here.

At the time of publication, White House press staff had not responded to a CNBC request for comment.

quote:

[....]
t’s a little technical, so bear with me. The issue involves payments that the Trump Organization made to Cohen as part of an agreement silencing adult-film actress Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels) and how the company accounted for them.

Cohen paid Clifford $130,000. Trump’s company ultimately reimbursed him for this payment to the tune of $420,000.

Why so much more than the original hush-money amount?

Because the Trump Organization peculiarly decided not to categorize the payment as a reimbursement for an expense Cohen incurred, the way a client might normally reimburse a lawyer for airfare while traveling on client business. Instead, according to prosecutors’ filings, the Trump Organization falsely called the entire payment a “retainer” and accounted for it internally as “legal expenses.”

That is, they indicated they were merely compensating Cohen for legal services provided to the company.

But income for legal services, unlike reimbursement for airfare, would require Cohen to pay taxes on the payment, meaning he wouldn’t be made whole by a mere $130,000. So, the Trump Organization “grossed up” the total to cover Cohen’s taxes (on both the $130,000 Clifford payment and a separate $50,000 payment Cohen made for “tech services”). It also added a $60,000 bonus.

"These are not normal business practices,” said Jenny L. Johnson Ware, a criminal tax lawyer. “None of this is how a company normally does business.” Other tax practitioners I consulted said the same.

Why go through all this rigmarole? Well, maybe to hide something.

Maybe Trump Organization execs were helping hide an excessive campaign contribution, one of the charges Cohen pleaded guilty to. Or maybe, as current Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani has argued, it was merely a payment for a personal legal settlement designed to “save” the “reputation” of Trump’s marriage.

Under neither explanation, though, would the $420,000 be a legitimate business expense that Trump or his company could deduct on their tax returns.

And yet: “The reason to go through the shenanigans of making this transaction look like legal expenses, to me, is to make something not deductible look deductible,” said Johnson Ware.

Hence that red flag.[....]

quote:

It’s not the first time a segment on Fox News gets the president tweeting. But it’s the first time Trump claims South African farmers are being mass-murdered.

This myth was fueled by white supremacists for years before it surfaced in a presidential tweet.

More than two decades after the end of apartheid, South African farmland owners remain a predominantly white group. Fringe groups in South Africa and the United States say these white farmers are targeted and killed at disproportionately high rates. There’s no evidence for this claim, experts say, but it feeds the white-supremacist agenda by stoking racial resentment and division.

Trump made two claims about South Africa in his tweet: that the government is seizing land from white farmers and that a “large scale killing of farmers” is underway.

The president’s first claim about land seizures has some merit but is mostly false. Trump’s second claim, that South African farmers are being killed on a “large scale,” is a fiction not supported by data.

We have no clue how this myth about farmers being killed ended up on the president’s Twitter feed. It didn’t come up on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the Fox News show Trump referenced in his tweet. But it has been swishing in the alt-right and white-nationalist ether for years. The Fox News segment may have jogged Trump’s memory about something he came across previously.

The Facts

SPOILER

When South Africa ended apartheid rule in 1994, approximately 15 percent of the country’s agricultural land was owned by the government or by “previously disadvantaged individuals,” a term used for people of African, colored or Indian descent. The remaining 85 percent “was owned by white commercial farmers,” according to Agri SA, an industry group.

Fast-forward two decades. In 2016, the government and previously disadvantaged individuals owned 26.7 percent of South Africa’s agricultural land — still the smaller share, although it was up from 15 percent in 1994, according to Agri SA.

A land audit released in November 2017 by the South African government found that, of the farms and agricultural holdings owned by individuals (as opposed to companies or trusts), whites owned 72 percent, followed by colored (mixed-race) people at 15 percent, Indians at 5 percent, Africans at 4 percent, others at 3 percent and co-owners at 1 percent.

President Cyril Ramaphosa and South African lawmakers have proposed plans to seize privately owned farmland and effectively redistribute it from white owners to previously disadvantaged individuals.

“Among the greatest obstacles to growth is the severe inequality between black and white South Africans,” Ramaphosa wrote in the Financial Times. “For the South African economy to reach its full potential, it is therefore necessary to significantly narrow gaps in income, skills, assets and opportunities. One of the areas where this disparity is most devastating is in the ownership and access to land. As the World Bank has observed, ‘South Africa’s historical, highly skewed distribution of land and productive assets is a source of inequality and social fragility.’”

The “land question,” as Ramaphosa put it, goes back more than a century. Colonists in 1913 approved a law that restricted the African population to slightly more than 10 percent of South Africa’s land, while the white minority was entitled to the rest.

Patrick Gaspard, a former U.S. ambassador to South Africa under President Barack Obama, said “this is the most complicated and the most charged issue in South African politics and in the South African economy.” The country "has 9 percent of its population controlling a little bit more than 70 percent of farmland in the country,” he said. “That 9 percent is overwhelmingly white.”

Gaspard added: “None of this [land] policy has moved forward. The architecture for it has not even been designed or pulled together.”

Carlson and his guest on Fox News, researcher Marian L. Tupy of the libertarian Cato Institute, criticized Ramaphosa’s plan during the segment that piqued Trump’s interest. They warned it could lead South Africa down the same destabilizing path that Zimbabwe took in 2000, when it began to seize farmland owned by whites without compensation.

But there was no talk whatsoever on Fox News about any farmers being killed.

“The president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, has begun, and you may have seen this in the press, seizing land from his own citizens without compensation, because they are the wrong skin color,” Carlson said, adding later that Ramaphosa “has changed the country’s constitution to make it possible to steal land from people.”

The South African government is considering a constitutional amendment to expropriate farmland, but that plan has not been finalized, so it’s premature to say that Ramaphosa has “changed the country’s constitution.” The government is also weighing whether it can redistribute farmland under current laws.

Carlson complained that Ramaphosa was “seizing land from his own citizens without compensation.” But Ramaphosa outlined a plan for farmland seizures “in the public interest subject to just and equitable compensation,” according to his op-ed in the Financial Times.

The South African parliament, he added, may decide that farmland seizures without compensation are justified in some cases. As possible examples, Ramaphosa mentioned “unused land, derelict buildings, purely speculative land holdings, or circumstances where occupiers have strong historical rights and title holders do not occupy or use their land.”

Citing “press reports,” Tupy wrote in an Aug. 20 blog post that “South Africa’s government has begun expropriating privately-owned farmland without financial compensation.” The one press report linked to in Tupy’s blog post, from an Australian news site, says that the South African government offered $1.87 million for two game farms in the northern part of the country (the owners wanted 10 times as much money) and that the seizure has been challenged in court.

That report, in turn, is based on an article from a South African newspaper that says a government official “emphasized that there was no talk of expropriation without compensation, but that the courts would have to give clarity on what constitutes ‘just and equitable’ compensation.” The seizure of the two game farms was carried out under South Africa’s current laws and has been described by local media as a test case.

So, Carlson flubbed some details on his show, and Trump made the same mistake on Twitter. Outside of what appears to be a test case, the South African government has not begun to seize land from white farmers.

Moving on, then. Where did Trump get his information about a “large scale killing of farmers” in South Africa? The White House didn’t answer our questions, and Carlson didn’t go near that one on his show.

“My focus is on the relationship between property rights and economic development,” Tupy emailed. “I have not studied the [South Africa] farm violence. So, I cannot be of help.”

South Africa recorded 19,016 murders during the year from April 2016 to March 2017, according to police statistics. This included 74 farm murders, 0.4 percent of the total.

But the official number for farm murders is misleading, according to our friends at Africa Check. After wrestling with a world of different statistics, the fact-checking service found that no reliable data exist to verify claims about South African farm murders. “Until an accurate estimate of the number of people ‘residing on, working on or visiting farms and smallholdings’ is released, it will not be possible to calculate a farm murder rate,” Africa Check found.

In any case, the government’s farm-murder statistic has been declining steadily from its peak in 2001-2002, when the total was 140. Separate figures from Agri SA show that murders of farmers are at a 20-year low, with 47 recorded in the year from April 2017 to March 2018 period, the Guardian reported.

James Myburgh, a South African researcher whose work was referred to us through Tupy, wrote that considering the total number of white farm owners, the more than 60 murders recorded in 2016-2017 would be far above the norm by his calculations. However, he acknowledged that the official farm-murder statistic was flawed. This is the best-case scenario for Trump: that some educated guesswork based on flawed statistics sort of backs him up, maybe.

In the end, we don’t see any sound basis for Trump’s claim that South African farmers are being killed on a large scale.

The State Department’s most recent report on human rights in South Africa, covering 2017, describes farm conditions and discrimination at length, but there’s no mention of farm murders or land seizures in this report.

At a briefing Aug. 23, the day after Trump’s tweet, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the president had spoken to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about South Africa but did not say exactly what was discussed. She said seizing land without compensation “would risk sending South Africa down the wrong path.” But she also seemed to reject the premise of Carlson’s criticism, that South Africa was looking like Zimbabwe.

“It may be easy for some to try to draw a comparison, but there are very big differences,” Nauert said. “In Zimbabwe, we saw the government there squash civil society, shut down the media from doing their jobs in reporting, and destroyed an independent judiciary. And we've not seen that happen in South Africa.”

The State Department otherwise had no comment on Trump’s tweet. Nauert’s remarks don’t back up either of the president’s claims.

It’s essential to keep in mind that white-supremacist groups have been spreading false claims for years about a “white genocide” in South Africa. The more specific claim that white farmers are being attacked and killed on a large scale is popular on the white-supremacist website Stormfront, which has a section devoted to South Africa, and appears to have originated with a political group called AfriForum.

“I was utterly floored to think that a president of the United States in 2018 could surface and promulgate white-supremacist mythology from some of the most extreme corners of a discredited movement,” Gaspard said. “My first reaction was: ‘This can’t be real. This can’t be Donald Trump’s account.’”

Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said that alt-right and white-supremacist groups in the United States have seized on the myth of a “white genocide” happening in South Africa since at least 2012. For them, he said, it’s a propaganda tool to warn about the dangers of coexisting with minorities, refugees or immigrants.

“We’re not talking about an epidemic of mass killings or anything like that,” Pitcavage said of the South African farm murders. “But white supremacists, first in South Africa, and then in other parts, including the U.S., started to promote the idea that this was a race war, this was a genocide. It was grist for the mill for American white supremacists.”

In 2012, he said, white supremacists in the United States “started promoting something called the South Africa Project, which was to raise awareness of this so-called ‘white genocide’ in South Africa.” In April, he said, one group appeared at the South African Embassy in Washington, posting signs on the Nelson Mandela statue outside that read, “Kill the farmers” and “Kill the Boers.” (That’s a term for some white South Africans.)

“The president clearly heard something from somewhere but it may not have been someone from the alt-right,” Pitcavage said. “It may have been someone close to him. He has an unusual circle of friends and associates, and it’s quite possible he talks to a wide circle of people about these things.”

South Africa’s minister of international relations and cooperation, Lindiwe Sisulu, called Trump’s comments “unfortunate.”

“It is regrettable that the tweet is based on false information,” Sisulu said in a statement, adding that South African officials would be meeting with U.S. officials and reaching out to Pompeo “to seek clarification.”

The Pinocchio Test

Trump started off by tweeting a mostly false claim that South Africa was seizing land from white farmers. The South African government is considering plans to redistribute private farmland, which is owned mostly by whites, but this plan is not yet final and Trump’s protest appears to have been spurred by one test case.

That’s not why we fact-checked his tweet.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Trump added an outlandish and baseless claim that South African farmers are being killed on a “large scale.” He prodded the secretary of state to investigate this myth fueled by white supremacists.

The president earns Four Pinocchios.

Four Pinocchios

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 12:07 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 12:04:45 Our Economy is setting records on virtually every front - Probably the best our country has ever done. Tremendous value created since the Election. The World is respecting us again! Companies are moving back to the U.S.A. reageer retweet

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One year after President Donald Trump announced a new strategy for winning the war in Afghanistan, the United States appears to be no closer to stabilizing the country and quelling the Taliban insurgency, according to analysts and a report issued by U.S. Defense Department.

The strategy has included a greater focus on defending population centers while ceding much of the remote countryside to the insurgents. It has also involved an interdiction campaign against the Taliban, with airstrikes on their narcotics labs and other revenue sources. The goal has been to pressure the Taliban to the negotiating table.

Pentagon officials say the measures are working.

“We have an unprecedented opportunity, a window of opportunity for peace right now,” said Gen. John Nicholson, the outgoing commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, briefing reporters at the Pentagon this week via video from Kabul.

He cited a brief cease-fire between the Afghan government and the Taliban over a Muslim holiday in June, followed by secret U.S.-Taliban peace talks in Qatar in July.

But the situation on the ground tells a different story. The Taliban maintain their grip on much of the country, and the civilian death toll has reached a record high, according to a recent report by the Pentagon’s inspector general. Also, the Islamic State in Khorasan, the Afghan arm of the Islamic State, continues to carry out high-profile attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians.

SPOILER

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the changes introduced during the Trump era weren’t significant enough to alter the balance of power in the 17-year war.

“The relatively modest changes it involves are unlikely to produce transformative effects quickly,” he said.

“It’s hard to believe that an overall coalition military strength less than 20 percent its maximum of a half decade ago can turn things around when 140,000 [International Security Assistance Force] troops couldn’t do so back in 2010-2012 or so.”

Seth Jones, a senior advisor to the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said data suggested that the Taliban’s control of populated areas overall, primarily in rural regions, had actually increased.

The problem with the administration’s strategy of ceding the more remote areas of the country to the Taliban is that the insurgents increasingly are using the rural terrain to conduct attacks within major urban areas, he explained.

“If the Taliban continues to increase its control of rural terrain, it will invariably put significant pressure on urban centers,” said Jones, who previously served as a plans officer and advisor to the commanding general of U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan.

This problem was on full display this month when the Taliban notched a significant symbolic victory with a bloody assault on the city of Ghazni. The Aug. 10 attack on the strategic city, which lies on the main highway between Kabul and Kandahar, reportedly caught Washington and Kabul off guard. An estimated 1,000 insurgents charged the city and surrounding districts, overwhelming Afghan local police and military officials, who temporarily lost control of parts of the city.

In a five-day counterattack, Afghan forces, backed by U.S. air power and Army Special Forces, eventually drove the Taliban from the city, but the bloodshed claimed the lives of at least 100 Afghan soldiers and police and more than 150 civilians.

In a statement, the insurgent group boasted that the assault on Ghazni “signifies the failure of yet the latest American strategy. … The experience of Ghazni has proven that no defensive belts of cities can withstand the offensive prowess of the mujahideen.”

Nicholson countered that the insurgents were driven out of the city with higher casualties than they inflicted. They also failed to achieve several key objectives: taking the city’s prison, the governor’s palace, and the police station.

“This was not a military victory by any stretch,” Nicholson said. He also noted that the Taliban only launched attacks in cities twice in 2018, a relatively low number compared with previous years.

Another component of the U.S. military’s strategy in Afghanistan is to build up the Afghan military, train the Afghan air force, and equip it with high-end gear, such as fighter aircraft and UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.

But the Afghan air force’s rapid increase in strike capability seems to be accompanied by a steep rise in civilian casualties. A U.N. report issued in July said 149 civilians had died and 204 suffered injuries from air operations in Afghanistan in the first six months of 2018—a 52 percent increase over the same period last year.

Jones said Trump’s strategy failed in another critical way: It has done little to prevent Pakistan from harboring Taliban fighters.

“What the U.S. has not been able to do is fundamentally change Pakistan’s behavior,” Jones said. “This is serious problem with the South Asia strategy. I’m not that optimistic over the long run.”

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 12:37 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 12:28:37 ....FISA abuse, Christopher Steele & his phony and corrupt Dossier, the Clinton Foundation, illegal surveillance of Trump Campaign, Russian collusion by Dems - and so much more. Open up the papers & documents without redaction? Come on Jeff, you can do it, the country is waiting! reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 15:40 schreef Mike het volgende:

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Hij vergeet er even bij te zeggen dat het begrotingstekort enorm is toegenomen.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 16:41 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Oh boy.....Geen pardon mogelijk........

A person familiar with the matter says New York’s attorney general is looking to open a criminal investigation into whether Michael Cohen also violated state tax law

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 16:45 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

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Hij had toch al aangegeven een pardon sowieso niet te accepteren?

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 16:51:07 Allen Weisselberg, Trump Organization CFO, granted immunity by prosecutors in Michael Cohen investigation - Dow Jones https://t.co/Og9S8kv36j reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 16:58 schreef Montov het volgende:
Die Weisselberg zal ook wel diep in het criminele moeras zitten. Is die immunity alleen voor deze medewerking of is het breder?

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Allen Weisselberg, President Trump’s longtime financial gatekeeper, was granted immunity by federal prosecutors for providing information about Michael Cohen in the criminal investigation into hush-money payments for two women during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Weisselberg was called to testify before a federal grand jury in the investigation earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal previously reported, citing people familiar with the investigation.

The decision by prosecutors in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office to grant immunity to Mr. Weisselberg escalates the pressure on Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Weisselberg has served for decades as executive vice president and chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. After Mr. Trump was elected, he handed control of his financial assets and business interests to his two adult sons and Mr. Weisselberg.

Mr. Weisselberg didn’t respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for Mr. Trump, who on Thursday said so-called flipping “almost ought to be illegal,” declined to comment.

Mr. Cohen on Tuesday pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges and told a federal judge that Mr. Trump had directed him during the 2016 campaign to buy the silence of two women who alleged affairs with Mr. Trump, a move that implicated the president in a federal crime. That was the first time Mr. Cohen admitted to coordinating with the president on the hush-money deals, which Mr. Trump denied.

Federal prosecutors also granted immunity to another longtime Trump ally: David Pecker, the chief executive of the company that publishes the National Enquirer, which in August 2016 purchased the rights to a former Playboy Playmate’s story of an affair with Mr. Trump. In exchange for immunity, Mr. Pecker met with prosecutors and shared details about payments Mr. Cohen arranged, including Mr. Trump’s knowledge of the deals, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Journal couldn’t determine whether Mr. Weisselberg told prosecutors that Mr. Trump had knowledge of the payments.

WSJ

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:03 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Ik denk dat Trump nu gillend gek wordt. Of hij krijgt een hartaanval.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:03 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Ik denk dat Trump nu gillend gek wordt. Of hij krijgt een hartaanval.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:03 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Ik denk dat Trump nu gillend gek wordt. Of hij krijgt een hartaanval.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:16 schreef Ulx het volgende:
The scope of Allen Weisselberg’s responsibilities:

Handled Trump Org. finances for decades

Been involved with the Trump Foundation

Managed Trump's private trust

Has at times reviewed the Trump presidential campaign's books

https://t.co/CCQYnRuXEf

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 16:58 schreef Montov het volgende:
Die Weisselberg zal ook wel diep in het criminele moeras zitten. Is die immunity alleen voor deze medewerking of is het breder?

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:17 schreef Nintex het volgende:

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Lijkt me de ideale persoon om te achterhalen of het verhaal van Cohen klopt.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:17 schreef Nintex het volgende:

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Lijkt me de ideale persoon om te achterhalen of het verhaal van Cohen klopt.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:19 schreef speknek het volgende:

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Als hij een immunity deal heeft, dan heeft hij dus al toegegeven criminele daden te hebben begaan als CFO.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:21 schreef Nintex het volgende:

Ze hebben allemaal gezien hoe het Manafort en Flynn vergaan is dus iedereen is natuurlijk erg voorzichtig.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:27 schreef Ulx het volgende:

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Die twee waren niet gevraagd om te komen getuigen. Die zijn gewoon gepakt.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:21 schreef Nintex het volgende:

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Nee, zo werkt dat niet. Een getuige kan ook immunity krijgen om hem zover te krijgen dat hij wil getuigen, zonder dat hij bang is gezien te worden als medeplichtig.

Ze hebben allemaal gezien hoe het Manafort en Flynn vergaan is dus iedereen is natuurlijk erg voorzichtig.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 17:35:12 NBC News confirms Weisselberg is "Executive 1" in the criminal info filed in the Cohen case.Prosecutors say Cohen sent an invoice to Executive 1 for "payment for services rendered," a payment really meant to reimburse Cohen for a Stormy Daniels payment. https://t.co/6dvbtsxR2C reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:35 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Manafort dacht ook dat 90% van wat hij aan het doen was gewoon legaal was.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:21 schreef Ulx het volgende:

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Hij heeft om immuniteit gevraagd, dat doe je als boekhouder alleen als je heb zitten sjoemelen.

Ik wil wel weten of Trump echt veel centjes heeft, jij ook?

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:35 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Manafort dacht ook dat 90% van wat hij aan het doen was gewoon legaal was.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:41 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Waar baseer je dit op en wat van die andere 10%?

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:43 schreef Ulx het volgende:

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Als 10% van wat ik zoal dagelijks doe illegaal is krijg ik heel wat politie achter me aan.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 15:10 schreef Ulx het volgende:
No collusion? We’ll see. But what about tax fraud?

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Uiteraard kan Trump dit simpel weerleggen door zijn taxreturns openbaar te maken......

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:52 schreef crystal_meth het volgende:

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Maar is het tax fraud wanneer er nog steeds evenveel (of zelfs meer) belasting betaald wordt? (al is me niet duidelijk of dat hier het geval is)

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Sen. John McCain to discontinue medical treatment, family says

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:52 schreef crystal_meth het volgende:

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Maar is het tax fraud wanneer er nog steeds evenveel (of zelfs meer) belasting betaald wordt? (al is me niet duidelijk of dat hier het geval is)

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:58 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Zou vrij absurd zijn. Hoe dan ook, stel entiteit A ontduikt belasting wat er op een of andere manier toe leidt dat entiteit B meer dan het verschil zou moeten betalen aan belasting kan ik me voorstellen dat de uitvoerenden van entiteit A daar wel voor verantwoordelijk gehouden kunnen worden of is dat niet wat je bedoelt? Geen idee verder of dit klopt... dus tsja...

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:35 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Manafort dacht ook dat 90% van wat hij aan het doen was gewoon legaal was.
Kortom, ze durven geen risico meer te nemen.

Bij Flynn is er dan nog het verhaal dat de ronde doet dat Strzok hem bewust in de val liet lopen en Flynn door zijn geld heen was en daarom besloot om niet verder te procederen. Zijn zaak is al vaak uitgesteld, omdat er grote vraagtekens zijn over de inhoud.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 18:05 schreef Ulx het volgende:

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Als ze aan verschillende regelgeving moeten voldoen gaat die vlieger niet op.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 18:31 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Wat een werkelijk geweldige infrastructuurweek was het tot nu toe. Dat wel.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 18:21 schreef Barbusse het volgende:
Het komt er gewoon op neer dat men iets opgeeft als belastingaftrekbaar terwijl het dat niet is, en dat men tegelijkertijd de prijs opdrijft zodat er meer geld belastingaftrekbaar is. Dat is zoals ik het begrijp. Beide zijn uiteraard niet toegestaan.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 17:58 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Zou vrij absurd zijn. Hoe dan ook, stel entiteit A ontduikt belasting wat er op een of andere manier toe leidt dat entiteit B meer dan het verschil zou moeten betalen aan belasting kan ik me voorstellen dat de uitvoerenden van entiteit A daar wel voor verantwoordelijk gehouden kunnen worden of is dat niet wat je bedoelt? Geen idee verder of dit klopt...

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 18:48 schreef nostra het volgende:

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Dat eerste niet inderdaad. Dat tweede is vrij gebruikelijk - ook bij jouw eigen loon.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 19:00 schreef crystal_meth het volgende:
Ze hadden het als reimbursement for expenses kunnen boeken, dan is Cohen slechts een tussenpersoon, het geld gaat van Trump naar Daniels, en enkel zij betaalt er belasting op. Maar ze boekten het als betaling voor diensten, dus inkomsten voor Cohen. Cohen betaalt belasting op z'n inkomsten, en die werden ook door Trump vergoed. Stel bvb dat de tax 20% bedraagt, dan zouden ze hem 162.500 betalen om break-even te komen (32.500: de belastingen op dat bedrag, en 130.000 voor Daniels).
Die 32.500 zou de IRS niet ontvangen hebben als ze het op de "juiste manier" hadden geboekt.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 19:04 schreef Barbusse het volgende:
Niet als men doet alsof jouw brutoloon 4000 p/m is terwijl het slechts 2000 p/m is.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 19:04 schreef nostra het volgende:

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Dat scheelt de IRS netto geen geld, want die 32k5 betaalt TTO minder aan belasting. Verliessituaties en dergelijke even daargelaten.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 19:08 schreef nostra het volgende:
Overigens is die CFO al nummer twee die immuniteit krijgt, dat gold ook voor de baas van de National Enquirer toch? Dat blijft al helemaal een apart verhaal.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 19:15 schreef Nintex het volgende:

Het hele Rusland verhaal is trouwens een broodje aap.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 19:15 schreef Nintex het volgende:

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Mjah, Mueller die achter de pers aan gaat zou geen 'good look' zijn voor de special council.

Hetzelfde blaadje dat schreef dat de vader van Ted Cruz mogelijk JFK vermoord had trouwens.


Het hele Rusland verhaal is trouwens een broodje aap. Cohen zegt zich niet te herkennen in het Steele dossier en beweerd nog steeds dat hij nooit in Praag is geweest.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 19:08 schreef nostra het volgende:
Overigens is die CFO al nummer twee die immuniteit krijgt, dat gold ook voor de baas van de National Enquirer toch? Dat blijft al helemaal een apart verhaal.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 19:36:00 I have asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to go to North Korea, at this time, because I feel we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula... reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 19:36:01 ...Additionally, because of our much tougher Trading stance with China, I do not believe they are helping with the process of denuclearization as they once were (despite the UN Sanctions which are in place)... reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 19:36:02 ...Secretary Pompeo looks forward to going to North Korea in the near future, most likely after our Trading relationship with China is resolved. In the meantime I would like to send my warmest regards and respect to Chairman Kim. I look forward to seeing him soon! reageer retweet

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 20:00 schreef Ulx het volgende:

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Die McDougal stond laatst toch op de voorpagina van een van de bladen van Pecker?

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 20:21 schreef Hyperdude het volgende:

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[ afbeelding ]

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 20:20 schreef Montov het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 19:36:00 I have asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to go to North Korea, at this time, because I feel we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula... reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 19:36:01 ...Additionally, because of our much tougher Trading stance with China, I do not believe they are helping with the process of denuclearization as they once were (despite the UN Sanctions which are in place)... reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 19:36:02 ...Secretary Pompeo looks forward to going to North Korea in the near future, most likely after our Trading relationship with China is resolved. In the meantime I would like to send my warmest regards and respect to Chairman Kim. I look forward to seeing him soon! reageer retweet

3 tweets binnen 3 seconden, dus dit is niet door Trump persoonlijk verstuurd. Hij durft persoonlijk nog niet het Noord Korea debacle toe te geven denk ik.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 20:28 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Plaatje wordt niet getoond.

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Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 21:02 schreef Hyperdude het volgende:

[..]

Sorry.

Plaatje met leaking Pecker toespeling.
Krijg 'm niet aan de praat. Mobiel enzo.

twitter:

mmfa twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 04:21:26 Geraldo Rivera calls out Fox News for their Mollie Tibbetts murder coverage: "We at this network are putting that spin on this story...this is a murder story, not an immigration story." https://t.co/yZGY3pFPuq https://t.co/soyuYcCySr reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 21:04 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

twitter:

mmfa twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 04:21:26 Geraldo Rivera calls out Fox News for their Mollie Tibbetts murder coverage: "We at this network are putting that spin on this story...this is a murder story, not an immigration story." https://t.co/yZGY3pFPuq https://t.co/soyuYcCySr reageer retweet

Kudos voor Geraldo die wel fel tegen de retoriek ingaat. Video in tweet.

quote:

Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 21:02 schreef Hyperdude het volgende:

[..]

Sorry.

Plaatje met leaking Pecker toespeling.
Krijg 'm niet aan de praat. Mobiel enzo.

quote:

Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 20:20 schreef Montov het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 19:36:00 I have asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to go to North Korea, at this time, because I feel we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula... reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 19:36:01 ...Additionally, because of our much tougher Trading stance with China, I do not believe they are helping with the process of denuclearization as they once were (despite the UN Sanctions which are in place)... reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 19:36:02 ...Secretary Pompeo looks forward to going to North Korea in the near future, most likely after our Trading relationship with China is resolved. In the meantime I would like to send my warmest regards and respect to Chairman Kim. I look forward to seeing him soon! reageer retweet

3 tweets binnen 3 seconden, dus dit is niet door Trump persoonlijk verstuurd. Hij durft persoonlijk nog niet het Noord Korea debacle toe te geven denk ik.

quote:

Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 22:15 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Veel te goed 'onderbouwd' om van Trump afkomstig te zijn. En waar zijn de spelfouten en Willekeurige Hoofdletters?

quote:

Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 18:02 schreef Hyperdude het volgende:

[..]

https://eu.usatoday.com/s(...)n-cancer/1083724002/

quote:

Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 21:08 schreef Chewie het volgende:

[..]

Geraldo is ook best wel een kritische onderzoeksjournalistiek geworden (heb nog wel een nacht slaap tegoed door dat Al Capone debacle in de jaren 80 ), zijn gesprek een tijdje terug bij Real Time was ook wel aardig.

twitter:

hamiltonnolan twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 23:46:19 Top story on the Fox News app right now: reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 24 augustus 2018 23:53 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

twitter:

hamiltonnolan twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 23:46:19 Top story on the Fox News app right now: [ afbeelding ] reageer retweet

Yikes.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 00:41 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Want we weten allemaal dat je afgeserveerd moet worden op basis van wat je opa deed.

twitter:

jdawsey1 twitterde op vrijdag 24-08-2018 om 23:51:26 From pool report: Kellyanne Conway introduced POTUS to a young girl in an Ohio classroom. Conway told the president the girl wanted to be the first female president. “Is that right?” Trump said. “I told her we kept open the job for first female president,” Conway said. reageer retweet

quote:

Senate Democrats officially call for Kavanaugh postponement, cite possible crimes by Trump (USA Today)

Citing concerns about possible "criminal wrongdoing" by President Donald Trump, the Democrats of the Senate Judiciary Committee called for a postponement Friday of the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

In a letter to committee chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the Democratic senators said that, "Given the possibility of criminal wrongdoing by the President, doubts that Judge Kavanaugh believes a president can even be investigated, and the unprecedented lack of transparency regarding this nominee’s record, we should not move forward with hearings on September 4th."

The lawmakers instead suggested a special committee meeting "to discuss a bipartisan, fair, and transparent process for moving forward."

The Democrats said "in light of this week's developments" – referring to the news that two former Trump associates were guilty of felonies – it was particularly important that the hearing be postponed.

"Importantly, there is no legitimate reason for the Senate to rush this nomination and fail to perform its constitutional duty," they said. "This is especially true, when the President, who faces significant legal jeopardy, chose the one candidate who has consistently and clearly expressed doubt as to whether a sitting president can be investigated or indicted for criminal wrongdoing."

The senators also said they could not move forward because "97 percent of Judge Kavanaugh's White House record is being withheld from the public and more than 94 percent is being withheld from the Senate."

Earlier this week, in response to calls for a delay, Grassley spokesman George Hartmann said the planned hearing will go forward in September. Hartmann noted that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was confirmed by the Senate while then-President Bill Clinton was dealing with the Whitewater investigation.

"Obviously, we are nowhere close to that situation today," Hartmann said. "Calls to delay the hearing are just the latest tactic from opponents who decided to vote 'no' weeks ago, frantically looking for anything that sticks."

All the Democrats on the committee signed the letter: Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California, Pat Leahy of Vermont, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Chris Coons of Delaware, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 00:41 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Want we weten allemaal dat je afgeserveerd moet worden op basis van wat je opa deed.

quote:

Exclusive: Ex-Trump World Tower doorman releases 'catch-and-kill' contract about alleged Trump affair

A former Trump World Tower doorman who says he has knowledge of an alleged affair President Donald Trump had with an ex-housekeeper, which resulted in a child, is now able to talk about a contract he entered with American Media Inc. that had prohibited him from discussing the matter with anyone, according to his attorney.

On Friday, Marc Held -- the attorney for Dino Sajudin, the former doorman -- said his client had been released from his contract with AMI, the parent company of the National Enquirer, "recently" after back-and-forth discussions with AMI.
CNN has exclusively obtained a copy of the "source agreement" between Sajudin and AMI, which is owned by David Pecker.

The contract appears to have been signed on Nov. 15, 2015, and states that AMI has exclusive rights to Sajudin's story but does not mention the details of the story itself beyond saying, "Source shall provide AMI with information regarding Donald Trump's illegitimate child..."

The contract states that "AMI will not owe Source any compensation if AMI does not publish the Exclusive..." and the top of the agreement shows that Sajudin could receive a sum of $30,000 "payable upon publication as set forth below."

But the third page of the agreement shows that about a month later, the parties signed an amendment that states that Sajudin would be paid $30,000 within five days of receiving the amendment. It says the "exclusivity period" laid out in the agreement "is extended in perpetuity and shall not expire."

The amendment also establishes a $1 million payment that Sajudin would be responsible for making to AMI "in the event Source breaches this provision."

(..)

Sajudin's allegation that Trump fathered a child out of wedlock has not been independently confirmed by any of the outlets that have investigated the story.

(..)

Bron: CNN

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 07:57 schreef Montov het volgende:

[..]

Vooralsnog neem ik dit met een grote korrel zout.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 09:35 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
Dit soort roddel en achterklap schandalen interesseren mij persoonlijk ook erg weinig. Wat kan mij het nou schelen dat die Trump een buitenechtelijk kind heeft?

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 09:35 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
Dit soort roddel en achterklap schandalen interesseren mij persoonlijk ook erg weinig. Wat kan mij het nou schelen dat die Trump een buitenechtelijk kind heeft?

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 11:41 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Het feit dat dat hem chantabel maakt. De rest boeit niet zo.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 13:00 schreef FlipjeHolland het volgende:
Eens een cheater, altijd een cheater. Hij heeft al zijn ex-vrouwen bedrogen, dus waarom niet bij oostbloksnol Melania?

Ik geloof best dat Melania een aparte slaapkamer heeft en haar tijd afwacht totdat Trump president af is om 'm daarna te smeren. Maar goed, een appetijtelijke vrouw zoals dat zal ook wel stiekem aangeduwd worden door een ander.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 13:11 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Ik denk niet dat de Secret Service dat toestaat. Tenzij ze zich laat palen door een agent.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 13:11 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Ik denk niet dat de Secret Service dat toestaat. Tenzij ze zich laat palen door een agent.

quote:

The California Republican, indicted this week for using $250,000 in campaign funds to enrich himself and his family, is blaming everyone but himself for his current legal predicament: Prosecutors are “biased” against him because he was an original supporter of then-candidate Donald Trump. The media is just trying to make him look a fool.
And his wife? Well, this whole thing is really her fault.

“She handled my finances throughout my entire military career, and that continued on when I got to Congress,” Hunter told Fox News host Martha MacCallum late Thursday, referring to his spouse Margaret, who was also indicted by the FBI Wednesday: "She was also the campaign manager so whatever she did, that’ll be looked at too, I’m sure, but I didn’t do it.”

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 14:08 schreef FlipjeHolland het volgende:
Nou, dat wordt scheiden.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 13:14 schreef clumsy_clown het volgende:

[..]

Of De schrijver van het eerstvolgende boek over trump.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 20:09 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:
Superdelegates afgeschaft bij de Dems, gaat grote invloed hebben op de komende primary;

https://www.buzzfeednews.(...)erdelegates-caucuses

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 20:10 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Wat gaat die grote invloed precies zijn? Ze hebben bij mijn weten nog nooit tegen de wil van de kiezer in een kandidaat genomineerd.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 20:22 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Nee maar de kans is groot dat de primary dit keer echt een race gaat worden, i.t.t. de vorige keer. Met superdelegates heeft de kandidaat die de voorkeur geniet van het 'establishment' (kutwoord maar wel waar) dan al een voorsprong. Bovendien maakt het de kans op een brokered convention groter.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 20:27 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Ach, Clinton had tegen Obama initieel ook het voordeel qua superdelegates, maar dat draaide toen Obama een voorsprong kreeg.
Het hele idee dat de superdelegates heel bepalend zouden zijn is een mythe.

twitter:

SecAzar twitterde op zaterdag 25-08-2018 om 02:03:03 The opioid crisis is one of our top priorities at HHS, with a drumbeat of action on the full range of efforts where we can assist local communities. Today, I joined @POTUS & @FLOTUS in Ohio to learn how states and communities are responding to the challenge of opioid addiction. https://t.co/NwxSoeNznA reageer retweet

quote:

Roger Stone: Mueller Will Soon Indict Donald Trump Jr. For 'Lying to the FBI'
Roger Stone, a former Donald Trump aide who’s long been linked with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference, said he believes one of the president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr., will soon be indicted for “lying to the FBI.” (Newsweek).

SPOILER

“I [predict], based on excellent sourcing, that the special counsel is going to charge Donald Trump Jr. with lying to the FBI,” Stone told James Miller of the conservative online outlet The Political Insider. “Notice they’re not charging him for having an illegal meeting with a Russian at Trump Tower because there’s nothing illegal about that meeting.”

Stone was referring to a controversial June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump Jr. and other members of the campaign and a Russian lawyer who offered damaging information on then-candidate Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.

There has been, as yet, no confirmation that Trump Jr. had met with the FBI to discuss that or anything else. Stone did not immediately respond to a request from Newsweek’s on Saturday to clarify his comments, and confirm whether he was aware of a previously unknown interview the FBI conducted with Trump Jr.

Stone said that he felt the “only thing illegal about that meeting was how the woman got in the country, how she got a visa from the Obama State Department, and why she was meeting with an official from Fusion GPS before and after the Trump Tower meeting.”

The president, Trump Jr., their lawyers and administration officials have changed their stories about the meeting repeatedly, depending on the circumstances. At first they said it was about adoptions. They denied the meeting was to collect dirt on Clinton and denied the president knew about it prior to it taking place. Those statements were subsequently proved false, often in new statements by the protagonists themselves.

A Senate committee released more than 1,800 pages of Trump Jr.'s testimony in May, including emails in which he said “If it’s what you say I love it” in response to an email offering dirt on Clinton. It also revealed Trump Jr. made a call to two blocked numbers as he was arranging the meeting, one of them possibly to his father, who was known to use a blocked number.

There were at least eight people present at the Trump Tower meeting. They include Paul Manafort, Trump’s ex-campaign chairman who was convicted on eight counts of hiding foreign bank accounts and tax and bank fraud; Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son; Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law; Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer and lobbyist with close ties to the Kremlin; Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lawyer and former Soviet counterintelligence officer; Rob Goldstone, a publicist for Emin Agalarov, who is connected to Trump Jr.'s attorney and Ike Kaveladze, a Georgian-American executive at Aras Agalarov's real estate company.

In late July, Cohen was willing to reveal to Mueller that Trump had prior knowledge of the meeting, according to reports from CNN and NBC that cited anonymous sources.

Trump has since claimed he did not know about the meeting beforehand and that Cohen is “[making] up stories.”

“I did NOT know of the meeting with my son, Don jr.,” Trump said at the time in a series of tweets.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 20:53 schreef Nibb-it het volgende:

[..]

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op zaterdag 25-08-2018 om 15:05:42 Big story out that the FBI ignored tens of thousands of Crooked Hillary Emails, many of which are REALLY BAD. Also gave false election info. I feel sure that we will soon be getting to the bottom of all of this corruption. At some point I may have to get involved! reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 20:41 schreef monkyyy het volgende:

twitter:

SecAzar twitterde op zaterdag 25-08-2018 om 02:03:03 The opioid crisis is one of our top priorities at HHS, with a drumbeat of action on the full range of efforts where we can assist local communities. Today, I joined @POTUS & @FLOTUS in Ohio to learn how states and communities are responding to the challenge of opioid addiction. https://t.co/NwxSoeNznA reageer retweet

[ afbeelding ]

Crea-dagje vandaag, bijna goed.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 21:09 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Mijn verwachting is ook dat Mueller het op Jr. of Kushner heeft gemunt. Dan volgt gratie van Trump en dan is het aan de GOP om te laten zien dat ze dusdanig weinig principes hebben dat ze het schoolvoorbeeld van nepotisme wegwuiven.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 21:39 schreef Falco het volgende:

[..]

Even wat duidelijker:

[ afbeelding ]

Lol, stable genius

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 21:42 schreef Montov het volgende:

[..]

Of Stone doet aan paniekzaaien om het ontslag van Mueller te bespoedigen. Stone kan ook flink in de problemen zitten nu een medewerker van hem immuniteit heeft gekregen.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 21:39 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:
"May have to get involved", hij gaat meedoen in het team en zichzelf onderzoeken?

Of bedoelt hij Mueller ontslaan, via via.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 21:39 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:
"May have to get involved", hij gaat meedoen in het team en zichzelf onderzoeken?

Of bedoelt hij Mueller ontslaan, via via.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 21:49 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

...Ik denk dat Trump er simpelweg de ballen niet voor heeft om echt iets gevaarlijke te doen.

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 21:54 schreef Hyperdude het volgende:

[..]

Probleem is dat ie waarschijnlijk niet altijd door heeft wat de risico's zijn van zijn acties. Who knew things could be so complicated?

twitter:

SecAzar twitterde op zaterdag 25-08-2018 om 02:03:03 The opioid crisis is one of our top priorities at HHS, with a drumbeat of action on the full range of efforts where we can assist local communities. Today, I joined @POTUS & @FLOTUS in Ohio to learn how states and communities are responding to the challenge of opioid addiction. https://t.co/NwxSoeNznA reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 23:50 schreef thesiren.nl het volgende:
Het is meer een russische vlag nu Op foto drie zie je hem afkijken van een 9 jarige.
Stable genius confirmed.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 00:00 schreef clumsy_clown het volgende:

[..]

En de beste man is fucking omringd door Amerikaanse vlaggen. Er zit er letterlijk één op z'n jasje gepind.

twitter:

RudyGiuliani twitterde op zaterdag 25-08-2018 om 12:02:50 Just a few days before 60 day run-up to 2018 elections. If Mueller wants to show he’s not partisan, then issue a report on collusion and obstruction. They will show President Trump did nothing wrong. Then we will have to admit you were fair. And we will. reageer retweet

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op zaterdag 25-08-2018 om 23:26:50 Want to know why you're less safe? Why we don't know what Putin is going to do to us? Trump *wanted* it that way: "The outing of an FBI informant under scrutiny by the House—an examination encouraged by Trump—has had a chilling effect on intel collection." https://t.co/TqbUjeOxCq reageer retweet

quote:

In 2016, American intelligence agencies delivered urgent and explicit warnings about Russia’s intentions to try to tip the American presidential election — and a detailed assessment of the operation afterward — thanks in large part to informants close to President Vladimir V. Putin and in the Kremlin who provided crucial details.

But two years later, the vital Kremlin informants have largely gone silent, leaving the C.I.A. and other spy agencies in the dark about precisely what Mr. Putin’s intentions are for November’s midterm elections, according to American officials familiar with the intelligence.

The officials do not believe the sources have been compromised or killed. Instead, they have concluded they have gone to ground amid more aggressive counterintelligence by Moscow, including efforts to kill spies, like the poisoning in March in Britain of a former Russian intelligence officer that utilized a rare Russian-made nerve agent.

Current and former officials also said the expulsion of American intelligence officers from Moscow has hurt collection efforts. And officials also raised the possibility that the outing of an F.B.I. informant under scrutiny by the House intelligence committee — an examination encouraged by President Trump — has had a chilling effect on intelligence collection.

SPOILER

Technology companies and political campaigns in recent weeks have detected a plethora of political interference efforts originating overseas, including hacks of Republican think tanks and fake liberal grass-roots organizations created on Facebook. Senior intelligence officials, including Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, have warned that Russians are intent on subverting American democratic institutions.

But American intelligence agencies have not been able to say precisely what are Mr. Putin’s intentions: He could be trying to tilt the midterm elections, simply sow chaos or generally undermine trust in the democratic process.

The officials, seeking to protect methods of collection from Russia, would not provide details about lost sources, but acknowledged the degradation in the information collected from Russia. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal classified information. A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined to comment.

To determine what the Russian government is up to, the United States employs multiple forms of intelligence, including intercepted communications and penetrated computer networks.

The United States continues to intercept Russian communication, and the flow of that intelligence remains strong, said current and former officials. And Russian informants could still meet their C.I.A. handlers outside Russia, further from Moscow’s counterintelligence apparatus.

But people inside or close to the Kremlin remain critical to divining whether there is a strategy behind seemingly scattershot efforts to undermine American institutions.

Spies and informants overseas also give American intelligence agencies early warning about influence campaigns, interference operations or other attempts to compromise the United States. That information, in turn, can improve the ability of domestic agencies, like the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I., to quickly identify and attempt to stop those efforts.

Because clandestine meetings can take months to set up and complete, a lengthy lag can pass before the C.I.A. realizes a key source has gone silent, according to former officials. It is rare for the agency to discover immediately that informants have eroded or are running scared. Only after several missed meetings might C.I.A. officers and analysts conclude that a source has decided it is too dangerous to pass information.

In 2016, American intelligence officials began to realize the scope of Russia’s efforts when they gathered intelligence suggesting that Moscow wanted to use Trump campaign officials, wittingly or not, to help sow chaos. John O. Brennan, the former director of the C.I.A., testified before the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017 about a tense period a year earlier when he came to believe that Mr. Putin was trying to steer the outcome toward a victory for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Brennan described the broad outlines of the intelligence in his congressional testimony, and his disclosures backed up the accounts of the information provided by the current and former officials. “I was convinced in the summer that the Russians were trying to interfere in the election. And they were very aggressive,” Mr. Brennan told lawmakers.

This year, Mr. Coats issued a series of warnings saying the Russian government, and Mr. Putin in particular, is intent on undermining American democratic systems.

At an appearance this month at the White House, Mr. Coats said intelligence agencies “continue to see a pervasive messaging campaign by Russia to try and weaken and divide the United States.” He added that those efforts “cover issues relevant to the elections.”

But officials said there has been no concrete intelligence pointing to Mr. Putin ordering his own intelligence units to wade into the election to push for a certain outcome, beyond a broad chaos campaign to undermine faith in American democracy. Intelligence agencies do not believe Mr. Putin has changed his strategy; instead, officials believe they simply do not have the same level of access to information from the Kremlin’s inner circle.

Intelligence collection appears to have suffered after Russia expelled officials from American diplomatic outposts there in retaliation for the United States removing 60 Russian officials this year, said John Sipher, a 28-year veteran of the C.I.A. who served in Moscow in the 1990s and later ran the agency’s Russia program.

The C.I.A.’s Moscow presence, according to former officers, was always small, at least in light of the importance of the target, the difficulty of spycraft and the amount of counterintelligence the Russians dedicated to thwarting American spies.

“The Russians kicked out a whole bunch of our people,” Mr. Sipher said. “Our station in Moscow is probably really small now and they are under incredible surveillance.”

Mr. Putin has also said he is intent on killing so-called traitors, comments he made just ahead of the high-profile assassination attempt of the former Russian intelligence officer, Sergei V. Skripal.

“The Russians are very focused and upset,” Mr. Sipher said. “They have shown they are willing to kill sources.”

Informants close to Putin are very rare, according to current and former officials. The United States, in recent years, has had only a few, and at times been reliant on only one or two for the most important insights on Mr. Putin, according to former officials. If those people go silent for their own protection, it can make it very hard for the agency to look inside Moscow.

The United States still should have a clear view of Mr. Putin’s strategies and intention to interfere in the elections, said Michael Carpenter, a Russia expert and former Obama administration official. He pointed to fake social media accounts created as part of Russian intelligence operations that have drummed up support for white nationalists and the Black Lives Matter movement, and have supported far right, far left and pro-Russian candidates in the United States and in Europe.

“Clearly Russia is playing both sides of controversial issues precisely to sow chaos. But that said it is not just chaos, there are certain candidates Russia prefers to see in office,” said Mr. Carpenter, now at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. “The Russians are trying to support anti-establishment and pro-Russian candidates, not just in the U.S. but everywhere.”

Still, there is little doubt about the crucial nature of informants, said Seth G. Jones, who leads the transnational threats project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy research organization.

“It is essential to have sources coming from inside the government. It was during the Cold War and it is today,” Mr. Jones said. “There are multiple ways to collect intelligence against your adversary, in this case the Russian government. But sources can provide you things you might not otherwise get, like documents, intelligence assessments.”

Sources can provide photographs of Russian documents and intelligence that are hard to intercept electronically, and that can help the United States figure out what Russia is targeting, not just with its election meddling but with its attempts to infiltrate financial systems, the power grid and other critical infrastructure, Mr. Jones said.

The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known. But current and former officials also said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated matters.

This year, the identity of an F.B.I. informant, Stefan Halper, became public after House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I. scrutiny for their ties to Russia.

Current American officials said there is no direct evidence that the exposure of Mr. Halper has been cited by overseas informants as a source of concern.

But the officials said that some allies have cited the exposure of the informant and other intelligence leaks in curbing some of the intelligence they share. And former spies believe that, long-term, the exposure will hurt overseas collection.

“Publicizing sources is really bad for the business,” Mr. Sipher said. “The only thing we can offer people is that we will do anything in our power to protect them. And anything that wears away at that trust, hurts.”

twitter:

thehill twitterde op zaterdag 25-08-2018 om 23:29:05 Trump doesn't plan to say anything positive about McCain while he's still alive: report https://t.co/c8ocBoNyfS https://t.co/aDDFSyh5vR reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 25 augustus 2018 13:00 schreef FlipjeHolland het volgende:
Eens een cheater, altijd een cheater. Hij heeft al zijn ex-vrouwen bedrogen, dus waarom niet bij oostbloksnol Melania?

Ik geloof best dat Melania een aparte slaapkamer heeft en haar tijd afwacht totdat Trump president af is om 'm daarna te smeren. Maar goed, een appetijtelijke vrouw zoals dat zal ook wel stiekem aangeduwd worden door een ander.

twitter:

DonaldJTrumpJr twitterde op donderdag 23-08-2018 om 22:15:39 This is what happens when moronic Politically Correct culture is allowed to rule over common sense and rational thinking. Truly one of the dumbest takes on a terrible tragedy I’ve ever seen. #mollietibbits https://t.co/IkNYWQhmDG reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op zondag 26-08-2018 om 02:44:13 My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you! reageer retweet

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 02:59 schreef Tweek het volgende:

19 seconds of drama: Reaction to McCain's vote

Deed ie toch maar goed. Benieuwd of er een politiek spektakel van ze begrafenis gemaakt gaat worden of dat ze het respectabel houden.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 03:07 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Ben benieuwd of Trump uitgenodigd is.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 03:13 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
[ afbeelding ]

twitter:

FilmmakerJulie twitterde op zondag 26-08-2018 om 02:54:54 CNN reporting John McCain requested that both George W Bush and Barack Obama deliver eulogies at his funeral. reageer retweet

John McCain: Remembering a Maverick

SPOILER

John S. McCain, the proud naval aviator who climbed from depths of despair as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to pinnacles of power as a Republican congressman and senator from Arizona and a two-time contender for the presidency, died on Saturday at his home in Arizona. He was 81.

According to a statement from his office, Mr. McCain died at 4:28 p.m. local time. He had suffered from a malignant brain tumor, called a glioblastoma, for which he had been treated periodically with radiation and chemotherapy since its discovery in 2017.

Despite his grave condition, he soon made a dramatic appearance in the Senate to cast a thumbs-down vote against his party’s drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But while he was unable to be in the Senate for a vote on the Republican tax bill in December, his endorsement was crucial, though not decisive, in the Trump administration’s lone legislative triumph of the year.

A son and grandson of four-star admirals who were his larger-than-life heroes, Mr. McCain carried his renowned name into battle and into political fights for more than a half-century. It was an odyssey driven by raw ambition, the conservative instincts of a shrewd military man, a rebelliousness evident since childhood and a temper that sometimes bordered on explosiveness.

Mr. McCain, bottom right, in 1965 with his Navy squadron. While in the Navy, he was cocky and combative and resisted discipline. National Archives

Nowhere were those traits more manifest than in Vietnam, where he was stripped of all but his character. He boiled over in foul curses at his captors. Because his father was the commander of all American forces in the Pacific during most of his five and a half years of captivity, Mr. McCain, a Navy lieutenant commander, became the most famous prisoner of the war, a victim of horrendous torture and a tool of enemy propagandists.

Shot down over Hanoi, suffering broken arms and a shattered leg, he was subjected to solitary confinement for two years and beaten frequently. Often he was suspended by ropes lashing his arms behind him. He attempted suicide twice. His weight fell to 105 pounds. He rejected early release to keep his honor and to avoid an enemy propaganda coup or risk demoralizing his fellow prisoners.

He finally cracked under torture and signed a “confession.” No one believed it, although he felt the burden of betraying his country. To millions of Americans, Mr. McCain was the embodiment of courage: a war hero who came home on crutches, psychologically scarred and broken in body, but not in spirit. He underwent long medical treatments and rehabilitation, but was left permanently disabled, unable to raise his arms over his head. Someone had to comb his hair.

His mother, Roberta McCain, Navy all the way, inspired his political career. After retiring from the Navy and settling in Arizona, he won two terms in the House of Representatives, from 1983 to 1987, and six in the Senate. He was a Reagan Republican to start with, but later moved right or left, a maverick who defied his party’s leaders and compromised with Democrats.

He lost the 2000 Republican presidential nomination to George W. Bush, who won the White House.

In 2008, against the backdrop of a growing financial crisis, Mr. McCain made the most daring move of his political career, seeking the presidency against the first major-party African-American nominee, Barack Obama. With national name recognition, a record for campaign finance reform and a reputation for candor — his campaign bus was called the Straight Talk Express — Mr. McCain won a series of primary elections and captured the Republican nomination.

But his selection of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate, although meant to be seen as a bold, unconventional move in keeping with his maverick’s reputation, proved a severe handicap. She was the second female major-party nominee for vice president (and the first Republican), but voters worried about her qualifications to serve as president, and about Mr. McCain’s age — he would be 72, the oldest person ever to take the White House. In a 2018 memoir, “The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights and Other Appreciations,” he defended Ms. Palin’s campaign performance, but expressed regret that he had not instead chosen Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Democrat-turned-independent.

At some McCain rallies, vitriolic crowds disparaged black people and Muslims, and when a woman said she did not trust Mr. Obama because “he’s an Arab,” Mr. McCain, in one of the most lauded moments of his campaign, replied: “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”

Analysts later said that Mr. Obama had engineered a nearly perfect campaign. And Mr. McCain confronted a hostile political environment for Republicans, who were dragged down by President George W. Bush’s dismal approval ratings amid the economic crisis and an unpopular war in Iraq.

On Election Day, Mr. McCain lost most of the battleground states and some that were traditionally Republican. Mr. Obama won with 53 percent of the popular vote to Mr. McCain’s 46 percent, and 365 Electoral College votes to Mr. McCain’s 173.

“Few of us have been tested the way John once was, or required to show the kind of courage that he did,” Mr. Obama said Saturday. “But all of us can aspire to the courage to put the greater good above our own. At John’s best, he showed us what that means.”

In the Gang of Eight

Mr. McCain in 2013 with a bipartisan group of senators, known as the Gang of Eight, that sought compromises on comprehensive immigration reform. Doug Mills/The New York Times

Returning to his Senate duties, the resilient Mr. McCain moved to the right politically to fend off a Tea Party challenge to his 2010 re-election. He voted against the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Obama’s signature health care plan, which became law in 2010. He endorsed Mitt Romney’s losing Republican bid for the presidency in 2012.

But while he was a persistent and outspoken critic of the Obama administration, Mr. McCain had by 2013 become a pivotal figure in the Senate, meeting with Mr. Obama and occasionally fashioning deals with him. He joined a bipartisan group of senators, known as the Gang of Eight, that sought compromises on comprehensive immigration reform.

“When Mr. McCain is with the president — on immigration and in brokering the recent deal to secure Senate approval of stalled Obama nominees — they can usually trump the political right,” The New York Times said in a 2013 news analysis. “When he is against him — sabotaging Mr. Obama’s plan last year to nominate Susan E. Rice as secretary of state — the White House rarely prevails.”

As Congress reconvened in January 2015 with Republicans in control of the Senate, Mr. McCain achieved his longtime goal to become chairman of the Armed Services Committee, with the power to advance his national security and fiscal objectives under a $600 billion military policy bill. He considered the post second only to occupying the White House as commander in chief.

Mr. McCain in 2016 before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. He served six terms in the Senate. Drew Angerer for The New York Times

With the rise of Donald J. Trump, the Republican flame thrower who steered American politics sharply to the right after his election in 2016 as the nation’s 45th president, Mr. McCain was one of the few powerful Republican voices in Congress to push back against Mr. Trump’s often harsh, provocative statements and Twitter posts and his tide of changes.

In his end-of-life memoir, Mr. McCain scorned Mr. Trump’s seeming admiration for autocrats and disdain for refugees. “He seems uninterested in the moral character of world leaders and their regimes,” he wrote of the president. “The appearance of toughness or a reality show facsimile of toughness seems to matter more than any of our values. Flattery secures his friendship, criticism his enmity.”

Long before Mr. Trump was criticized as setting new lows for public discourse, Mr. McCain himself had used coarse language and blunt insults, although they were far less assertive, and he often used them in jest. He called Secretary of State John Kerry, a Democrat, “a human wrecking ball,” and the right-wing Republican Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky “wacko birds.”

Personal animus between Mr. McCain and Mr. Trump arose in the Republican presidential primaries in 2016. After months of boasts by Trump about his wealth, celebrity and deal-making as qualifications for the White House, and his dismissive capsule characterizations of climate change as “a hoax” and the Iraq war as “a mistake,” Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney, with standing as the previous two Republican presidential nominees, denounced Mr. Trump as unfit for the presidency.

Saying Mr. Trump had neither the temperament nor the judgment for the White House, Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney called him ignorant on foreign policy and said he had made “dangerous” statements on national security. They warned that his election might imperil the United States and its democratic systems.

In a venomous response, Mr. Trump denigrated Mr. Romney as a “failed candidate” and “a loser” beaten by Mr. Obama. He had little to say about Mr. McCain. But months earlier, Mr. Trump, who had never served in the military (or held public office) had derided Mr. McCain as a bogus war hero and made light of his years of captivity and torture.

Mr. McCain campaigning with Mitt Romney in 2012 in Pensacola, Fla. He endorsed Mr. Romney’s Republican bid for the presidency that year. Credit Emmanuel Dunand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“He’s a war hero because he was captured,” Mr. Trump said. “I like people who weren’t captured.”

Mr. McCain held his fire. But the nation was shocked. An avalanche of denunciations tumbled from editorial boards and political leaders, but the outrage faded into the tapestry of Mr. Trump’s provocations against Mexicans, Muslims, women and black and Hispanic people. Trump supporters, who were mostly white, said his biases showed a refreshing willingness to disregard political correctness.

On Saturday night, Mr. Trump expressed his sympathies and respect for Mr. McCain’s family, but refrained from commenting on the senator himself.

A No-Show in Cleveland

As the Trump juggernaut rolled on, Mr. McCain, campaigning for re-election to his sixth six-year term, did not attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, but said he would support his party’s nominee. (Mr. McCain withdrew that support months later after a recording surfaced exposing lewd comments about women by Mr. Trump, who bragged that his celebrity allowed him to grope them.)

Days after the Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton as the first major-party female candidate for the presidency, Mr. McCain rebuked Mr. Trump for his comments about the family of a Muslim Army captain killed by a suicide bomber as he tried to save fellow American troops in Iraq in 2004. Given the podium at the Democratic convention, Khizr Khan, the father of the captain, Humayun Khan, had denounced Mr. Trump for suggesting that Muslims harbored terrorist sympathies.

With his wife, Ghazala, at his side, the father held up a pocket-size copy of the Constitution and asked if Mr. Trump had read it.

In response, Mr. Trump belittled the parents, saying the soldier’s father had delivered the speech because his wife had not been “allowed” to speak. His implication, that Mrs. Khan had not spoken because of female subservience in some strains of Islam, drew widespread condemnation, led on Capitol Hill by Senator McCain.

“While our party has bestowed upon him the nomination, it is not accompanied by unfettered license to defame those who are the best among us,” Mr. McCain said. “I challenge the nominee to set the example for what our country can and should represent.”

Soon after Mr. McCain’s statement, other Republican senators offered their own condemnations. In ensuing days, as outrage over the Trump remarks spread, Mr. Trump told his Twitter followers that Mr. Khan had “no right” to “viciously” attack him.

Seemingly impervious to criticism of any kind, Mr. Trump, who had easily won nomination, turned his guns on Mrs. Clinton. After a bruising campaign laden with Trump falsehoods and scurrilous innuendo, he defeated her in the general election, losing the popular vote by nearly three million but winning in the Electoral College.

After the election, Mr. McCain, determined to let the new administration take shape, said he would temporarily not discuss Mr. Trump publicly.

But weeks after President Trump moved into the White House and began blindsiding the public and sometimes the government with executive orders and mixed messages on immigration, foreign policy and other issues, Mr. McCain, himself newly re-elected, let loose.

At a security conference in Munich, he delivered a forceful critique of Mr. Trump’s “America First” program before a receptive audience of allied officials and foreign policy experts dismayed at the administration’s drift from seven decades of Western alliances.

“Make no mistake, my friends, these are dangerous times,” Mr. McCain said. “But you should not count America out, and we should not count each other out.”

As for Mr. Trump’s claim that his White House was operating like a “fine-tuned machine,” Mr. McCain said, “In many respects, this administration is in disarray.”

Appearing on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” a day later, Mr. McCain punctured Mr. Trump’s contention that the news media was “the enemy of the American people.”

“The first thing that dictators do is shut down the press,” Mr. McCain, a strong defender of the First Amendment, told his national television audience. While not expressly calling the president a dictator, he said, “We need to learn the lessons of history.”

For a senator who had long backed free trade, NATO and assertive foreign policies, and who had harbored suspicions about Russian intentions, Mr. McCain’s differences with Mr. Trump ran deep. He denounced Russia for “interfering” in the presidential election and called for a select Senate committee to investigate the Kremlin’s cyberactivities.

His disapproval of Mr. Trump perhaps peaked in July, after the president and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia met privately in Helsinki, Finland, and then participated in an extraordinary joint news conference there. Responding to Mr. Trump’s performance, in which the president spoke favorably of his Russian counterpart and questioned American intelligence findings that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 presidential election, Mr. McCain declared, “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”

Weeks later, in signing a $716 billion military spending bill named in Mr. McCain’s honor, Mr. Trump did not mention the senator by name in what was widely interpreted as a deliberate snub.

Although Mr. McCain was sharply critical of Mr. Trump, especially when he thought the new president had threatened to overstep domestic or national interests, he remained broadly supportive of the administration’s agenda.

After an acrimonious yearlong fight over replacing the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, Mr. McCain joined the Senate’s 54-to-45 majority to confirm Mr. Trump’s selection of Neil Gorsuch as an associate justice. Justice Gorsuch’s installation tipped the court’s balance in favor of a conservative majority that seemed destined to last for years.

Mr. McCain voted for all but two of Mr. Trump’s 15 cabinet selections and eight other administration posts requiring Senate confirmation. But he also chastised Mr. Trump for comments equating Russian and American interests. “That moral equivalency is a contradiction of everything the United States has ever stood for in the 20th and 21st centuries,” he said.

During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing taking testimony from James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director who was fired by Mr. Trump, Mr. McCain posed confusing questions, seeming to conflate the 2016 investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state with the 2017 investigation of Russian interference in the American election. He later issued a clarification.

“What I was trying to get at was whether Mr. Comey believes that any of his interactions with the president rise to the level of obstruction of justice,” he said. “In the case of Secretary Clinton’s emails, Mr. Comey was willing to step beyond his role as an investigator and state his belief about what ‘no reasonable prosecutor’ would conclude about the evidence. I wanted Mr. Comey to apply the same approach to the key question surrounding his interactions with President Trump — whether or not the president’s conduct constitutes obstruction of justice.”

Days after surgery for brain cancer, in July 2017, Mr. McCain returned to the Senate to take part in the vote to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. In a dramatic televised moment, he voted not to replace it, turning a pivotal thumb down. Credit Senate TV, via Reuters

Since he had opposed the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Obama’s signature health care law, Mr. McCain became a critical vote on the Republican bill to repeal and replace it. Written in secret, the Republicans’ bill was opposed by health care and patient advocacy groups. Mr. McCain, fearing his constituents might be harmed, was noncommittal. After struggling to write a passable bill and with no votes to spare, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, put off a showdown when Mr. McCain was sidelined by surgery for a cranial blood clot over his left eye in July.

Senator McCain’s office disclosed that, behind the clot, his doctors had found a glioblastoma, an aggressive and malignant brain tumor. Medical experts said that such cancers may be treated with radiation and chemotherapy but almost always grow back, and that the median length of survival with a glioblastoma is about 16 months.

Days after surgery for the brain cancer, Mr. McCain returned to the Senate and provided a crucial vote for the Republicans to open debate on their efforts to repeal the health law. But when a last-ditch repeal vote was taken later, Mr. McCain made a stirring televised reappearance in the well of the Senate and shocked his colleagues and the nation by turning his thumb down, casting the decisive vote against it.

The seven-year Republican drive to derail the Affordable Care Act had collapsed. Some pundits called the McCain vote cold revenge for Mr. Trump’s mockery of his ordeal as a prisoner of war. But the senator told colleagues that he felt compelled only to “do the right thing.” And in a later statement, he gave a fuller explanation.

“The vote last night presents the Senate with an opportunity to start fresh,” he said. “I encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to trust each other, stop the political gamesmanship and put the health care needs of the American people first. We can do this.”

In December, Mr. McCain had been expected to be a pivotal vote in the Republican drive to rewrite the nation’s tax code and cut taxes for individuals and businesses by adding up to $1.5 trillion to the federal deficit. Critics of the measure had identified him as a potential holdout against his party’s legislation. Days before the vote, however, Mr. McCain returned home to Arizona for medical treatment, and he did not cast a ballot in the Senate proceedings. But he endorsed the bill, and his support was important, though not decisive, in the Senate’s 51-48 adoption of the tax package.

To the Navy Born

Mr. MCain, left, in 1961 with his parents, Roberta Wright McCain and John S. McCain Jr., with a plaque of Mr. McCain’s grandfather, Adm. John Sidney McCain Sr., the patriarch of the military family. Credit Associated Press

John Sidney McCain III was born on Aug. 29, 1936, at the Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, one of many posts where his father, John Sidney McCain Jr., served in a long, distinguished Navy career. He was the middle sibling of three children. His mother, born Roberta Wright, was a California oil heiress. His parents eloped to Tijuana, Mexico, to marry in 1933.

With his older sister, Jean Alexandra (who was known as Sandy), and brother, Joseph Pinckney McCain II, John grew up with frequent moves, an often-absent father, a rock-solid mother and family lore that traced ancestral lineages to combatants in every American war and to Scottish clans. There were also highly dubious family claims of having descended from Robert the Bruce, the 14th-century king of the Scots.

The patriarch of the 20th-century military family was John’s grandfather, Adm. John Sidney McCain Sr. A pioneer of aircraft carriers, he led many naval and air operations in the Western Pacific in World War II, covering Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines and inflicting heavy losses on the enemy in the war’s final stages. He was in the front row of officers aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese signed the documents of surrender in 1945.

John’s father was a decorated submarine commander in World War II. In Washington, the elder Mr. McCain was influential in political affairs as the postwar Navy’s chief information officer and liaison with Congress. Senators, representatives and military brass were often guests at his home. Raised to full admiral, he was the commander of American naval forces in Europe and, from 1968 to 1972, of all American forces in the Pacific, including those in the Vietnam War theater.

(Two Navy destroyers were named McCain, for the senator’s father and grandfather, the first father-and-son full admirals in American naval history.)

Whipsawed by family relocations, young John attended some 20 schools before finally settling into Episcopal High School, an all-white, all-boys boarding school in Alexandria, Va., in the fall of 1951 for his last three years of secondary education. The school, with an all-male faculty and enrollments drawn mostly from upper-crust families of the Old South, required jackets and ties for classes.

But the scion of one of the Navy’s most illustrious families was defiant and unruly. He mocked the dress code by wearing dirty bluejeans. His shoes were held together with tape, and his coat looked like a reject from the Salvation Army. He was cocky and combative, easily provoked and ready to fight anyone. Classmates called him McNasty. Most gave him a wide berth.

“He cultivated the image,” Robert Timberg wrote in a biography, “John McCain: An American Odyssey” (1995). “The Episcopal yearbook pictures him in a trench coat, collar up, cigarette dangling Bogey-style from his lips. That pose, if hardly the impression Episcopal sought to project, at least had a fashionable world-weary style to it.”

John and a few friends often sneaked off campus at night to patronize bars and burlesque houses in Washington. He joined the wrestling team — a 127-pound dynamo, he once pinned an opponent in 37 seconds, a school record — and the junior varsity football team, as a linebacker and offensive guard. His grades were abysmal, except in literature and history, his favorite subjects. He graduated in 1954.

That summer, he followed his father and grandfather into the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. He resisted the discipline. His grades were poor. He stood up to upperclassmen, broke rules and piled up demerits, though never enough to warrant expulsion. But he became a ferocious boxer, a magnet for attractive young women and one of the most popular midshipmen in his class.

In the Cockpit

Mr. McCain possessed the rugged independence of a natural leader. It came out at parties and in carousing with friends. Caught by the Shore Patrol at an off-limits bar, he led a carload of drinking buddies in a daring escape. “Being on liberty with John McCain was like being in a train wreck,” one recalled. In 1958, he graduated 894th in his class, fifth from the bottom.

Accepted for flight training, the newly commissioned Ensign McCain learned to fly attack jets at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla. He also had flings with a succession of young women, from schoolteachers to strippers, and once with a tobacco heiress, “often returning to base just in time to change clothes and drag himself out to the flight line,” Mr. Timberg said.

He liked flying, but his performance was subpar, sometimes careless or even reckless. In the 1960s he crashed in Corpus Christi Bay in Texas and Tidewater, Va., but escaped with minor injuries — and his flying skills improved over time. Early assignments were aboard aircraft carriers: the Intrepid in the Caribbean during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the Enterprise in the Mediterranean.

In 1965, Mr. McCain married Carol Shepp, a model. He adopted her two children, Douglas and Andrew, and they had a daughter, Sidney. After a long separation, the couple were divorced in 1980. He then married Cindy Lou Hensley, a Phoenix teacher whose father owned a beer distributorship. They had two sons, John IV and James, and a daughter, Meghan, and adopted a girl, Bridget, from a Bangladeshi orphanage.

A complete list of survivors was not immediately provided.

The crew on the carrier Forrestal put out a fire that killed 134 men in the worst noncombat incident in American naval history. Mr. McCain was seriously injured. Credit U.S. Navy, via Associated Press

Promoted to lieutenant commander in early 1967, Mr. McCain requested combat duty and was assigned to the carrier Forrestal, operating in the Gulf of Tonkin. Its A-4E Skyhawk warplanes were bombing North Vietnam in the campaign known as Operation Rolling Thunder. He flew five missions.

Then, on July 29, 1967, he had just strapped himself into his cockpit on a deck crowded with planes when a missile fired accidentally from another jet struck his 200-gallon exterior fuel tank, and it exploded in flames. He scrambled out, crawled onto the plane’s nose, dived onto a deck seething with burning fuel and rolled away until he cleared the flames.

As he stood up, other aircraft and bomb loads exploded on deck. He was hit in the legs and chest by burning shrapnel. At one point, the Forrestal skipper considered abandoning ship. When the fire was finally brought under control, 134 men had been killed in the worst noncombat incident in American naval history.

Despite his misgivings, Mr. McCain volunteered for more missions and was transferred to the carrier Oriskany. On Oct. 26 he took off on his 23rd mission of the war, part of a 20-plane attack on a heavily defended power plant in central Hanoi. Moments after releasing his bombs on target, as he pulled out of his dive, a Soviet-made surface-to-air missile sheared off his right wing.

He ejected as the plane plunged, but hit something as he exited. Both arms were broken and his right knee was shattered. He fell into a lake and, with 50 pounds of gear, sank 15 feet to the bottom, then pulled the inflating pins of his Mae West life jacket with his teeth and rose to the surface, gasping for air. Swimmers dragged him ashore, where he was set upon by a mob.

Mr. McCain, center, after he ejected from his fighter plane in 1967 and fell into a lake. The Vietnamese imprisoned and tortured him for more than five years. Credit Library of Congress

Mr. McCain was stripped to his skivvies, kicked and spat upon, then bayoneted in the left ankle and groin. A North Vietnamese soldier struck him with his rifle butt, breaking a shoulder. A woman tried to give him a cup of tea as a photographer snapped pictures. Carried to a truck, Mr. McCain was driven to Hoa Lo, the prison compound its American inmates had labeled the Hanoi Hilton.

There he was denied medical care. His knee swelled to the size and color of a football. He lapsed in and out of consciousness for days. When he awoke in a cell infested with roaches and rats, he was interrogated and beaten. The beatings continued for days. He gave his name, rank and serial number and defied his tormentors with curses.

After two weeks, a doctor, without anesthesia, tried to set his right arm, broken in three places, but gave up in frustration and encased it in a plaster cast. He was moved to another site and tended by two American prisoners of war, who brought him back from near death.

Commander McCain’s prisoner-of-war status was widely reported around the world. Only after his captors learned that his father was an admiral was he given a modicum of medical treatment. Other prisoners said he spoke, incongruously, of someday being president of the United States.

Once he was visited by a group of North Vietnamese dignitaries. A prisoner, Jack Van Loan, said Mr. McCain shrieked at them. “Here’s a guy that’s all crippled up, all busted up, and he doesn’t know if he’s going to live to the next day, and he literally blew them out of there with a verbal assault,” Mr. Van Loan told Mr. Timberg. “You can’t imagine the example John set for the rest of the camp by doing that.”

Two Years in Solitary

Mr. McCain in 1967 at a hospital in Hanoi, North Vietnam. Only after his captors learned that his father was an admiral was he given medical treatment. Credit Associated Press

In March 1968, Mr. McCain was put in solitary confinement, fed only watery pumpkin soup and scraps of bread. It lasted two years. When Admiral McCain became the Pacific Theater commander in July, his son was offered early repatriation repeatedly. Commander McCain refused, following a military code that prisoners were to be released in the order taken. He was beaten frequently and tortured with ropes.

Years after his confession to “war crimes” and “air piracy,” Mr. McCain wrote: “I had learned what we all learned over there: that every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.”

His ordeal finally ended on March 14, 1973, two months after the Paris Peace Accords had ended American involvement in the war. The place he had lived longest in his nomadic life was Hanoi. At 36, his hair had gone white. He went home a celebrity, cheered in parades, showered with medals, embraced by President Richard M. Nixon and Gov. Ronald Reagan of California.

For a Navy man who had always tried to live up to his father’s accomplishments, the Silver and Bronze Stars, the Distinguished Flying Cross and other decorations he received were not enough. But a psychiatrist’s report seemed to capture his happiest moment. “Felt fulfillment,” it said, “when his dad was introduced at a dinner as ‘Commander McCain’s father.’ ”

After months of rehabilitation and recovery, he returned to duty and became the Navy’s Senate liaison, as his father had once been. But he knew that his Navy future would be limited by his physical disabilities, and that he would never be an admiral like his forebears. With his mother’s encouragement, he was already thinking about a political career when he retired as a captain in 1981.

Setting his sights on a congressional seat, he settled in Phoenix and became a public relations executive for his father-in-law’s beer distributorship. He developed contacts in the news media and business community, and got to know real estate developers and bankers like Charles Keating Jr.

In 1982, Mr. McCain, in a campaign partly financed by his wife, easily won a seat in a Republican congressional district in Arizona. Credit Tom Tingle/Phoenix Gazette, via Associated Press

When Representative John Rhodes of Arizona retired after 30 years in Congress in 1982, Mr. McCain, in a campaign partly financed by his wife, easily won the seat in a Republican district. He embraced President Reagan’s agenda of tax and budget cuts and a strong national defense, but voted to override Mr. Reagan’s veto of sanctions against South Africa for its racist policies. He was re-elected in 1984.

After Senator Barry M. Goldwater decided not to seek re-election as Arizona’s conservative stalwart in 1986, Mr. McCain crushed Richard Kimball, a former Democratic state legislator, for the seat. He won appointments to the Armed Services Committee, the Commerce Committee and the Indian Affairs Committee, and soon gained national attention.

A longtime gambler with ties to the gaming industry, Mr. McCain helped write the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988, codifying regulations for Native American gambling enterprises. He backed legislation, sponsored by Senators Phil Gramm of Texas and Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire, for automatic spending cuts in deficit budgets. He was shortlisted as a vice-presidential running mate by the 1988 Republican nominee, George Bush, who won the White House (with Senator Dan Quayle on the ticket).

But Mr. McCain’s rising political career was almost upended by scandal. He was one of five senators who took favors from Charles Keating to intercede with federal regulators on behalf of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which collapsed with catastrophic losses. The scandal cost the government and investors billions, and Mr. Keating went to prison for fraud; the so-called Keating Five, cleared of wrongdoing by Senate investigators, were only rebuked for ethical lapses.

In the years that followed, Mr. McCain reinvented himself as a scourge of special interests, crusading for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.

The Persian Gulf War in 1991 also helped restore Mr. McCain’s tarnished image. As a television commentator, he showcased his military savvy and impressed Americans as an authoritative voice on foreign policy. While Mr. Bush lost the White House to Bill Clinton in 1992, Mr. McCain easily won re-election.

After years of voting along party lines, Mr. McCain, in the 1990s, emphasized his independence. With the presidency in his distant sights, he challenged Republican leaders and Democrats and was harder to peg politically. He became a self-appointed Republican spokesman on national security — challenging the Clinton administration’s intervention in Somalia, counseling against deploying American troops to the Balkans and sounding an early warning on North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

Mr. McCain and Senator John Kerry, a Democrat and fellow Vietnam War veteran, were chairmen of the Select Committee on P.O.W./M.I.A. Affairs, which found “no compelling evidence” that Americans were still alive in captivity in Southeast Asia. Veterans groups and families of long-missing troops rejected the report. He also pressed for full diplomatic relations with Vietnam, which were achieved in 1995.

In the 1996 election, Mr. McCain appeared to be a favorite for the Republican vice-presidential slot, but former Senator Bob Dole, the Republican presidential nominee, chose Jack Kemp, the former congressman and National Football League star. They would lose to Mr. Clinton and Al Gore.

Mr. McCain won re-election to a third term by a landslide in 1998, and a year later he published a memoir, “Faith of My Fathers,” which became a best seller in time for the 2000 election campaign and was later made into a television movie, starring Shawn Hatosy as Mr. McCain.

Smears and Defeat

Republican presidential hopefuls, including Mr. McCain, right, before a debate in 1999. The others, from left, were Gary Bauer, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, Steve Forbes, Sen. Orrin Hatch and Alan Keyes. Credit Luke Frazza/Agence France-Presse

Seeking the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, Mr. McCain pledged “a fight to take our government back from the power brokers and special interests.” Gov. George W. Bush of Texas was favored, but Mr. McCain won the New Hampshire primary, 49 to 30 percent. South Carolina’s primary then loomed as crucial.

It was one of the era’s dirtiest campaigns. Anonymous smears falsely claimed that Mr. McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock, that his wife was a drug addict and that he was a homosexual, a traitor and mentally unstable. McCain ads portrayed Mr. Bush as a liar and called his religious supporters, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the televangelist Pat Robertson, “agents of intolerance.”

Mr. McCain later said he regretted calling a Confederate flag on the State Capitol in Columbia a “symbol of heritage.” Civil rights groups had denounced it as a symbol of slavery and oppression of African-Americans. “I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary,” Mr. McCain admitted.

Mr. Bush won the primary and the nomination, and narrowly defeated the Democrat, Vice President Gore, in the general election.

[Reflections of John McCain’s decades in public life by reporters and editors at The Times.]

Always wary of an adventurousness that might blind Mr. McCain to potential embarrassments, his advisers grew anxious during the 2000 campaign when a lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, began turning up with him at fund-raisers and at his office. It came to nothing. But a long report in The Times in 2008 said that aides, fearing a romantic involvement, had cautioned Mr. McCain and warned Ms. Iseman off.

The article raised a flap of angry denials, and Ms. Iseman sued the newspaper for libel. The Times did not retract its article but published a note to readers saying it had not intended to suggest a romantic affair, and the suit was dropped.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. McCain supported the Bush administration’s war on terrorism; its invasion of Afghanistan to suppress a fanatic Taliban regime and hunt for Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the terrorist attacks; and later the invasion of Iraq to depose President Saddam Hussein, the tyrant who was wrongly believed to have weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. McCain visiting American troops in Kabul in 2014. He supported the Bush administration’s fight against terrorism after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Credit Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

Rewarded for years of pushing campaign-finance reforms, Mr. McCain and Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, finally saw passage in 2002 of the McCain-Feingold Act. It banned a key source of financing for both parties, so-called soft money donated in unlimited amounts to build party strengths, and it limited donations for national candidates to “hard money,” subject to annual limits and other rules. The law’s effects became tangled in lawsuits, court rulings and financing schemes.

As a torture victim, Mr. McCain was sensitive to the detention and interrogation of detainees in the fight against terrorism. In 2005 the Senate passed his bill to bar inhumane treatment of prisoners, including those at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by limiting military practices to those permitted by the United States Army Field Manual on Interrogation. His 2008 bill to ban waterboarding as torture was adopted, but vetoed by President Bush.

Mr. McCain wrote six books with his aide, Mark Salter, all with themes of courage. Besides his 2018 memoir, they were “Worth the Fighting For” (2002), “Why Courage Matters: The Way to a Braver Life” (2004), “Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember” (2005), “Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them” (2007) and “Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of Americans at War” (2014).

In 1993, Mr. McCain gave the commencement address at Annapolis: the sorcerer’s apprentice, class of 1954, home to inspire the midshipmen. He spoke of Navy aviators hurled from the decks of pitching aircraft carriers, of Navy gunners blazing into the silhouettes of onrushing kamikazes, of trapped Marines battling overwhelming Chinese hordes in a breakout from the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea.

“I have spent time in the company of heroes,” he said. “I have watched men suffer the anguish of imprisonment, defy appalling cruelty until further resistance is impossible, break for a moment, then recover inhuman strength to defy their enemies once more. All these things and more I have seen. And so will you. I will go to my grave in gratitude to my Creator for allowing me to stand witness to such courage and honor. And so will you.

“My time is slipping by. Yours is fast approaching. You will know where your duty lies. You will know.”

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 02:50 schreef Tweek het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op zondag 26-08-2018 om 02:44:13 My bigly sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you! Sad! reageer retweet

Heeft hij vast niet zelf geschreven.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 02:50 schreef Tweek het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op zondag 26-08-2018 om 02:44:13 My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain. Our hearts and prayers are with you! reageer retweet

Heeft hij vast niet zelf geschreven.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 04:01 schreef Tweek het volgende:

twitter:

FilmmakerJulie twitterde op zondag 26-08-2018 om 02:54:54 CNN reporting John McCain requested that both George W Bush and Barack Obama deliver eulogies at his funeral. reageer retweet

Een laatste fuck you naar Trump en poging om het land bij elkaar te krijgen.

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Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 07:12 schreef vipergts het volgende:

[..]

Dit is toch niet het enige wat er gezegd wordt vanuit het Witte Huis?

twitter:

FLOTUS twitterde op zondag 26-08-2018 om 02:44:17 Our thoughts, prayers and deepest sympathy to the McCain Family. Thank you Senator McCain for your service to the nation. reageer retweet

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 07:14 schreef clumsy_clown het volgende:

[..]

Nee hoor, Melania heeft er ook een zinnetje uit weten te persen.

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Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 07:36 schreef clumsy_clown het volgende:
Kelli Ward, MAGA-R politicus die heeft geprobeerd McCain te verslaan voor de positie van senator in Arizona, en nu probeert het plekje van Jeff Flake te bemachtigen en flink op campagnetour is, denkt dat McCain dood is gegaan om haar dwars te zitten.

[ afbeelding ]

Ze heeft het bericht inmiddels verwijderd en geeft de media de schuld over fake news en zulks.

Pareltje.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 02:59 schreef Tweek het volgende:

19 seconds of drama: Reaction to McCain's vote

Deed ie toch maar goed. Benieuwd of er een politiek spektakel van ze begrafenis gemaakt gaat worden of dat ze het respectabel houden.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 07:36 schreef clumsy_clown het volgende:
Kelli Ward, MAGA-R politicus die heeft geprobeerd McCain te verslaan voor de positie van senator in Arizona, en nu probeert het plekje van Jeff Flake te bemachtigen en flink op campagnetour is, denkt dat McCain dood is gegaan om haar dwars te zitten.

[ afbeelding ]

Ze heeft het bericht inmiddels verwijderd en geeft de media de schuld over fake news en zulks.

Pareltje.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 11:04 schreef TjjWester het volgende:
Ik zie dat trump de staatsschuld enorm laat oplopen om zijn idiote beleid te bekostigen, nu vroeg ik mij af waarom het geen optie is om een deal te sluiten met de FED? Immers hij kan het brengen als een zuiver adminstratieve handeling en voor wie daar anders over denkt kan hij dat bestempelen als fake news.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 11:04 schreef TjjWester het volgende:
Ik zie dat trump de staatsschuld enorm laat oplopen om zijn idiote beleid te bekostigen, nu vroeg ik mij af waarom het geen optie is om een deal te sluiten met de FED? Immers hij kan het brengen als een zuiver adminstratieve handeling en voor wie daar anders over denkt kan hij dat bestempelen als fake news.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 12:21 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Hoe zie jij die deal dan voor je? Geld laten printen ofzo?

Nog even los van het feit dat de Fed een onafhankelijk orgaan is..

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Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 12:29 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Wat voor deal zou hij kunnen maken?

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Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 13:30 schreef TjjWester het volgende:

[..]


[..]

De FED is alles behalve een onafhankelijk orgaan. De leden van het board wordt samengesteld door de president, voor een termijn van 14 jaar.

Ik doelde op een deal waarbij de schulden worden weggestreept of worden afgekocht, gezien het hier eigenlijk gewoon gaat om een interne transactie, zie ik niet in waarom de markt daar heel heftig op zou reageren.

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Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 13:34 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Waarom zou een instantie niet onafhankelijk kunnen zijn omdat haar medewerkers worden benoemd?
Juist die lange termijn zorgt ervoor dat de president ze verder weinig kan maken.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 13:38 schreef TjjWester het volgende:

[..]

Als je de board members bekijkt dan zie je dat ze allemaal strategisch zijn gekozen en vaak zeer actief zijn voor hun eigen partij.