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:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 13:42 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Dat is niet waar onafhankelijkheid om gaat. Onafhankelijkheid gaat om de vraag of je zonder consequenties beslissingen kunt maken. Rechters zijn ook gewoon politieke benoemingen, maar niets staat ze in de weg om een eigen koers te varen.
Dat de Democraten veelal rechters benoemen met een liberale insteek en de Republikeinen rechters met een conservatieve insteek doet verder niets af aan hun onafhankelijkheid.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 13:46 schreef TjjWester het volgende:

[..]

Jij durft met droge ogen te beweren dat deze mensen niet gekozen zijn: omdat ze bijzonder trouw zijn aan hun partij, veel gedaan hebben in de partij en idealen/beleid nastreven dat aansluit bij de partij?

Ongeacht welke kant van het politieke spectrum.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 13:50 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Nee, ze zijn gekozen om het "hebben van de juiste opvattingen".
Maar nogmaals, dat is niet waar het om gaat bij "onafhankelijkheid". Dat gaat om de vraag of ze onafhankelijk beslissingen kunnen nemen. Zo kwam Trump er ook achter dat zijn benoeming van Gorsuch er niet toe leidde dat de man braaf als zijn schoothondje ging fungeren in Sessions v. Dimaya.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 13:52 schreef TjjWester het volgende:

[..]

Ik vind je aandoenlijk naief. Het gaat er gewoon om welke partij de meeste pionnen op de juiste plek heeft.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 13:52 schreef TjjWester het volgende:

[..]

Ik vind je aandoenlijk naief. Het gaat er gewoon om welke partij de meeste pionnen op de juiste plek heeft.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 13:57 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Vorige week nog heeft de nieuwe directeur van de Fed nog te kennen gegeven dat Trump kan roepen wat hij wil, maar dat de rente gewoon omhoog gaat als hij dat wil. Ik vind jou eerlijk gezegd aandoenlijk achterdochtig.

Het is me ook nog niet duidelijk wat voor een 'deal' je nou precies voor je ziet. Want als de V.S. te kennen geeft haar schuldeisers niet meer te gaan betalen, zijn ze feitelijk failliet.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:01 schreef TjjWester het volgende:

[..]

Ik heb nooit gesproken over schuldeisers

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:05 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

De Fed is zo ongeveer de grootste schuldeiser van de federale overheid. De Fed is gewoon een externe partij, dat begrijp je toch wel?

Bovendien gaat jouw plan leiden tot a) enorme inflatie en b) dan gaat de Fed waarschijnlijk zelf ook failliet. Dan stort het bankensysteem in elkaar. Bijzonder slecht plan dus.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:01 schreef TjjWester het volgende:

[..]

Ik heb nooit gesproken over schuldeisers

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:09 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Maar het plan is dus dat de FED gaat zeggen 'de schuld bestaat niet meer'.

Ja, als het zo makkelijk was zou dat wel lachen zijn.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:08 schreef TjjWester het volgende:

[..]

Hou op zeg, de fed is geen externe partij, het is formeel volgens de wet een zelfstandig orgaan, dat beïnvloed wordt door de politiek.

Het is een interne adminstratieve ingreep en doordat je externe schuldeisers(china!) wel gewoon blijft terug betalen, laat je zien dat er geen reden is voor wantrouwen.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:10 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Ja, was het maar zo makkelijk, hè?

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:13 schreef TjjWester het volgende:

[..]

Mijn voorstel waarbij de FED akkoord gaat dat de staat een x percentage terugbetaald en ruil voor schuldenverlichting, is een idee dat wereldwijd al heel vaak is toegpast. Hetzelfde idee zal straks in het groot uitgevoerd gaan worden bij griekenland in relatie tot de ecb en de europese landen.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:10 schreef TjjWester het volgende:

[..]

Ik zie het meer als een afkoop van schuld, zoals wel vaker is toegepast, wereldwijd.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:16 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]
De VS moeten stoppen met op de pof leven

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:19 schreef Wombcat het volgende:

[..]

Nou, dat zie ik niet snel gebeuren. Zeker niet zoals de republikeinen er nu inzitten.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:19 schreef Wombcat het volgende:

[..]

Nou, dat zie ik niet snel gebeuren. Zeker niet zoals de republikeinen er nu inzitten.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:18 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Ja, maar waarom zou de FED in hemelsnaam een biljoen kwijtschelden?

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:24 schreef TjjWester het volgende:

[..]

Bijna al het geld dat de staat "geleend" heeft is gecreëerd geld, The FED heeft nooit daadwerkelijk de beschikkig gehad over het geld en zal dat ook nooit krijgen als ze op deze manier verder gaan, tenzij jij denkt dat ze ooit echt gaan aflossen.

Het idee dat er ooit 1 biljoen terug komt bestaat alleen in de boeken, wat mij betreft, even los van het feit dat het een zeer positief effect kan hebben op de dollar.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:38 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Trump heeft een mooi bericht over de dood van McCain op Instagram gezet. Voorzien van een foto van zichzelf.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:38 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Trump heeft een mooi bericht over de dood van McCain op Instagram gezet. Voorzien van een foto van zichzelf.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:38 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Trump heeft een mooi bericht over de dood van McCain op Instagram gezet. Voorzien van een foto van zichzelf.

Maar hij heeft de Tweet verwijderd.

Laatste die er nu staat is van de 24ste.

quote:

Following the death of McCain, Fox & Friends host Griff Jenkins asked Jeffress if a lesson could be learned from the senator's final speech extolling the importance of one's convictions.

"I think there are two lessons we can all learn from him," Jeffress said. "First of all, to be tenacious in your convictions."

"Let's be honest, the reason he and President Trump butt heads is because they are both men of conviction," he added. "And we shouldn't condemn either one for standing up for their convictions."

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:40 schreef Ringo het volgende:

[..]

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bm7HFb3gMOc

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op zondag 26-08-2018 om 17:15:30 Trump has arrived at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, VA, according to the pool report.This is Trump's 194th day at a Trump property as president and his 151st day at a Trump golf club as president. reageer retweet

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 18:27 schreef clumsy_clown het volgende:
En omdat het weer eens tijd wordt voor een teller.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op zondag 26-08-2018 om 17:15:30 Trump has arrived at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, VA, according to the pool report.This is Trump's 194th day at a Trump property as president and his 151st day at a Trump golf club as president. reageer retweet

Dat is een kwart van zijn presidentschap. De man voor het kleine volk!

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 18:27 schreef clumsy_clown het volgende:
En omdat het weer eens tijd wordt voor een teller.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op zondag 26-08-2018 om 17:15:30 Trump has arrived at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, VA, according to the pool report.This is Trump's 194th day at a Trump property as president and his 151st day at a Trump golf club as president. reageer retweet

Dat is een kwart van zijn presidentschap. De man voor het kleine volk!

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 18:40 schreef Szura het volgende:

[..]

Ja maar Obama

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 18:46 schreef Janneke141 het volgende:
Wees blij dat die man zo veel golft. Dat betekent alleen maar minder tijd voor het schofferen van bevriende staatslieden en het lanceren van kutplannen.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 18:09 schreef Ulx het volgende:
https://crooksandliars.co(...)t-jeffress-trump/amp

Pastor Robert Jeffress, a Fox News contributor, on Sunday compared Donald Trump to the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

[..]

Wat een klapjosti.

twitter:

shannonrwatts twitterde op zondag 26-08-2018 om 06:42:36 Donald Trump’s Instagram post about the death of John McCain features... wait for it... a photo of Donald Trump. https://t.co/sRKFTWfrZS reageer retweet

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 16:20 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
De winst van de FED gaat al naar de federale overheid, dus ik zie niet in wat het kwijtschelden van de schuld moet uit halen...

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 23:17 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Tja, Trump zakt nu door het ijs. Advocaat geflipt, Manafort opgesloten.

Oh nee, nieuwe ALL TIME HIGH approval rating
https://ntknetwork.com/trump-approval-jumps-to-46/

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 23:17 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Tja, Trump zakt nu door het ijs. Advocaat geflipt, Manafort opgesloten.

Oh nee, nieuwe ALL TIME HIGH approval rating
https://ntknetwork.com/trump-approval-jumps-to-46/

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 23:24 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:
En als 44 een all time high moet zijn is het wel erg triest.

quote:

Trump nixed issuing a statement that praised the life of John McCain and called him a "hero," telling senior aides he preferred to issue a brief tweet before posting the one Saturday night that did not include any kind words for McCain, according to WaPo. https://t.co/PFGqEuzfDE

quote:

"It certainly doesn't bother me or the people I know close to John,” ex-McCain aide John Weaver said. "I don't think it bothers John one bit. If we heard something today or tomorrow from Trump, we know it'd mean less than a degree from Trump University." https://t.co/PFGqEuzfDE

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 06:27 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 06:08 schreef Ulx het volgende:
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1033859140630798336?s=19

[..]

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 15:06 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Het Breitbart-volk haat de man wel zeg. Ik zit de reacties daar te lezen en er zitten echt verbitterde smerige opmerkingen tussen.

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 14:13 schreef TjjWester het volgende:

[..]

Mijn voorstel waarbij de FED akkoord gaat dat de staat een x percentage terugbetaald in ruil voor schuldenverlichting, is een idee dat wereldwijd al heel vaak is toegepast.

Hetzelfde idee zal straks in het groot uitgevoerd gaan worden bij griekenland in relatie tot de ecb en de europese landen.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 09:27 schreef Ulx het volgende:
John McCain's final message for the President

Goede analyse wat het betekent dat McCain de twee mannen van wie hij de verkiezingen verloor - Bush en Obama - gevraagd heeft te spreken op zijn begrafenis en dat Trump niet welkom is.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 09:41 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 10:28 schreef DustPuppy het volgende:
Trump fathered child with a housekeeper: doorman

Na de val/flip van Cohen gaan we dit wellicht meer zien, maar dit is alvast wel weer een mooie.

SPOILER

The Mask - Smokin!!

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 10:42 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

D'r zijn iets van 100 deals met vrouwen gesloten naar het schijnt.

SPOILER

The Mask - Smokin!!

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 11:15 schreef Klaphark het volgende:
RICO act gaat die hele Trump organisatie slopen. Hij gaat spijt krijgen van z'n presidentschap, als hij dat niet al heeft.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 11:19 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

Het grootste probleem van Trump is dat hij "zaken" en zijn presidentschap niet heeft kunnen/willen scheiden. De aandacht van Mueller is nu verlegd naar zijn zakenimperium puur omdat hij dit niet heeft gedaan.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 11:22 schreef Klaphark het volgende:

[..]

Als Weisselberg echt helemaal in de zak van de aanklagers zit, heeft de organisatie een heel groot probleem zou je zeggen.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 11:22 schreef Klaphark het volgende:

[..]

Als Weisselberg echt helemaal in de zak van de aanklagers zit, heeft de organisatie een heel groot probleem zou je zeggen.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 11:28 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

Het zou zomaar kunnen gebeuren dat ze dan Trump gaan "wippen" Zoiets gebeurt wel vaker met de stichter om het bedrijf te redden. Ze waren toch al de bedrijfsnaam van van de gevel te slopen..

[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 11:36 schreef Klaphark het volgende:

[..]

Dan moet de hele familie eruit, dus dat zal niet snel gebeuren. Trump is er op papier al uit dacht ik.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 11:28 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

Het zou zomaar kunnen gebeuren dat ze dan Trump gaan "wippen" Zoiets gebeurt wel vaker met de stichter om het bedrijf te redden. Ze waren toch al de bedrijfsnaam van van de gevel te slopen..

[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Op zondag 26 augustus 2018 18:45 schreef SaintOfKillers het volgende:

[..]

Iig. de man van de kleine stok en de kleine balletjes.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 11:15 schreef Klaphark het volgende:
RICO act gaat die hele Trump organisatie slopen. Hij gaat spijt krijgen van z'n presidentschap, als hij dat niet al heeft.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 11:15 schreef Klaphark het volgende:
RICO act gaat die hele Trump organisatie slopen. Hij gaat spijt krijgen van z'n presidentschap, als hij dat niet al heeft.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 11:48 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Ik vraag me af of Trump al doorheeft dat hij alles kwijtraakt als hij geen president meer is.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 11:53 schreef Klaphark het volgende:

[..]

Ik heb nog niet goed begrepen hoe het zit na zijn presidentschap, qua strafrechtelijke vervolging. Een zittende president wordt niet aangeklaagd, maar is dat niet slechts uitstel?

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 12:07 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Er is overigens geen wet die zegt dat je een zittende president niet kunt aanklagen. Men heeft het alleen nooit getest.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 11:55 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Je kan iemand na zijn presidentschap natuurlijk gewoon aanklagen voor wat je wilt, dan ben je 'gewoon' weer een burger.

Misschien ga je wat problemen krijgen met verjaarde zaken, maar buiten dat zijn er niet echt beperkingen. Je kan hem uiteraard niet aanklagen voor dingen die met zijn presidentschap te maken hebben.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 12:16 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

Trump staat niet boven de wet. En dat het nog niet eerder is gebeurd is, heeft meer te maken dat er nog geen president is geweest die zoveel schimmige zaakjes tijden het presidentschap heeft gehad.

^{Hij mag overigens ook wel staande aangeklaagd worden, zolang ze hem maar aan de schandpaal nagelen.}

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 13:01 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Ik zou niet weten waarom Trump na zijn presidentsschap niet kan worden aangeklaagd voor eventuele misdaden die tijdens zijn presidentsschap zijn begaan? Dan heeft hij toch geen immuniteit meer?

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 13:21 schreef zalkc het volgende:

[..]

Je doet Nixon wel een beetje tekort vind ik.

twitter:

karentravers twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 12:20:23 Flags at the White House were lowered to half staff this weekend for the passing of John McCain but this morning they are back to full staff. There was no official proclamation from President Trump (as he has done in the past for other notable figures passing) https://t.co/rmUO6xbtrp reageer retweet

twitter:

MarshallCohen twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 01:29:29 Roger Stone's latest pitch to his email list of supporters boils down to this: Donate right now because, literally, I am the next guy to get indicted. https://t.co/sWAx2BQtSJ reageer retweet

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 14:08 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

MarshallCohen twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 01:29:29 Roger Stone's latest pitch to his email list of supporters boils down to this: Donate right now because, literally, I am the next guy to get indicted. https://t.co/sWAx2BQtSJ reageer retweet

[ afbeelding ]

39 jaar de koffie rondbrengen. Dat is toch ook geen carrière?

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 11:43 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

Nu nog uit het witte huis. Er gaan stemmen op bij de democraten om hem (wanneer ze het huis en de senaat kunnen veroveren) Trump tot aan de presidentsverkiezingen te laten zitten waar hij zit zonder al te veel blijvende schade te kunnen veroorzaken. Ondertussen kan dan de hele Trump org. ontmanteld worden en kan Trump zich later niet meer verschuilen achter zijn poen.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 14:17 schreef Zwoerd het volgende:

[..]

Lijkt me wel mooi. Trump vs Elizabeth Warren, waarbij Trump niet verder komt dan haar elke dag Pocahontas te noemen, waarna een vernederende nederlaag volgt. Maar eigenlijk heb ik 0 vertrouwen meer in de Amerikaanse kiezers.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 15:12 schreef vipergts het volgende:

[..]

Die krijgt gewoon nog een tweede termijn hoor. Zolang het economisch nog voorspoedig gaat als de herverkiezing begint. Het enige wat hem tegenhoudt is als Mueller genoeg vind. En zelf dan moeten ze hem schoppend en schreeuwend het Witte Huis uitdragen

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 14:08 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

MarshallCohen twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 01:29:29 Roger Stone's latest pitch to his email list of supporters boils down to this: Donate right now because, literally, I am the next guy to get indicted. https://t.co/sWAx2BQtSJ reageer retweet

[ afbeelding ]

39 jaar de koffie rondbrengen. Dat is toch ook geen carrière?

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 15:39:02 A big deal looking good with Mexico! reageer retweet

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 15:42 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 15:39:02 A big deal looking good with Mexico! reageer retweet

Kan dit buiten NAFTA zonder dat Canada meedoet?

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 15:20:30 Manafort saw managing the 2008 Republican Convention as almost a birthright, according to The Atlantic. But McCain denied him the job. He couldn’t abide Manafort's pro-Russian clients—and told him so, a rejection that sent Manafort into a fit of rage. https://t.co/vJOyyBNk4d reageer retweet

quote:

A central feature of John McCain’s biography was his capacity for change. After he sullied himself in the Savings and Loan scandal of the late eighties, he self-consciously transformed into a warrior on behalf of the cause of political reform. And then, in the course of his insurgent challenge to the anointed candidacy of George W. Bush—which McCain referred to as the “Death Star”—he came to understand how the mindless libertarianism of his early political career didn’t fully reflect his true beliefs. McCain began to criticize the regressive tax cuts that he once supported—what began as a tactical maneuver, then seemingly acquired the weight of conviction. Luke Skywalker didn’t win that fight, but he returned to fight the Bush tax cuts in the Senate.

This is what made McCain so admirable to those who disagree with his politics: a profound sense of humility, openness to learning from his own error, an ability to adjust core beliefs in response to changing evidence, an insatiable hunger for rebellion.

SPOILER

One of John McCain’s mistakes, which he would belatedly rectify, was a relationship with the just-convicted lobbyist Paul Manafort. It was really more of an association. John McCain was the type of man who attracted loyalists, a father-figure who scooped up eager wannabe sons. If you hung around his world long enough, you got a taste for how his closest aides would fight each other for his attention, how they would cudgel and knife one another to achieve primacy in his eyes. Many of these aides have proven themselves as worthy proteges, inheriting the mentor’s eagerness for an internecine fight and forming the core of the Never Trumper movement.

Some of McCain’s proteges, however, also included the ranks of lobbyists. McCain had a strange blindness to their presence, which could be most charitably described as fierce loyalty. At the same time as he sincerely railed against influence peddlers—and he presented himself as a successor to Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive-era crusading—his inner circle contained the very forces he decried. One of these loyalists was the man who eventually managed his campaign in the 2008 presidential race, Rick Davis. For nearly a decade, Davis was the named partner in Paul Manafort’s lobbying firm, Davis, Manafort.

All the intramural squabbling that made McCain’s inner circle so entertaining to cover also makes it hard to clearly decipher. Rival McCainland tribes often posit competing narratives of events. Best I can tell, Paul Manafort viewed McCain’s 2008 campaign as an easy mark. He hoped to leverage his relationship with Rick Davis to enrich himself and to endear his firm to clients. One of his first ploys was to create a business (called 3eDC) that would sell the campaign proprietary software to manage websites and online fundraising—which earned Manafort a lucrative contract with the McCain operation. (After aides complained to McCain about 3eDC, he canceled the contract, although the campaign had already spent $1 million on it.) Evidence from Manafort’s recent troubles with the law have shown his inability to convert a PDF document to Microsoft Word, which makes it hard to believe that he once presented himself as a tech entrepreneur.

Davis Manafort’s most prized client in 2006 was the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, one of the richest men in the world. At the time, Deripaska had the esteem and ear of Vladimir Putin, who considered him one of his most important proxies. Davis and Manafort helped Deripaska to rub shoulders with McCain. They introduced McCain to Deripaska at a party in Davos in 2007; seven months later, they brought McCain to Deripaska’s yacht, which was anchored off Montenegro, where the oligarch hosted a seventieth birthday party for the Arizona senator. (The actress Anne Hathaway also attended those festivities.) This story is fully told in an outstanding investigative piece, published by The Nation.

What The Nation described is a sort of tangled relationship with lobbyists that McCain so eloquently denounced in other contexts; it also showed McCain getting perilously close to an ally of the Kremlin, even as he denounced Vladimir Putin. McCain should have seen these dangers earlier, and he should have reacted more furiously upon discovering them. Davis’ rivals in the campaign had denounced Davis so often and for so long that perhaps it caused McCain to discount their warnings about Manafort.

McCain took these complaints seriously only after Davis’ rivals charged Manafort with owning an apartment in Trump Tower, allegedly purchased by Oleg Deripaska. (There’s no evidence that I have seen to bolster that allegation, although Manafort was, indeed, in the midst of further entangling himself with the Russian oligarch in various other business ventures.) As McCain considered these allegations, he began to articulate the menace represented by Paul Manafort. One McCain aide told me the candidate instructed Davis and Manafort to cease their firm’s ties with its pro-Russian clients—an edict that Manafort apparently ignored.

According to McCain aides, the crucial moment came in the planning for the 2008 convention. I was told that Manafort lobbied desperately to become manager of the Republican National Convention, to take on the role of orchestrating the show. This was the sort of job that he held several times before. It represented the sort of behind-the-scenes power that he sought his entire career. Because of his relationship with Davis, and because of his resume, he thought of the job as something close to his birthright. But McCain didn’t want any further association with Manafort, so he denied him the job, a rejection that sent Manafort into a fit of rage and depression. All the evidence for rejecting Paul Manafort as a man of dubious character was amply available in 2008—and McCain acted upon it.

During the approximate time that McCain was mulling these decisions, I remember watching him at a town hall meeting in Northern Virginia. I remember crowding into a sweaty gymnasium—and listening to him discourse on the history of political reform and the legacy of the McCain-Feingold legislation. What he described was a cycle: In a moment of fervor, responding to instances of malfeasance, the country would enanct new, stricter limits on acceptable political behavior. But, after a time, complacency would set in. The forces of corruption would discover the loopholes in the new limits and find novel methods for feasting on the system. Eventually, the public would reawaken to the problem and a sense of fervor would descend again, creating the conditions for a new set of reforms to impose even more stringent limits. There was no escaping this cycle, he said, no alternative to imperfect reforms. In a way, he was describing his own history on the subject—how he sometimes failed, but ultimately recovered and then spoiled for a fight.

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 16:11:47 This underscores how *widely known* Manafort's shady Russian ties were when Trump hired him in March 2016 https://t.co/CmeEpD7Uts reageer retweet

twitter:

agearan twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 15:55:14 U.S., Mexico reach partial agreement to resolve trade conflict, a step towards a NAFTA deal https://t.co/7tAa20QJtF reageer retweet

twitter:

GeoffRBennett twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 13:12:35 The flags at the White House are back at full staff this morning. Traditionally, sitting senators who die in office have flags lowered in their honor from date of death until burial. And we've received no presidential proclamation for McCain. reageer retweet

twitter:

tedlieu twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 16:13:55 Dear #SecDef: You served on active duty. As a nation mourns McCain, it would be appropriate to lower the flag to half staff at all @DeptofDefense buildings. I respectfully request you give that order, regardless of the views of @realDonaldTrump. It is the honorable thing to do. https://t.co/KSHnUuYPPc reageer retweet

twitter:

tedlieu twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 16:06:39 Dear @SecPompeo: You served on active duty. As a nation mourns McCain, it would be appropriate to lower the flag to half staff at all @StateDept buildings. I respectfully request you give that order, regardless of the views of @realDonaldTrump. It is the honorable thing to do. https://t.co/yIllKANhMq reageer retweet

twitter:

tedlieu twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 15:38:57 Dear @SecretaryZinke: You served on active duty. As a nation mourns McCain, it would be appropriate to lower the flag to half staff at all @Interior buildings. I respectfully request you give that order, regardless of the views of @realDonaldTrump. It is the honorable thing to do https://t.co/HnxooCDRfP reageer retweet

quote:

"We are worse off than where we were when the summit happened because, in the meantime, China and Russia have alleviated sanctions pressure on North Korea. We've also unilaterally canceled our military exercises with South Korea with our own president even labeling these exercises provocative which certainly unnerved Japan," said Sean King, senior vice president at public policy and business development firm Park Strategies.

Even during the June summit, King said, both parties seemed to have misunderstood to what the other was agreeing.

"Trump thinks he (Kim) said he will give up his nukes and then we will work toward some kind of peace deal. But in Kim's mind, it is the end of the U.S.-South Korea alliance first and then maybe he will denuclearize," King said.

King suggested that part of the problem was a difference of opinion about strategy within the White House.

"You have a professional staff that is talking a hard line, and the president feels he could do his own deal based on personal chemistry. It is like we have two parallel administrations and North Korea is trying to exploit that," King said.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 15:50:00 No tweets from the president yet about the shooting in Jacksonville. reageer retweet

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 16:50:12 WASHINGTON (AP) — Nation's top official overseeing student loans resigns, citing White House hostility to protecting borrowers. reageer retweet

quote:

The federal official in charge of protecting student borrowers from predatory lending practices has stepped down.

In a scathing resignation letter, Seth Frotman, who until now was the Student Loan Ombudsman at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says current leadership "has turned its back on young people and their financial futures." The letter was addressed to Mick Mulvaney, the bureau's acting director.

In the letter, obtained by NPR, Frotman accuses Mulvaney and the Trump administration of undermining the CFPB and its ability to protect student borrowers.

"Unfortunately, under your leadership, the Bureau has abandoned the very consumers it is tasked by Congress with protecting," it read. "Instead, you have used the Bureau to serve the wishes of the most powerful financial companies in America."

The letter raises serious questions about the federal government's willingness to oversee the $1.5 trillion student loan industry and to protect student borrowers.

SPOILER

Frotman has served as Student Loan Ombudsman for the past three years. Congress created the position in 2010, in the wake of the financial crisis, as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. As Ombudsman and Assistant Director, Frotman oversaw the CFPB's Office for Students and Young Consumers and reviewed thousands of complaints from student borrowers about the questionable practices of private lenders, loan servicers and debt collectors.

Since 2011, the CFPB has handled more than 60,000 student loan complaints and, through its investigations and enforcement actions, returned more than $750 million to aggrieved borrowers. Frotman's office was central to those efforts. It also played a role in lawsuits against for-profit giants ITT Tech and Corinthian Colleges and the student loan company, Navient.

Over the past year, the Trump administration has increasingly sidelined the CFPB's student loan office. Last August, the U.S. Department of Education announced it would stop sharing information with the bureau about the department's oversight of federal student loans, calling the CFPB "overreaching and unaccountable" and arguing that the bureau's actions were confusing borrowers and loan servicers alike. Of the move, Frotman writes, "the Bureau's current leadership folded to political pressure... and failed borrowers who depend on independent oversight to halt bad practices."

In May, Mulvaney called for a major shake-up in Frotman's division. The Office for Students and Young Consumers would be folded into the bureau's financial education office, signalling a symbolic shift in mission from investigation to information-sharing. While the CFPB told NPR at the time that the move was "a very modest organizational chart change," consumer advocates reacted with alarm.

Mick Mulvaney was tapped to run the CFPB while also serving as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Before joining the Trump administration he was a Republican Congressman from South Carolina and a fierce critic of the bureau he now manages. He once called the CFPB "a joke ... in a sick, sad kind of way" because, Mulvaney argued, it often acted above the law with no accountability to Congress.

Frotman has served at the CFPB for seven years, since its inception. He arrived in early 2011 as part of the Treasury Department's implementation team. Frotman began in the Office of Servicemember Affairs as senior advisor to Holly Petraeus. That office was instrumental in expanding servicemember protections under the Military Lending Act and in cracking down on lenders and retailers that preyed on servicemembers.

The CFPB did not immediately respond to a request for comment. This story will be updated.

quote:

Republicans on the Hill have again and again claimed that there is no Donald Trump scandal worth investigating. But in a sign that maybe they aren’t operating totally on the level, Jonathan Swan at Axios reports that a “senior House Republicans office” has compiled a spreadsheet of all the things they believe House Democrats will investigate if they win a majority in November — and they are terrified what these inquiries might turn up.

In total defiance of the (flawed) logic of the Madisonian constitutional system, Republicans have used their control of the congressional agenda to stymie any kind of rigorous investigation into dozens of urgent scandals swirling around the Trump administration.

Swan reports that “it has churned Republican stomachs” and includes the following:

SPOILER

• President Trump’s tax returns

• Trump family businesses — and whether they comply with the Constitution’s emoluments clause, including the Chinese trademark grant to the Trump Organization

• Trump’s dealings with Russia, including the president’s preparation for his meeting with Vladimir Putin

• The payment to Stephanie Clifford — a.k.a. Stormy Daniels

• James Comey’s firing

• Trump’s firing of U.S. attorneys

• Trump’s proposed transgender ban for the military

• Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s business dealings

• White House staff’s personal email use

• Cabinet secretary travel, office expenses, and other misused perks

• Discussion of classified information at Mar-a-Lago

• Jared Kushner’s ethics law compliance

• Dismissal of members of the EPA board of scientific counselors

• The travel ban

• Family separation policy

• Hurricane response in Puerto Rico

• Election security and hacking attempts

• White House security clearances

The striking thing about it is that almost everything on this list is stuff that’s urgently worthy of investigation. Maybe one or two items here (the emails thing, for example) could be characterized as partisan grandstanding that’s likely to be irresistible to Democrats but doesn’t serve a real public purpose.

But of course Congress should be looking into election security and Trump’s dealings with Russia, especially since many Republican members of Congress in their own public statements have acknowledged that there’s something weird about Trump’s takes on these matters.

Of course Congress should be trying to understand how the White House botched its “zero-tolerance” border enforcement initiative so badly that there are still hundreds of children separated from their parents. Of course the business dealings of Cabinet secretaries and the president’s family should be overseen by Congress.

quote:

It’s natural, normal, and almost certainly inevitable for Congress to go softer on a same-party president than they would on an opposite-party president. But the sheer length and gravity of this list is an indictment of congressional Republicans’ total abdication of their responsibilities to the country.

But instead of seeing it that way, they’re just using it as a scare story to try to motivate greater effort toward winning the midterms so they can continue the coverup.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 17:50 schreef AnneX het volgende:
Het raaskaalt weer live met president elect van Mexico over de “ elegante” naam voor de U.S.-Mexico agreement. Fascinerend.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 17:50:07 Can't stop watching Trump trying to get the President of Mexico on speakerphone. (via CBS) https://t.co/1KDrFHV2qp reageer retweet

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 17:55 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

[..]

Filmpje in de tweet:

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 17:50:07 Can't stop watching Trump trying to get the President of Mexico on speakerphone. (via CBS) https://t.co/1KDrFHV2qp reageer retweet

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 17:55 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

[..]

Filmpje in de tweet:

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 17:50:07 Can't stop watching Trump trying to get the President of Mexico on speakerphone. (via CBS) https://t.co/1KDrFHV2qp reageer retweet

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 18:37 schreef Szura het volgende:

[..]

Gvd

twitter:

JenniferJJacobs twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 18:26:50 Lots of warmth between Trump and Mexico's Enrique Peña Nieto, who was on speaker phone in Oval Office for trade deal announcement. Peña Nieto offered a "toast, with tequila, of course" to celebrate. And Trump told him, at end of call: "A hug from you would be very nice." reageer retweet

twitter:

jdawsey1 twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 00:33:18 Lanny Davis, Michael Cohen's lawyer, tells the Post on the record that he was saying things he did not know to be true. https://t.co/gLmhRo6v9i reageer retweet

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 20:01 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Hoppa dealtje met Mexico.

twitter:

JenniferJJacobs twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 18:26:50 Lots of warmth between Trump and Mexico's Enrique Peña Nieto, who was on speaker phone in Oval Office for trade deal announcement. Peña Nieto offered a "toast, with tequila, of course" to celebrate. And Trump told him, at end of call: "A hug from you would be very nice." reageer retweet

De advocaat van Cohen heeft zijn grootste keutel ingetrokken

twitter:

jdawsey1 twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 00:33:18 Lanny Davis, Michael Cohen's lawyer, tells the Post on the record that he was saying things he did not know to be true. https://t.co/gLmhRo6v9i reageer retweet

Can't stump the T R U M P

twitter:

AaronBlake twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 17:57:32 Trump: "So we made a deal with Canada."Aide corrects him that it's actually with Mexico. reageer retweet

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 20:54 schreef Ulx het volgende:
https://edition.cnn.com/2(...)ces-drill/index.html

Noord-Korea roept nu dat de VS op het oorlogspad is. Daar moet Trump ook even ingrijpen zonder een oorlog te starten.

Succes Don.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 20:46 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:

twitter:

AaronBlake twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 17:57:32 Trump: "So we made a deal with Canada."Aide corrects him that it's actually with Mexico. reageer retweet

[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 21:34 schreef Ulx het volgende:
https://twitter.com/kelliwardaz/status/1034097219752742912?s=19

"Political correctness is like a cancer", aldus Senaatkandidaat voor Arizona Kelli Ward vandaag.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 21:36 schreef pullup het volgende:

[..]

De reacties op die tweet zijn de moeite waard.

Wat een kreng is dat

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 21:34 schreef Ulx het volgende:
https://twitter.com/kelliwardaz/status/1034097219752742912?s=19

"Political correctness is like a cancer", aldus Senaatkandidaat voor Arizona Kelli Ward vandaag.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 21:39 schreef Kansenjongere het volgende:

[..]

Dat was toch dat mens dat dacht dat John McCain zijn behandeling opgaf om haar campagne te saboteren?

twitter:

Reuters twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 19:51:06 From the White House to Broadway: Anthony Scaramucci brings a musical about the Trump family to the stage https://t.co/2lIirKQY2q reageer retweet

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 21:55 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:

twitter:

Reuters twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 19:51:06 From the White House to Broadway: Anthony Scaramucci brings a musical about the Trump family to the stage https://t.co/2lIirKQY2q reageer retweet

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 20:09 schreef Szura het volgende:
Hee Donnie, wil je nog wat zeggen over Sjon McKeen?

[ afbeelding ]

Trump ignores questions on John McCain 3 times

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 22:23 schreef Klaphark het volgende:
Weer krediet bij een grote groep mensen verspelen omdat je niet snapt dat je in de VS van oorlogshelden af moet blijven :’) En zelf lekker met smoesjes niet in dienst gaan. De domheid is onmeetbaar.

twitter:

EamonJavers twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 21:42:31 There’s been a lot of focus on this today, but the White House flag is now at half staff, after being fully raised earlier in the day. https://t.co/MPZvGjnN7T reageer retweet

quote:

My fellow Americans, whom I have gratefully served for 60 years, and especially my fellow Arizonians, thank you for the privilege of serving you and for the rewarding life that service in uniform and in public office has allowed me to lead. I've tried to serve our country honorably. I've made mistakes, but I hope my love for America will be weighed favorably against them. I've often observed that I am the luckiest person on Earth. I feel that way even now as I prepare for the end of my life. I've loved my life, all of it.

I've had experiences, adventures, friendships enough for ten satisfying lives and I am so thankful. Like most people, I have regrets but I would not trade a day of my life in good or bad times for the best day of anybody else's. I owe the satisfaction to the love of my family. One man has never had a more loving wife or children he was prouder of than I am of mine. And I owe it to America to be connected with America's causes, liberty, equal justice, respect for the dignity of all people brings happiness more sublime that life's fleeting pleasures. Our identities and sense of worth are not circumscribed but are enlarged by serving good causes bigger than ourselves.

Fellow Americans, that association has meant more to me than any other. I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world's greatest republic. A nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world. We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. We have acquired great wealth and power in the progress. We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been. We are 325 million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates.

But, we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country, we'll get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before. We always do. Ten years ago, I had the privilege to concede defeat in the election for president. I want to end my farewell to you with heartfelt faith in Americans that I felt so powerfully that evening. I feel it powerfully still. Do not despair of our present difficulties, we believe always in the promise and greatness of America because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit, we never surrender, we never hide from history, we make history. Farewell fellow Americans. God bless you and god bless America.

twitter:

thehill twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 20:58:06 Poll: Beto O'Rourke within 1 point of Cruz in Texas Senate race https://t.co/Voxe6n91OD https://t.co/eKO0YOlQUS reageer retweet

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 21:18:31 BREAKING NEWS: "True Pundit," who spread the Russia-born "Pizzagate" conspiracy about Clinton's emails just days before Election Day 2016—with Team Trump's help—has outed himself as Michael Moore, former employee of......ex-RNC Finance Chair Steve Wynn. https://t.co/H89SaTQlaA reageer retweet

quote:

Days after former FBI lawyer Lisa Page testified in a closed-door meeting with the House Oversight and Government Reform and House Judiciary committees, pro-Trump website True Pundit published an explosive — and false — report about what she said.

The article cited anonymous “well-placed FBI sources” to claim Page revealed that Chinese hackers had accessed Hillary Clinton’s private server, stolen her emails, intercepted hundreds of top-secret documents including even the president's daily schedule — and that the FBI knew about it and did nothing.

In response, Page’s lawyer spoke publicly to say the story was unequivocally false. Even Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert — who has pushed the as-yet unproven claim that a foreign power “other than Russia” gained access to Clinton’s server — disputed the story about Page. He told Fox News she “apparently didn’t know” about anything related to China, directly contradicting True Pundit.

Regardless, the false story generated more than 22,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook, and was a hit on Twitter, where famed Trump supporter Bill Mitchell shared it. (The story was also copied by notorious fake news peddler YourNewsWire, which generated another 77,000 Facebook engagements.)

SPOILER

The most Twitter engagements for the article were generated by the owner of True Pundit, who uses the handle @Thomas1774Paine and goes by the historical pseudonym Thomas Paine. He shared the link more than 25 times to his close to 200,000 followers, generating thousands of retweets and likes.

“MSM Quiet on This One -- Wonder Why?” Paine tweeted, suggesting big media outlets were covering up his false scoop.

It was classic Paine: publish a false story that paints the FBI and Hillary Clinton in a bad light, credit the information to anonymous sources, and claim the mainstream media is covering it all up.

Since launching the site in June 2016, Paine and True Pundit have carved out a unique niche among the news grifters capitalizing on our conspiracy-laden, deeply polarized information environment. As New York Magazine noted in a piece debunking two True Pundit stories, Paine is “fluent in the paranoid language of 2016 social media.”

Paine combines the use of a pseudonym with almost exclusive use of anonymous sources to establish the persona of a deeply connected reporter with a vast network of FBI, law enforcement, and government sources. As with the Page story, he adds false or conspiracy-filled claims to real events or documents in order to create the impression of being rooted in fact. And the retweets, traffic, and supporters have rolled in.

True Pundit is frequently cited by other hyperpartisan and conspiracy websites, and its stories are shared by prominent pro-Trump figures such as former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, actor James Woods, and others.

One of Paine’s 2016 stories even led to an email exchange between then–FBI director James Comey and his former deputy, Andrew McCabe, about whether True Pundit really had sources inside the FBI. Paine, of course, seized upon that as evidence that he’s as well-sourced as he claims. (He loves to criticize the bureau: The site has used the phrase “Federal Bureau of Incompetence” in the headline of five different stories.)

The question of who’s behind True Pundit has itself become the source of wild theories. Viral #resistance tweeter Seth Abramson dedicated an 84-tweet thread to True Pundit and Paine. Abramson argued that True Pundit was being fed information by “a cadre of pro-Trump FBI agents and intel officers — some active, some retired — [who] conspired to swing the election to Trump.” (Another Twitter user investigated the account and concluded it’s a fake persona concocted by the Trump campaign’s social media team.)

More credibly, Zachary Elwood, an author of poker books who also investigates social media accounts, published a detailed investigation of True Pundit at whoistruepundit.com that revealed a litany of details about Paine’s identity.

Among the many clues: Paine and his lawyer say he is based in the Philadelphia area; he has talked publicly about covering the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 as a newspaper reporter; he used to run a Twitter account called @HockeyIntel before changing his handle to @Thomas1774Paine; and he once tweeted a photo of what he said is his Gerald Loeb Award, a prestigious business journalism prize.



Could Paine really be perhaps the best-sourced reporter in America when it comes to big cases being investigated by the FBI, NYPD, and other agencies? Is he someone federal agents would leak incredibly sensitive information to, at the risk of being fired and/or prosecuted? Or is he using his pseudonym to conceal relevant details about his background that further undermine his many dubious claims?

To get answers, BuzzFeed News investigated Paine and True Pundit’s social media accounts, business and court records, and other publicly available information. They reveal that Thomas Paine is in fact Michael D. Moore, 51, a Pennsylvania man with a background in journalism, a criminal record as a result of an FBI investigation, and a long history of shady and illegal business practices.

After being contacted for comment, Moore did not respond and instead published a story on his website confirming BuzzFeed News' reporting.

Just as Paine has publicly stated, Moore won a Loeb Award in 1996 while working for the Record, a New Jersey newspaper. He also authored at least some coverage of TWA Flight 800: A copy of the front page of a New Jersey newspaper from Sept. 12, 1996, features a story with his byline that examined airport security in light of the crash. (To read how BuzzFeed News found Moore, see the section, “Connecting Michael D. Moore to True Pundit and Thomas Paine” at the bottom of this story.)

Paine has also talked publicly about leaving journalism in the late ’90s to work in “intelligence.” During that same time period, Moore created a company called Dig Dirt that he described as an investigations service. He left his newspaper job to work on it full-time. The company’s site is now offline, but as recently as the fall of 2016 it contained language that directly echoes the messaging of True Pundit.

“We subordinate our desire for public recognition and publicity to the ever-growing need for confiendiality [sic] and LOYALTY. Old School,” said the Dig Dirt site.

True Pundit’s Patreon says it’s “creating old school journalism,” and the Paine Twitter account constantly refers to things as “old school.”

The Patreon’s description also says True Pundit offers “investigative intelligence unmatched elsewhere.”

Dig Dirt’s tagline? “Investigative intelligence.”

Moore also has a connection to the FBI that could explain True Pundit's fixation with the agency: he was arrested by federal agents in November 2011 for running two websites that sold pirated hockey DVDs and downloads. Months earlier, FBI agents executed a search warrant on his home and carted off the equipment he used to pirate hockey games and other content.

Moore pleaded guilty to one count of copyright infringement in June 2013. He was sentenced to time served of one day in prison, a year of house arrest, and three years of supervised release. During his release he had to provide monthly income statements and facilitate the “investigation of his financial dealings,” according to a sentencing document filed on June 17, 2013.

And so, almost exactly three years later, with probation and its financial disclosure requirements behind him, Moore launched True Pundit.

He didn’t waste any time pumping up its credentials. “True Pundit has folks who worked for the FBI and other agencies on staff,” claimed one of the site’s earliest articles.

Moore's hastily-published admission that he is in fact Thomas Paine made it clear that his case later fed his motivation to start a site that would hit back at the FBI.

"These bastards — and their bosses — were going to pay for violating my family. My kids. My home. One way or the other, I would have the last word," he wrote. "As I have throughout my life and career. And I was going to have to go back into journalism to even the score."

Many would have found it hard to believe that a man who’d been recently been arrested by the bureau, and pleaded guilty, now had former FBI employees on staff at his just-launched website.

But no one knew that True Pundit was the work of Michael D. Moore. Instead, it was Thomas Paine, his Loeb award, and all of his impressive-seeming anonymous sources pumping out frequently false stories to fire up the pro-Trump base.



When he launched True Pundit, Moore was careful to cover his tracks. He registered the domain privately, and later created a Delaware limited liability corporation, True Pundit Media LLC, through a third-party administrator. (Delaware LLCs do not require that the beneficiaries be publicly disclosed.)

Moore appears to have avoided using existing personal emails or social media accounts as contacts or administrators for his new project, or even to promote the site. This level of operational security makes sense in light of the fact that one of Dig Dirt’s main services was finding people. Moore knew how to hide.

"It's very hard for a legitimate individual to become invisible," he told the Columbus Dispatch in a 2000 article about his company.

Like True Pundit, Dig Dirt boasted of having strong connections to the intelligence and law enforcement communities.

“To enhance DigDirt.com's investigative arsenal, the company also uses a number of former federal agents who spent their respected careers in agencies including the Secret Service, Central Intelligence Agency and Internal Revenue Service among others,” read the company’s About page in October 2000.

It’s unclear to what extent, if at all, Moore was in contact with former federal agents while running Dig Dirt. His website also made the eye-popping claim that in just a few years of operation the company had solved “more than 20,000 cases in over 100 countries.”

Rather than describing the company as a global investigative or intelligence agency, media articles about Dig Dirt that quoted Moore typically described it as an “online research firm,” “information broker,” or “public-records search firm.”

Dig Dirt was also the source of negative online comments from private investigators who used the service. One thread of messages on alt.private.investigator included complaints about being overcharged for services that didn’t work, having prices raised without notice, and receiving incorrect data. Moore’s subsequent businesses, including his illegal DVD and downloads operation, also left a trail of irate customers who said they’d been ripped off.

Moore started and ran Dig Dirt while he was still working full time as a reporter for the Record, a newspaper in New Jersey. In 1996, the year he shared a prestigious Loeb award with two colleagues, the paper found out about Moore’s side hustle and opened an internal investigation.

Editors were concerned he might have used his press access to public records to benefit his business. Moore was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing, though the paper’s editor said the business “very clearly created the appearance and potential for a conflict of interest,” according to an article in Editor & Publisher.

Moore resigned and spoke out about what he felt was mistreatment at the hands of the paper’s leadership. "I think it's a problem when colleagues are actually investigating you with the permission of the newspaper," Moore said. "It's like a bad movie, and that's the main factor why I couldn't go back to work there."

Criticism of mainstream media now permeates the work of True Pundit. “One of the reasons you launch your own media site is to say what the main-stream media and other pundits simply won’t say. It’s called the truth,” he wrote in one story. (Moore’s also not a fan of BuzzFeed, or of the author of this story.)

But in spite of his disdain for traditional media, Paine’s Twitter bio claims some very mainstream accolades. It identifies him as a winner of a Loeb, which is true. It also claims Paine/Moore is a "2-Time Pulitzer Prize” investigative reporting nominee, and that he received a“George Polk Political Reporting” nomination. Neither is true. The Polk Awards does not announce nominees, only winners. The Pulitzers began announcing “finalists” in 1980, and Moore has never been one.

The Polk Awards told Elwood, the independent researcher, that True Pundit submitted a story for consideration for the 2017 awards. Anyone can make a submission; it is not a “nomination.” But True Pundit published a false article claiming it had received a "coveted" nomination anyway. (The Paine Twitter account has also falsely claimed to have won a Polk Award.)

Once out of journalism in the late ’90s, Moore became embroiled in lawsuits. In 1999, he sued the Washington law firm Steptoe & Johnson for $10 million. Moore’s suit alleged that people working for the firm had hacked into Dig Dirt’s websites hundreds of times, posted defamatory messages about him online, “and tried to cover it all up by doing their evil deeds under an e-identity swiped from an Alexandria, Virginia, furniture store owner,” according to a report in Wired at the time.

One key element of the case involved Moore’s ownership of a domain name that was similar to the URL of a competing investigation service used by the law firm. Moore in part alleged that the firm’s people had attempted to penetrate his systems via that URL. The firm, however, said the visits to the website were a mistake and the result of Moore cybersquatting on the domain.

The suit was dismissed with prejudice in August 2000 by agreement of all parties.

Also that year, Moore’s cybersquatting came back to haunt him. He was ordered to pay $25,000 in damages for squatting on six domains that contained names of law firms. When representatives of the firms contacted him to object to his ownership of the URLs, Moore asked for money, according to a news brief from the International Trademark Association.

“The complaint also claimed that Mr. Moore diluted and detracted from the distinctiveness of the firms' trademarks by using the domain names to advertise his investigative services business,” it said.

Delaware corporate records indicate that Dig Dirt still owes $525 in back taxes dating from 2003, and that the company has not filed an annual report since 2000. It’s unclear how active Dig Dirt was from 2000 onwards. A scaled-down version of the website remained online until late 2016 before being taken fully offline after True Pundit launched. Moore, however, had long been working on other businesses by then.

As early as 2007, according to website archives and domain ownership records, Moore was selling Irish peat logs. That company soon became the focus of angry customer reviews online.

“I too could not get a response from either irishpeat.com or moore and assosciates [sic] … It's been over 5 weeks and I have not received my item,” read one review from 2009.

Others also complained of paying for but not receiving their orders. The same kind of complaints can be found online about hdhockey.com and broadstreetbullies.com, the sites Moore used for his illegal hockey DVD and downloads business. It was in operation as early as 2006, according to a federal indictment. Domain records from DomainTools suggest both sites may have changed ownership as early as 2004. (Moore also owns a company called Moore & Associates that was registered in Pennsylvania in 1999, according to state records. It’s unclear what this company does, but it remains active.)

“I've been after this douche for years after he ripped a ton of people on here years ago. Kharma [sic] is a bitch!” wrote one person on the hockeyfights.com message board after learning of Moore’s arrest. The thread was soon filled with others who said they had paid for DVDs that never arrived. (One person, however, said he’d received his order.)

Even today, Moore is still engaged in his old habit of copyright infringement. Patrick Brown, CEO of Liftable Media, which publishes Conservative Tribune and the Western Journal, told BuzzFeed News he would be contacting True Pundit to demand it stop “stealing the first 10 paragraphs or so of our content” in articles on the site. (True Pundit has many articles that consist entirely of several paragraphs of a story published elsewhere, with a link to “read more.”)

“We will be reaching out to True Pundit to ask them to cease and desist regarding the text,” Brown said in an email.

The True Pundit YouTube channel was also terminated at some point since early June due to “multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy against spam, deceptive practices and misleading content or other Terms of Service violations.”



Given that he was busy selling Irish peat logs and pirated hockey content, it’s difficult to know how much, if any, investigative work Moore did in the decade or more before launching True Pundit. And when the site launched he had been out of journalism for roughly 20 years.

Did Moore maintain whatever contacts he might have had in the heyday of Dig Dirt and his newspaper career? Would these contacts have reengaged with a convicted criminal fresh off probation and now writing under a pseudonym? And what useful current information could longtime former agents have about current investigations and cases?

What’s clear is that Moore’s background in journalism, at Dig Dirt, and in online marketing gave him the skills needed to create incredibly suspect and outright false stories that spread widely among pro-Trump networks on Facebook and Twitter. True Pundit’s bread and butter — what drives viral traffic to the site and inspires Paine’s supporters on Patreon — are the stories often credited to its “investigative bureau.”

A review of True Pundit’s top-performing content on Facebook and Twitter reveals many false stories and those built on big unverified claims that veer into the realm of conspiracy. Its biggest hit on Facebook is a November 2016 story that helped contribute to the creation and spread of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. It has generated more than 174,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook, been shared on Twitter more than 15,000 times, and received more than 19,000 upvotes and comments on Reddit.

“BREAKING BOMBSHELL: NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes with Children, Child Exploitation, Pay to Play, Perjury,” read the headline.

The story was built on the recent news that the FBI had reopened an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails after discovering messages on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner, the husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

In the end, the FBI found that the emails in question were largely duplicates, and soon closed the investigation. But before that happened, True Pundit quoted “NYPD sources” to claim that there was enough information on the laptop “to put Hillary (Clinton) and her crew away for life.”

It quoted one “NYPD Chief” saying, “What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach.”

The story also claimed that this senior NYPD officer was ready to go public with the contents of the laptop if they were not released by the FBI. But in reality, no incriminating information was found on the laptop about perjury, money laundering, or child exploitation related to Clinton or any of her advisers. And in spite of the anonymous “NYPD Chief” declaring the emails had “turned [his] stomach,” no such emails ever surfaced. (Weiner pleaded guilty to federal obscenity charges related to text messages and Skype chats with a minor.)

Clinton is a frequent target of the site. True Pundit was the source of the made-up claim that Clinton once asked “Can’t we just drone this guy?” about Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. Paine’s report cited “State Department sources” and relied on a total misrepresentation of standard State Department language. The story was soon amplified by WikiLeaks itself, as well as by Infowars, Russia Today, and others. It generated more than 83,000 engagements on Facebook and was shared on Twitter more than 80,000 times. (It's also the story True Pundit submitted for a Polk Award.)

The false claim that Hillary Clinton used a tiny earpiece during one of the presidential debates also originated with True Pundit. It cited “NYPD sources involved with the NBC forum’s security detail.” Fox News, Infowars, and others picked it up. (Donald Trump Jr. also tweeted the resulting Infowars story.)

The site has also falsely claimed that Clinton used hand signals with one of the debate moderators during a 2016 presidential debate, and that she was drunk one morning before a campaign rally.

The FBI is another favorite target. The site published a series of conspiracy-laden stories alleging that the bureau’s leadership covered up evidence suggesting that Las Vegas mass shooter Stephen Paddock was not alone. One story also falsely claimed Paddock was a member of Antifa and that “FBI & Vegas police worked hard to conceal Paddock’s politics.”

The site also speculated that Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooter Omar Mateen was an FBI informant, and that the agency was trying to cover that up. Moore later updated his theory to say “definitively” that Mateen was either an FBI informant or he was somehow radicalized by FBI informants during a botched operation. (Neither are true, though Mateen’s father was an informant.)

More recently, True Pundit has been focused on stories that paint the picture of a broad conspiracy involving every US intelligence agency, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, former attorney general Loretta Lynch, British intelligence, Sen. John McCain, former US attorney Preet Bharara, former deputy attorney general Sally Yates, and others in an illegal plot to prevent Trump from winning the election.

The site has also claimed that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Michael Flynn were all wiretapped as part of this plot as early as 2015. (It’s no surprise, then, that in one of his YouTube appearances as Paine, Moore voiced praise for Infowars conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, a major proponent of the Qanon conspiracy theory.)

David Gomez is a former FBI national security executive who reviewed several True Pundit stories at the request of BuzzFeed News. He said some displayed a lack of understanding about basic FBI procedures.

"The key thing that I took away from those stories is that a lot of the quotes and a lot of the factual situations that he relates do not ring true based on my 28 years of experience in the FBI," Gomez said in an interview.

Gomez said it's possible True Pundit is in touch with a former agent or two, but said the articles do not reflect the work of someone with high-level bureau sources and insight into ongoing investigations.

"I think he may have one or two people that’s he talking to on a regular basis. I think it would be the same person providing a similar type of information," Gomez said. "But I also think, and it’s clear from his writing, that he’ll also take a bit of what someone says and spin it. And I don't for a second believe his quotes."

In some cases, Moore (as Paine) later claimed his “exclusives” were correct when news broke that was tangentially related. His story that helped feed the Pizzagate conspiracy now carries five bullet points at the top that reference subsequent events as if they support his initial report.

The fact that Weiner later pleaded guilty to federal obscenity charges is cited as proof of True Pundit’s claim that his laptop would show evidence of “Child exploitation” and “Sex crimes with minors (children).” In reality, the laptop was originally obtained by law enforcement as part of its investigation into Weiner for exactly those reasons. But none of True Pundit’s claims about the laptop having evidence of crimes by Clinton or others proved true.

None of that stopped the site from boasting in June of this year that its story was correct. As evidence, it cited the FBI inspector general’s report about bureau activity leading up to the 2016 election. In a section about Weiner’s laptop, the report contained a reference to “crime against children” and the “sexual exploitation of children.” As noted above, the investigation into him sexting with a minor was why law enforcement obtained his laptop in the first place. Neither reference to child exploitation in the report was connected to Clinton or anyone other than Weiner.

True Pundit claimed vindication anyway. “So who in the media or some of the other half-witted critics out there in social media land are going to be the first to apologize for hammering True Pundit’s reporting in 2016?” its story asked.

Any of the above stories alone should do deep damage to a site’s credibility, and its ability earn revenue and attract an audience. But the opposite has happened for True Pundit, according to traffic measurement services Alexa and SimilarWeb.

Over the past period of nearly a year, as other conservative sites struggled with low or inconsistent traffic, True Pundit has enjoyed a climb in audience.

Moore also sells True Pundit merchandise, has close to 250 people supporting a Patreon, and earns advertising revenue thanks to an arrangement with Revcontent. (A 2017 analysis by BuzzFeed News found that Revcontent was monetizing more fake news sites than any other ad network. The company responded by labeling the story fake news.)

For a period this summer, True Pundit was also working with Intermarkets, a Washington ad firm that handles advertising for the Drudge Report, among other prominent conservative sites.

“We no longer work with Truepundit.com,” said Kary Jones, the manager of publisher development for Intermarkets, in an email to BuzzFeed News. “You can reach out to them directly.”

Jones did not answer follow-up questions about how long they worked together or why the relationship ended.

Unmasking Moore and revealing his criminal history, potential grudge against the FBI, lack of recent work in journalism or investigations, and string of false stories attributed to anonymous sources should cause many to discount True Pundit as a source.

But the reality is his audience is already invested in his fake scoops about the deep state, out-of-control federal agencies, and child exploitation. They will almost certainly stay with him. Moore can simply portray himself as yet another victim of the FBI, mainstream media, and deep-state complex, all while promoting his Patreon and True Pundit merchandise.

twitter:

Thomas1774Paine twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 20:55:07 The Deep State are going to wish this genie stayed in the bottle. MORE TO COME. I am public now. GLOVES OFF. reageer retweet

As Moore has demonstrated over the last two years, there’s a fake angle for every real story. ●

Connecting Michael D. Moore to True Pundit and Thomas Paine

Before he became Thomas Paine, Moore was @HockeyIntel on Twitter. With that account, he showed a particular interest in smaller leagues such as the United States Premier Hockey League. He also displayed the same combativeness and ego that would come to the forefront when he later switched to @Thomas1774Paine. (Twitter allows people to swap one username for another and keep their followers and old timeline.)

But prior to taking on his Paine account and persona, Moore unwittingly left enough clues on his old hockey account to connect the dots.

As part of his research into True Pundit, Zachary Elwood collected old tweets that referenced @HockeyIntel. BuzzFeed News noted that another Twitter account, @Dig_Dirt, often replied to threads to support @HockeyIntel’s comments.

In one 2014 tweet, @Dig_Dirt jumped in on a thread between @HockeyIntel and another account. The phrasing of the tweet (“As a parent … we know the scoop.”) suggested the same person might be running both @Dig_Dirt and @HockeyIntel:



That account had earlier shared a YouTube video of a young defenseman with the last name Moore. The person running @Dig_Dirt also spoke about the player in another tweet as if they were his parent. From there, BuzzFeed News was able to determine that the player’s father is Michael D. Moore. Research on Moore quickly revealed he fit all of the disclosed characteristics of Thomas Paine’s real identity.

Another link between Moore and True Pundit is that the @Thomas1774Paine Twitter account has twice praised tweets sent from the Twitter account of the sports apparel company run by Moore’s son, the former hockey player.

In the end, Moore’s careful work to conceal his true identity was undone by a sockpuppet account and a father’s pride.

CORRECTION

Seth Abramson's Twitter thread about True Pundit and Thomas Paine argued that the site was being fed information by “a cadre of pro-Trump FBI agents and intel officers — some active, some retired — [who] conspired to swing the election to Trump.” He did not claim that these people were running the site.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 22:42 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
A final statement from Sen. John McCain, who died Saturday at 81, read by his spokesman Rick Davis:

[..]

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 22:46 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

thehill twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 20:58:06 Poll: Beto O'Rourke within 1 point of Cruz in Texas Senate race https://t.co/Voxe6n91OD https://t.co/eKO0YOlQUS reageer retweet

quote:

The Kushner family real estate company has been fined $210,000 by New York City regulators following an Associated Press investigation that showed it routinely filed false documents with the city claiming it had no rent-regulated tenants in its buildings when it, in fact, had hundreds.

The city buildings department on Monday fined the Kushner Cos. for filing 42 false applications for construction work on more than a dozen buildings when presidential adviser Jared Kushner ran the business.

The false documents allowed the company to escape extra scrutiny during construction that watchdog group Housing Rights Initiative has said led to harassment of low-paying, rent-regulated tenants to get them to leave.

The Kushner Cos. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

twitter:

NatashaBertrand twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 23:10:18 Roger Stone says in an Instagram video that a story is coming in The New Yorker which says Stone explicitly told Trump in October 2016 that WikiLeaks had/was going to dump the Podesta emails. https://t.co/GrQC8eIB8c reageer retweet

quote:

Paul Manafort’s defense team held talks with prosecutors to resolve a second set of charges against the former Trump campaign chairman before he was convicted last week, but they didn’t reach a deal, and the two sides are now moving closer to a second trial next month, according to people familiar with the matter.

The plea discussions occurred as a Virginia jury was spending four days deliberating tax and bank fraud charges against Mr. Manafort, the people said. That jury convicted him on eight counts and deadlocked on 10 others. Prosecutors accused Mr. Manafort of avoiding taxes on more than $16 million he earned in the early 2010s through political consulting work in Ukraine.

The plea talks on the second set of charges stalled over issues raised by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, one of the people said. It isn’t clear what those issues were, and the proposed terms of the plea deal couldn’t immediately be determined.

Representatives for Messrs. Manafort and Mueller declined to comment.

SPOILER

The talks were aimed at forestalling a second, related trial for Mr. Manafort, which is scheduled to begin on Sept. 17 in Washington.

Prosecutors and defense lawyers have been arguing over how to describe that case to the jury and what evidence can be presented at trial. They are scheduled to discuss those issues at a hearing Tuesday morning before U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson.

Mr. Manafort faced two separate trials on related allegations in neighboring districts because he declined to let prosecutors combine the charges into one case. From a defense perspective, such a move can force prosecutors to fight two battles and divide resources.

The plea discussions on the Washington case represent a softening in posture for Mr. Manafort, who has fought charges brought by Mr. Mueller’s 15-month investigation longer and more aggressively than other defendants in the probe.

Three other former Trump campaign aides, including former Manafort business associate Richard Gates, pleaded guilty to lying to investigators and other crimes not core to Mr. Mueller’s mandate of examining Russian interference in the 2016 election. Twenty-five Russians have also been charged with hacking and other crimes. Moscow denies any election meddling.

The Virginia indictment charged Mr. Manafort with filing false tax returns between 2010 and 2014 and misleading multiple U.S. banks to obtain millions of dollars in loans in 2016, after his Ukraine income allegedly dried up.

Prosecutors have said the tax fraud charges against Mr. Manafort could result in a prison term of eight to 10 years, but some other tax-related sentences have fallen well below that.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis, who oversaw Mr. Manafort’s Virginia case, last year sentenced a retired business school professor to seven months after he pleaded guilty to hiding $220 million in foreign accounts and not paying $18 million in federal and state taxes.

Unlike Mr. Manafort, that defendant had previously paid a $100 million penalty to the U.S. Treasury and cooperated in the investigation.

After Mr. Manafort’s Virginia conviction last week, a juror said the vote on the other 10 counts was 11-1 in favor of conviction. The juror, a self-described Trump supporter, told Fox News the evidence was “overwhelming,” and that the other jurors had tried to convince the lone holdout to switch her vote.

Prosecutors have until Wednesday to report whether they plan to retry Mr. Manafort on the deadlocked counts. For now, both sides appear to be preparing for the Washington trial.

In that case, prosecutors accuse Mr. Manafort of not registering in the U.S. for his lobbying work for the Ukrainian government between 2008 and 2014, and of conspiring to launder millions of dollars in income from that work to hide it from U.S. authorities.

In June, prosecutors added charges accusing Mr. Manafort of trying to influence the testimony of potential witnesses. That prompted Judge Jackson to send Mr. Manafort to jail as he awaited trial.

In a filing late Friday, prosecutors said they expected to take 10 to 12 days to present their case. Last week they turned over to Mr. Manafort’s team more than 1,500 exhibits they plan to present.

Mr. Manafort’s attorneys said they weren’t sure if they would present a defense, but if they did, it could take three or four days. They said they were in the process of identifying expert witnesses who could testify on money-laundering and foreign-lobbying registration rules.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 00:45:23 Interest contrast: Just last week, Trump praised Manafort, tweeting, "unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to 'break'." https://t.co/SqlFBaIIUc reageer retweet

quote:

A panel of three federal judges held Monday that North Carolina’s congressional districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered to aid Republicans over Democrats, and said it may require new districts before the November elections, possibly affecting control of the House.

The judges acknowledged that primary elections have already produced candidates for the 2018 elections but said they were reluctant to let elections take place in congressional districts that courts have twice found violate constitutional standards.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 20:01 schreef Nintex het volgende:

De advocaat van Cohen heeft zijn grootste keutel ingetrokken

twitter:

jdawsey1 twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 00:33:18 Lanny Davis, Michael Cohen's lawyer, tells the Post on the record that he was saying things he did not know to be true. https://t.co/gLmhRo6v9i reageer retweet

Can't stump the T R U M P

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op maandag 27-08-2018 om 01:36:38 I think many will misread this news. As I said earlier this week, Davis needs to walk back his claims because making those claims publicly hurt his client by (a) angering Mueller, and (b) teasing what Cohen has in a way that hurts his bargaining position. https://t.co/npgRPdKIMy reageer retweet

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 02:30:29 The General Services Administration I.G. has released an in-depth report showing that Trump was involved in scuttling plans by the FBI to build a new headquarters that would have created large construction zones near Trump's D.C. hotel.https://t.co/7DV9xWAsl9 reageer retweet

quote:

President Donald Trump was more intimately involved in the debate over relocating the FBI headquarters than Congress was told, a new inspector general report finds.

Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, a Democrat representing parts of Northern Virginia, said the report he requested from the General Services Administration IG confirmed his suspicions that the president was involved in the decision to scrap plans to vacate the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, and move the agency to a campus location in either the Maryland or Virginia suburbs.

“When we began this investigation, the prospect that President Trump was personally involved in the government-led redevelopment of a property in close proximity to the Trump Hotel was dismissed as a conspiracy theory,” Connolly said in a statement. “Now, the president’s involvement in this multi-billion-dollar government procurement which will directly impact his bottom line has been confirmed by the White House Press Secretary and government photographs.”

SPOILER

The report criticized as incomplete and potentially misleading congressional testimony to a House Appropriations subcommittee by GSA Administrator Emily Murphy regarding the change of direction.

The exchange in question involved questioning from Rep. Mike Quigley. The Illinois Democrat is the ranking member on the Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee.

“Murphy told us that she believed her answers to Representative Quigley were truthful,” the report said. “We agree that her responses were literally true.”

But beyond that, the IG found significant issues with the scope of the testimony, since she did not mention conversations with top Trump administration officials, including the president himself.

“However, we found that because she omitted any mention in her answers of her discussions with [Chief of Staff John] Kelly, [Office of Management and Budget Director Mick] Mulvaney, and the President during the decision-making process for the Revised FBI Headquarters Plan, her testimony was incomplete and may have left the misleading impression that she had no discussions with the President or senior White House officials in the decision-making process about the project,” the Monday report said.

The IG report confirms the existence of direct interaction with Trump about the project.

“Murphy told us that she attended two meetings about the FBI project at the White House on January 24, 2018. The first meeting occurred in Kelly’s office, and immediately preceded the second meeting,” the report said. “The second meeting was in the Oval Office with the President.”

Also at that meeting to update Trump on the decision-making process were Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., wrote to Murphy earlier this month to try to give her an opportunity to clarify earlier Senate testimony on the same topic.

In addition to raising more questions about the level of Trump’s personal involvement in a project that could easily affect the value of his nearby hotel at the Old Post Office Building, the IG report casts doubt on cost estimates provided to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee back in February, which suggested that a move to the suburbs would actually be more expensive than rebuilding on the same land.

“The plan shows that the JEH rebuild would cost less and require less additional funding than the JEH exchange,” the report said. “However, we determined that the JEH rebuild will have a higher project cost and require more additional funding than the JEH exchange would have.”

In part, the issue is that the on-site rebuild would involve the relocation of 2,306 FBI employees to other facilities across the country in places such as Huntsville, Alabama, and Pocatello, Idaho. The GSA report indicates those expenses were not properly counted in the proposal presented to the Environment and Public Works Committee.

“The IG review acknowledges an indisputable fact: the Administrator’s congressional testimony was truthful. As the FBI’s representative stated under oath before [EPW], the FBI made the decision to keep its headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. GSA is unaware of any White House involvement in the FBI’s decision,” the GSA said in a statement in response. “Further, GSA stands by the cost analysis in its revised plan, as those numbers are accurate, transparent, and more representative of the full costs of the project than the analysis put forth in the IG review.”

In response to the report, Connolly wants the executive branch to go back to the drawing board.

“Regarding the future of this procurement, we must wipe the slate clean in light of these troubling revelations. The GSA and FBI must return immediately to the plan for a fully consolidated FBI headquarters at one of the sites selected as part of the original procurement,” he said in a statement. “The hardworking men and women of the FBI deserve a functional headquarters without further delay.”

quote:

A Department of Interior official who oversaw last year’s drive to shrink two massive national monuments in Utah has left the department to join BP’s government affairs team, a spokesman for the energy giant confirmed Monday.

Former deputy chief of staff Downey Magallanes served as a top adviser to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke from the time he took over the department. Her portfolio included policy as well as operations, which encompassed a push to expand oil, gas and mining production on public lands and in federal waters.

“Downey was an incredible asset and I trusted her to carry out some of the Administration’s highest priority projects,” the secretary said in a statement. “She will be missed in our office and I wish her all the best.”

Magallanes left Interior last week and will join BP just after Labor Day.

SPOILER

“I am grateful to Secretary Zinke and President Trump for giving me the chance to serve in the Department of the Interior,” she said in an email. “I look forward to this incredible new opportunity with BP.”

BP spokesman Jason Ryan echoed that sentiment but declined to elaborate on what Magallanes would do in her new job.

According to two individuals familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it involved a personnel issue, Magallanes, a former aide to Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), would work on congressional relations. Her father, Frederick Palmer, served as a lobbyist for Peabody Energy from 2001 to 2015.

Trump’s ethics pledge bars political appointees from lobbying their respective agencies for five years after leaving office, and from lobbying anyone in the executive branch for the rest of his administration.

But Stephen Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, an advocacy group, said in an email: “Her prior work on behalf of oil, gas and coal, her family’s ties to the coal industry, and the fact that she is headed to BP all point in one direction: that she came to Interior with an agenda to promote fossil fuel development over the interest of the American public.”

He added: “Magallanes was intimately involved in the lead up to President Trump’s unlawful attack on the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, a decision that was immediately challenged by Native American tribes, conservationists, and businesses. We’ll be working to undo that mischief long after she’s gone.”

Trump’s decision in December to shrink the boundaries of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments by 85 percent and 46 percent, respectively, is likely to open up parts of once-protected areas to oil and gas drilling, as well as mining claims.

Magallanes — who worked on offshore drilling plans and regulatory reform, among other issues — met with BP officials three times between Jan. 30 and Aug. 31, 2017, according to official calendars released under the Freedom of Information Act. Those sessions included a March 16, 2017, meeting with top officials from BP’s government and regulatory affairs division and an April 25, 2017, meeting with BP Exploration (Alaska), along with a Western Energy Alliance gathering on April 25 whose attendees included Sam Knaizer, a BP government affairs official based in Colorado.

Magallanes is the second high-ranking official to leave Interior within a week. Vincent DeVito, the department’s energy counselor, stepped down late last week and will return to private practice, a move first reported by E&E News.

DeVito, whom Zinke praised as helping “set the course for energy dominance in the first term of this administration,” has not announced where he is headed. A former Energy Department official and Zinke campaign aide, DeVito worked on overhauling federal royalties for energy exploration as well as federal permitting rules.

Aaron Weiss, spokesman for the environmental group Center for Western Priorities, cited the two departures as evidence that the Trump administration is “filling” the swamp in Washington rather than draining it.

“In the last week, two of his top lieutenants have left to cash in on their policy decisions by moving to the private sector,” he said in an email.

twitter:

NewsHour twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 01:06:25 Could Cindy McCain replace her late husband in the Senate?"It would follow a long tradition of wives being named to their husband's seats after their husband has died," says @tamarakeithNPR, pointing out that, historically, that's one way women have gotten into Congress. https://t.co/lTtxlVGYkh reageer retweet

twitter:

JohnWDean twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 02:38:09 Although this was John McCain’s last wish, Mitch McConnell will probably quietly move to block it fearing Cindy might vote with the Democrats against the anti-choice Kavanaugh, or for pro-immigrant policies her late husband sought along with other thinking Arizonans. https://t.co/JsMYLwVQ42 reageer retweet

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 23:31 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

21% undecided is nog wel erg veel. Maar een mens mag hopen.

quote:

The systematic “zero-tolerance” policy of removing children from their parents, as a means of deterring future migrant arrivals, was in effect for just six weeks. During that time, more than 2,600 minors were confiscated from their mothers and fathers and sent to government-run facilities. The most recent data, current as of Aug. 20, show that 528 of them — about a fifth — remain separated from their parents, most under the auspices of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Bron

quote:

I asked the current Administration official whether the outcry over family separation had caught the government by surprise. It had, the official said. “The expectation was that the kids would go to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, that the parents would get deported, and that no one would care.” Yet, when it became clear that the public did, the Administration chose not to change course.

Bron

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 04:11 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

NewsHour twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 01:06:25 Could Cindy McCain replace her late husband in the Senate?"It would follow a long tradition of wives being named to their husband's seats after their husband has died," says @tamarakeithNPR, pointing out that, historically, that's one way women have gotten into Congress. https://t.co/lTtxlVGYkh reageer retweet

twitter:

JohnWDean twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 02:38:09 Although this was John McCain’s last wish, Mitch McConnell will probably quietly move to block it fearing Cindy might vote with the Democrats against the anti-choice Kavanaugh, or for pro-immigrant policies her late husband sought along with other thinking Arizonans. https://t.co/JsMYLwVQ42 reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 08:30 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:ed

[..]

Hoe zou McConnell dat willen blokkeren afgezien van het masseren van de mening de governor van Arizona?

Het zou me trouwens ook niet verbazen als ze voor Kavanaugh zou stemmen. McCain heeft juist publiekelijk zijn steun uitgesproken voor hem.

Overigens zijn vandaag de primaries in Arizona.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 23:31 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

21% undecided is nog wel erg veel. Maar een mens mag hopen.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 11:24:35 Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of... reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 11:28 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 11:24:35 Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of... reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 11:28 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 11:24:35 Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of... reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 11:28 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 11:24:35 Google search results for “Trump News” shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of... reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 11:34:44 ....results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed! reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 11:36 schreef Chewie het volgende:
Als Trump dat zelf onderzocht heeft zegt dat toch meer over de search bubbel waar hij in zit

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 11:36 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 11:34:44 ....results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed! reageer retweet

Vrij paranoïde geratel, zo 's ochtends vroeg. Maar dit gaat er wel als koek in bij de complotgekkies natuurlijk.

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 11:37 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Uiteraard, maar goed, leg jij dat maar eens aan hem uit.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 11:54:32 “President Trump has done more for minority groups in this country than any president in decades.” @LouDobbs reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 11:57:51 NASDAQ has just gone above 8000 for the first time in history! reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 12:11 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 11:57:51 NASDAQ has just gone above 8000 for the first time in history! reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 12:11 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 11:57:51 NASDAQ has just gone above 8000 for the first time in history! reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 12:04 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 11:54:32 “President Trump has done more for minority groups in this country than any president in decades.” @LouDobbs reageer retweet

Mee eens. Neem nu bijvoorbeeld miljonairs: Een duidelijke minderheid. En hij doet daar echt zijn stinkende best voor.

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 12:16 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:

[..]

De eerste beurzen daar zijn nog niet eens open?

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 12:16 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:

[..]

De eerste beurzen daar zijn nog niet eens open?

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 11:42 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Die man is echt totaal de weg kwijt.

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 11:36 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 11:34:44 ....results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed! reageer retweet

Vrij paranoïde geratel, zo 's ochtends vroeg. Maar dit gaat er wel als koek in bij de complotgekkies natuurlijk.

quote:

And what did the Florida's top legal officer discuss during her cable tryout? Not the state's renewed fight over stand your ground or a private beach law that has everyone confused (neither of which she has weighed in on). Nor the ongoing opioid crisis, for which she is spearheading a lawsuit against pharmaceutical companies.

Instead, Bondi opined on topics ranging from the Robert Mueller investigation and the murder of an Iowa jogger to new animal cracker boxes, whether kids should walk the dog alone and colleges that ban snowball fights.

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 14:05 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Kan hij een eventuele straf tegelijk uitzitten met de straf uit de andere zaak of stapelt men deze ook bij een veroordeling?

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 14:36 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Ik las juist dat hij tot 305 jaar de nor in kon gaan. Dat leek me dus een gevalletje straffen stapelen.

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 14:52 schreef clumsy_clown het volgende:

[..]

Preet Bharara legt het uit in z'n laatste podcast-aflevering.

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 14:56 schreef Euribob het volgende:

[..]

Heb je daar een linkje van?

twitter:

paulkrugman twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 15:12:36 By far the best explanation of whatever it is Trump sort-of negotiated with Mexico. Read @ChadBown for the real analysis; I just have a few further thoughts 1/ https://t.co/sYeayf5Bup reageer retweet

twitter:

paulkrugman twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 15:15:05 The deal appears to impose fairly onerous requirements on new Mexican auto plants if they want to qualify for tariff-free access to the US market. Bown suggests that Mexican producers would find it cheaper to ignore the reqs and pay the 2.5% tariff on non-NAFTA autos 2/ reageer retweet

twitter:

paulkrugman twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 15:16:35 Trump could block this by imposing a 232 -- that is, national security -- tariff on nonconforming Mexican auto exports. But this would be a travesty -- a clear violation of the spirit of international trade rules 3/ reageer retweet

twitter:

paulkrugman twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 15:18:31 Trump presumably doesn't care. But then the question: is the tariff (a) only on Mexico, or (b) global? If (a), this hurts Mexican production vis-a-vis European and Asian. Since Mexican cars contain a lot of US parts, this probably destroys US auto jobs 4/ reageer retweet

twitter:

paulkrugman twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 15:20:32 If (b), it's a big step toward all-out global trade war. Is this the plan? Probably not: they're backing themselves into it with a shoddily constructed agreement and lack of clear thinking 5/ reageer retweet

twitter:

paulkrugman twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 15:22:10 The only way this doesn't get ugly fast is if Bown is wrong, and the requirements on Mexico aren't really binding. But in that case this is a Potemkin agreement, pure theater without substance. And u know what? Trump et al surely have no idea which it is 6/ reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 15:15 schreef clumsy_clown het volgende:

[..]

https://www.npr.org/podca(...)reet?t=1535462107091

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 15:22 schreef Klaphark het volgende:
Manafort kan miss wel 300 jaar krijgen, maar dat wordt gewoon een pardon.

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 15:37 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

Én een gevalletje hoofdpijn voor Trump. Manafort moet dan schuld bekennen. En zal dan onder ede zijn voormalige werkgever in grote problemen brengen.

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 16:56 schreef Klaphark het volgende:

[..]

En dan gewoon zwijgen en weer pardon krijgen. Kan gewoon.

quote:

Op maandag 27 augustus 2018 23:21 schreef Whiskers2009 het volgende:
Sorry hoor, maar dit vind ik echt
Amerikaans superioriteitsdenken en holle frasen-galore.

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 17:39 schreef Ringo het volgende:

[..]

Eens, maar dat vind ik ook van de wollenkousenretoriek van Obama. Alsof je naar een monoloog van Kevin Sutherland in Designated Survivor zit te luisteren. Links, rechts, republikein of democraat, het is één grote wolk gezwollen nietszeggendheid. Het is een imitatie van Hollywood geworden.

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 17:45 schreef Monolith het volgende:
Kevin, is dat de tweelingbroer van Kiefer?

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 16:54 schreef Montov het volgende:
Waarom zou Trump een pardon geven aan Manafort? Die veroordeling heeft helemaal niets te maken met Trump. Dat heb in dit topic gestaan. Ok, Trump heeft meermalen over dit proces getweet, maar Trump tweet over zoveel issues waar hij niet serieus aan een oplossing werkt.

twitter:

ShimonPro twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 18:05:52 Manafort’s attorney told the judge they plan to ask to move the trial out of DC. reageer retweet

twitter:

ddale8 twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 12:43:55 Trump’s “96%” complaint about Google is from an article by right-wing PJ Media that has been making the rounds online in the last day. It complains that the News tab for Trump brings up...news sites...rather than right-wing opinion sites...like PJ Media. https://t.co/RfEM6a0PRm https://t.co/HOfN7zyQm0 reageer retweet

twitter:

ddale8 twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 13:02:13 Here is the “bias” classification system the PJ Media uses. Among the “left-wing” outlets: the Associated Press, USA Today, Politico, The Hill, Bloomberg, Reuters (to which Trump just gave an interview)...In other words, this is all very silly. But you knew that. https://t.co/tfmcDbcMn4 reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 19:46 schreef gniffie het volgende:
Wie zijn trouwens de beste twitteraars om al dit leuks te volgen

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 20:01 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Onderzoek stelt dodental orkaan Maria op Puerto Rico bij van 64 naar 2.975 https://nu.nl/buitenland/(...)bij-van-64-2975.html (via @NUnl)

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 20:05 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:

[..]

Dat is nogal een bijstelling.

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 20:01 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

kyle griffin
paul krugman
Jim Acosta
Ted Lieu

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 20:01 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Onderzoek stelt dodental orkaan Maria op Puerto Rico bij van 64 naar 2.975 https://nu.nl/buitenland/(...)bij-van-64-2975.html (via @NUnl)

quote:

Republicans Push Back on Trump's Trade Gambit

The president threatened to leave Canada behind in renegotiating NAFTA. But lawmakers doubt he’s allowed to do that.
Congressional Republicans disregarded President Donald Trump's announcement Monday that he would pursue a bilateral trade deal with Mexico unless Canadian negotiators quickly agree to a framework for an updated trilateral North American Free Trade Agreement, arguing that his plan may not even be possible due to procedural constraints.

"That would be almost impossible as it's been described to me,” said Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson when asked about Trump’s plan. “About all we can really do is fix NAFTA and keep it as a three-party agreement, which I think, first of all, we should want that.”

Trump, announcing the understanding with Mexico, said that he would like to rename NAFTA the “United States-Mexico Trade Agreement.” The “agreement” — used in the loosest sense of the term — is preliminary. Many details haven’t been shared yet, though it represents a key breakthrough for U.S. and Mexican negotiators who have quibbled over auto manufacturing requirements for months. It would include new minimum wage requirements for a percentage of the vehicle manufacturing process ($16 an hour) and increase the amount of U.S. or Mexican content that must be included in each automobile, from 62.5 percent to 75 percent, in order to obtain duty-free status.

"We will see whether or not we decide to put up Canada or just do a separate deal with Canada, if they want to make the deal,” Trump said.

Because the White House has to notify Congress 90 days in advance of signing an agreement, negotiators have only until Friday to strike a deal if they want to finish a new NAFTA before current Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto is replaced by left-wing president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in early December. Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland is set to appear in Washington to meet with negotiators on Tuesday, but it remains to be seen just how flexible the Canadians are willing to be on a number of politically-sensitive issues, such as dairy tariffs. If Canada does not agree to a renegotiated NAFTA this week, the White House plans to notify Congress of the U.S.-Mexico deal on Friday instead, a senior Trump administration official told reporters on a phone call with reporters Monday afternoon.

“Ideally Canada will be in it and we’ll be able to notify that. If Canada’s not in, we’ll notify that we have an agreement with Mexico and we’re open to Canada joining us,” the official told reporters.

It is unclear why the office of the U.S. Trade Representative thinks this is an option.

In order to negotiate trade pacts quickly in accordance with Trade Promotion Authority, the White House has to notify Congress of its intentions in writing. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer did that in the spring of 2017—but with respect to NAFTA specifically, explicitly stating that both Mexico and Canada would be involved. “I am pleased to notify the Congress that the President intends to initiate negotiations with Canada and Mexico regarding modernization of the North American Free Trade Agreement,” Lighthizer wrote in his letter.

This kicked off a process that allows the administration to move more quickly in obtaining congressional approval, known as “ fast track” negotiating authority, which speeds up to process by limiting the amount of debate time available and preventing amendments from being submitted to trade agreements, among other things.

But Lighthizer has not taken any of the steps required to proceed on a bilateral basis to negotiate an entirely new U.S.-Mexico trade agreement. CNBC’s Kayla Tausche notes that the administration would have to ask Congress to approve the two-party negotiations and would later have to notify lawmakers of its plans to seek a vote on that trade deal. “That process would take, at a minimum, 180 days,” Tausche writes.

"What the administration submitted to Congress in setting up the opportunity to use TPA, and the expedited process that TPA allows, contemplated a revision to a tri-party agreement,” Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey told reporters on Monday night. “So it's my understanding that this has to be a tri-party agreement.”

SPOILER

Lighthizer — perhaps hedging his bets on the consistent reluctance of congressional Republicans to differ with the president — instead hopes to bypass the procedural hurdles of TPA, submitting a bilateral Mexican trade agreement instead of the trilateral NAFTA modernization he obtained approval for in the first place.

"I don’t think anybody’s envisioning that,” Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander said of a plan that the White House is most certainly envisioning. “Modernizing it is a good thing, but I hope that the president takes whatever agreement he has with Mexico and then gets one promptly with Canada and we'd get back to business.”

Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, often an ally of Trump’s on matters of trade, agreed that the final deal has to include Canada. “There is question about whether Trade Promotion Authority is allowed if you don't include Canada. But I prefer that if you're going to renegotiate NAFTA, you renegotiate with all three countries in it,” he said.

The chairmen of both congressional committees dealing with trade released statements lauding the progress that had been made with Mexico, but clearly signaling that they expect a three-party agreement in the end. “I look forward to carefully analyzing the details and consulting in the weeks ahead with my colleagues and constituents to determine whether the new proposal meets the trade priorities set out by Congress under Trade Promotion Authority,” House Ways and Means chairman Kevin Brady wrote.

And Senate Finance chairman Orrin Hatch said that a “final agreement should include Canada.” Asked specifically if Hatch thought a bilateral Mexican trade deal would be TPA-compliant, a spokesperson for the Finance committee reiterated, “The chairman’s preference is a trilateral agreement.”

If anything, given the procedural difficulty of a bilateral deal with Mexico at this point, the newfound solidarity between the United States and Mexico may be primarily intended to place additional pressure on Canada to make concessions. Mexico’s foreign minister appeared to be doing his part to strong-arm Ottawa into an agreement on Monday when he said that while a trilateral NAFTA is ideal, Mexico would be willing to continue towards its bilateral deal with the United States if Canada does not agree to a revised NAFTA by Friday.

Retiring Tennessee Republican Bob Corker raised the prospect that the U.S.-Mexico understanding was being exaggerated. “My guess is that this is more like Singapore and, you know, maybe there's not really …” he trailed off. “We'll see what comes out of it. I think all of us want to see. But you know, for it to work, you need a need a three-way deal.”

twitter:

ABC twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 23:44:28 FIFA head Gianni Infantino gifts Pres. Trump a red card for "when you want to kick out someone." The president jokingly pretended to give it to members of the media gathered in the Oval Office. https://t.co/NkJuIoyFEp https://t.co/RaMhiTUITc reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 23:59 schreef Nintex het volgende:

twitter:

ABC twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 23:44:28 FIFA head Gianni Infantino gifts Pres. Trump a red card for "when you want to kick out someone." The president jokingly pretended to give it to members of the media gathered in the Oval Office. https://t.co/NkJuIoyFEp https://t.co/RaMhiTUITc reageer retweet

Trump is weer helemaal de oude

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 22:20:06 Trump told Christian leaders that if the GOP loses, "they will overturn everything that we've done and they'll do it quickly and violently, and violently. There's violence. When you look at Antifa and you look ... these groups — these are violent people." https://t.co/JAvYYlkMk8 reageer retweet

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 00:16 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Hearing tonight from a surprising number of veterans and vets’ relatives who all say Trump’s handling of McCain’s death, esp the flag fiasco, did irreparable damage to their opinion of him, which had been positive until now.

WH & GOP, take note: It’s more serious than you think.

https://mobile.twitter.co(...)/1034259820386365441

Caveat: The plural of “anecdote” is not “data,” and these are still just anecdotes I’m hearing. Only when the next round of polling comes out will we learn if the data backs up the individual stories.

https://mobile.twitter.co(...)/1034261558396903424

Ik ben hier sceptisch over. Vooralsnog deed niks specifieks de naald bewegen van deze cultists en was het slechts het enthusiasme waar wel wat gemeten zou kunnen zijn. Nintex lijkt ook nog steeds achter hem aan te huppelen als een cultist. Komt bij dat er vooralsnog 2 polls zijn van trumps approval na de 25e, waar er volstrekt geen negatief effect is.

quote:

Op dinsdag 28 augustus 2018 23:59 schreef Nintex het volgende:

twitter:

ABC twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 23:44:28 FIFA head Gianni Infantino gifts Pres. Trump a red card for "when you want to kick out someone." The president jokingly pretended to give it to members of the media gathered in the Oval Office. https://t.co/NkJuIoyFEp https://t.co/RaMhiTUITc reageer retweet

Trump is weer helemaal de oude

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 00:57 schreef Freak188 het volgende:

[..]

Brrrr... die aalgladde infantillo. Die is ook geen haar beter (pun intended) dan z’n voorganger.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 00:03 schreef clumsy_clown het volgende:

[..]

Inderdaad.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op dinsdag 28-08-2018 om 22:20:06 Trump told Christian leaders that if the GOP loses, "they will overturn everything that we've done and they'll do it quickly and violently, and violently. There's violence. When you look at Antifa and you look ... these groups — these are violent people." https://t.co/JAvYYlkMk8 reageer retweet

quote:

"The level of hatred, the level of anger is unbelievable," he said. "Part of it is because of some of the things I've done for you and for me and for my family, but I've done them. … This Nov. 6 election is very much a referendum on not only me, it's a referendum on your religion, it's a referendum on free speech and the First Amendment.

[..]

"Now one of the things I'm most proud of is getting rid of the Johnson Amendment," the president said. "That was a disaster for you."

The president doesn't have the power to repeal a law -- only Congress can do that. The Supreme Court can also rule a law unconstitutional, but that has not happened in this case

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 00:55:09 Reuters confirms @NatashaBertrand scoop: Devin Nunes sought unsuccessfully to meet with the chiefs of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ on a recent visit to London.https://t.co/QxnYpVOqam reageer retweet

quote:

Earlier this month, as all eyes were on the courtroom dramas unfolding in Virginia—where President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman was just convicted on bank- and tax-fraud charges—and in New York—where the president’s longtime personal lawyer pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations and implicated Trump in a crime—the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee was in London, seeking out new information about the former British intelligence officer and Trump-Russia dossier author Christopher Steele.

According to two people familiar with his trip across the pond who requested anonymity to discuss the chairman’s travels, Devin Nunes, a California Republican, was investigating, among other things, Steele’s own service record and whether British authorities had known about his repeated contact with a U.S. Justice Department official named Bruce Ohr. To that end, Nunes requested meetings with the heads of three different British agencies—MI5, MI6, and the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. (Steele was an MI6 agent until a decade ago, and GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, was the first foreign-intelligence agency to pick up contacts between Trump associates and Russian agents in 2015, according to The Guardian.)

A U.K. security official, speaking on background, said “it is normal for U.K. intelligence agencies to have meetings with the chairman and members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.” But those meetings did not pan out—Nunes came away meeting only with the U.K.’s deputy national-security adviser, Madeleine Alessandri. The people familiar with his trip told me that officials at MI6, MI5, and GCHQ were wary of entertaining Nunes out of fear that he was “trying to stir up a controversy.” Spokespeople for Alessandri and Nunes did not return requests for comment, and neither did the press offices for MI5 and MI6. GCHQ declined to comment.

SPOILER

Steele, who authored a collection of memos sourced to Kremlin and campaign insiders alleging a conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Moscow to win the 2016 election, has been a fixation for Nunes ever since the document was published slightly more than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration. Last summer, two of Nunes’s staffers, Kash Patel and Doug Presley, traveled to London—without the knowledge of the U.S. Embassy or British government—in search of Steele, whose lawyer denied the staffers access to his client. This time, Nunes sought a work-around, I’m told. His trip to London at such a precarious moment for the president, and the intelligence agencies’ decision to decline him a meeting, is emblematic of the political island on which Nunes finds himself—along with a handful of other Trump allies in Congress and the media—as he continues his search for wrongdoing by the Justice Department.

Nunes, who served on Trump’s transition team, has been conducting a parallel investigation into the FBI and the DOJ since March 2017, when he first began examining whether top officials improperly “unmasked” and then leaked the names of Trump associates who surfaced in intelligence reports during the transition period. The unmasking scandal lost steam as Nunes shifted his attention to alleged surveillance abuses by the DOJ—a probe that Democrats said they did not approve and had no control over, but to which a group of House Republicans were privy. Earlier this year, Nunes alleged in a memo that the FBI had used intelligence passed to them by Steele to bolster the bureau’s application for a surveillance warrant targeting an early Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, while failing to disclose “the political origins” of Steele’s research to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. A copy of the FBI’s warrant application, however, directly contradicts that claim.

Ohr, a high-level Justice Department official whose wife works for the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS—the firm that hired Steele to research Trump’s Russia ties—has landed on Nunes’s radar, too. In an interview with the Fox News host Sean Hannity last month, Nunes said that Ohr “is at the heart” of the FBI’s alleged misconduct “because his wife was working for Fusion GPS.” There is no evidence that his wife’s work influenced his own, however. Ohr, who is scheduled to testify before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committee panels on Tuesday, has known Steele since 2007, when Steele was still in MI6, according to The New York Times. With the FBI’s knowledge and approval, Ohr met with Steele repeatedly from late 2016 to early 2017 to debrief him on any new intelligence he may have obtained about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Steele, a 20-year MI6 veteran whose work focused mostly on Russia, has worked with the FBI on and off for years, offering valuable intelligence on Russian organized crime.

Still, both Steele and Ohr—along with former FBI high-ranking officials such as Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe, and James Comey, all of whom have been fired in the past year—have been targeted by the president and his allies, who have characterized the Russia investigation currently being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a “witch hunt” that was launched because of the dossier. As the Times has documented, however, it was a young Trump campaign aide’s drunken disclosure that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton that led the FBI to investigate the campaign’s Russia ties. There is much to investigate in London, including the trail left there by the mysterious Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud who told George Papadopoulos about the Russian dirt to begin with. Nunes, however, continues to focus his attention on the investigators themselves—all in the name, many argue, of protecting the president at all costs.

quote:

A preliminary report on international trade for the month of July showed the U.S. trade deficit in goods widened last month to $72.2 billion from $67.9 billion in June.

The trade deficit in goods had narrowed slightly from February to May, and now appears to have widened two months in a row, although the data is preliminary and only covers trade in goods and not trade in services.

Exports of goods dipped to $140 billion last month from $142.5 billion in June, while imports of goods rose to $212.2 billion, up from $210.4 billion in June on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the Commerce Department’s latest “Advance Economic Indicators” report, which provides an early and partial snapshot of trade and inventories data.

Exports face a number of headwinds that could contribute to a wider trade deficit for the rest of the third quarter, which may ultimately weigh on third-quarter readings of gross domestic product.

“Export growth is expected to cool over the coming months, weighed down by more modest global momentum, a firmer U.S. dollar, trade tariffs and trade policy uncertainty,” said Oren Klachkin, lead economist for Oxford Economics, in a note.

The preliminary data report is not a major economic indicator, but has been watched by some economists in recent months for two reasons: First, because a narrowing of the trade deficit in the second quarter provided a lift to U.S. GDP, which clocked in at 4.1% growth at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate. If the preliminary data are confirmed in final reports, then part of the boost in second quarter GDP could be reversed in the third-quarter GDP report. That report, however, will not be released until October.

Macroeconomic Advisers lowered its tracking estimate of GDP growth for the third quarter by 0.1 percentage point to 3.1% based on the report.

The report has also been watched for any insight into whether President Trump’s trade actions are succeeding in reducing the U.S. deficit. Because the data are so volatile, however, it is too soon to provide meaningful answers.

The data may also be distorted by factors like soybean exporters rushing to ship their crop to China and other locations before agricultural tariffs take effect. That movement could now be going into reverse.

quote:

Trump’s preferred candidate, Rep. Ron DeSantis, decisively won the GOP nomination. Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, a liberal backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, claimed the Democratic nod in an upset.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 03:16:58 Report just out: “China hacked Hillary Clinton’s private Email Server.” Are they sure it wasn’t Russia (just kidding!)? What are the odds that the FBI and DOJ are right on top of this? Actually, a very big story. Much classified information! reageer retweet

Bombshell Report On Chinese Hacking of Hillary Clinton's Server, DCNF Reporter Dishes The Details

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 06:11:45 Hillary Clinton’s Emails, many of which are Classified Information, got hacked by China. Next move better be by the FBI & DOJ or, after all of their other missteps (Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr, FISA, Dirty Dossier etc.), their credibility will be forever gone! reageer retweet

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 06:20:12 The president is tweeting after midnight again. reageer retweet

The Rachel Maddow Show [FULL] 8/28/18 | The Rachel MSNBC Today Aug 28, 2018

quote:

House Republicans say the closed-door testimony of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr on Tuesday has heightened their concerns that federal authorities abused surveillance powers during the 2016 presidential election.

GOP lawmakers, trickling in and out of the roughly eight-hour interview, claimed Ohr indicated in his testimony that FBI officials knew more information than they led on in their application to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

Ohr, whom Republicans described as cooperative in his testimony on Tuesday, has come under increasing GOP scrutiny for his contacts with intelligence firm Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele, who were behind an opposition research dossier on Trump.
“Thus far, [Ohr] has done nothing but exacerbate my concerns that the FISA process has been abused,” Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), a House Judiciary Committee member, told The Hill.

SPOILER

House Republicans have long questioned whether federal authorities leaned too much on the dossier assembled by Steele and Fusion GPS, a controversial document containing a series of salacious allegations on the then-GOP candidate's ties to Russia.

Now, House Republicans are suggesting the FBI withheld key information in their application in order to obtain a warrant.

“Not only did the FBI know that the dossier was unverified, but they also knew there was real credibility issues or it would never end up in a courtroom because of the inherent way it was collected and the bias that was associated with that,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), one of the fiercest DOJ critics, noting that lawmakers have to verify such claims.

The FBI used Steele as a source in their application to obtain a surveillance warrant on Page, according to the heavily redacted FISA application released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) last month.

While the bureau noted in their application that Steele was a credible source who was likely “looking for information that could be used to discredit” Trump’s campaign, they still deemed him as a “reliable.”

The FBI continued to view Steele as reliable even after the bureau ended its relationship with him as a source over his unauthorized contacts with the press.

The Republican lawmakers declined to elaborate on the details the FBI may have omitted from the application, citing an ongoing interview that is being jointly conducted by the House Judiciary and House Oversight and Government Reform committees.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on the Republican assertions.

Majority and minority staff on the two committees questioned Ohr on Tuesday, though no Democratic lawmakers made an appearance for the interview. Seven Republicans attended the sit-down.

FISA applications go through a rigorous vetting and editing process at the FBI and DOJ in order to prevent unsubstantiated information from making it to the surveillance court. Not only is the FBI’s supervisory special agent required to sign “under penalty of perjury” that the information put it the FISA application is “true and correct,” but senior officials at the FBI and DOJ must also sign off on the application.

The U.S. government must show probable cause that the target of a FISA application is acting as an “agent of a foreign power” who is “knowingly” engaging “in clandestine intelligence activities” in order to obtain a warrant -- but it does not need to prove that a crimes have been committed.

Ratcliffe indicated that he believed Ohr’s testimony should be referred to John Huber, a U.S. attorney from Utah who is working with the DOJ’s inspector general to probe Republican-fueled allegations of surveillance abuse at the FBI and DOJ. Huber was quietly tapped by Attorney General Jeff Sessions last year.

“I would expect that his testimony and transcript today would be of interest to United States Attorney John Huber, who I understand has been tasked with investigating specifically whether or not the FISA process was abused as it related to obtaining a warrant on an American citizen named Carter Page,” Ratcliffe said.

In addition to Meadows and Ratcliffe, five other GOP lawmakers returned to Capitol Hill during the August recesses for the anticipated interview with Ohr, including Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

Republican lawmakers said they questioned the DOJ official on Tuesday about his wife, Nellie Ohr, who worked for Fusion GPS during the election as a contractor.

Glenn Simpson, co-founder of the opposition research firm, hired Steele to help compile the Trump dossier, which was funded in part by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Nellie Ohr's involvement has become a flashpoint among Republicans who hint at nefarious motivations, suggesting she was paid to create the dossier -- and could’ve possibly passed along the information to her husband at the DOJ.

No evidence to support such claims has been made public.

Bruce Ohr, a longtime government prosecutor, was demoted in December 2017 after the Justice Department learned he had been in touch with Steele. But Ohr has not been found to have mishandled sensitive information.

While GOP lawmakers did not disclose what Ohr said about his wife, they said he showed a willingness to discuss such matters.

Trump has repeatedly targeted Ohr in recent weeks on Twitter and in front of cameras, lifting the DOJ official's profile to new heights.

Ohr’s interview is part of a broader efforts by Republicans to unravel what they claim was bias against Trump among the top brass at the FBI and DOJ.

“What we really need to get to the bottom of this is: How come this culture existed at the very highest levels?” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) told The Hill in an interview. “What culture permitted people in these two agencies to basically act and operate as independent agents?”

Some Republicans have gone after the FBI’s use of FISA warrants during the election to attack special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which is investigating ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

Ohr is one of a handful of FBI and DOJ figures that the committees plan to interview as they seek to examine FBI and DOJ decisionmaking during the 2016 election. Former FBI general counsel Jim Baker is expected to be interviewed on Thursday, according to a GOP committee source.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 04:32 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
Trump-aligned Republican and African American Democrat who ran to the left win primaries

[..]

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 07:50 schreef Szura het volgende:
Ah nu heeft China de mails van Clinton gehackt

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 08:06 schreef Falco het volgende:

[..]

Dit soort openbare beschuldigingen zullen niet goed vallen bij de Chinezen

quote:

Christian Supremacist Mike Pence: God Is Calling Me To Be President

Mike Pence believes that God has called him to be president of the U.S., according to a new biography, “The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence.”

While Trump may be a crass and ignorant buffoon, Vice President Pence is much worse – a cold, cruel, religious extremist with dreams of a Christian theocracy.

Pence, who is fond of saying he is “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order,” is Sarah Palin without the charisma, a conservative Christian nightmare who rejects the separation of church and state, and places his Christian faith above the U.S. Constitution.

Lees verder

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 07:50 schreef Szura het volgende:
Ah nu heeft China de mails van Clinton gehackt

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 08:54 schreef Arcee het volgende:

[..]

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 08:54 schreef Arcee het volgende:

[..]

twitter:

thehill twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 05:16:06 Indicted GOP lawmaker says to "leave my wife out of it" after blaming her for the charges https://t.co/5QnLrPsoHh https://t.co/eJd1tD956e reageer retweet

quote:

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) on Tuesday told a reporter to "leave my wife out of it" as he discussed their recent indictment on charges of misusing campaign funds, days after he appeared to blame his wife, Margaret, for the charges.

"Leave my wife out of it. Leave my family out of it," he said in an interview with 10News, an ABC affiliate in San Diego. "It's me they're after anyway. They're not after my wife. They want to take me down. That's what they're up to."

Both Duncan and Margaret Hunter were indicted last week, charged with misusing at least $250,000 in campaign funds for personal expenses. Hunter is accused of using the funds to pay for trips to Italy and Hawaii, his family's dental work, his children's tuition and travel for relatives, among other personal expenses.

Hunter said in an interview on Fox News last week that his wife was responsible for the campaign spending.

"She was also the campaign manager, so whatever she did, that'll be looked at too, I'm sure," Hunter said at the time. "But I didn't do it. I didn't spend any money illegally."

Hunter has dismissed the charges against him as politically motivated, calling them a "witch hunt" on the part of the Department of Justice.

Hunter is up for reelection in California's 50th congressional district this November, when he'll face off against Democratic challenger Ammar Campa-Najjar.

quote:

Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) are working on a resolution that would rename the Russell Senate Office Building, named in honor of former Democratic Sen. Richard Brevard Russell (Ga.), after McCain.

But the proposal is facing skepticism, and in some cases outright opposition, threatening to inject partisan fighting into the chamber's bipartisan mourning.

ADVERTISEMENT
"Senator Russell was a well respected man from the South and up here too,” said Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), adding that he was “a man of his time.”
“He was a well-respected senator,” Shelby said.

Russell is considered controversial because of his opposition to civil rights legislation.

quote:

White House counsel Don McGahn is reported to be planning to step down this fall, and is tipped to be succeeded by Emmet Flood—a lawyer recently brought on for President Trump who also advised Bill Clinton during his impeachment hearings. Axios reports McGhan will step down either after Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court or after the midterm elections. Trump is said to not have settled on a successor, but Flood, who worked as special counsel in the George W. Bush administration, is reported to be the top internal choice. McGhan’s replacement could be in charge of handling subpoenas for documents and testimony if Democrats win control of the House in the midterms, and could end up in a constitutional fight if the White House ends up challenging special counsel Robert Mueller. McGhan has reportedly said privately, despite planning to step down, that he expects to continue to be of assistance to the president through the re-election campaign.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 12:45 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Renaming Senate office building after McCain sparks GOP backlash

[..]

De GOP wil dus een Democraat blijven eren in plaats van een Republikein.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 13:14 schreef Ulx het volgende:
a lawyer recently brought on for President Trump who also advised Bill Clinton during his impeachment hearings.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 13:25 schreef Szura het volgende:

[..]

De boel naar een oorlogsaanjager vernoemen gaat me ook wat ver

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 13:30 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Russell was van mening dat het aantal dooie japanse burgers onbelangrijk was. Maar dat was niet echt heel bijzonder.

twitter:

jules_su twitterde op woensdag 31-05-2017 om 14:14:33 HOLY SHIT HE ACTUALLY DID IT! I told Trump to spend more time with his son AND HE BLOCKED ME! https://t.co/iGxBodZRWB reageer retweet

twitter:

jules_su twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 01:57:30 WE DID IT GUYS!WE WON THE LAWSUIT!WE'RE FINALLY UNBLOCKED BY @REALDONALDTRUMP! https://t.co/yebQvNQhU2 reageer retweet

twitter:

jules_su twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 02:15:15 First order of business now that I’ve been #unblocked. https://t.co/5iuf3jtg3N reageer retweet

SPOILER

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 14:41:38 When you see “anonymous source,” stop reading the story, it is fiction! reageer retweet

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 15:07 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 14:41:38 When you see “anonymous source,” stop reading the story, it is fiction! reageer retweet

[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 14:13 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Trump is wel erg grappig:

Twitter Users Torch Trump Over Bizarre ‘I Remember Pearl Harbor’ Comments

Ik herinner me als de dag van gisteren de moord op Willem de Zwijger. Sterker nog: Ik denk dat het gisteren was.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 00:16 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Hearing tonight from a surprising number of veterans and vets’ relatives who all say Trump’s handling of McCain’s death, esp the flag fiasco, did irreparable damage to their opinion of him, which had been positive until now.

WH & GOP, take note: It’s more serious than you think.

https://mobile.twitter.co(...)/1034259820386365441

Caveat: The plural of “anecdote” is not “data,” and these are still just anecdotes I’m hearing. Only when the next round of polling comes out will we learn if the data backs up the individual stories.

https://mobile.twitter.co(...)/1034261558396903424

Ik ben hier sceptisch over. Vooralsnog deed niks specifieks de naald bewegen van deze cultists en was het slechts het enthusiasme waar wel wat gemeten zou kunnen zijn. Nintex lijkt ook nog steeds achter hem aan te huppelen als een cultist. Komt bij dat er vooralsnog 2 polls zijn van trumps approval na de 25e, waar er volstrekt geen negatief effect is.

twitter:

EamonJavers twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 16:37:48 President Trump confirms anonymously sourced Axios report just an hour after Tweeting that anonymously sourced reports are fiction: https://t.co/y53Sp8WFds reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 16:30:35 White House Counsel Don McGahn will be leaving his position in the fall, shortly after the confirmation (hopefully) of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court. I have worked with Don for a long time and truly appreciate his service! reageer retweet

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 12:45 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Renaming Senate office building after McCain sparks GOP backlash

[..]

De GOP wil dus een Democraat blijven eren in plaats van een Republikein.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 17:05:24 Ron DeSantis says on Fox that Florida shouldn't "monkey this up" by electing his opponent, the first African American to win a major-party nomination for governor in Florida. https://t.co/g9JvXhEesY https://t.co/jzb4Ud39ag reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 17:12:23 How the hell is Bruce Ohr still employed at the Justice Department? Disgraceful! Witch Hunt! reageer retweet

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 18:00:23 Trump's announcement of Don McGahn's departure came as a surprise, including to McGahn.He was not aware that Trump planned to send the tweet before it posted, a source tells WaPo.McGahn's reaction was, "Of course it happened this way."https://t.co/ltWJ4S6dlS reageer retweet

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 18:07 schreef Ulx het volgende:
https://gritpost.com/joe-arpaio-dead-last/


Aardig stuk over de afgang van Joe Arpaio in Arizona.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 18:10 schreef Szura het volgende:

[..]

Tot in de vergetelheid, ransaap

quote:

“Me? I’m not a racist,” he said in his Times interview. “Just yesterday I must have had 20 pictures taken with Hispanics from here to Yuma.”

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 17:07 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 17:05:24 Ron DeSantis says on Fox that Florida shouldn't "monkey this up" by electing his opponent, the first African American to win a major-party nomination for governor in Florida. https://t.co/g9JvXhEesY https://t.co/jzb4Ud39ag reageer retweet

Die maakt ook alles nog even duidelijk.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 15:55 schreef crystal_meth het volgende:

[..]

Waren die polls van na het vlag gedoe? Er zijn 21.8 miljoen veterans in de VS (cijfer van 2014), kan me voorstellen dat het voor sommigen wel een stap te ver was.

quote:

[..]

In an ironic twist, the committee complained in one memo that the narrative around marijuana is unfairly biased in favor of the drug. But rather than seek objective information, the committee’s records show it is asking officials only to portray marijuana in a negative light, regardless of what the data show.

[..]

Departments were told to “identify marijuana threats; issues created by state marijuana initiatives; and consequences of use, production, and trafficking on national health, safety, and security.”

The agencies should also provide an example of a “story, relating an incident or picture, that illustrates one or more the key areas of concern related to use, production, and trafficking of marijuana,” the White House guidance says. The agencies were asked to describe how the drug poses threats to their department and the consequences of marijuana “on national health and security.”

[..]

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 04:46 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 03:16:58 Report just out: “China hacked Hillary Clinton’s private Email Server.” Are they sure it wasn’t Russia (just kidding!)? What are the odds that the FBI and DOJ are right on top of this? Actually, a very big story. Much classified information! reageer retweet

Edit: Ow gevonden... bij de Daily Caller

Bombshell Report On Chinese Hacking of Hillary Clinton's Server, DCNF Reporter Dishes The Details

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 20:01:00 An FBI official is refuting this report that Trump tweeted about."The FBI has not found any evidence the (Clinton) servers were compromised," the official told NBC News. https://t.co/Ut2I9EBwJE https://t.co/4m7I1Qlasf reageer retweet

quote:

Sixteen hours after President Trump tweeted about a right-wing media story alleging that China hacked Hillary Clinton’s private email server, an FBI official is refuting the report in a comment to NBC News.

"The FBI has not found any evidence the (Clinton) servers were compromised," the official said.

It’s the latest example of the widening breach between a president who traffics in unverified news accounts and the law enforcement agencies he frequently maligns.

The FBI official, speaking for the bureau, also pointed to a report issued in June by the Justice Department inspector general that examined the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server.

In the report, the IG noted that while the FBI assessed that it was "possible" that hostile actors gained access to Clinton’s private email server, the bureau "acknowledged that the FBI investigation and its forensic analysis did not find evidence that Clinton’s email server systems were compromised."

According to the IG report, an FBI forensics agent assigned to the case told investigators that, although he did not believe there was "any way of determining...100%" whether Clinton’s servers had been compromised, he felt "fairly confident that there wasn’t an intrusion." When asked whether a sophisticated foreign adversary was likely to be able to cover its tracks, he stated, "They could. Yeah. But I, I felt as if we coordinated with the right units at headquarters...for those specific adversaries.... And the information that was returned back to me was that there was no indication of a compromise."

SPOILER

The FBI statement came after a right-wing media organization, the Daily Caller, published a story alleging that "a Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton’s private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails." The story cited two sources briefed on the matter.

The story cited a remark at a July hearing by a conservative Republican congressman, Louis Gohmert of Texas, that another inspector general — the Intelligence Community Inspector General — found that virtually all of Clinton’s emails were sent to a "foreign entity."

The story said the Chinese firm "obtained Clinton’s emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server, " and that "the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation."

The story appeared to prompt this tweet last night by Trump:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 03:16:58 Report just out: "China hacked Hillary Clinton's private Email Server." Are they sure it wasn't Russia (just kidding!)? What are the odds that the FBI and DOJ are right on top of this? Actually, a very big story. Much classified information! reageer retweet

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment about Gohmert's allegation or the Daily Caller story.

The Justice Department IG's report noted that the FBI conducted "'intrusion analyses' on each of Clinton’s devices and other evidence to determine whether any classified information had been compromised," and said the agent assigned to conduct forensic analysis "described the team's efforts in this regard as exhaustive."

"He stated that these efforts included (1) examining the servers and others devices to identify suspicious logins or other activity, and (2) searching numerous datasets to determine whether foreign adversaries or known hostile domestic actors had accessed emails that the [team] had confirmed to contain classified information."

Former FBI Director James Comey, in his July 5, 2016, press conference regarding possible cyber intrusion of Clinton’s email servers, said the FBI had not found direct evidence of any intrusion into her personal email domain, but didn't rule out the possibility.

"Given the nature of the system and of the actors potentially involved, we assess that we would be unlikely to see such direct evidence. We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private commercial email accounts of people with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her personal account ... She also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including sending and receiving work-related emails in the territory of sophisticated adversaries. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account."

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 13:25 schreef Szura het volgende:

[..]

De boel naar een oorlogsaanjager vernoemen gaat me ook wat ver

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:06 schreef crystal_meth het volgende:

[..]

NATO considers naming headquarters after McCain
Beetje ironisch dat een Brit een nieuwe naam voor een gebouw in Brussel voorstelt...

twitter:

KamalaHarris twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 01:45:00 A few weeks ago, I introduced the Rent Relief Act, which would ensure families earning up to $100k don’t pay more than 30% of their income on rent. With rising rents and stagnant wages, this bill will keep money in hardworking families’ pockets and a roof over their heads. reageer retweet

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:18 schreef Szura het volgende:

[..]

Gadverdamme hou eens op met die heldenverering. De man had genoeg smerige kanten, heeft talloze oorlogen gesteund en zelfs aangewakkerd die honderdduizenden mensen het leven hebben gekost.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:22 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

twitter:

KamalaHarris twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 01:45:00 A few weeks ago, I introduced the Rent Relief Act, which would ensure families earning up to $100k don’t pay more than 30% of their income on rent. With rising rents and stagnant wages, this bill will keep money in hardworking families’ pockets and a roof over their heads. reageer retweet

Ugh. Ben bang dat ik haar hiermee een stuk minder serieus neem als potentiele presidentskandidaat.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:22 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

twitter:

KamalaHarris twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 01:45:00 A few weeks ago, I introduced the Rent Relief Act, which would ensure families earning up to $100k don’t pay more than 30% of their income on rent. With rising rents and stagnant wages, this bill will keep money in hardworking families’ pockets and a roof over their heads. reageer retweet

Ugh. Ben bang dat ik haar hiermee een stuk minder serieus neem als potentiele presidentskandidaat.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:26 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:

[..]

Huh? Vage speculatie daargelaten, zie je haar serieus als potentiele kandidaat?

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:25 schreef Whiskers2009 het volgende:

[..]

Hij merkt slechts op dat het ironisch is dat een Brit dat voorstelt mbt een gebouw in Brussel (Brexit verwijzing)...

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:27 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Ze wordt wel vrij veel "genoemd" in ieder geval.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:29 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:

[..]

Ja, maar dat is volgens mij meer een gevalletje 'we hebben even niets anders'.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:22 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

twitter:

KamalaHarris twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 01:45:00 A few weeks ago, I introduced the Rent Relief Act, which would ensure families earning up to $100k don’t pay more than 30% of their income on rent. With rising rents and stagnant wages, this bill will keep money in hardworking families’ pockets and a roof over their heads. reageer retweet

Ugh. Ben bang dat ik haar hiermee een stuk minder serieus neem als potentiele presidentskandidaat.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:26 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:

[..]

Huh? Vage speculatie daargelaten, zie je haar serieus als potentiele kandidaat?

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:31 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Waarom precies?

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:26 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Waarom precies? Dit past toch gewoon in het straatje van een vrij linkse politica? Het is een tax credit voor hoge huren, feitelijk een soort HRA.
De concrete invulling schijnt niet denderend te zijn van wat ik er van las.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:35 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:

[..]

Ik denk niet dat ze het in haar heeft om tegen de incompetentie van Trump en diens achterban op te boksen en ik zie nu even aan die kant geen andere potentiele kandidaten, dus 'dan die maar'.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:26 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:

[..]

Huh? Vage speculatie daargelaten, zie je haar serieus als potentiele kandidaat?

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:38 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Omdat ik een hekel heb aan populistische prietpraat in een politicus/politica.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:40 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Ik denk dat ze de nominatie best wel eens binnen zou kunnen slepen ja en dat de kans vrij redelijk is dat ze ambities in die richting heeft.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:40 schreef Montov het volgende:
Iedereen die even in het nieuws komt wordt genoemd als presidentskandidaat.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:41 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Maar wat is er populistisch aan? Is huurtoeslag ook populistisch?

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:46 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Zoals ze het hier in de tweet doet voorkomen zou het ingericht worden zodat niemand meer dan een hard x percentage aan huur zou betalen onder cutoff y. Dat vind ik ronduit bizar. In werkelijkheid is het een aftrekmogelijkheid van huur, wat me ook een onzalig plan lijkt, omdat die aftrek dan richting de huiseigenaren zal gaan... die verhogen immers de huur navenant als iedereen ineens die aftrekpost heeft. Beetje als onze HRA (zoals je aangaf), wat ik ook waanzinnig vind (maar wel van "profiteer").

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:43 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:

[..]

Ja, ach, eerst maar even wachten wat november gaat brengen. Duurt ook niet lang meer.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:50 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Ik zie ook weinig in dit soort maatregelen, maar echt populistisch zou ik het niet noemen. Het is een act die wat probeert te doen voor huurders, die in de VS toch in een wat andere situatie zitten dan in Nederland. Dat lijkt me voor een linkse politica geen vreemde actie.
Ik denk alleen dat het een weinig effectieve maatregel is omdat dergelijke subsidies toch vooral prijsinflatie veroorzaken.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 21:52 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Het feit dat het weinig effectief is, en zelfs juist mogelijk een tegengestelde werking zou kunnen hebben maakt het wmb wel degelijk populistisch of op zijn minst niet zo verstandig. De trigger om dat label eraan te hangen was wmb trouwens de tweet.

Maar goed, dit allemaal gezegd hebbende, is er denk ik al te veel over gezegd ... de soep wordt niet zo heet gegeten.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 17:07 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 17:05:24 Ron DeSantis says on Fox that Florida shouldn't "monkey this up" by electing his opponent, the first African American to win a major-party nomination for governor in Florida. https://t.co/g9JvXhEesY https://t.co/jzb4Ud39ag reageer retweet

Die maakt ook alles nog even duidelijk.

Gillum on Fox News

quote:

During an interview with Fox News host Shep Smith, Gillum said DeSantis was taking a page “directly from the campaign manual of Donald Trump.”

“Yeah, that part wasn’t lost on me," Gillum said to Smith when asked about the remarks. "It’s very clear that Mr. DeSantis is taking a page directly from the campaign manual of Donald Trump. But I think he’s got another thing coming to him.”

“He thinks that in today’s day and age Florida’s voters are going to respond to that level of derision and division,” he continued. “They’re sick of it.”

"In the handbook of Donald Trump they no longer do whistle calls, they’re now using full bullhorns," Gillum continued when pressed by Smith whether he believed the congressman's remarks were racist or just a figure of speech.

"And what I’ve got to say about that is we got to make sure we stay focused, I think, on the issues that confront everyday people. I’m not going to get down in the gutter with DeSantis and Trump," he added.

twitter:

kyledcheney twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 22:40:43 MUELLER seeks more time to decide whether to retry a Manafort on the 10 charges that deadlocked an Alexandria jury reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 22:55:45 #StopTheBias https://t.co/xqz599iQZw reageer retweet

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 23:34 schreef Nintex het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op woensdag 29-08-2018 om 22:55:45 #StopTheBias https://t.co/xqz599iQZw reageer retweet

Trump begint #stopthebias campagne tegen Google.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 23:43 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Het is wel waar. Google en Facebook waren continu Obama aan het pluggen en nu negeren ze het Witte Huis volledig.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 23:54 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Een voorbeeld is dat Michelle Obama altijd als eerste het nieuwe design voor een Twitter profile mocht uitproberen

[ afbeelding ]

Een van de eerste livestream events op YouTube was een interview met Obama.
Dan had je inderdaad, zoals Trump in zijn Tweet opmerkt altijd verwijzingen naar bijv. de State of the Union address.

Zo doen de social media helemaal niet mee met de cyberbullying campagne van Melania.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 23:56 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Ja klacht was tegen Google en Facebook.

Buiten dat, Trump mag nogsteeds zijn leugens posten na thermonucleaire oorlog te dreigen .. lijkt me best tegen de TOS.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 23:57 schreef Nintex het volgende:

[..]

Het ene sluit het andere niet uit. Trump kan zowel soms de TOS overschrijden als dat Facebook/Google/Twitter een bias hebben voor Democrats.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 23:43 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Het is wel waar. Google en Facebook waren continu Obama aan het pluggen en nu negeren ze het Witte Huis volledig.

quote:

Op woensdag 29 augustus 2018 23:54 schreef Nintex het volgende:
Een voorbeeld is dat Michelle Obama altijd als eerste het nieuwe design voor een Twitter profile mocht uitproberen

[ afbeelding ]

Een van de eerste livestream events op YouTube was een interview met Obama.
Dan had je inderdaad, zoals Trump in zijn Tweet opmerkt altijd verwijzingen naar bijv. de State of the Union address.

Zo doen de social media helemaal niet mee met de cyberbullying campagne van Melania.

quote:

Op donderdag 30 augustus 2018 00:08 schreef SymbolicFrank het volgende:

[..]

Google geeft altijd individuele resultaten, gebaseerd op je zoekhistorie. En wat je doet op je Android telefoon, en welke Youtube video's je bekijkt.

Over het algemeen zie je dus steeds meer van hetzelfde. En iets heel anders dan je buurman. Bij dezelfde zoekterm.

quote:

Op donderdag 30 augustus 2018 00:13 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Ja, wat jij zegt klopt idd, hoewel in Trumpiaanse kringen google en youtube misschien gelijkgesteld worden?!

quote:

Op donderdag 30 augustus 2018 00:13 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Ja, wat jij zegt klopt idd, hoewel in Trumpiaanse kringen google en youtube misschien gelijkgesteld worden?!

quote:

Op donderdag 30 augustus 2018 00:17 schreef Kansenjongere het volgende:

[..]

Ik zie aan de laatste reactie van Nontex dat in Trumpiaanse kringen zelfs google/facebook en twitter gelijkgesteld worden.

quote:

Op donderdag 30 augustus 2018 00:08 schreef thesiren.nl het volgende:
Het is heel simpel als de verdeling fifty fifty is wat betreft democraten en republikeinen en van de republikeinen is een kleine meerderheid voor Trump, dan is dat niet meer dan 30% van de bevolking. De rest klikt en shared meer het negatieve nieuws. Angry people click more is het adagium van de sociale media. Als hij zelf veel cnn of msnbc aanklikt dan krijgt hij op basis van zijn keuzes in het verleden dat meer te zien.
Mensen die volledig in een fox breitbart bubble zitten en principieel geen cnn filmpjes klikken krijgen dat ook niet te zien.

quote:

Op donderdag 30 augustus 2018 00:11 schreef TruusHenk het volgende:

[..]

Het probleem met deze vergelijking is dat er zoveel andere verschillen zijn dan alleen de poltitieke kleur. Ik denk dat het veel meer te maken heeft met het feit dat de Obama's niet blank zijn, veel meer een jeugdige, hippe uitstraling hadden (en die veelal bevestigd hebben in hun doen en laten) en de politieke dynamiek van hun presidentschap heel anders was (hoop vs. haat om het grof te zeggen). Als Trump namens de Democraten had meegedaan en gewonnen had ie ook niet de Twitterdesigntjes mogen uitproberen denk ik. .