[AMV] Amerikaanse politiek #550 - Kavanaugh(t?)

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Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, rejected calls that the FBI help investigate an explosive allegation of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, saying federal investigators “would have no bearing” on what Christine Blasey Ford tells lawmakers in the coming days.

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 13:46 schreef Sloggi het volgende:

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Ik heb de zaak niet echt gevolgd na het initiële nieuwsbericht. Wat is er onmenselijk aan deze reactie?

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 13:48 schreef Ulx het volgende:

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Een agent trapt een deur in en schiet iemand neer in zijn huis.

Roept daarna:"Ik vergiste me, dacht dat het mijn huis was."

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After days of obsessing over the anonymous New York Times op-ed and Bob Woodward’s book Fear, Donald Trump’s mood was improving markedly last week as he watched Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination sailing toward a confirmation vote. “Everyone thought Kavanaugh was a slam dunk,” an outside adviser to the White House told me. In a phone call with Sean Hannity over the weekend, Trump even boasted he’d gotten past Woodward’s book—he told people it was a dud. But his reprieve would be short-lived. On Sunday, college professor Christine Blasey Ford told The Washington Post that Kavanaugh had allegedly attempted to rape her at a party when they were teenagers, thrusting Trump and the White House into a #MeToo crisis at a moment when they can’t afford to antagonize women voters ahead of the midterms.

According to three sources, Kavanaugh’s imperiled confirmation has unsettled Trump and the White House. “Everyone knows his predisposition is to punch back, but this is a different situation than an election,” a former West Wing official briefed on the strategy discussions said. In the past, Trump responded to allegations of sexual misconduct by channeling his mentor Roy Cohn: deny everything, and go on the attack. But he’s been surprisingly measured in his defense of Kavanaugh. In a news conference today, Trump told reporters, “I feel so badly for him that he’s going through this,” but refrained from attacking Ford.

According to sources, several factors are at play. White House advisers are worried that more damaging information about Kavanaugh could come out. Two sources told me the White House has heard rumors that Ford’s account will be verified by women who say she told it to them contemporaneously. People worry, without apparent evidence, of another Ronan Farrow bomb dropping. One source says Ivanka Trump has told her father to “cut bait” and drop Kavanaugh.

Another reason Trump hasn’t gone to the mat for Kavanaugh is that he’s said to be suspicious of Kavanaugh’s establishment pedigree. “‘He’s a Bush guy, why would I put myself out there defending him?’” Trump told people, according to a former White House official briefed on the conversations. Trump also has expressed frustration with White House counsel Don McGahn, who aggressively lobbied for him to choose Kavanaugh, a source said. “Trump wants this guy on the court, but Trump knows there are five other people he could put on the court if this falls apart,” a former official said.

But the threat of losing the House and Senate seems to have helped convince Trump not to go scorched-earth on Ford. If Trump antagonizes women voters, it could increase the odds Republicans would lose both houses in Congress. “Trump knows the Senate is not looking good,” an outside adviser said. “It’s all about the impeachment, he knows it’s coming.”

Even before the Kavanaugh crisis, Trump has been worried about Republicans’ declining fortunes, and he’s been finding ways to shift the blame. Trump told a friend in the Oval Office last week that it would be Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan’s fault if Republicans lost the House and the Senate, according to a person familiar with the conversation. “This is the election about Ryan and McConnell—it’s about those guys,” Trump said. Trump referred to his 2020 campaign as “the real election.” “It’s pure Trump. He has to come up with a way he’s not responsible if Republicans lose,” a former West Wing staffer said.

The White House and the offices of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan did not respond to requests for comment.

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 12:58 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Sen. Chuck Grassley: No Need For FBI To Investigate Kavanaugh Allegation

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Niet echt van de Law & Order die partij.

twitter:

eliseviebeck twitterde op woensdag 19-09-2018 om 05:22:59 Kavanaugh’s accuser thought her life would be upended. She was right. https://t.co/Spm2ce4kTR reageer retweet

twitter:

reinabori twitterde op dinsdag 18-09-2018 om 15:52:47 I graduated from Holton Arms, and knew both Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge. Christine Blasey Ford was a year or so behind me, I remember her. I signed this letter. The incident was spoken about for days afterwords in school. Kavanaugh should stop lying, own up to it and apologize https://t.co/Ah24yKuMpz reageer retweet

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 14:00 schreef Ulx het volgende:

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reinabori twitterde op dinsdag 18-09-2018 om 15:52:47 I graduated from Holton Arms, and knew both Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge. Christine Blasey Ford was a year or so behind me, I remember her. I signed this letter. The incident was spoken about for days afterwords in school. Kavanaugh should stop lying, own up to it and apologize https://t.co/Ah24yKuMpz reageer retweet

Als dit klopt -en waarom niet- is het logisch dat de GOP geen onderzoek door de FBI wil. Die zullen uiteraard met schoolgenoten gaan praten om te kijken of dit inderdaad al rond 1980 besproken werd.

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 14:22 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

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Die tweet is alweer verwijderd. Denk ik fake.

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 14:41 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:
Ted Cruz

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kylegriffin1 twitterde op woensdag 19-09-2018 om 15:00:03 The Justice Department, FBI, and ODNI are expected to tell Trump that some Russia investigation information should be kept secret with redactions, three people familiar with the matter tell Bloomberg.https://t.co/XUrJWbTbdy reageer retweet

twitter:

ABCPolitics twitterde op woensdag 19-09-2018 om 15:41:09 Pres. Trump on the FBI investigating the Kavanaugh allegation: "Well, it seems that the FBI really doesn't do that ... let the senators do it, they're doing a very good job" https://t.co/1IwP5MHwiI https://t.co/KdzzvZu6Eo reageer retweet

twitter:

jjouvenal twitterde op woensdag 19-09-2018 om 15:50:10 BREAKING: Trump says it is “very hard for me to imagine anything happened” between Kavanaugh and accuser as he leaves White House. reageer retweet

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 15:05 schreef clumsy_clown het volgende:
Ondertussen gooit Trump Sessions nog maar eens voor de bus.

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https://thehill.com/hillt(...)tter_impression=true

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 14:22 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

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Die tweet is alweer verwijderd. Denk ik fake.

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 14:41 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:
Monolith had weer gelijk, 1 poll is geen poll. Nu is er weer eentje uit waarbij O'Rourke met 2 punten leidt:

Beto O'Rourke (D): 47%
Ted Cruz (R-inc): 45%

https://www.reuters.com/a(...)s-poll-idUSKCN1LZ18B

Voor zover ik weet de eerste poll waarin hij de leiding neemt.

twitter:

LindseyGrahamSC twitterde op woensdag 19-09-2018 om 13:47:22 It is imperative the Judiciary committee move forward on the Kavanaugh nomination and a committee vote be taken ASAP. reageer retweet

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 15:05 schreef clumsy_clown het volgende:
Ondertussen gooit Trump Sessions nog maar eens voor de bus.

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https://thehill.com/hillt(...)tter_impression=true

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President Trump in an exclusive interview with Hill.TV said Tuesday he ordered the release of classified documents in the Russia collusion case to show the public the FBI probe started as a “hoax” and that exposing it could become one of the “crowning achievements” of his presidency.

“What we’ve done is a great service to the country, really,” Trump said in a 45-minute, wide-ranging interview in the Oval Office.

“I hope to be able to call this, along with tax cuts and regulation and all the things I’ve done ... in its own way this might be the most important thing because this was corrupt,” he said.

Trump also said he regretted not firing former FBI Director James Comey immediately instead of waiting until May 2017, confirming an account his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, gave Hill.TV earlier in the day that Trump was dismayed in 2016 by the way Comey handled the Hillary Clinton email case and began discussing firing him well before he became president.

“If I did one mistake with Comey, I should have fired him before I got here. I should have fired him the day I won the primaries,” Trump said. “I should have fired him right after the convention, say I don’t want that guy. Or at least fired him the first day on the job. ... I would have been better off firing him or putting out a statement that I don’t want him there when I get there.”

Trump has offered different reasons in the past for his firing of the FBI chief, blaming Comey’s handling of the Clinton case but also linking it to Comey’s actions in the Russia investigation.

The president also called into question the FBI’s handling of the Russia investigation, again criticizing it for surveilling his campaign.

He criticizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court’s approval of the warrant that authorized surveillance of Carter Page, a low-level Trump campaign aide, toward the end of the 2016 presidential race, suggesting the FBI misled the court.

“They know this is one of the great scandals in the history of our country because basically what they did is, they used Carter Page, who nobody even knew, who I feel very badly for, I think he’s been treated very badly. They used Carter Page as a foil in order to surveil a candidate for the presidency of the United States.”

As for the judges on the secret intelligence court: “It looks to me, just based on your reporting, that they have been misled,” the president said, citing a series of columns in The Hill identifying shortcomings in the FBI investigation. “I mean I don’t think we have to go much further than to say that they’ve been misled.”

“One of the things I’m disappointed in is that the judges in FISA didn’t, don’t seem to have done anything about it. I’m very disappointed in that Now, I may be wrong because, maybe as we sit here and talk, maybe they’re well into it. We just don’t know that because I purposely have not chosen to get involved,” Trump said.

The president spared no words in criticizing Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, lawyer Lisa Page and other FBI officials who started the probe. He recited specific text messages Page and Strzok traded while having an affair and investigating his campaign, arguing the texts showed they condoned leaks and conducted a bogus probe.

Those texts are to be released as a result of Trump’s announcement on Monday.

“It’s a hoax, beyond a witch hunt,” he said.

Trump cited one text released recently in which Strzok and Page appear to discuss getting McCabe to approve an expansion of the Russia case right after Comey is fired.

“Comey was a bad guy. He gets fired. They only have Andy left because they know they’re doing wrong,” the president said in describing how he felt wronged by the FBI.

He denounced the FBI for leaking to create what he said was a false narrative against him, saying it appeared to be an “insurance policy” to destroy his presidency if he won.

“Number one, how illegal is it? And number two, how low is it?” he said.

“What we have now is an insurance policy,” the president said. “But it has been totally discredited, even Democrats agree that it has been discredited. They are not going to admit to it, but it has been totally discredited. I think, frankly, more so by text than by documents.”

Trump said he had not read the documents he ordered declassified but said he expected to show they would prove the FBI case started as a political “hoax.”

“I have had many people ask me to release them. Not that I didn’t like the idea but I wanted to wait, I wanted to see where it was all going,” he said.

In the end, he said, his goal was to let the public decide by seeing the documents that have been kept secret for more than two years. “All I want to do is be transparent,” he said.

Asked what he thought the outcome of his long-running fight with the FBI, the president said: “I hope to be able put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to ... expose something that is truly a cancer in our country.”

The Hill

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 17:25 schreef Sloggi het volgende:

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Waarom is dit een zaak voor de FBI en niet voor lokale politie? Is aanranding of verkrachting een federal crime?

Edit: de FBI zou achtergrondinformatie kunnen vergaren voor de hoorzitting, blijkbaar.

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 17:11 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Obligaat:

twitter:

NateSilver538 twitterde op woensdag 19-09-2018 om 16:09:59 I suppose I feel obligated to point out that Beto's back to 1 in 3 now after a new Ipsos poll showing him ahead by 2 points. (This is the problem with tweeting about individual polls.) https://t.co/xgjtOxrzdZ reageer retweet

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Intelligence and law-enforcement veterans broadly agree that President Donald Trump’s latest directive to the FBI and Justice Department—issued after much urging from a small group of his GOP supporters in Congress—to declassify portions of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (fisa) warrant and other documents that are part of the ongoing Russia investigation is remarkable.

“This appears to be an unprecedented use of the president’s discretionary authority to declassify information for purely partisan political reasons,” said David Laufman, a former high-ranking DOJ official who served as the chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section before leaving in February. “I believe it raises the resignation issue more forcefully than anything the president has done so far,” said John McLaughlin, a former acting director of the CIA.

But one of the more bizarre subplots in the ongoing saga of Trump and House Republicans condemning alleged “deep state” corruption has been the martyrdom of Carter Page—a former Trump campaign adviser suspected by the FBI of acting as a foreign agent for Russia, and the subject of the fisa warrants that Trump and his allies now want declassified. “Carter Page is a very unlikely GOP hero,” Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told me. “But there’s a desperation by Republicans to cast the initiation of the Russia investigation as illegitimate. And that includes creating a completely different story around Carter Page.”

One month before the 2016 election, the FBI applied for a fisa warrant to surveil Page, which House Republicans—led by Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes—have tried repeatedly to characterize as but one part of a politically motivated spying operation targeting innocent Trump campaign associates carried out by the Obama administration and its holdovers, justified by nothing more than raw intelligence collected by a former British intelligence agent named Christopher Steele. The warrant application needs to be fully declassified, Nunes told Fox News on Monday, so that the public can “really understand just how broad and invasive this investigation has been to many Americans, and how unfair it has been.”

Rep. Devin Nunes On Trump Declassifying Russia Probe Documents

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 17:29 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

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Als je het gemiddelde neemt kom je op het RCP average van Cruz +3/4 uit. Zal wel ongeveer kloppen.

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 18:32 schreef Monolith het volgende:

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Daarbij is dan weer de vraag in hoeverre zo'n gemiddelde recente trends oppakt. Het kan zijn dat één van de twee recente outliers die trend wel goed oppikt bijvoorbeeld. Als het LV's zijn is het de vraag in hoeverre de modellen dat accuraat voorspellen, wat ook een fors verschil op kan leveren in peilingresultaten.

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 18:42 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

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Iedere trend begint natuurlijk met een outlier. Alleen kunnen we nu nog niet weten wat die trend (if any) is.

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 18:48 schreef Monolith het volgende:

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Dat klopt, maar het ging mij meer om het feit dat daarmee niet direct gezegd is dat het gemiddelde van de polls over de afgelopen één of twee maanden de meest accurate indicator zou zijn van hoe de zaak er nu voor staat.

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op woensdag 19-09-2018 om 16:50:02 (THREAD) Trump's allies in Congress desperately want reporters to start asking questions about Carter Page's time on the Trump campaign. As it happens, so do I. Please RETWEET this thread—which asks some of the major outstanding questions about Page and Trump and demands answers. https://t.co/ZKKGDaqwaj reageer retweet

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 14:00 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

reinabori twitterde op dinsdag 18-09-2018 om 15:52:47 I graduated from Holton Arms, and knew both Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge. Christine Blasey Ford was a year or so behind me, I remember her. I signed this letter. The incident was spoken about for days afterwords in school. Kavanaugh should stop lying, own up to it and apologize https://t.co/Ah24yKuMpz reageer retweet

Als dit klopt -en waarom niet- is het logisch dat de GOP geen onderzoek door de FBI wil. Die zullen uiteraard met schoolgenoten gaan praten om te kijken of dit inderdaad al rond 1980 besproken werd.

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King has since taken down her Facebook post, which NBC News verified as having appeared on her account. She said on Twitter that she deleted it "because it served its purpose and I am now dealing with a slew of requests for interviews … Organizing how I want to proceed. Was not ready for that, not sure I am interested in pursuing. Thanks for reading."

NBC

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nytimes twitterde op woensdag 19-09-2018 om 18:30:16 When Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the Iran deal, experts feared it would hurt the economy and leave Iran free to restart its nuclear program. But, so far, the policy has been effective without either of those consequences. https://t.co/vIRLdv4gSd reageer retweet

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 21:10 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Dankzij de rest van de wereld ja, die de deal nog intact houden.

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 19:22 schreef Nintex het volgende:
[ afbeelding ]

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 21:27 schreef MangoTree het volgende:

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“Got it?” Trump said as he handed two meals to a person in a car, adding: “Have a good time.”

The comment caused one MSNBC reporter to speak out off camera.

“I think he just said have a good time!” the reporter gasped.

twitter:

JStein_WaPo twitterde op woensdag 19-09-2018 om 14:46:43 Congress votes 93-7 to approve $607B military budget, a $17B increase, @ericawerner reportsThis appears to be the biggest military budget outside height of the Iraq WarNo votes: 6 conservatives (Paul, Toomey, Sasse, Lee, Flake, Perude), & Sen. Sandershttps://t.co/0gOTkZsMRt reageer retweet

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 21:10 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Dankzij de rest van de wereld ja, die de deal nog intact houden. Waar is Trumps betere deal dan?

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 21:32 schreef Nintex het volgende:

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JStein_WaPo twitterde op woensdag 19-09-2018 om 14:46:43 Congress votes 93-7 to approve $607B military budget, a $17B increase, @ericawerner reportsThis appears to be the biggest military budget outside height of the Iraq WarNo votes: 6 conservatives (Paul, Toomey, Sasse, Lee, Flake, Perude), & Sen. Sandershttps://t.co/0gOTkZsMRt reageer retweet

ART OF THE DEAL

Biggest military budget in 'peace time'.

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Op woensdag 19 september 2018 21:43 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

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Volgens mij was de hoofdzaak van het zijn tegen de sancties dat het de bestaande deal onder druk zou zetten. Echt economische problemen voor onze eigen economie of die van de VS kan ik me zo geen mening van herinneren... hoewel dat in deze tijd niet veel zegt.