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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: 8 augustus

SPOILER: 14 september

SPOILER: 19 oktober

SPOILER: juni

SPOILER: 8 augustus

SPOILER: 14 september

SPOILER: 19 oktober

SPOILER: juni

SPOILER: 8 augustus

SPOILER: 14 september

SPOILER: 19 oktober

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quote:

Op maandag 26 november 2018 17:49 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:
Met andere woorden, zelfs met volledige controle over de three branches of government slaagt Trump er niet in om een antwoord te vinden op de migratie crisis

quote:

waarbij we niet eindigen met het schieten van traangas op peuters. En dan nog durven te stellen dat dat een gepaste reactie is.

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Op maandag 26 november 2018 17:51 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:

[..]

Dat zal Trump zeker niet lukken.

[..]

Natuurlijk is dat een gepaste reactie op mensen die illegaal je grens bestormen. Trump of niet. En nogmaals, dit soort sentimentele gezeik heeft niemand wat aan.

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Op maandag 26 november 2018 17:55 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

"Sentimenteel gezeik". I rest my case.

[ afbeelding ]

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Op maandag 26 november 2018 17:57 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:

[..]

I rest my case, iets anders dan een zielig plaatje posten kun je niet. Inhoudelijk is te moeilijk. Je zou toch wel verwachten dat iemand als jij dit soort tribale bullshit zou kunnen vermijden.

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Op maandag 26 november 2018 18:00 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Sorry dat ik wel medeleven op kan brengen voor kinderen die met traangas bestookt worden.

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Op maandag 26 november 2018 18:18 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:

[..]

Dat kan ik ook. Maar de oplossing voor hen is simpel: niet de grens bestormen. Heeft met beleid geen reet te maken.

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Op maandag 26 november 2018 18:21 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Je zet het weg als tribal bullshit en sentimenteel gezeik.

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Op maandag 26 november 2018 18:23 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:

[..]

Ja, dat is het ook. Het is goedkoop die kinderen te gebruiken als politieke chips.

Illegale migranten weren is niet buitenproportioneel.

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Op maandag 26 november 2018 18:26 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Dat is een beetje een non-statement. Illegale migranten weren an sich is niet direct buitenproportioneel, de relevante vraag is of de wijze waarop buitenproportioneel is. Met torpedo's bootjes met vluchtelingen torpederen of met scherp schieten is redelijk buitenproportioneel.
Ik heb niet precies gezien wat er hier gebeurd is, maar je kunt best beargumenteren dat traangas onnodig was.

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Op maandag 26 november 2018 18:26 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Dat is een beetje een non-statement. Illegale migranten weren an sich is niet direct buitenproportioneel, de relevante vraag is of de wijze waarop buitenproportioneel is. Met torpedo's bootjes met vluchtelingen torpederen of met scherp schieten is redelijk buitenproportioneel.
Ik heb niet precies gezien wat er hier gebeurd is, maar je kunt best beargumenteren dat traangas onnodig was.

quote:

Op maandag 26 november 2018 18:35 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Wanneer je in overweging neemt dat de reden dat deze mensen zich genoodzaakt voelden om op illegale wijze de grens over te steken in het falende immigratiebeleid van deze regering gezocht moet worden, lijkt de buitenproportionaliteit me evident.

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Op maandag 26 november 2018 18:35 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Wanneer je in overweging neemt dat de reden dat deze mensen zich genoodzaakt voelden om op illegale wijze de grens over te steken in het falende immigratiebeleid van deze regering gezocht moet worden

quote:

Op maandag 26 november 2018 19:21 schreef Begieltie het volgende:

🇺🇸 A Mexican police official addresses some migrants. 🇺🇸

[ afbeelding ]

[ afbeelding ]

Ik zie, ik zie, wat jij niet ziet...

quote:

Op maandag 26 november 2018 19:26 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

[..]

Wat zie je dan?

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Op maandag 26 november 2018 19:29 schreef Begieltie het volgende:

[..]

Een kind die aan z'n haren naar voren wordt geduwd. Video bekeken?

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Op maandag 26 november 2018 19:57 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

[..]

Iemand aan zijn haren naar voren duwen, nogal een truc.

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Op maandag 26 november 2018 20:17 schreef Nibb-it het volgende:
Nog altijd oorverdovend stil vanuit het Witte Huis aangaande de situatie in Oekraïne. Trump had in 2016 zoveel kritiek op Obama omdat hij de Krim zou hebben weggegeven en niets deed aan de Russische agressie. Geeft Trump nu de Zee van Azov weg?

twitter:

Reuters twitterde op maandag 26-11-2018 om 19:38:46 JUST IN: GM CEO Mary Barra to meet with White House economic adviser Kudlow following job cut announcement - sources https://t.co/jTd66HlDxT reageer retweet

SPOILER

die stemmen net zoals Hans en Ingrid hier ook volgende keer weer Republikeins want mensen met een kleurtje zijn enger dan het verlies van hun eigen bestaanszekerheid

twitter:

ScottMStedman twitterde op dinsdag 27-11-2018 om 00:54:18 BREAKING: Mueller says that Manafort lied multiple times to investigators since plea agreement. reageer retweet

twitter:

kyledcheney twitterde op dinsdag 27-11-2018 om 00:55:46 BREAKING: Mueller says Manafort breaches his plea agreement by lying repeatedly to investigators. https://t.co/LIRbFgpIBJ reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 00:56 schreef Nibb-it het volgende:

twitter:

ScottMStedman twitterde op dinsdag 27-11-2018 om 00:54:18 BREAKING: Mueller says that Manafort lied multiple times to investigators since plea agreement. reageer retweet

twitter:

kyledcheney twitterde op dinsdag 27-11-2018 om 00:55:46 BREAKING: Mueller says Manafort breaches his plea agreement by lying repeatedly to investigators. https://t.co/LIRbFgpIBJ reageer retweet

quote:

Op maandag 26 november 2018 20:30 schreef speknek het volgende:
Hoe genaaid zou de rust belt zich voelen dat Trump niet alleen gelogen heeft over het beschermen van hun banen, maar zelfs direct een veel grotere ontslaggolf heeft veroorzaakt door zijn domme tarrifs?

SPOILER

die stemmen net zoals Hans en Ingrid hier ook volgende keer weer Republikeins want mensen met een kleurtje zijn enger dan het verlies van hun eigen bestaanszekerheid

quote:

Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 00:56 schreef Nibb-it het volgende:

twitter:

ScottMStedman twitterde op dinsdag 27-11-2018 om 00:54:18 BREAKING: Mueller says that Manafort lied multiple times to investigators since plea agreement. reageer retweet

twitter:

kyledcheney twitterde op dinsdag 27-11-2018 om 00:55:46 BREAKING: Mueller says Manafort breaches his plea agreement by lying repeatedly to investigators. https://t.co/LIRbFgpIBJ reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 03:18 schreef Zwoerd het volgende:

[..]

Die komt waarschijnlijk nooit van z'n leven meer op vrije voeten.

quote:

Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 00:56 schreef Nibb-it het volgende:

twitter:

ScottMStedman twitterde op dinsdag 27-11-2018 om 00:54:18 BREAKING: Mueller says that Manafort lied multiple times to investigators since plea agreement. reageer retweet

twitter:

kyledcheney twitterde op dinsdag 27-11-2018 om 00:55:46 BREAKING: Mueller says Manafort breaches his plea agreement by lying repeatedly to investigators. https://t.co/LIRbFgpIBJ reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 10:53 schreef archito het volgende:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1067142819008122885

Stelt Trump nu min of meer voor om een propagandakanaal te beginnen?

quote:

Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 10:43 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Ik twijfel nog steeds tussen a) Manafort is een gigantische mongool die nog steeds niet snapt hoe penibel zijn situatie is, of b) Manafort bewaart een geheim zo groot dat hij bereid is de rest van zijn leven er voor naar de gevangenis te gaan. Hij is eigenlijk te intelligent voor a) maar te egoïstisch voor b).

quote:

Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 10:43 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Ik twijfel nog steeds tussen a) Manafort is een gigantische mongool die nog steeds niet snapt hoe penibel zijn situatie is, of b) Manafort bewaart een geheim zo groot dat hij bereid is de rest van zijn leven er voor naar de gevangenis te gaan. Hij is eigenlijk te intelligent voor a) maar te egoïstisch voor b).

quote:

Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 10:58 schreef Nibb-it het volgende:

[..]

Ik las allerlei theorieen over dat Mr. T. hem mogelijk gratie heeft beloofd. Maar ik kan mij nauwelijks voorstellen dat zoiets echt zal gebeuren.

quote:

Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 10:53 schreef archito het volgende:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1067142819008122885

Stelt Trump nu min of meer voor om een propagandakanaal te beginnen?

quote:

Op maandag 26 november 2018 18:18 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:

[..]

Dat kan ik ook. Maar de oplossing voor hen is simpel: niet de grens bestormen. Heeft met beleid geen reet te maken.

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Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 10:59 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

of c) hij leeft in dezelfde droomwereld als Trump.

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Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 11:17 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Dat zie ik als a).

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Op maandag 26 november 2018 18:31 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:

[..]

Het zal allicht een afschrikkend effect hebben. Met scherp gaan schieten is natuurlijk een heel ander verhaal.

quote:

Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 11:17 schreef Vis1980 het volgende:

[..]

Alsof die kinderen die keuze kunnen maken. Daarnaast zal men wel gewoon asiel moeten aanvragen.

quote:

Op maandag 26 november 2018 20:20 schreef Theebag het volgende:

[..]

Misschien wat drukker met GM ? Die sluiten een paar fabrieken en snoeien lichtjes in het personeelsbestand.

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws(...)ord-amerika-a2756568

Of

https://www.foxbusiness.c(...)veral-vehicle-models

quote:

Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 11:39 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:

[..]

Hij is ook weer druk met importheffingen. 10% op laptops en telefoons is nu het plan.

Ben benieuwd, voor de gewone consument waren die heffingen niet al te duidelijk zichtbaar tot nu toe, maar als telefoons 10% duurder worden raakt dat mensen wel.

quote:

Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy
Exclusive: Trump ally met WikiLeaks founder months before emails hacked by Russia were published

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told. Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House. (Guardian).

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It is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.

Manafort, 69, denies involvement in the hack and says the claim is “100% false”. His lawyers declined to answer the Guardian’s questions about the visits.

Manafort was jailed this year and was thought to have become a star cooperator in the Mueller inquiry. But on Monday Mueller said Manafort had repeatedly lied to the FBI, despite agreeing to cooperate two months ago in a plea deal. According to a court document, Manafort had committed “crimes and lies” on a “variety of subject matters”.

His defence team says he believes what he has told Mueller to be truthful and has not violated his deal.

Manafort’s first visit to the embassy took place a year after Assange sought asylum inside, two sources said.

A separate internal document written by Ecuador’s Senain intelligence agency and seen by the Guardian lists “Paul Manaford [sic]” as one of several well-known guests. It also mentions “Russians”.

According to two sources, Manafort returned to the embassy in 2015. He paid another visit in spring 2016, turning up alone, around the time Trump named him as his convention manager. The visit is tentatively dated to March.

Manafort’s 2016 visit to Assange lasted about 40 minutes, one source said, adding that the American was casually dressed when he exited the embassy, wearing sandy-coloured chinos, a cardigan and a light-coloured shirt.

Visitors normally register with embassy security guards and show their passports. Sources in Ecuador, however, say Manafort was not logged.

Embassy staff were aware only later of the potential significance of Manafort’s visit and his political role with Trump, it is understood.

The revelation could shed new light on the sequence of events in the run-up to summer 2016, when WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of emails hacked by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. Hillary Clinton has said the hack contributed to her defeat.

The previously unreported Manafort-Assange connection is likely to be of interest to Mueller, who has been investigating possible contacts between WikiLeaks and associates of Trump including the political lobbyist Roger Stone and Donald Trump Jr.

One key question is when the Trump campaign was aware of the Kremlin’s hacking operation – and what, if anything, it did to encourage it. Trump has repeatedly denied collusion.

Earlier this year Mueller indicted 12 GRU intelligence officers for carrying out the hack, which began in March 2016.

In June of that year WikiLeaks emailed the GRU via an intermediary seeking the DNC material. After failed attempts, Vladimir Putin’s spies sent the documents in mid-July to WikiLeaks as an encrypted attachment.

According to sources, Manafort’s acquaintance with Assange goes back at least five years, to late 2012 or 2013, when the American was working in Ukraine and advising its Moscow-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych.

Why Manafort sought out Assange in 2013 is unclear. During this period the veteran consultant was involved in black operations against Yanukovych’s chief political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, whom Yanukovych had jailed. Manafort ran an extensive lobbying operation featuring European former politicians.

He flew frequently from the US to Ukraine’s capital, Kiev – usually via Frankfurt but sometimes through London, flight records seen by the Guardian show.

Manafort is currently in jail in Alexandria, Virginia. In August a jury convicted him of crimes arising from his decade-long activities in Ukraine. They include large-scale money laundering and failure to pay US tax. Manafort pleaded guilty to further charges in order to avoid a second trial in Washington.

As well as accusing him of lying on Monday, the special counsel moved to set a date for Manafort to be sentenced.

One person familiar with WikiLeaks said Assange was motivated to damage the Democrats campaign because he believed a future Trump administration would be less likely to seek his extradition on possible charges of espionage. This fate had hung over Assange since 2010, when he released confidential US state department cables. It contributed to his decision to take refuge in the embassy.

According to the dossier written by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, Manafort was at the centre of a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump campaign and Russia’s leadership. The two sides had a mutual interest in defeating Clinton, Steele wrote, whom Putin “hated and feared”.

In a memo written soon after the DNC emails were published, Steele said: “The [hacking] operation had been conducted with the full knowledge and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.”

As a candidate Trump warmly welcomed the dump of DNC emails by Assange. In October 2016 he declared: “I love WikiLeaks.” Trump’s comments came after WikiLeaks released a second tranche of emails seized from the email account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman.

The Trump White House subsequently sent out mixed messages over Assange and his legal fate. In 2017 and behind the scenes Assange tried to reach a deal with Trump’s Department of Justice that might see him avoid US prison.

In May 2017, , Manafort flew to Ecuador to hold talks with the country’s president-elect Lenín Moreno. The discussions, days before Moreno was sworn in, and before Manafort was indicted – were ostensibly about a large-scale Chinese investment.

However, one source in Quito suggests that Manafort also discreetly raised Assange’s plight. Another senior foreign ministry source said he was sceptical Assange was mentioned. At the time Moreno was expected to continue support for him.

Last week a court filing released in error suggested that the US justice department had secretly charged Assange with a criminal offence. Written by the assistant US attorney, Kellen Dwyer, the document did not say what Assange had been charged with or when the alleged offence took place.

twitter:

BrookingsFP twitterde op dinsdag 27-11-2018 om 01:05:02 “Digital information warfare is cost-effective and high-impact, making it the perfect weapon of a technologically and economically weak power,” @apolyakova writes on Russian disinformation campaigns. https://t.co/xTERG8ReYX reageer retweet

quote:

Weapons of the weak: Russia and AI-driven asymmetric warfare
Editor's Note: This report is part of "A Blueprint for the Future of AI," a series from the Brookings Institution that analyzes the new challenges and potential policy solutions introduced by artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”[1] – Russian President Vladimir Putin, 2017.

“A people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”[2] – Hannah Arendt, 1978

Speaking to Russian students on the first day of the school year in September 2017, Putin squarely positioned Russia in the technological arms race for artificial intelligence (AI). Putin’s comment (see above) signaled that, like China and the United States, Russia sees itself engaged in direct geopolitical competition with the world’s great powers, and AI is the currency that Russia is betting on. But, unlike the United States and China, Russia lags behind in research and development on AI and other emerging technologies. Russia’s economy makes up less than 2 percent of global GDP compared to 24 percent for the United States and 15 percent for China, which puts Russia on par with a country like Spain.[3] Despite Putin’s focus on AI, the Russian government has not released a strategy, like China has, on how the country plans to lead in this area. The Russian government’s future investment in AI research is unknown, but reports estimate that it spends approximately $12.5 million a year[4] on AI research, putting it far behind China’s plan to invest $150 billion through 2030. The U.S. Department of Defense alone spends $7.4 billion annually on unclassified research and development on AI and related fields.[5] (Brookings).

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Russia’s public corruption, decline in rule-of-law, and increasingly oppressive government regulations have produced a poor business environment. As a consequence, the country trails the United States and China in terms of private investment, scientific research, and the number of AI start-ups.[6] In 2018, no Russian city entered the top 20 global regional hubs for the AI sector,[7] despite the much-hyped opening of the “Skolkovo Innovation Center” in 2010, which was designed to be Russia’s answer to Silicon Valley. Unlike Silicon Valley, Skolkovo did not spur the kind of private investments and innovation that the Kremlin had hoped for and has since fizzled out. Russia’s new venture, a “technopolis” named Era, which is set to open in the fall of 2018, now promises to be the new hub for emerging technologies, but it too is unlikely to spur Silicon Valley like innovation.[8] It is telling that despite high-level presidential and administrative support, there is scant Russian language academic research on AI.

It is not likely that the country’s stagnant and hydrocarbon-dependent economy will do much to improve the government’s ability to ramp up investment in emerging technologies. In the longer term, Russia’s demographic crisis (Russia is projected to lose 8 percent of its population by 2050, according the UN)[9] will likely lead to shortages in highly skilled workers, many of whom have already left Russia for better pay and opportunities elsewhere.[10] Western sanctions on key sectors of the Russian financial sector and defense industry, which Europe and the United States imposed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the United States has continued to ramp up since then, put extra pressure on the Russian economy. Taken together, the economic and demographic trends signal that in the AI race, Russia will be unable to match China on government investment or compete with the United States on private sector innovation.

The Kremlin is undoubtedly aware of the country’s unfavorable position in the global AI competition, even if such an admission is unlikely to ever be made publicly. Strategically, such a wide gap between ambition and capacity means that Russia will need to invest its limited resources carefully. Currently, Moscow is pursuing investments in at least two directions: select conventional military and defense technologies where the Kremlin believes it can still hold comparative advantage over the West and high-impact, low-cost asymmetric warfare to correct the imbalance between Russia and the West in the conventional domain. The former—Russia’s development and use of AI-driven military technologies and weapons—has received significant attention.[11]

The latter—the implications of AI for asymmetric political warfare—remains unexplored.[12] Yet, such nonconventional tools—cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns, political influence, and illicit finance—have become a central tenet of Russia’s strategy toward the West and one with which Russia has been able to project power and influence beyond its immediate neighborhood. In particular, AI has the potential to hyperpower Russia’s use of disinformation—the intentional spread of false and misleading information for the purpose of influencing politics and societies. And unlike in the conventional military space, the United States and Europe are ill-equipped to respond to AI-driven asymmetric warfare (ADAW) in the information space.

Russian information warfare at home and abroad
Putin came to power in 2000, and since then, information control and manipulation has become a key element of the Kremlin’s domestic and foreign policy. At home, this has meant repression of independent media and civil society, state control of traditional and digital media, and deepening government surveillance. For example, Russia’s surveillance system, SORM (System of Operative-Search Measures) allows the FSB (Federal Security Service) and other government agencies to monitor and remotely access ISP servers and communications without the ISPs’ knowledge.[13] In 2016, a new package of laws, the so-called Yarovaya amendments, required telecom providers, social media platforms, and messaging services to store user data for three years and allow the FSB access to users’ metadata and encrypted communications.[14] While there is little known information on how Russian intelligence agencies are using these data, their very collection suggests that the Kremlin is experimenting with AI-driven analysis to identify potential political dissenters. The government is also experimenting with facial recognition technologies in conjunction with CCTV. Moscow alone has approximately 170,000 cameras, at least 5,000 of which have been outfitted with facial recognition technology from NTechLabs.[15]

Still, Moscow’s capacity to control and surveil the digital domain at home remains limited, as exemplified by the battle between the messaging app Telegram and the Russian government in early 2018. Telegram, one of the few homegrown Russian tech companies, refused to hand over its encryption keys to the FSB in early 2018.[16] What followed was a haphazard government attempt to ban Telegram by blocking tens of millions of IP addresses, which led to massive disruptions in unrelated services, such as cloud providers, online games, and mobile banking apps. Unlike Beijing, which has effectively sought to censor and control the internet as new technologies have developed, Moscow has not been able to implement similar controls preemptively. The result is that even a relatively small company like Telegram is able to outmaneuver and embarrass the Russian state. Despite such setbacks, however, Moscow seems set to continue on a path toward “digital authoritarianism”—using its increasingly unfettered access to citizens’ personal data to build better microtargeting capabilities that enhance social control, censor behavior and speech, and curtail counter-regime activities.[17]

Externally, Russian information warfare (informatsionaya voyna) has become part and parcel of Russian strategic thinking in foreign policy. Moscow has long seen the West as involved in an information war against it—a notion enshrined in Russia’s 2015 national security strategy, which sees the United States and its allies as seeking to contain Russia by exerting “informational pressure…” in an “intensifying confrontation in the global information arena.”[18] Under Putin, Cold War-era “active measures”—overt or covert influence operations aimed at influencing public opinion and politics abroad—have been revived and adapted to the digital age. Information warfare (or information manipulation)[19] has emerged as a core component of a broader influence strategy. At the same time, the line between conventional (or traditional) and nonconventional (or asymmetric) warfare has blurred in Russian military thinking. “The erosion of the distinction between war and peace, and the emergence of a grey zone” has been one of the most striking developments in the Russian approach to warfare, according to Chatham House’s Keir Giles.[20] Warfare, from this perspective, exists on a spectrum in which “political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures” are used to lay the groundwork for last resort military operations.[21] The importance of information warfare on the spectrum of war has increased considerably in 21st century warfare, according to contemporary Russian military thought.[22]

Maskirovka, the Soviet/Russian term for the art of deception and concealment in both military and nonmilitary operations, is a key concept that figures prominently into Russian strategic thinking. The theory is broader than the narrow definition of military deception. In the conventional military domain, it includes the deployment of decoys, camouflage, and misleading information to deceive the enemy on the battlefield. The use of “little green men,” or unmarked soldiers and mercenaries, in Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 is one example of maskirovka in military practice. So is the use of fake weapons and heavy machinery: one Russian company is producing an army of inflatable missiles, tanks, and jets that appear real in satellite imagery.[23]

Maskirovka, as a theory and operational practice, also applies to nonmilitary asymmetric operations. Modern Russian disinformation and cyber attacks against the West rely on obfuscation and deception in line with the guiding principles of maskirovka. During the 2016 U.S. Presidential elections, for example, Russian citizens working in a troll factory in St. Petersburg, known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), set up fake social media accounts pretending to be real Americans. These personas then spread conspiracy theories, disinformation, and divisive content meant to amplify societal polarization by pitting opposing groups against each other.[24] The IRA troll factory itself, while operating with the knowledge and support of the Kremlin and the Russian intelligence services, was founded and managed by proxy: a Russian oligarch known as “Putin’s chef,” Yevgeny Prigozhin. Concord, a catering company controlled by Prigozhin, was the main funder and manager of the IRA, and it went to great lengths to conceal the company’s involvement, including the setting up a web of fourteen bank accounts to transfer funding to the IRA.[25] Such obfuscation tactics were designed to conceal the true source and goals of the influence operations in the United Stated while allowing the Kremlin to retain plausible deniability if the operations were uncovered—nonconventional maskirovka in practice.

On the whole, Russia’s limited financial resources, the shift in strategic thinking toward information warfare, and the continued prevalence of maskirovka as a guiding principle of engagement, strongly suggest that in the near term, Moscow will ramp up the development of AI-enabled information warfare. Russia will not be the driver or innovator of these new technologies due its financial and human capital constraints. But, as it has already done in its attacks against the West, it will continue to co-opt existing commercially available technologies to serve as weapons of asymmetric warfare.

AI-driven asymmetric warfare
The Kremlin’s greatest innovation in its information operations against the West has not been technical. Rather, Moscow’s savviness has been to recognize that: (1) ready-made commercial tools and digital platforms can be easily weaponized; and (2) digital information warfare is cost-effective and high-impact, making it the perfect weapon of a technologically and economically weak power. AI-driven asymmetric warfare (ADAW) capabilities could provide Russia with additional comparative advantage.

U.S. government and independent investigations into Russia’s influence campaign against the United States during the 2016 elections reveal the low cost of that effort. Based on publicly available information,[26] we know that the Russian effort included: the purchase of ads on Facebook (estimated cost $100,000)[27] and Google (approximate cost $4,700), set up of approximately 36,000 automated bot accounts on Twitter, operation of the IRA troll farm (estimated cost $240,000 over the course of two years)[28], an intelligence gathering trip carried out by two Russian agents posing as tourists in 2014 (estimated cost $50,000)[29], production of misleading or divisive content (pictures, memes, etc.), plus additional costs related to the cyber attacks on the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. In sum, the total known cost of the most high-profile influence operation against the United States is likely around one million dollars.

The relatively low level of investment produced high returns. On Facebook alone, Russian linked content from the IRA reached 125 million Americans.[30] This is because the Russian strategy relied on ready-made tools designed for commercial online marketing and advertising: the Kremlin simply used the same online advertising tools that companies would use to sell and promote its products and adapted them to spread disinformation. Since the U.S. operation, these tools and others have evolved and present new opportunities for far more damaging but increasingly low-cost and difficult-to-attribute ADAW operations.

Three threat vectors in particular require immediate attention. First, advances in deep learning are making synthetic media content quick, cheap, and easy to produce. AI-enabled audio and video manipulation, so-called “deep fakes,” is already available through easy-to-use apps such as Face2Face,[31] which allows for one person’s expressions to be mapped onto another face in a target video. Video to Video Synthesis[32] can synthesize realistic video based a baseline of inputs. Other tools can synthesize realistic photographs of AI-rendered faces, reproduce videos and audio of any world leader,[33] and synthesize street scenes to appear in a different season.[34] Using these tools, China recently unveiled an AI made news anchor.[35] As the barriers of entry for accessing such tools continue to decrease, their appeal to low-resource actors will increase. Whereas most Russian disinformation content has been static (e.g., false news stories, memes, graphically designed ads), advances in learning AI will turn disinformation dynamic (e.g. video, audio).

Because audio and video can easily be shared on smart phones and do not require literacy, dynamic disinformation content will be able to reach a broader audience in more countries. For example, in India, false videos shared through Whatsapp incited riots and murders.[36] Unlike Facebook or Twitter, Whatsapp (owned by Facebook) is an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform, which means that content shared via the platform is basically unmonitored and untraceable. The “democratization of disinformation” will make it difficult for governments to counter AI-driven disinformation. Advances in machine learning are producing algorithms that “continuously learn how to more effectively replicate the appearance of reality,” which means that “deep fakes cannot easily be detected by other algorithms.”[37]

Russia, China, and others could harness these new publicly available technologies to undermine Western soft power or public diplomacy efforts around the world. Debunking or attributing such content will require far more resources than the cost of production, and it will be difficult if not impossible to do so in real time.

Second, advances in affective computing and natural language processing will make it easier to manipulate human emotions and extract sensitive information without ever hacking an email account. In 2017, Chinese researchers created an “emotional chatting machine” based on data users shared on Weibo, the Chinese social media site.[38] As AI gains access to more personal data, it will become increasingly customized and personalized to appeal to and manipulate specific users. Coupled with advances in natural learning processing, such as voice recognition, this means that affective systems will be able to mimic, respond to, and predict human emotions expressed through text, voice, or facial expressions. Some evidence suggests that humans are quite willing to form personal relationships, share deeply personal information, and interact for long periods of time with AI designed to form relationships.[39] These systems could be used to gather information from high value targets—such as intelligence officers or political figures—by exploiting their vices and patterns of behavior.

Third, deep fakes and emotionally manipulative content will be able to reach the intended audience with a high degree of precision due to advances in content distribution networks. “Precision propaganda” is the set of interconnected tools that comprise an “ecosystem of services that enable highly targeted political communications that reach millions of people with customized messages.”[40] The full scope of this ecosystem, which includes data collection, advertising platforms, and search engine optimization, aims to parse out audiences in granular detail and identify new receptive audiences will be “supercharged” by advances in AI. The content that users see online is the end product of an underlying multi-billion dollar industry that involves thousands of companies that work together to assess individuals’ preferences, attitudes, and tastes to ensure maximum efficiency, profitability, and real-time responsiveness of content delivery. Russian operations (as far as we know), relied on the most basic of these tools. But, as Ghosh and Scott suggest, a more advanced operation could use the full suite of services utilized by companies to track political attitudes on social media across all congressional districts, analyze who is most likely to vote and where, and then launch, almost instantly, a customized campaign at a highly localized level to discourage voting in the most vulnerable districts. Such a campaign, due to its highly personalized structure, would likely have significant impact on voting behavior.[41]

Once the precision of this distribution ecosystem is paired with emotionally manipulative deep fake content delivered by online entities that appear to be human, the line between fact and fiction will cease to exist. And Hannah Arendt’s prediction of a world in which there is no truth and no trust may still come to pass.

Responding to AI-driven asymmetric warfare
Caught by surprise by Russia’s influence operations against the West, governments in the United States and Europe are now establishing processes, agencies, and laws to respond to disinformation and other forms of state-sponsored influence operations.[42] However, these initiatives, while long overdue, will not address the next generation of ADAW threats emanating from Russia or other actors. So far, Western attempts to deter Russian malign influence, such as economic sanctions, have not changed Russian behavior: cyber-attacks, intelligence operations, and disinformation attacks have continued in Europe and the United States.

To get ahead of AI-driven hyper war,[43] policymakers should focus on designing a deterrence strategy for nonconventional warfare.[44]

The first step toward such a strategy should be to identify and then seek to remedy the information asymmetries between policymakers and the tech industry. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Defense launched the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to fund the development of new technologies with defense implications.[45] DIU’s mission could be expanded to also focus on pilot AI research and development into tools to identify and counter dynamic disinformation and other asymmetric threats.

The U.S. Congress established an AI Caucus co-chaired by Congressman John Delaney and Congressman Pete Olsen. The Caucus should make it a priority to pass legislation to set the U.S. government’s strategy on AI, much like China, France, and the EU have done. The Future of Intelligence Act, introduced in 2017, begins this process, but it should be expanded to include asymmetric threats and incorporated into the broader national security strategy and the National Defense Authorization Act. Such legislation should also mandate an immediate review of the current tools the U.S. government has to respond to an advanced disinformation attack. Part of the review should include a report, in both classified and unclassified versions, on investments in AI research and development across the U.S. government and the preparedness of various agencies in responding to future attacks. As attribution becomes more difficult, such a report should also recommend a set of baselines and metrics that warrant a governmental response and what the nature of such a response would be.

Step two toward a deterrence strategy would involve informing the Russian government and other adversarial regimes of the consequences for deploying AI-enabled disinformation attacks. Such messaging should be carried out publicly by high-level cabinet officials and in communications between intelligence agencies. Deterrence can only be effective if each side is aware of the implications of its actions. It also requires a nuanced understanding of the adversary’s strategic intentions and tactical capabilities – Russian strategic thinking will be different than Chinese strategic thinking. Deterrence is not a one size fits all model. Policymakers will need to develop a more in-depth understanding of Russian (or Chinese) culture, perceptions, and thinking. To that end, the U.S. government should reinvest, at a significant level, into cultivating expertise and training the next generation of regional experts.

Inevitably, policy will not be able to keep pace with technological advances. Tech companies, research foundations, governments, private foundations, and major non-profit policy organizations should invest in research that will assess the short- and long-term consequences of emerging AI technologies for foreign policy, national security, and geopolitical competition. Research and strategic thinking at the intersection of technology and geopolitics is sorely lacking even as Russia—a country identified as a direct competitor to the United States in the 2017 National Security Strategy —prioritizes expanding its capacities in this area. The United States is still far ahead of its competitors, especially Russia. But even with limited capabilities, the Kremlin can quickly gain comparative advantage in AI-driven information warfare, leaving the West to once again be caught off guard.

quote:

Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 16:21 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:
Zo schitterend dat 'ie op twitter nog steeds tekeer gaat over Clinton's emails.

quote:

Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 10:43 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Ik twijfel nog steeds tussen a) Manafort is een gigantische mongool die nog steeds niet snapt hoe penibel zijn situatie is, of b) Manafort bewaart een geheim zo groot dat hij bereid is de rest van zijn leven er voor naar de gevangenis te gaan. Hij is eigenlijk te intelligent voor a) maar te egoïstisch voor b).

quote:

Op maandag 26 november 2018 20:30 schreef speknek het volgende:

die stemmen net zoals Hans en Ingrid hier ook volgende keer weer Republikeins want mensen met een kleurtje zijn enger dan het verlies van hun eigen bestaanszekerheid

quote:

Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 11:13 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

[..]

Ze hebben PBS toch al? Die maken zelfs nog aardige docus ook en hebben ook nog een zooi interessante youtubekanalen. Al kan ik me zo voorstellen dat een kanaal als PBS Space Time een beetje te hoog gegrepen is voor de doorsnee evangelistische Trumpstemmer.
https://m.youtube.com/cha(...)snd2hF82MAbjStRNQLGV

quote:

Mueller has emails from Stone pal Corsi about WikiLeaks Dem email dump
"Word is (Julian Assange) plans 2 more dumps...Impact planned to be very damaging," Jerome Corsi said in email to Stone, say draft court documents.

Two months before WikiLeaks released emails stolen from the Clinton campaign, right-wing conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi sent an email to former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone anticipating the document dump, according to draft court papers obtained by NBC News.

"Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps," Corsi wrote on Aug. 2, 2016, referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to the draft court papers. "One shortly after I'm back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging." (NBC).

SPOILER

The email was revealed in a draft court document, known as a statement of the offense, sent to Corsi by special counsel Robert Mueller's office. Mueller also sent Corsi a draft plea agreement stipulating that the special counsel would not oppose Corsi requesting a sentence of probation if he agreed to plead guilty to one count of lying to federal investigators.

As NBC News reported on Monday, Corsi said he has rejected the deal. He has described Mueller's team as "thugs" and insisted that he did not "intentionally lie" about his communications related to WikiLeaks.

The draft court documents obtained by NBC News provide the most extensive account to date of Corsi's contact with Mueller's prosecutors.

The interviews began on Sept. 6 when Corsi told investigators that an associate, identified by Corsi as Stone, asked him in the summer of 2016 to get in touch with an organization, identified by Corsi as WikiLeaks, about unreleased materials relevant to the presidential campaign, the draft court papers say.

"Get to (Assange) [a]t Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending (WikiLeaks) emails," read the email to Corsi dated July 25, 2016, according to the draft court documents.

Corsi said he declined the request and made clear to Stone that an attempt to contact WikiLeaks could put them in investigators' crosshairs, according to the draft court documents.

But Mueller's team said that was a lie.

Instead of turning down the request, Corsi in fact passed it along to a person in London, according to the draft court documents. Corsi said that person was conservative author Ted Malloch.

Eight days later, Corsi sent the email to Stone saying that WikiLeaks possessed information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign and planned to release it in October.

"Time to let more than (Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta) to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC (Hillary Rodham Clinton)," Corsi added in the Aug. 2, 2016, email, according to the draft court papers. "That appears to be the game hackers are now about."

On Oct. 7, 2016, WikiLeaks released the first of two batches of emails that Russian hackers stole from Podesta, altering the trajectory of the presidential race.

Mueller's team says in the court papers that Corsi scrubbed his computer between Jan. 13, 2017, and March 1, 2017, deleting all email correspondence that predated Oct. 11, 2016, including the messages from Stone about WikiLeaks and Corsi's email to Malloch.

Corsi remained in contact with Stone in 2017 when the former Trump adviser's connections to WikiLeaks came under investigation by the FBI and congressional committees, according to the draft court papers.

On Nov. 30, 2017, Stone emailed Corsi asking him to write about a person whom Stone had told congressional investigators was his "source" or "intermediary" to WikiLeaks, according to the draft court papers.

Corsi and Stone have identified that person as Randy Credico, a radio host and one-time friend of Stone.

"Are you sure you want to make something out of this now?" Corsi responded, according to the draft court papers. "Why not wait to see what (Credico) does? You may be defending yourself too much — raising new questions that will fuel new inquiries. This may be a time to say less, not more."

Stone responded by telling Corsi that Credico will "take the 5th — but let's hold a day," the draft court document says.

The draft court documents says that Corsi met with the special counsel's office for several additional interviews and provided access to his email accounts and electronic devices.

In the interviews, the draft court papers say, Corsi said that his claims to Stone, beginning in 2016, that he had a way of obtaining confidential information from WikiLeaks were false.

Corsi, the former Washington bureau chief of the conspiracy theory outlet InfoWars, has told NBC News that he had no direct or indirect contact with WikiLeaks. Corsi claims to have anticipated WikiLeaks' release of the hacked emails by "connecting the dots" between public statements from Assange and other available materials.

"Why did I think they were coming out in October? Because I said to myself if I had these emails I'd use them as the October surprise," Corsi told NBC News on Tuesday. "And why did I think they would come out serially, drip by drip? Because Assange is very strategic. He understands the news cycle."

A spokesman for Mueller's office declined to comment. Corsi's lawyer, David Gray, also declined to comment.

But in a letter drafted by Gray and addressed to Mueller's team, Corsi's lawyer argued that he should not be charged with a crime based on a faulty memory.

"I understand that this plea to making a false claim is predicated on the fact that Dr. Corsi had emails and phone calls wherein he was in fact interested in WikiLeaks," Gray wrote.

"He had not had the benefit of reviewing all of his emails prior to the interview and you graciously allowed him to review his emails and amend his statements — which he did. Now, after various amendments to his statements, Dr. Corsi is being asked to affirmatively state that he lied to FBI agents. The issue is that the statements that Dr. Corsi made were, in fact, the best he could recall at the time."

Gray also noted that if Corsi were to plead guilty, he would have to give up his securities license and cease his online chats until sentencing, depriving him of crucial sources of income.

Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who is now a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, said the documents suggest that Mueller has more on Corsi than is laid out in the draft court papers.

"Based on reviewing these documents, I believe that the office of the special counsel may have more evidence of criminal wrongdoing by Corsi beyond the false statements, and that is why they engaged in plea negotiations," Goldman said.

twitter:

ZoeTillman twitterde op dinsdag 27-11-2018 om 21:21:34 NEW: Statement from Paul Manafort about today's Guardian story, via a spokesman: "This story is totally false and deliberately libelous. I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him." https://t.co/4hZDK29neE reageer retweet

twitter:

wikileaks twitterde op dinsdag 27-11-2018 om 15:49:02 Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper's reputation. @WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor's head that Manafort never met Assange. https://t.co/R2Qn6rLQjn reageer retweet

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Op woensdag 28 november 2018 00:06 schreef thesiren.nl het volgende:
Het lijkt me sterk dat een ambassade geen gastenlijst onderhoud.

twitter:

DeadlineWH twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 00:20:44 "I think Manafort is protecting other interests. He has his eyes on other things than the President... you should look at his client list... Manafort may have worries about his family's well-being because of the people he's done business with..."- @TimOBrien with @NicolleDWallace https://t.co/UdFM7MR45h reageer retweet

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Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 17:52 schreef nostra het volgende:

[..]

Het is ook wel erg simpel (en gewoon pertinent onjuist) om de rust belt of de Midwest weg te zetten als een gebied dat per definitie Republikeins stemt en dat dan ook nog eens zou doen vanuit racistische overwegingen en ondanks een zelfondervonden economisch nadeel. Dat zijn extrapolaties van de conclusies van die studie, die klok en klepel nogal van elkaar scheiden.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 02:45:44 A lawyer for Paul Manafort repeatedly briefed Trump's lawyers on his client's discussions with federal investigators after Manafort agreed to cooperate with Mueller, one of Trump's lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations tell NYT. https://t.co/AwWiUe8Bao reageer retweet

quote:

A lawyer for Paul Manafort, the president’s onetime campaign chairman, repeatedly briefed President Trump’s lawyers on his client’s discussions with federal investigators after Mr. Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations.

The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with Mr. Mueller’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Mr. Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said. Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the president’s personal lawyers, acknowledged the arrangement on Tuesday and defended it as a source of valuable insights into the special counsel’s inquiry and where it was headed. Such information could help shape a legal defense strategy, and it also appeared to give Mr. Trump and his legal advisers ammunition in their public relations campaign against the special counsel’s office.

SPOILER

For example, Mr. Giuliani said, Mr. Manafort’s lawyer Kevin M. Downing told him that prosecutors hammered away at whether the president knew about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting where Russians promised to deliver damaging information on Hillary Clinton to his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. The president has long denied knowing about the meeting in advance. “He wants Manafort to incriminate Trump,” Mr. Giuliani declared of Mr. Mueller.

While Mr. Downing’s discussions with the president’s team violated no laws, they helped contribute to a deteriorating relationship between lawyers for Mr. Manafort and Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors, who accused Mr. Manafort of holding out on them despite his pledge to assist them in any matter they deemed relevant, according to the people. That conflict spilled into public view on Monday when the prosecutors took the rare step of declaring that Mr. Manafort had breached his plea agreement by lying to them about a variety of subjects.

Mr. Manafort’s lawyers insisted that their client had been truthful but acknowledged that the two sides were at an impasse. Mr. Manafort will now face sentencing on two conspiracy charges and eight counts of financial fraud — crimes that could put him behind bars for at least 10 years.

Mr. Downing did not respond to a request for comment. Though it was unclear how frequently he spoke to Mr. Trump’s lawyers or how much he revealed, his updates helped reassure Mr. Trump’s legal team that Mr. Manafort had not implicated the president in any possible wrongdoing.

Mr. Giuliani, who has taken an aggressive posture against the Russia investigation since Mr. Trump hired him in April, seized on Mr. Downing’s information to unleash lines of attack onto the special counsel.

In asserting that investigators were unnecessarily targeting Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani accused the prosecutor overseeing the Manafort investigation, Andrew Weissmann, of keeping Mr. Manafort in solitary confinement simply in the hopes of forcing him to give false testimony about the president.

But detention officials decide whether inmates serve in solitary confinement, according to law enforcement officials, and allies of Mr. Manafort have said he is there for his own safety.

A spokesman for Mr. Mueller’s office declined to comment. Mr. Weissmann is a longtime senior Justice Department prosecutor who specializes in prosecuting financial crimes and turning defendants into cooperating witnesses. His aggressive nature has earned him two competing reputations: Prosecutors view him as a relentless investigator who has overseen some of the Justice Department’s most complex investigations, but some defense lawyers say he is overly combative and will bend the facts to gain a conviction.

In his own recent Twitter attacks on the special counsel, the president seemed to imply that he had inside information about the prosecutors’ lines of inquiry and frustrations. “Wait until it comes out how horribly & viciously they are treating people, ruining lives for them refusing to lie,” Mr. Trump wrote on Tuesday.

Earlier this month, he tweeted: “The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want.”

Mr. Manafort’s legal team had long kept Mr. Trump’s lawyers abreast of developments in his case under a joint defense agreement. Mr. Trump’s team has pursued such pacts as a way to monitor the special counsel’s inquiry. Mr. Giuliani said last month that the president’s lawyers had agreements with lawyers for 32 witnesses or subjects of Mr. Mueller’s 18-month-old investigation.

Defense lawyers involved in investigations with multiple witnesses often form such alliances so they can share information without running afoul of attorney-client privilege rules. But when one defendant decides to cooperate with the government in a plea deal, that defense lawyer typically pulls out rather than antagonize the prosecutors who can influence the client’s sentence. For instance, a lawyer for the president’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn withdrew last year from such an agreement with Mr. Trump’s lawyers before pleading guilty to a felony offense and agreeing to help the special counsel.

Mr. Manafort’s lawyers, on the other hand, maintained their joint defense agreement with the president’s legal team even after Mr. Manafort pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts in September and began answering questions in at least a dozen sessions with the special counsel.

Even if the pact was mostly informal at that point, law enforcement experts said it was still highly unusual for Mr. Manafort’s lawyers to keep up such contacts once their client had pledged to help the prosecutors in hope of a lighter punishment for his crimes.

Mr. Manafort must have wanted to keep a line open to the president in hope of a pardon, said Barbara McQuade, a former United States attorney who now teaches law at University of Michigan. “I’m not able to think of another reason,” she said.

If Mr. Manafort wanted to stay on the prosecutors’ good side, “it would make no sense for him to continue to share information with other subjects of the investigation,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former United States attorney and senior F.B.I. official. He added: “He is either all in or all out with respect to cooperation. Typically, there is no middle ground.”

In another development on Tuesday, Mr. Manafort categorically denied a report in The Guardian claiming that he met with Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, around the time he joined the Trump campaign in the spring of 2016. Mr. Mueller’s team has been investigating whether any associates of Mr. Trump conspired with Moscow’s operation to influence the presidential election with documents stolen from Democratic computers and distributed by WikiLeaks.

“This story is totally false and deliberately libelous. I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him. I have never been contacted by anyone connected to WikiLeaks, either directly or indirectly. I have never reached out to Assange or WikiLeaks on any matter,” Mr. Manafort said in a statement released by his spokesman. He said he was considering legal action against the newspaper. WikiLeaks said on Twitter that Mr. Assange planned to sue the newspaper for libel over the article, which The New York Times did not independently confirm.

Last year, a lawyer for Mr. Trump broached the idea of presidential pardons to lawyers for both Mr. Manafort and Mr. Flynn as prosecutors were building cases against both men, according to people familiar with the conversations. The lawyer, John Dowd, who later resigned from the president’s team, denied ever raising the prospect of a pardon.

But later, Mr. Giuliani suggested that Mr. Manafort and others might be eligible for pardons after Mr. Mueller’s inquiry ends, and the prospect has continued to hover over Mr. Manafort’s case. On Tuesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said she had no knowledge of any conversations about a pardon for Mr. Manafort. A week ago, after months of negotiations, Mr. Trump provided written answers to some questions from Mr. Mueller.

Some defense lawyers have suggested that prosecutors deliberately fashioned Mr. Manafort’s plea agreement to counter a possible pardon. In forcing Mr. Manafort to forfeit almost all his wealth, including five homes, various bank accounts and an insurance policy, prosecutors specified that they could seize his assets under civil procedures “without regard to the status of his criminal conviction.”

Harry Litman, a University of California, San Diego, law professor and former deputy assistant attorney general, said that he had seen similar provisions in other cases. But other legal experts said it seemed tailor-made to ensure Mr. Manafort would lose much of his wealth, no matter what Mr. Trump did.

twitter:

rgoodlaw twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 03:37:00 Mueller draft doc connects Stone-Corsi plot to Trump campaign and Donald J Trump by name:Says Corsi "understood [Stone] to be in regular contact with senior members of the Trump Campaign, including...Donald J. Trump" with goal to get docs "relevant to the presidential campaign" https://t.co/4ih7n3v1Y4 reageer retweet

twitter:

K8brannen twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 04:03:37 Here's a weak denial: "Rudolph W. Giuliani, an attorney for Trump, said the president does not recall ever speaking to either Stone or Corsi about WikiLeaks." https://t.co/5Ge4LDaR0B reageer retweet

twitter:

SteveKornacki twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 04:12:38 NBC News projects that Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) wins the Mississippi Senate runoff over Mike Espy (D) reageer retweet

twitter:

axios twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 04:00:00 The White House is barring CIA Director Gina Haspel and other intelligence officials from briefing the Senate on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, The Guardian reportshttps://t.co/KJJ8f6M3kO reageer retweet

quote:

The White House has denied preventing the CIA director, Gina Haspel, from briefing the Senate on the murder of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi.

The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the defence secretary, James Mattis, are due to give a briefing on US relations with Saudi Arabia to the entire Senate behind closed doors on Wednesday, ahead of a vote that could cut off US support for Riyadh's military campaign in Yemen.

On a national security issue of such importance, it would be customary for a senior intelligence official to take part, Senate staffers said. On this occasion, the absence of the intelligence community is all the more glaring, as Haspel travelled to Istanbul to hear audio tapes of Khashoggi's murder provided by Turkish intelligence, and then briefed Donald Trump.

Senior senators - including the chairman of the foreign relations committee, Bob Corker - have called for Haspel to appear, but there was no sign on Tuesday evening that she will take part.

Officials said that the decision for Haspel not to appear in front of the committee came from the White House, but the national security adviser, John Bolton, denied it. "Certainly not," he told reporters, but left it unclear why there would be no intelligence presence.

SPOILER

According to multiple reports, the tapes and other intelligence material point clearly to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as having ordered Khashoggi's killing in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October.

The US president has asserted, however, that the CIA report is inconclusive. He told the Washington Post on Tuesday: "Maybe he did and maybe he didn't. But he denies it. And people around him deny it ... I'm not saying that they're saying he didn't do it, but they didn't say it affirmatively."

Trump's faith in the crown prince is treated with profound scepticism by many senators who expected to hear first-hand from Haspel on Wednesday on a brutal killing that appears to have help sway several senators against continuing military support to Riyadh for the war in Yemen.

That conflict is thought to have killed more than 50,000 people, with many of the casualties coming from the Saudi-led coalition's aerial bombing campaign. The coalition's use of economic blockades has meanwhile help bring the country to the brink of famine. Save the Children estimates that up to 85,000 children have died of hunger.

Against that backdrop the administration is increasingly nervous that the Senate will rebel against its policy of maintaining support for Riyadh and Prince Mohammed, asserting its powers under the War Powers Resolution.

As of Tuesday, however, the Senate was told by the administration to expect only Pompeo and Mattis at the Wednesday briefing. The White House did not respond to a query on the absence of an intelligence official.

"There is always an intel person there for a briefing like this," a Senate staffer told the Guardian. "It is totally unprecedented and should be interpreted as nothing less than the Trump administration trying to silence the intelligence community."

Bruce Riedel, a veteran CIA official and an expert on the US-Saudi relationship at the Brookings Institution, said: "Gina [Haspel] has been the case officer on this. She traveled to Turkey and she is the one who listened to the tapes and is reported to have briefed the president multiple times.

"This is further evidence that the White House is trying to outdo the Saudis in carrying out the worst cover-up in modern history," Riedel added.

Bolton told reporters on Tuesday that he had not heard the tape of Khashoggi's murder, and did not intend to.

"People who speak Arabic have listened to the tape and given us the substance of what's in it," Bolton said a White House briefing. Pressed on why he had not listened to something of such potential importance to relations with Riyadh, he retorted: "How many of you speak Arabic? I guess I should ask you why you think I should [listen]? What do you think I would learn from it?"

A previous attempt to cut off military assistance to Riyadh under the War Powers Resolution, sponsored by the independent senator Bernie Sanders, Democrat Chris Murphy and Republican Mike Lee, was blocked in March this year by a 55-44 margin.

But several senators who voted to shelve the resolution then have since changed their mind, including Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, and Corker.

Both senators have called for the administration to make a formal judgment on Prince Mohammed's involvement in the Khashoggi murder and renewed calls for Haspel to appear on Wednesday.

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"The briefings are lacking because there's no one from the intelligence community there. That says to me that you are specifically trying not to have the key question asked," Menendez said on Monday according to DefenseNews.

"I've laid in the railroad tracks in the past to keep us from blocking arms to Saudi Arabia," Corker told reporters. "I'm in a real different place right now as it relates to Saudi Arabia."

The timing of the vote on the Saudi resolution is unclear. Sanders has said there is support for holding it this week. The Republican majority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, can try to postpone it, but cannot put it off indefinitely, as any measure under the War Powers Resolution has privileged status and cannot be stopped from going to the Senate floor for a vote.

quote:

NC elections board refuses to certify 9th District race, leaving it in limbo (Charlotte Observer)

The state board of elections Tuesday refused to certify the results of the 9th Congressional District election after one board member cited what he called “unfortunate activities” in the eastern part of the district.

It’s unclear what those activities involved or what the failure to certify might mean. The board discussed the matter in closed session.

Republican Mark Harris defeated Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes.

Election board member Joshua Malcolm raised the issue in what was expected to be a routine certification of the results of North Carolina’s 13 congressional races. He asked the board to remove the 9th District from the list of those to be certified.

“I’m very familiar with unfortunate activities that have been happening down in my part of the state,” vice chair Malcolm, a Robeson County Democrat, told the board. “And I am not going to turn a blind eye to what took place to the best of my understanding which has been ongoing for a number of years that has repeatedly been referred to the United States attorney and the district attorneys for them to take action and clean it up. And in my opinion those things have not taken place.”

Malcolm cited a statute that allows the board the authority to take any necessary action “to assure that an election is determined without taint of fraud or corruption and without irregularities that may have changed the result of an election.”

Republicans cried foul.

“We think they have abused their discretion and violated the statute,” said Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the state GOP. “This will inevitably end up in court. The fact of the matter is Mark Harris won the race. He got more votes.”

McCready conceded to Harris the day after the election.

Woodhouse said Republicans believe the issue stems from Bladen County, the district’s eastern-most county. Harris won Bladen by 1,557 votes.

The 9th District stretches from southeast Charlotte east through eight counties.

A spokesman for the Harris campaign would not comment. The McCready campaign could not be reached.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 09:28 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:
Trump wil de subsidie aan GM intrekken. Ben benieuwd hoe dit gaat lopen.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 09:28 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:
Trump wil de subsidie aan GM intrekken. Ben benieuwd hoe dit gaat lopen.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 09:28 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:
Trump wil de subsidie aan GM intrekken. Ben benieuwd hoe dit gaat lopen.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 10:05 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:

[..]

En hoe moet dat precies banen terugbrengen?

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 04:19 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

SteveKornacki twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 04:12:38 NBC News projects that Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) wins the Mississippi Senate runoff over Mike Espy (D) reageer retweet

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 04:19 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

SteveKornacki twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 04:12:38 NBC News projects that Cindy Hyde-Smith (R) wins the Mississippi Senate runoff over Mike Espy (D) reageer retweet

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 12:06 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Het werd wel een stuk spannender dan verwacht. 53.9% voor CHS, 46.1% voor Espy. Het was voor het laatst zo spannend in een Senaatsverkiezing in Mississippi in 1988 (!). Toont aan dat CHS een uitermate zwakke kandidaat is die vrijwel zeker een primary challenge gaat krijgen in 2020. Espy was altijd de underdog maar verliezen met maar 7.8% is een respectabele prestatie voor een Dem in Mississippi. Volgend jaar zijn er Gouverneursverkiezingen dus dat moet ze zeker moed geven.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 12:38 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

Inderdaad, wederom zaten ze heel dicht bij elkaar. Het is een trend die de republikeinen in het Congres niet lekker zit. Voor hun achterban hebben ze de Blue Wave als marginaal afgedaan, maar de harde cijfers geven toch een heel ander beeld.

quote:

Op dinsdag 27 november 2018 10:53 schreef archito het volgende:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1067142819008122885

Stelt Trump nu min of meer voor om een propagandakanaal te beginnen?

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 14:13 schreef icecreamfarmer_NL het volgende:

[..]

Ze hebben radio free europe en aanverwanten toch al?

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 15:00:03 Trump just retweeted an image that said Rod Rosenstein, his own deputy Attorney General, and many others should be tried for treason. reageer retweet

twitter:

kyledcheney twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 16:05:34 Update: DOJ declines to comment on the president accusing the deputy AG of treason. reageer retweet

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 15:30:05 Chris Coons tells @Morning_Joe that he and Jeff Flake plan to head to the floor today to ask to hold an immediate vote on the bill to protect Robert Mueller. He says he's confident they have the votes to pass it. reageer retweet

twitter:

ddale8 twitterde op dinsdag 27-11-2018 om 20:21:08 An interesting approach by CNN here - putting actual facts in a big box beside Sarah Sanders. Would be worth exploring this kind of Factual Pop-Up Video for Trump's own speeches. https://t.co/FrpvfSviT5 reageer retweet

twitter:

asharock twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 00:56:40 PolitiFact pitched this to the cables in 2016. No takers. Interesting to see if 2020 will be different. https://t.co/GZa4xA0dmr reageer retweet

twitter:

ddale8 twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 16:36:47 Last week was a quiet week by Trump standards. He made 29 false claims, a normal number for him in 2017 but not in 2018; it was his lowest since mid-September. He uttered just 12,156 total words, per @FactbaseFeed, down from 80,000+ in weeks before the midterms. reageer retweet

quote:

President Trump placed responsibility for recent stock market declines and this week’s announcement of General Motors plant closures and layoffs on the Federal Reserve during an interview Tuesday, shirking any personal blame for cracks in the economy and declaring that he is “not even a little bit happy” with his hand-selected central bank chairman.

In a wide-ranging and sometimes discordant 20-minute interview with The Washington Post, Trump complained at length about Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. “Jay” Powell, whom he nominated last year. When asked about declines on Wall Street and GM’s announcement that it was laying off 15 percent of its workforce, Trump responded by criticizing higher interest rates and other Fed policies, though he insisted that he is not worried about a recession.

“I’m doing deals, and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed,” Trump said. “They’re making a mistake because I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

He added: “So far, I’m not even a little bit happy with my selection of Jay. Not even a little bit. And I’m not blaming anybody, but I’m just telling you I think that the Fed is way off-base with what they’re doing.”

SPOILER

Sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, Trump also threatened to cancel his scheduled meeting with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin at a global summit this week in Argentina because of Russia’s maritime clash with Ukraine.

Asked whether he thought Putin was within his rights to capture three Ukrainian ships and their crews Sunday in the Black Sea, Trump said he was awaiting a “full report” from his national security team Tuesday evening about the incident. “That will be very determinative,” Trump said. “Maybe I won’t have the meeting. Maybe I won’t even have the meeting.”

When asked whether Russia’s aggression is a cause for concern for the American people, Trump responded with a more forceful critique of Putin’s actions than those he has delivered in the past.

“I don’t like that aggression,” he said. “I don’t want that aggression at all. Absolutely. And by the way, Europe shouldn’t like that aggression. And Germany shouldn’t like that aggression.”

Trump also dismissed the federal government’s landmark report released last week finding that damage from global warming is intensifying around the country. The president said that “I don’t see” climate change as man-made and that he does not believe the scientific consensus.

“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers,” Trump said. “You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean.”

The president added of climate change, “As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it.”

The comments were Trump’s most extensive yet on why he disagrees with the dire National Climate Assessment released by his own administration Friday, which found that climate change poses a severe threat to the health and financial security of Americans, as well as to the country’s infrastructure and natural resources.

Trump again questioned the CIA’s assessment that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a contributor to The Post, and said he considered Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s repeated denials in his decision to maintain a close alliance with the oil-rich desert kingdom

“Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t,” Trump said. “But he denies it. And people around him deny it. And the CIA did not say affirmatively he did it, either, by the way. I’m not saying that they’re saying he didn’t do it, but they didn’t say it affirmatively.”

Trump said he could visit with Mohammed on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit, though no formal meeting has been scheduled.

The CIA has assessed that Mohammed ordered Khashoggi’s killing and has shared its findings with lawmakers and the White House, according to people familiar with the matter. Intelligence assessments are rarely, if ever, ironclad, and Trump has repeatedly stressed that there is no evidence that would irrefutably lay the blame at Mohammed’s feet.

But the CIA based its overall assessment of Mohammed’s role on a number of pieces of compelling evidence, including intercepted communications; surveillance from inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, where Khashoggi was killed in October; and the agency’s analysis of Mohammed’s total control of the Saudi government.

Meanwhile, Trump said he had “no intention” of moving to stop special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“The Mueller investigation is what it is. It just goes on and on and on,” he said. When pressed on whether he would commit to letting the probe continue until its conclusion, Trump stopped short of making an explicit pledge.

“This question has been asked about me now for almost two years,” he said, at which point counselor Kellyanne Conway chimed in, “A thousand times.”

Trump continued: “And, in the meantime, he’s still there. He wouldn’t have to be, but he’s still there, so I have no intention of doing anything.”

The president declined to discuss on the record the Mueller team’s accusation Monday that Paul Manafort had breached his plea agreement by lying repeatedly to investigators, or whether he would use presidential powers to help his former campaign chairman.

“Let me go off the record because I don’t want to get in the middle of the whole thing,” he said. He added later: “At some point, I’ll talk on the record about it. But I’d rather not.”

Trump also floated the idea of removing U.S. troops from the Middle East, citing the lower price of oil as a reason to withdraw.

“Now, are we going to stay in that part of the world? One reason to is Israel,” Trump said. “Oil is becoming less and less of a reason because we’re producing more oil now than we’ve ever produced. So, you know, all of a sudden it gets to a point where you don’t have to stay there.”

Trump also called the killing of three U.S. troops in a roadside explosion in Afghanistan this week “very sad.” He said he was continuing the military presence in Afghanistan only because “experts” told him the United States needed to keep fighting there.

The president said he was considering visiting troops in the region soon, perhaps before Christmas. “At the right time I will,” he said of a war-zone visit, which would be his first as president.

During the interview, Trump’s sharpest criticism was reserved for his Fed chairman. Though Trump said several times in response to a question about emerging cracks in the economy that he wasn’t “blaming anybody,” he clearly assigned blame to Powell for leading the Fed through several interest rate increases this year.

In Twitter posts Tuesday, issued shortly after his interview with The Post, Trump blamed GM chief executive Mary Barra for the company’s plant closures and layoffs and threatened to strip away any government subsidies for the auto giant.

Trump’s fury at GM and the Fed was similar to his outrage at Harley-Davidson this summer, after the Milwaukee-based motorcycle company announced it was moving some jobs overseas in part because it said it was caught in the midst of a trade war between the White House and foreign leaders.

The stock market has tumbled in recent weeks, unnerving Trump, who in turn has blamed Democrats, the Chinese government and the central bank for any perceived economic weakness.

Asked in the interview who should be held responsible — and reminded that one of his predecessors, Harry Truman, famously kept a sign at his desk that read, “The buck stops here” — Trump took no personal responsibility.

The Federal Reserve is the nation’s central bank and sets the direction for interest rates, or the cost of borrowing money. Higher rates make it more expensive for consumers and businesses to obtain credit, which can put downward pressure on the economy.

During the interview, Trump’s description of the economy was at odds with its actual performance. It has grown since he took office and the unemployment rate has fallen, but he suggested that as many jobs were returning to the United States from overseas as were being lost in layoffs.

In addition, Trump said the stock market was up 38 percent since he took office. In fact, the Dow Jones industrial average is up 25 percent since he was sworn in, less than the increase during President Barack Obama’s first two years in office.

The United States has had very low interest rates for more than a decade, and Fed officials are slowly trying to bring them back up. Many economists believe that higher interest rates are a way to combat inflation and prevent the economy from overheating.

Powell took over as chairman earlier this year. Since then, the Fed has raised interest rates three times and is expected to increase them another time next month.

“The Fed is doing exactly what it should be doing, which is to prevent overheating and boom- bust-type conditions in the future,” former Federal Reserve vice chairman Donald Kohn said.

Brad DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said the Fed was responding in part to economic conditions Trump had helped foster, such as last year’s tax cut, which led to what some had projected would be a short-term economic growth spurt.

“The Federal Reserve cannot be expected to do otherwise than raise interest rates,” DeLong said. “This is what Trump bought when he made his Fed appointments. So why is he surprised?”

Trump’s selection of Powell to lead the central bank was driven largely by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Powell’s appointment was very unusual, as he is not an economist. He had served in a past Republican White House but was first tapped to serve as a Fed governor by Obama. During his initial tenure at the Fed, Powell was seen as largely supportive of the slow-but-steady interest rate increase strategy used by then-Chair Janet L. Yellen.

Trump considered reappointing Yellen to the post, and she impressed him greatly during an interview, according to people briefed on their encounter. But advisers steered him away from renominating her, telling him that he should have his own person in the job.

The president also appeared hung up on Yellen’s height. He told aides on the National Economic Council on several occasions that the 5-foot-3-inch economist was not tall enough to lead the central bank, quizzing them on whether they agreed, current and former officials said.

Discussing his decision to tap Powell, Trump said Monday: “Look, I took recommendations. I’m not blaming anybody.”

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 16:35 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 15:30:05 Chris Coons tells @Morning_Joe that he and Jeff Flake plan to head to the floor today to ask to hold an immediate vote on the bill to protect Robert Mueller. He says he's confident they have the votes to pass it. reageer retweet

Dat gaat O'Connell weer tegenhouden?

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 13:05 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Netto komt voor de Dems de winst neer op -1 in de Senaat, +40 in het Huis, +7 Governor's en ongeveer +400 lokale zetels. Als je dat geen "wave" vindt ben je delusional.

twitter:

seungminkim twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 17:16:28 OMG -->; A Senate panel delays confirmation vote on Trump's pick to lead ICE, Ron Vitiello, as senators sort out concerns raised by ICE local unions. One concern is how Vitiello apparently shared images on Twitter comparing Trump to Dennis the Menacehttps://t.co/Mc1aPNoGCI reageer retweet

quote:

President Donald Trump on Wednesday shared a post from a parody account of Vice President Mike Pence giving thanks “for every day Hillary Clinton is not president.”

The post was originally shared by @MikePenceVP, a profile that uses the same photo as one of Pence’s verified accounts but describes itself as a “fan account. My Goal is to expose liberal hypocrisy and Fake News Bias.” The vice president’s official Twitter accounts are @VP and @Mike_Pence.

“I’m thankful for every day Hillary Clinton is not President!” the @MikePenceVP account tweeted on Thanksgiving.

Trump retweeted the post Wednesday morning to his 56 million Twitter followers. The tweet had been retweeted 4,700 times by 10 a.m.

It is unclear whether the president thought he was retweeting the vice president or knew it is a parody account. Trump was active throughout the morning on Twitter, sharing several other posts criticizing his 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 13:05 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Netto komt voor de Dems de winst neer op -1 in de Senaat, +40 in het Huis, +7 Governor's en ongeveer +400 lokale zetels. Als je dat geen "wave" vindt ben je delusional.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 18:07 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:

[..]

Heel net resultaat, vooral die -1 in de Senaat valt me mee. Kennelijk heb ik niet opgelet.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 18:42 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Puur de midterms is -2, maar als je de hele cycle meerekent -1 in verband met Doug Jones.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 18:43 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:

[..]

En hoe zit het met de AGs? Want die werden ook gekozen toch of heb ik dat mis?

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 18:48 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Meeste staten wel. Democraten hebben 4 AG's meer dan voor de verkiezingen. Was 27R/21D, nu 24R/25D. Voor de rest independents of mensen zonder partijvoorkeur.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 18:49 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:

[..]

Ik zag daarover wat van John Oliver, vandaar . Bedankt voor de informatie.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 18:50 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Die pennendief in Texas heeft helaas net gewonnen.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 17:53 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
En ook nog eens fake accounts retweeten

Trump retweets fake Pence account giving thanks for Clinton's 2016 loss

[..]

quote:

Trump was active throughout the morning on Twitter, sharing several other posts criticizing his 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 19:24 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:
Trump ontkent alles, zegt van helemaal niets te weten in antwoord op vragen van Mueller:

Exclusive: Two key answers from Trump to Mueller
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2(...)ump-tower/index.html

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 21:09 schreef Re het volgende:
blijkbaar wel slim gedaan van Mueller, geen gag order voor Manafort, en hem met Trump laten overleggen omdat ze een joint defence hebben, Trump zijn open book questions laten invullen en dan Manafort zijn plea deal torpederen want leugens verteld. Bijkomend voordeel is dat bij de afhandeling van de strafmaat van Manafort een groot stuk report van Mueller meegenomen wordt en Whitaker kan daar niets aan doen om het tegen te houden

als er iemand 4D chess speelt is het Mueller wel

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 21:18 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Ja die is natuurlijk gepokt en gemazeld, terwijl de advocaten van Trump hem moeten smeken om geen domme dingen te doen.
Het morele faillissement van de GOP zorgt er natuurlijk voor dat Trump zelf vrijwel zeker buiten schot blijft ongeacht de uitkomst van het onderzoek, maar zijn familie is nog best een potentieel interessant doelwit.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 21:09 schreef Re het volgende:
als er iemand 4D chess speelt is het Mueller wel

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 21:18 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Ja die is natuurlijk gepokt en gemazeld, terwijl de advocaten van Trump hem moeten smeken om geen domme dingen te doen.
Het morele faillissement van de GOP zorgt er natuurlijk voor dat Trump zelf vrijwel zeker buiten schot blijft ongeacht de uitkomst van het onderzoek, maar zijn familie is nog best een potentieel interessant doelwit.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 21:28 schreef Tweek het volgende:

[..]

Laten we nog maar even afwachten wat er daadwerkelijk gespeeld wordt om teleurstelling te voorkomen.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 22:01 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
De democraten in Wisconsin maken zich zorgen over of de republikeinen hun gegerrymanderde meerderheid in de lame-duck sessie zouden gebruiken om de nieuw verkozen democratische governor een veto (of anderszins invloed) te ontzeggen bij nieuw te tekenen districten in 2020.

Wisconsin Democrats fear GOP redistricting end-around

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Op woensdag 28 november 2018 22:25 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Heeft de GOP ook in North Carolina gedaan.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 22:46 schreef Monolith het volgende:
De senaat stemt in met het intrekken van de steun aan S-A in Jemen:
https://www.politico.com/(...)upport-yemen-1025657

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Op woensdag 28 november 2018 22:49 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Dit is slechts de stem om tot een debat+stemming te komen hierover toch?

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Op woensdag 28 november 2018 22:26 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Yep, hoewel dat geen stand hield en de republikeinen in dit geval ontkennen.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 23:16 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Hoezo, hield geen stand? Geen van de bevoegdheden die van de gouverneur zijn weggenomen zijn teruggegeven, hoor. Het enige is dat de districten zijn afgewezen door de rechter. Maar dat staat los van de antidemocratische power grab die daar heeft plaatsgevonden.

quote:

Op woensdag 28 november 2018 23:28 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Jawel, zie bv. de tijdslijn hier waarin vanaf 2016 senate bill 4 genoemd wordt: https://ballotpedia.org/C(...)ina_General_Assembly

twitter:

SecPompeo twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 17:02:24 Iran’s regime has no interest in easing Yemeni suffering; the mullahs don’t even care for ordinary Iranians. Saudi Arabia has invested billions to relieve suffering in #Yemen. Iran has invested zero. reageer retweet

twitter:

chrislhayes twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 21:04:04 This is monstrously Orwellian. The impurity of Iranian intentions aside, the Saudis are quite literally bombing and starving civilians by the tens of thousands. https://t.co/jyQAAQBt61 reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 00:09 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

SecPompeo twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 17:02:24 Iran’s regime has no interest in easing Yemeni suffering; the mullahs don’t even care for ordinary Iranians. Saudi Arabia has invested billions to relieve suffering in #Yemen. Iran has invested zero. reageer retweet

quote:

Russian hackers weren’t the ones behind the theft of Democratic emails that upended the 2016 presidential race, conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi told his InfoWars fans last year. Instead, Corsi said, Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich had stolen the emails and was murdered in revenge for the heist.

But Corsi was lying. In an email to Trump confidante Roger Stone in 2016, Corsi acknowledged that in fact hackers were behind the email theft, according to newly released messages.

Despite that admission, both Corsi and Stone played key roles promoting the conspiracy theory about Rich. Stone became one of the first major figures in Trump’s orbit to suggest Rich was murdered over the emails, tweeting on August 10, 2016 that Rich had “ties to DNC heist.”

SPOILER

In 2017, after Rich’s parents begged right-wing media personalities to stop pushing conspiracy theories about their son, Corsi put the blame for the email theft on Rich in a three-part InfoWars series.

In his InfoWars posts and a series of YouTube videos, Corsi portrayed Rich as a disaffected supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who stole the emails to get revenge against the DNC and paid for it with his life. Corsi wrote that Rich had clearly been “implicated in breaches of email systems.” The young staffer was, according to Corsi, the “likely perpetrator.”

Corsi’s theory helped fuel conspiracy theorists on the right who claim, without evidence, that Rich was murdered on the orders of Hillary Clinton. But emails from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia show that Corsi knew all along that Russian hackers gave the emails to WikiLeaks.

In an August 2, 2016 email, made public Tuesday in draft court papers prepared by Mueller’s office, Corsi told Stone that “hackers” were behind the WikiLeaks releases.

“Time to let more than [Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta] to be exposed as in bed with enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC,” Corsi wrote. “That appears to be the game hackers are now about.”

By August 2016, cybersecurity experts had identified the hackers as Russians and it was widely reported the U.S. government reached the same conclusion.

Corsi’s biggest push for the Seth Rich conspiracy theory came in his 2017 series for Alex Jones’ InfoWars, where Corsi worked as a Washington bureau chief.

Days earlier, Rich’s parents had pleaded with Corsi and his allies to stop claiming that their son’s unsolved July 2016 murder, which police believe was a botched robbery, was actually an assassination. The conspiracy theories, they wrote in The Washington Post, had turned his death into a “political football.”

Corsi pressed on anyway, despite knowing that hackers had been behind the email theft. The first item in his InfoWars series promised that “new evidence suggests Seth Rich was DNC leaker.”

Corsi and Stone didn’t respond to requests for comment. Rich’s family, who are currently engaged in several lawsuits over the conspiracy theories about Rich’s death, declined to comment.

twitter:

jerome_corsi twitterde op dinsdag 10-07-2018 om 14:39:38 I will be joining Jason Goodman on his Live Stream broadcast today SETH RICH- Witness Prepared to Identify Two Killers of Seth Rich at Tuesday press conference at 1:00PM at the HOLIDAY INN Rosslyn Key Bridge in DC -- I will join Jason by SKYPE - please watch CROWDSOURCE THE TRUTH https://t.co/KJ2Em3AyMh reageer retweet

twitter:

jerome_corsi twitterde op maandag 09-07-2018 om 21:28:05 BREAKING NEWS: Witness Prepared to Identify Two Killers of Seth Rich at Tuesday press conference at 1:00PM at the HOLIDAY INN Rosslyn Key Bridge in DC https://t.co/ijhcQNNldN via Alicia Powe, The Gateway Pundit @gatewaypundit reageer retweet

twitter:

jerome_corsi twitterde op maandag 09-07-2018 om 21:28:06 Jack Burkman, a Washington-based attorney and lobbyist who has worked with a private investigative team to solve the Seth Rich murder mystery, told The Gateway Pundit that the witness has conclusive evidence that will bring Rich’s killers to justice within a month. GATEWAY PUNDIT reageer retweet

Corsi has continued to promote Rich conspiracy theories, appearing in several YouTube videos with other people pushing the Rich hoax. In 2018, he live-streamed a press conference held by another right-wing conspiracy theorist about Rich’s death, analyzing it for “clues” about whether Rich had been involved with WikiLeaks and the email leak.

Corsi has continued to promote Rich conspiracy theories, appearing in several YouTube videos with other people pushing the Rich hoax. In 2018, he live-streamed a press conference held by another right-wing conspiracy theorist about Rich’s death, analyzing it for “clues” about whether Rich had been involved with WikiLeaks and the email leak.

quote:

President Donald Trump's legal team has a mutual defense agreement in place with conservative author Jerome Corsi amid special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into the 2016 election, according to Corsi and a source familiar with the arrangement.

Corsi, an associate of Roger Stone, said his lawyer David Gray has spoken with Trump attorney Jay Sekulow on more than one occasion about his dealings with Mueller.

"I wanted Jay Sekulow as the president's attorney to know what was happening to me with the Mueller investigation," said Corsi.

"I did this because I support Donald Trump...I wanted him to survive the Mueller investigation unscathed, which I believe he will, and I want him to be reelected in 2020."

Corsi said he never participated in the calls and, to his knowledge, neither did Trump. A source familiar with the arrangement confirmed the existence of the mutual defense agreement but wouldn't elaborate.

Corsi said Gray described the conversations to him as "very much one way," with Gray updating Sekulow on the proceedings with Mueller.

"In other words we were explaining to Jay Sekulow what was happening to us, and Jay was not explaining what the president was going to do, was not explaining what was happening in other cases," Corsi said.

"They may have talked about Roger Stone, that would be likely. But the president wasn't disclosing his strategy."

SPOILER

Corsi revealed the existence of the agreement a day after he provided to NBC News copies of a draft plea agreement and other draft court documents that shed new light on the efforts by Stone to find out in the summer of 2016 what information WikiLeaks had that could be damaging to the Clinton campaign.

Corsi has said he rejected the plea agreement — which would have required him to admit that he lied to federal investigators — because he did not intentionally try to mislead investigators. He maintains that he did not remember the 2016 emails with Stone about WikiLeaks.

"I knew in my heart and I know in my heart today that I did not do that," Corsi said, noting that he worked hard to cooperate with Mueller's investigators since he was subpoenaed on August 28.

Corsi added that accepting the plea deal would have made him a federal felon and required him to stop writing and speaking out in public ahead of his sentencing, depriving him of the ability to support his family.

Corsi said he's not anticipating a pardon from President Trump and has not discussed a pardon with anyone, including his own lawyer.

"I don't expect Donald Trump to come over the hill on a white horse... in the last 20 minutes of the movie. That's not my calculation," Corsi said, adding that he plans to file a complaint with the Justice Department accusing Mueller of misconduct. "Mr. Trump will do what he wants to do. And there are lots of reasons that pardons are given and not given. Whether he gave me a pardon or not he will still have my enduring support."

In a wide-ranging interview with NBC News Wednesday, Corsi explained his relationship with President Trump, who he describes as a respected acquaintance but not a close friend. He said he first met Trump when Trump bought the Plaza Hotel in the late 1980s.

"In the 1980s and through much of the 1990s I was in financial services…for several of those years, I was just about living at the Plaza Hotel," he said.

"Being there that often and of course spending the money and all the rest Donald Trump came to know who I was, [and] most of the staff knew who I was. And I would see Donald Trump from time to time and he was very cordial and we would speak," he said.

"I was considered kind of a VIP guest of the Plaza, and Donald Trump treated me as a VIP guest of the Plaza, and our relationship was on that basis," he said.

He also said he had business encounters with Trump when he was working for a subsidiary of life insurance giant Conseco Inc. that bought the General Motors building along with Trump in 1998.

He said the relationship picked up again in the spring of 2011 when he was leading the so-called birther movement, which spread the false claim that President Obama was not a U.S. citizen.

"When I was doing the birth certificate stuff, Donald Trump would call me on the phone. He would call me on the phone to ask me questions and we had a discussion," Corsi said, adding that his phone records show the two men spoke four or five times in March, April and May of 2011, in conversations that lasted 20 to 30 minutes.

He called Trump "very cordial, very polite" during those conversations and called the president a "real gentleman."

Corsi said he spoke to Trump only once during the 2016 presidential campaign. It happened when he brought London-based conservative author Ted Malloch to Trump Tower to show him the campaign headquarters and possibly meet Trump. Corsi said Malloch was interested in potentially doing policy work for the campaign.

Shortly after Corsi and Malloch entered the lobby, Trump happened to be getting into the elevator, Corsi said.

"We said hello. Trump points to me and he points to Malloch and he says, 'There's trouble there,'" Corsi said. "And he laughs, we laugh, and that's the only time I spoke to Donald Trump [during the campaign]."

Corsi said he spoke to Trump only one time since then when the pair had a phone conversation following the president's speech at the United Nations in September. Corsi said he told Trump about his book, "Killing the Deep State."

Corsi said Trump asked him for an autographed copy, which he said he had delivered to the White House.

Key Mueller Witness: I Lied And I'm Ready To Die In Jail | The Beat With Ari Melber | MSNBC

twitter:

SethAbramson twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 05:17:48 Corsi told @TheBeatWithAri his trip to Italy was in July 2016. Cohen also took a "vacation" in July 2016 to Italy. Cohen's alibi for why/where he went in Italy has fallen apart. Was Corsi there while Cohen was? Did he/they meet Kremlin agents in Italy--as Papadopoulos did (twice)? reageer retweet

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Cohen showed his passport to BuzzFeed. The only travel into the proper area indicated by passport stamps was a trip to and from Italy from July 9 to 17. WP

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Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) announced Wednesday that he is canceling votes on nearly two dozen of President Trump’s judicial nominees that were expected to come up in the Judiciary Committee this week.

The cancellation of the committee’s Thursday business meeting comes as Senate Republicans are in a standoff with outgoing Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who has vowed to oppose all court picks until he gets a vote on legislation protecting special counsel Robert Mueller.

The notification from the Judiciary Committee didn’t specify when, or if, the committee votes on the nominations would be rescheduled. Six circuit court nominees had been expected to get a vote, as well as 15 district court nominees.

But Grassley warned late Wednesday afternoon that he would likely cancel the meeting unless he could get a deal with Flake that would allow the nominations to move forward.

“We haven’t cancelled the meeting yet,” Grassley said roughly an hour before the announcement. “If we don’t get a positive out of it, we’ll probably cancel the meeting.”

SPOILER

Republicans hold a 51-49 majority in the Senate allowing them to move Trump's nominees despite Flake as long as the remaining 50 Republican senators remain united.

But on the Judiciary Committee Republicans are limited to a 11-10 majority meaning they need Flake's support unless they can get help from Democrats.

"We can vote on all the people who cleared the committee," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the No. 2 Republican senator and member of the Judiciary Committee. "But in terms of getting a vote out of committee we need his help."

Flake reiterated earlier Wednesday that he remains committed to opposing nominees until he gets a vote on the Mueller protection bill. He tried to get consent to schedule a vote on the bill Wednesday but was blocked by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who warned that the legislation was unconstitutional.

The resolution, which cleared the Judiciary Committee earlier this year, would protect Mueller, or any other special counsel, in the event he is fired, but the bill has stalled amid opposition from GOP leadership.

The bill would codify Justice Department regulations that say only a senior department official could fire Mueller or another special counsel.

It would give a special counsel an "expedited review" of their firing. If a court determines that it wasn't for "good cause," the special counsel would be reinstated.

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The calls almost always came deep into the night.

Caller ID labeled them “unknown,” but Roger Stone said he knew to pick up quickly during those harried months of the 2016 presidential campaign. There would be a good chance that the voice on the other end of the line would belong to his decades-long friend — the restless, insomniac candidate Donald Trump — dialing from a blocked phone number.

Those nocturnal chats and other contacts between the man who now occupies the Oval Office and an infamous political trickster have come under intensifying scrutiny as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation bores into whether Stone served as a bridge between Trump and WikiLeaks as the group was publishing hacked Democratic emails.

Mueller’s keen interest in their relationship was laid out in a draft court document revealed this week in which prosecutors drew a direct line between the two men — referring to Stone as someone understood to be in regular contact with senior Trump campaign officials, “including with then-candidate Donald J. Trump.”

The inclusion of the president by name in the draft filing rattled his legal team and indicated how closely the special counsel is scrutinizing what Trump may have learned from Stone about WikiLeaks’ release of emails that prosecutors say were hacked by Russian intelligence operatives.

SPOILER

In recent months, the Trump Organization turned over to Mueller’s team phone and contact logs that show multiple calls between the then-candidate and Stone in 2016, according to people familiar with the material.

The records are not a complete log of their contacts — Stone told The Washington Post on Wednesday that Trump at times called him from other people’s phones.

Stone said he never discussed WikiLeaks with Trump and diminished the importance of any phone records, saying “unless Mueller has tape recordings of the phone calls, what would that prove?”

Stone and WikiLeaks have denied collaborating with each other, and Stone has decried the Mueller investigation as a “political witch hunt” to punish him for supporting Trump.

Trump has told his lawyers — and last week said in written answers to Mueller — that Stone did not tell him about WikiLeaks’ upcoming release and that he had no prior knowledge of it, according to people familiar with his responses.

Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Trump, declined to discuss Trump’s contacts with Stone. “The president has responded to the questions asked by the special counsel,” Sekulow said. “We do not discuss those responses.”

WikiLeaks has been a major focus of the Mueller investigation. In July, prosecutors charged Russian intelligence officers with hacking Democrats and using the group to release stolen material to the public to help Trump defeat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

New details about Stone’s interest in WikiLeaks’ plans emerged this week after one of his associates, conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, announced that he had rejected a plea deal offered by Mueller’s team. He provided The Post and other news organizations with a draft filing by prosecutors describing his interactions with Stone — including an Aug. 2, 2016, email in which the right-wing author alerted Stone that he heard WikiLeaks was planning a major release of “very damaging” material.

The next day, Stone had one of his private talks with Trump, Stone said on a 2016 Infowars broadcast first reported by CNN.

In an interview, Stone insisted that the topic of hacked emails was never broached in the Aug. 3 phone call — or in any other communication with Trump.

“It just didn’t come up,” Stone said. “I am able to say we never discussed WikiLeaks. I’m not sure what I would have said to him anyway because it’s all speculation . . . I just didn’t know if it’s true or not.”

Stone, however, sounded much more certain in his public pronouncements at the time, stating confidently that Assange would reveal material that would hurt Clinton’s campaign.

On Wednesday, Stone said he was making such bold statements to “drive media coverage” of the expected WikiLeaks releases.

Stone served as an official adviser in the early stages of Trump’s campaign but left in August 2015. For a few months, they had little contact because of friction over their competing accounts of whether Stone was fired or resigned, Stone said.

“We went through a period of bad feelings,” Stone said.

But eventually the longtime allies were back in touch.

The frequency of their contacts isn’t clear. Stone told the Guardian in November 2016 that they were talking once a week. But Wednesday, he said that statement “might be a little bit of hype” and that they spoke only “occasionally” during the campaign, with their most frequent periods of contact coming at the beginning and the end of the contest.

From January through March 2016, Stone said he had a cellphone number for Trump. But he said the phone number got into too many hands, and Trump’s staff changed it. After that, a pattern developed for their calls, Stone said: Trump would call Stone from a blocked number or from the phones of associates or campaign aides.

“He would initiate the calls,” Stone said. “I didn’t call him.”

Once, Stone said, he answered his iPhone because the caller ID said he was getting a call from Christopher Ruddy, a Trump friend who is the CEO of Newsmax, a conservative television network. But the voice on the line was Trump’s.

“I believe there was one time when he asked me to call Roger,” Ruddy said in an interview Wednesday, adding that he did not believe “there was any discussion related to Russians or improper activities.”

The calls from Trump came at odd hours, Stone said, because Trump “gets almost no sleep.” Trump usually wanted to get a sense of how the campaign was going, Stone said, or just to “touch base.” Stone sometimes offered suggestions, but often he could barely get a word in.

“When Donald Trump calls you, he does most of the talking; you do most of the listening,” Stone said.

A review of the phone contacts that Trump’s team turned over to Mueller showed a series of calls between Stone and Trump over the length of the campaign, according to people familiar with the records.

They spoke from “time to time” during 2016, the people said, but there was no “flurry” of calls at any particular period. A handful of calls were lengthy. The vast majority involved short calls by Stone to Trump’s assistant Rhona Graff that lasted roughly 30 seconds.

Stone said he was usually calling to alert Graff that he was sending her a strategy memo for Trump, which she would print out for him to read since he didn’t use email.

Trump has told some advisers that he no longer talks to Stone, according to people familiar with his statements. But people close to Trump say he has occasionally talked to him in the White House.

Trump is known to use several phones and has placed calls from cellphones that are not logged in the White House switchboard, current and former aides said. He has occasionally asked associates to make calls for him on their phones, they said.

In midsummer 2016, Trump’s allies were keenly interested in what WikiLeaks had planned for the final weeks of the White House race.

On July 22, WikiLeaks had rocked the campaign by releasing more than 50,000 internal Democratic National Committee emails on the eve of the party’s convention. The leak dominated the gathering in Philadelphia and resulted in the resignation of party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida congresswoman.

Three days later, Stone received an email from blogger Charles Ortel, who forwarded a note from Fox News reporter James Rosen. “Am told WikiLeaks will be doing a massive dump of HRC emails relating to the CF in September,” Rosen wrote, referring to the Clinton Foundation. Rosen has declined to comment.

That same day, according to the draft Corsi plea document, Stone reached out to Corsi. “Get to [Assange] [a]t Ecuadoran Embassy in London and get the pending [WikiLeaks] emails . . . they deal with the Foundation, allegedly,” he wrote.

When asked about the email, Corsi at first told prosecutors that he declined Stone’s request and told him that trying to contact WikiLeaks could attract the attention of investigators. But in fact — the draft Mueller document alleges and Corsi acknowledged this week — Corsi forwarded Stone’s request to Ted Malloch, a self-described informal Trump adviser living in London.

Corsi said Stone wanted Malloch to help him undermine the 2016 Democratic candidates.

“Stone wanted Malloch to go see Assange,” Corsi said, but “I don’t think Malloch did anything.”

Malloch has declined to comment.

Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Trump was also eager to see what other hacked emails might emerge that could help his campaign. On July 27, two days after Stone emailed Corsi, the candidate was asked repeatedly at a news conference about allegations that Russia had hacked the Democratic Party and given the stolen materials to WikiLeaks.

He responded that it was impossible to tell if Russia was behind the attack, but added: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” a reference to emails Clinton sent while secretary of state and then deleted. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be next.”

On Aug. 2, 2016, Corsi followed up with Stone.

“Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps,” he wrote, according to the draft filing. “Impact planned to be very damaging. . . . Time to let more than [Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta] to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop [Clinton]. That appears to be the game hackers are now about.”

Corsi said that email was the product of his deductive reasoning and that he searched his memory and feels confident he had no person connected to WikiLeaks who provided inside information.

“I can take pieces and put them together. I’m not always right. But it’s scary how often I’m right,” Corsi told The Post. “Here I’m stuck with the fact that I figured it out. It turns out I was right. Nobody can believe that I actually did figure it out.”

On Wednesday, Stone said he recently had a cellphone expert extract data from two old iPhones that he used during the campaign. Among the material recovered were text messages that showed Stone asking New York comedian Randy Credico for information about WikiLeaks weeks after he corresponded with Corsi, he said. Stone has long asserted that Credico was his main source of information about Assange’s plans.

Stone has described Corsi, who is best known for his promotion of the false theory that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, as a researcher who shared information about the business dealings of John Podesta and his lobbyist brother, Tony.

Stone accuses Mueller of “squeezing” Corsi in an attempt to frame him.

“The emails prove nothing,” Stone said, “other than, like every other politico and political reporter in America, I was curious to know what it was that WikiLeaks had.”

quote:

Paul Manafort’s alleged misstatements to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators include comments about his personal business dealings and about his contacts with a former associate in Ukraine, say people familiar with the matter.

Those statements—among those described by Mr. Mueller as “lies” and Mr. Manafort as “truthful information” in a court filing Monday—are what led the special counsel this week to take the unusual step of ending the former Trump campaign chairman’s plea agreement 2½ months after it was reached, the people said.

The content of those statements don’t appear to be central to the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election that Mr. Mueller is investigating. It is unclear if prosecutors plan to accuse Mr. Manafort of additional lies.

But Mr. Mueller’s move to end the cooperation deal reflects more broadly a combative relationship that has developed between Mr. Manafort and Mr. Mueller’s investigators, as well as the special counsel’s conclusion that Mr. Manafort fell short of his cooperation agreement, court filings show.

Investigators alleged that Mr. Manafort made inaccurate statements in interviews with Mr. Mueller’s team about his communications with Konstantin Kilimnik, said the people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Kilimnik, who Mr. Mueller charged earlier this year along with Mr. Manafort with trying to influence the testimony of two witnesses against Mr. Manafort, had worked for Mr. Manafort’s lobbying firm in Ukraine. Messrs. Manafort and Kilimnik communicated earlier this year about contacting others who worked with them in an alleged effort to coordinate their stories, according to an indictment Mr. Mueller filed against them.

Mr. Kilimnik, whom the FBI has assessed to have ties to Russian intelligence, according to a filing by the special counsel’s office, isn’t in custody and hasn’t responded to the charges in court.

A spokesman for Mr. Mueller declined to comment.

SPOILER

Mr. Mueller has long been interested in the relationship between Messrs. Manafort and Kilimnik. He has questioned witnesses about a boat trip that Mr. Manafort took with Tom Barrack, a longtime friend of Mr. Trump, after Mr. Manafort was ousted from the Trump campaign in August 2016, say people familiar with the matter. Witnesses believed investigators were seeking to determine whether Mr. Manafort ever met with Mr. Kilimnik on that trip.

In his conversations with Mr. Mueller’s team, Mr. Manafort also allegedly misrepresented information about payments he received related to his lobbying work, the people familiar with the matter said.

A judge plans to set a date on Friday for Mr. Manafort’s sentencing, now that his cooperation with Mr. Mueller has reached an apparent impasse. Before that sentencing, Mr. Mueller’s office will submit a memo outlining Mr. Manafort’s alleged misdeeds in more detail.

Mr. Mueller’s team, in the court filing Monday, accused Mr. Manafort of “lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters.” Mr. Manafort’s lawyers said he had spoken repeatedly to the special counsel’s team and provided information “in an effort to live up to his cooperation obligations.”

With the Mueller-Manafort dispute breaking into public view, some legal experts believe Mr. Manafort’s best hope for leniency is to obtain a presidential pardon. On Wednesday Mr. Trump told the New York Post a pardon for Mr. Manafort was “not off the table.” Any pardon would likely spark a firestorm among Democrats, who are preparing to take control of the House.

Mr. Manafort’s decision to plead guilty to other crimes in September and cooperate in the continuing investigation into Russian electoral interference and any links to the Trump campaign appeared to be a major win for the prosecutors.

Mr. Manafort’s allies have said for months that the former Trump aide had little to tell investigators about Russia’s 2016 efforts. Mr. Mueller’s actions to end the cooperation agreement signals Mr. Manafort provided little information that prosecutors found useful.

Mr. Manafort’s team maintained an unusual open channel with Mr. Trump’s attorneys even after his plea agreement, briefing the president’s lawyers about its contacts with Mr. Mueller’s office.

Still, attorneys for the president weren’t aware that Mr. Mueller would accuse Mr. Manafort of lying until Monday’s filing, they said. Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said the legal team has received no indication that any of Mr. Manafort’s allegedly false statements relate to the president.

Mr. Trump recently responded in writing to a set of questions posed by Mr. Mueller’s office, including a few questions related to Mr. Manafort, said a person familiar with the matter. They did include questions about a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between top Trump campaign aides, including Mr. Manafort, and a Russian lawyer linked to the Kremlin.

Mr. Trump responded that he didn’t know at the time about the Trump Tower meeting, the person said.

The developments come as some targets of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry are taking an increasingly combative tone in public. Conservative activist Jerome Corsi, who had been in talks with Mr. Mueller’s office to potentially plead guilty to lying to investigators, has publicly rejected a plea and said Wednesday he hired a new lawyer.

In a tweet, Mr. Corsi said he had instructed his legal team to file with Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker “a criminal complaint against Mueller’s Special Counsel and the DOJ for prosecutorial misconduct in my case.”

On another front, Senate Republicans Wednesday blocked an effort to pass legislation protecting Mr. Mueller’s investigation.

For the second time this month, Sens. Jeff Flake (R., Ariz) and Chris Coons (D., Del.) tried to pass by unanimous consent legislation designed to protect Mr. Mueller from being fired. They were blocked by Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) on Wednesday. Two weeks earlier, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) had objected, blocking the bill.

The proposed measure would protect a special counsel from removal except for “good cause.”

twitter:

ScottMStedman twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 00:01:27 BREAKING from me/@NatashaBertrand: An explosive letter has been sent to Schiff's office claiming that Papadopoulos coordinated with Russians with Trump's knowledge in the weeks following the election. Authorities are taking the letter "very seriously" https://t.co/3uT4q0g4nL reageer retweet

twitter:

ScottMStedman twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 00:24:06 Here it is, folks. We had to redact portions of the letter as to not give away any details about the Papadopoulos confidant. It's real, and federal authorities are investigating thoroughly. https://t.co/mFGwc0usw4 reageer retweet

SPOILER

twitter:

11thHour twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 05:36:12 Fmr. Bush 43 ethics lawyer @RWPUSA on Trump & Manafort's attorneys talking after Manafort took a plea deal from Mueller: "These lawyers better hire some lawyers." Learn more: https://t.co/0pV151IIts #11MSNBC #11thHour https://t.co/cpPV9jLNIk reageer retweet

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Op donderdag 29 november 2018 00:02 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Ja, oké, maar dat ziet niet toe op het tekenen van de kiesdistricten, toch? Hoe dan ook zijn de Republikeinen hun vetoproof meerderheid nu kwijt daar.

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Updated: What we know - and need to know soon - about the Board of Elections 9th District bombshell (Charlotte Observer)


BY THE OBSERVER EDITORIAL BOARD

What’s going on in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District? An election certification is being held up. The person behind the delay is being a bit coy about it. The public is in the dark. That needs to change — and soon.

The state board of elections refused Tuesday to certify the results of the 9th District race, in which Republican Mark Harris defeated Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes. That certification was expected to be routine, but election board member Joshua Malcolm raised a last minute issue concerning the 9th and asked board members to remove the results from the list of those to be certified.

Malcolm, a Robeson County Democrat, cited a statute that allowed the board to do so, but he declined to be specific about what caused him to raise his objection. That, in itself, is troubling.

Here’s what we do know:

We know that board members twice voted 9-0 not to certify the 9th District results. That means the board, which consists of Democrats and Republicans, was overwhelmingly persuaded of the seriousness of Malcolm’s concerns.

We know that Elections board spokesman Patrick Gannon told the Associated Press Wednesday that the board is investigating “irregularities” involving absentee ballots in Bladen County, which Harris won by 1,557 votes. We also know that Bladen has what can charitably be described as a colorful political history of alleged arson and fraud.

We know that Malcolm’s move Tuesday was a surprise. Neither campaign knew Malcolm’s complaint was coming, which indicates that it likely doesn’t involve an election day complaint of fraud, at least not one significant enough to cause McCready to call for an investigation before conceding this razor-thin result.

Malcolm’s comments Tuesday also seem to indicate that the issues troubling him are ongoing. “I am not going to turn a blind eye to what took place to the best of my understanding which has been ongoing for a number of years that has repeatedly been referred to the United States attorney and the district attorneys for them to take action and clean it up,” he said. “And in my opinion those things have not taken place.”

Update, 11/28, 6:30 pm: Two sources tell the editorial board that the issue specifically involves a person who allegedly gained access to absentee ballots, perhaps through voters who request them from the county or state. The ballots were filled out for Harris. This individual was suspected of similar fraud in 2016, sources said, but investigators didn’t find enough to prosecute. The number of ballots involved in the 2018 race, however, wouldn’t be enough to swing the outcome to McCready, sources said.

Malcolm isn’t offering specifics, but there are plenty of questions he can answer without jeopardizing an investigation. Such as: Are the issues he raised widespread enough to change the 9th District results? Is he merely trying to get the attention of investigators he feels have been ignoring serious long-term problems?

If that’s the case, mission accomplished. Now stop it. Holding a congressional election hostage is not the appropriate way to resolve longstanding issues, regardless of how serious they might be.

We’re in a fragile period regarding elections in this country. We have a president too ready to declare — even just this week — that results he doesn’t like are tainted. It’s become too common for members of both parties to question the legitimacy of outcomes they don’t like.

Malcolm and the board certainly might have legitimate concerns about fraud or other malfeasance in Bladen, and the investigation raises obvious questions about whether the Harris campaign knew anything about tainted absentee ballots. Malcolm, however, should address whether the issue directly changed the outcome in November’s 9th District race. If so, he owes the public more specifics, immediately. If not, this is not the best way to raise his concerns.

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Op donderdag 29 november 2018 00:09 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

SecPompeo twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 17:02:24 Iran’s regime has no interest in easing Yemeni suffering; the mullahs don’t even care for ordinary Iranians. Saudi Arabia has invested billions to relieve suffering in #Yemen. Iran has invested zero. reageer retweet

twitter:

chrislhayes twitterde op woensdag 28-11-2018 om 21:04:04 This is monstrously Orwellian. The impurity of Iranian intentions aside, the Saudis are quite literally bombing and starving civilians by the tens of thousands. https://t.co/jyQAAQBt61 reageer retweet

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Op donderdag 29 november 2018 09:18 schreef icecreamfarmer_NL het volgende:
Hoeveel betaalt SA voor deze propaganda.

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Op woensdag 28 november 2018 21:28 schreef Tweek het volgende:

[..]

Laten we nog maar even afwachten wat er daadwerkelijk gespeeld wordt om teleurstelling te voorkomen.

twitter:

GStephanopoulos twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 15:02:32 Michael Cohen, Pres Trump’s former personal attorney, reaches new plea deal with Mueller this morning. Expected to enter guilty plea for false statements to Congress coupled with dozens of hours of testimony potentially damaging to Pres Trump--Special Counsel values testimony. reageer retweet

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 15:25:51 NEW YORK (AP) -- Michael Cohen pleads guilty to lying to Congress about Trump real estate project in Russia. reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 15:27 schreef Ulx het volgende:

twitter:

GStephanopoulos twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 15:02:32 Michael Cohen, Pres Trump’s former personal attorney, reaches new plea deal with Mueller this morning. Expected to enter guilty plea for false statements to Congress coupled with dozens of hours of testimony potentially damaging to Pres Trump--Special Counsel values testimony. reageer retweet

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 15:25:51 NEW YORK (AP) -- Michael Cohen pleads guilty to lying to Congress about Trump real estate project in Russia. reageer retweet

KA-BOOOM

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 16:01 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Een vastgoeddeal in Moskou anno 2015/2016.
Dat is gewoon dealen met de Russen tijdens de campagne. Slecht nieuws voor Trump.

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 16:28 schreef martijnde3de het volgende:
Wat vinden jullie van de democratische kandidaat Richard Ojeda?

[ afbeelding ]

Wel een gaaf logo!

[ afbeelding ]

https://voteojeda.com/

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 16:28 schreef martijnde3de het volgende:
Wat vinden jullie van de democratische kandidaat Richard Ojeda?

[ afbeelding ]

Wel een gaaf logo!

[ afbeelding ]

https://voteojeda.com/

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 16:28 schreef martijnde3de het volgende:
Wat vinden jullie van de democratische kandidaat Richard Ojeda?

[ afbeelding ]

Wel een gaaf logo!

[ afbeelding ]

https://voteojeda.com/

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 16:25 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Ik ben benieuwd wat Cohen aan Mueller heeft gegeven. De man weet alles van Trump's manier van werken.

quote:

We wish you a Mueller Christmas
We wish you a Mueller Christmas
We wish you a Mueller Christmas
And impeachment next year

Indictments we bring
To you and your kin
Indictments for Christmas
And impeachment next year

We wish you a Mueller Christmas
And impeachment next year..

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 16:36 schreef Nibb-it het volgende:

[..]

Statement Trump: Cohen is een 'zwakkeling' die liegt en enkel uit is op strafvermindering.

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 17:00 schreef Toby56 het volgende:
Hoe dan ook, Mueller zit nu echt diep te wroeten in Trumps (al dan niet dubieuze) zakendeals. Ik geloof nooit dat Trump dit zomaar laat gebeuren. Individual One moet zich steeds grotere zorgen maken. Het zou mij niet verbazen als Matthew Whitaker een klusje opgedragen gaat krijgen. Benieuwd wat dat allemaal gaat geven in Washington, DC.

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 17:07 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Met al die sealed indictments die bij de rechtbank liggen? Het lijkt me dat die dan niet zo ineens verdwijnen....

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 17:29 schreef Ulx het volgende:
En had Trump nou al schriftelijk antwoord op vragen van Mueller gegeven?

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 17:30 schreef Toby56 het volgende:

[..]

Ja zekers.

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 17:32 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Kans dat die antwoorden naast die van die van Cohen (en anderen) worden gelegd: 100%

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 17:00:05 Of note in this passage: Michael Cohen "briefed family members of Individual 1 within the Company about the [Moscow] project."Cohen previously identified individual one as Trump. https://t.co/oQiJcoglg3 reageer retweet

SPOILER

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 17:32 schreef Ulx het volgende:

[..]

Kans dat die antwoorden naast die van die van Cohen (en anderen) worden gelegd: 100%

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 17:36 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

[..]

En wat heeft Kushner onder ede verklaard?

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 17:00:05 Of note in this passage: Michael Cohen "briefed family members of Individual 1 within the Company about the [Moscow] project."Cohen previously identified individual one as Trump. https://t.co/oQiJcoglg3 reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 17:42 schreef Nibb-it het volgende:
Trump trekt zich terug uit de G20-ontmoeting met Poetin.

twitter:

PaulBegala twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 17:01:02 .@AshaRangappa_ made an important point just now on @CNNnewsroom: Yes, Mr. Trump was allowed to do business with Russia while a candidate. But he lied about it, which gave the Kremlin leverage over him, since Putin could have exposed Trump’s lie during the campaign. reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 17:50 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

PaulBegala twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 17:01:02 .@AshaRangappa_ made an important point just now on @CNNnewsroom: Yes, Mr. Trump was allowed to do business with Russia while a candidate. But he lied about it, which gave the Kremlin leverage over him, since Putin could have exposed Trump’s lie during the campaign. reageer retweet

twitter:

rgoodlaw twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 17:02:03 What Donald Trump Jr told Congress about Moscow Tower dealNote Michael Cohen plea: "briefed family members...within the Company about the project"Don Jr to Senate:Sater worked on deal "in 2015""I wasn't involved"Were you aware Cohen reached out to Kremlin? "No, I was not" https://t.co/ITyt6cc7dd reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 18:12 schreef Whiskers2009 het volgende:
Ontmoeting met Poetin tijdens de G20 geschrapt: https://www.nu.nl/buitenl(...)tuatie-oekraine.html

Edit: Owh, ik loop achter Excuus!

quote:

In the past 24 hours...

1) Jerome Corsi admitted he and Roger Stone lied to Congress
2) Trump's main lender, Deutsche Bank, raided for money launderin'.
3) Michael Cohen enters plea deal and cooperation agreement with Mueller
4) Offices of Trump's tax guy in Chicago raided.

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 16:28 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Nou ja, "de Russen", een particuliere vatsgoeddeal is wel even iets anders dan direct contact met de Russische overheid. Maar het is wel pikant aangezien Trump altijd zei dat hij geen enkele business in Rusland had.

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 18:48 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Ik lees net het volgende:

[..]

3 wist ik. Kloppen de andere zaken ook?

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 18:48 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Ik lees net het volgende:

[..]

3 wist ik. Kloppen de andere zaken ook?

twitter:

fspielman twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 17:18:26 Source says feds showed up this am, asked everyone to leave and put brown paper on the doors. https://t.co/4qJBwzoKF4 reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 18:58 schreef kladderadatsch het volgende:

[..]

4 klopt ook.

twitter:

fspielman twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 17:18:26 Source says feds showed up this am, asked everyone to leave and put brown paper on the doors. https://t.co/4qJBwzoKF4 reageer retweet

quote:

Op donderdag 29 november 2018 18:48 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Ik lees net het volgende:

[..]

3 wist ik. Kloppen de andere zaken ook?

quote:

THE SWAMP BUILDERS

How Stone and Manafort helped create the mess Trump promised to clean up

(..)

“I don’t think they invented the swamp, they invented an innovative way to navigate the swamp.”
John Donaldson, veteran Washington strategist

(..)

It was Stone who ushered then-candidate Trump into the fringy netherworld of Internet conspiracy enthusiasts and far-right activists by arranging for him to appear on “Infowars,” the program hosted by Alex Jones that boasts a massive digital following and has a penchant for spreading outrageously false stories.

Stone would also help Trump reach out to mainstream Republicans by suggesting that he hire Manafort as campaign chairman. Manafort, who owned an apartment in Trump Tower but wasn’t close to the candidate, was sold to Trump by Stone and others as the perfect man to tap long-standing connections with party regulars in the event of a floor fight at the Republican convention.

Trump — who vowed to bring “all the best people” to Washington as president — is now knit in scandal with both Manafort and Stone. Manafort has been convicted in a fraud case and has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and obstruction of justice in another legal matter in return for cooperating in the special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference in support of Trump in 2016.

Stone, an early adviser to Trump’s election effort, has been the subject of intensifying grand jury scrutiny in the same special counsel probe related to statements he made in 2016 predicting the release by WikiLeaks of documents damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

(..)

There was little that Stone wasn’t willing to do for Trump in those days, as now. When the New York developer bought a yacht — then one of the largest in the world — from the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, Stone maneuvered to get approval for a dredging operation so it could be docked at a marina in New Jersey.

“Those permits can take years,” Stone recalled. “I got it done in months.”

How?

“I’m Roger Stone,” he said.

Trump was a famous client but not necessarily a huge revenue generator for the firm, even as they worked on projects such as getting around height restrictions for a Chicago skyscraper and blocking competition for his casinos from Indian tribes.

“Donald Trump never pays anybody a lot,” Stone said.

Nor was he particularly easy to handle when bills came due, Black said.

“We had trouble getting paid on time,” he recalled.

A pattern developed, Black said. He would call Trump to ask him to pay an overdue bill, and Trump would start off saying he’d pay half.

“When I have cash, I’ll pay you the rest,” Trump would say, according to Black.

Black would respond: “I’m sure, Donald, you’ve got cash.”

Trump would then tell Black to come up to New York to see him. Black would fly to Manhattan to collect a check.

(..)

Though Manafort and Stone were no longer inside the campaign, the two friends had already left their stamp on the presidency to come.

“Roger’s relationship with Trump has been so interconnected that it’s hard to define what’s Roger and what’s Donald,” Manafort said in the documentary “Get Me Roger Stone.” “While it will be clearly a Trump presidency, I think it’s influenced by a Stone philosophy.”

On the eve of Trump’s inauguration, the three partners got together, along with their wives, for dinner at the Palm, one of their old hangouts. It was the first time they’d had a meal together in at least two decades, Stone said.

Before they ordered, they got word that an article was coming out saying that Stone and Manafort were under investigation as part of a probe of possible Russian influence in the 2016 campaign, and that the inquiry included intercepted communications.

It was worrisome. But it seemed to Stone as more of a curiosity than a serious threat. They didn’t think they had too much to worry about, he said.

After all, their man was now in the White House.

Bron: WaPo

quote:

New insurance guidelines would undermine rules of the Affordable Care Act

The Trump administration is urging states to tear down pillars of the Affordable Care Act, demolishing a basic rule that federal insurance subsidies can be used only for people buying health plans in marketplaces created under the law.

According to advice issued Thursday by federal health officials, states would be free to redefine the use of those subsidies, which have since 2014 provided the first help the government ever has offered consumers to afford monthly insurance premiums.

States could allow the subsidies to be used for health plans the administration has been promoting outside the ACA marketplaces that are less expensive because they provide skimpier benefits and fewer consumer protections. Even more dramatic, states could let residents with employer-based coverage set up accounts in which they mingle the federal subsidies with health-care funds from their job or personal tax-deferred savings funds to use for premiums or other medical expenses.

(..)

Bron: WaPo

twitter:

keithboykin twitterde op donderdag 29-11-2018 om 14:19:56 Trump reportedly owes between $175 million to $300 million to Deutsche Bank US. The loans were given to him despite his record of at least six bankruptcy filings. The bank even sued him for failure to repay loans. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has subpoenaed the bank’s records. https://t.co/PGMMPBnkoB reageer retweet

quote:

The bank refused last year to hand over documents requested by five Democratic lawmakers related to its relationship with Trump, citing the confidentiality of nonpublic customer information, and the GOP refused to subpoena the records. Bron

twitter:

rgoodlaw twitterde op vrijdag 30-11-2018 om 00:34:04 Looks like Don Jr is in hot water:WSJ now reporting: “Investigators obtained emails about the project from late 2015 and January 2016...in which Mr. Cohen communicated with or copied Mr. Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and his daughter, Ivanka Trump”Compare Don Jr told Senate: https://t.co/3ABZQow3Q9 reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 00:54 schreef PippenScottie het volgende:
We zitten diep in de derde akte, volgens mij.

Ik hoop dat de MAGA’s niet overgaan tot geweld als het hele kaartenhuis straks in elkaar stort.

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 01:01 schreef trein2000 het volgende:

[..]

Ik heb ook het gevoel dat de endgame op het punt van beginnen staat. Maar dat is een gevoel, concreet heb ik niks.

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 01:06 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Definieer endgame. Het rapport van Mueller zit er aan te komen. Dat zal niet lang meer duren. Maar dan is Trump niet ineens van het toneel verdwenen.

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 01:13 schreef trein2000 het volgende:

[..]

Ja ik weet niet wat het gaat zijn. Maar ik denk aan iets dat boven water komt dat Trump of tot aftreden dwingt of vleugellam maakt.
Maar misschien moet ik het iets breder trekken en het gewoon ‘iets groots’ noemen. Want wat, tja wist ik het maar.

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 01:14 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Als er een rapport naar buiten komt waarin Trump van strafbare feiten wordt beschuldigd zie ik hem niet zo snel aftreden. Dan is hij immers zijn onschendbaarheid en invloed kwijt. Tenzij Pence hem dan een pardon geeft.

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 01:19 schreef trein2000 het volgende:

[..]

Ik zie die Republikeinen nog wel een grotere truc uithalen. Namelijk aftreden, pardon, Trump VP maken, Pence aftreden en klaar. Dus ik denk idd dat het niet zoiets zal zijn. Het moet iets zijn wat z’n geloofwaardigheid bij de bevolking wegslaat. Dan durven er waarschijnlijk ook lui binnen de GOP tegen hem op te staan. Nu is ie nog te machtig binnen de GOP.

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 01:40 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Dat zal niet werken want een VP die niet door het volk gekozen is moet door beide kamers goedgekeurd worden.

quote:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into President Trump’s efforts to build a skyscraper in Moscow has led him to ask questions about the role two of the president’s children played in attempting to secure a Russian real estate deal, sources tell Yahoo News.

Mueller’s interest in the Trump family real estate company’s plans for a skyscraper in Russia was confirmed on Thursday when Michael Cohen, the president’s former attorney and fixer, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the proposed deal. In charging documents, Mueller said Cohen falsely claimed that the effort to build a Trump Tower Moscow “ended in January 2016” in an attempt to “minimize” links between Trump and the project and to “give the false impression” the effort ended before the Republican primaries in 2016. Yahoo News first reported in May that congressional investigators had obtained text messages and emails showing Cohen’s work on Trump Tower Moscow continued for longer than he admitted under oath.

But Cohen wasn’t the only person at the Trump Organization who was pursuing deals to build a skyscraper in the Russian capital. Multiple sources have confirmed to Yahoo News that the president’s elder daughter, Ivanka, who is now a top White House adviser, and his eldest son, Don Jr., were also working to make Trump Tower Moscow a reality. The sources said those efforts were independent of Cohen’s work on the project. One of the sources said Ivanka was also involved in Cohen’s efforts. And a separate source familiar with the investigation told Yahoo News that Mueller has asked questions about Ivanka and Don Jr.’s work on Trump Tower Moscow.

Mueller’s charging documents against Cohen included a line that described the Trump family’s involvement in the project. According to Mueller, one of the things Cohen lied about was that he “briefed family members” of Trump’s who worked at the Trump Organization about the proposed Moscow skyscraper. Prior to joining the White House, Ivanka was an executive at the company. Don Jr. and Trump’s middle son, Eric, remain with the Trump Organization.

A spokesperson for the special counsel’s office declined to comment on this story. Cohen and his attorney, Guy Petrillo, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did lawyers representing the president.

SPOILER

A source familiar with the Trump Organization confirmed to Yahoo News that Ivanka and Don Jr. engaged in separate efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The source said these efforts began “years earlier” than Cohen’s project and concluded in 2013.

“They were not looking at any other deals after that,” the source said.

The source also confirmed that both Ivanka and Don Jr. were aware of Cohen’s attempts to build in Moscow. According to the source, Ivanka’s role was limited to recommending an architect and Don Jr. was only “peripherally” aware of the plan.

“Michael was looking at that deal. Don and Ivanka knew about it and Don testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was peripherally aware of it,” the source said, adding, “That’s why we’re so perplexed Cohen would lie about briefing them, because no one’s ever disputed that they knew he was looking at it.”

Don Trump Jr. did not respond to a request for comment on this story. An attorney for Ivanka Trump declined to comment on record.

Just prior to his inauguration, Trump vowed his family’s real estate company would do no new deals abroad while he was in office. It would not be illegal for the Trump Organization to have conducted business in Russia prior to that point, and Mueller inquiring about Ivanka and Don Jr.’s work on Trump Tower Moscow does not mean they are targets of his investigation. The source familiar with the Trump Organization said the pair were not aware of any work Cohen did on the project beyond the period he initially described to congressional investigators.

“There’s no question they knew about it, but they had no knowledge of any work on the project after January 2016,” the source said.

The Trump Organization’s dealings in Moscow have attracted added attention given the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump. The president has repeatedly denied that he colluded with Russia and has called Mueller’s probe a politically motivated “witch hunt.” Messages obtained by the government show Cohen reached out to Putin’s office for help as he pursued the Moscow project. He initially said the Russian government did not respond to his overtures, but Mueller’s charging documents said Cohen did receive a response from Putin’s government.

“On or about January 20, 2016, COHEN received an email from the personal assistant to Russian Official 1 (“Assistant 1”), stating that she had been trying to reach COHEN and requesting that he call her using a Moscow-based phone number she provided,” Mueller wrote.

According to Mueller, Cohen and the official’s assistant spoke for “approximately 20 minutes” and he “requested assistance in moving the project forward, both in securing land to build the proposed tower and financing the construction.” Mueller said Felix Sater, a developer who was working on the project with Cohen, subsequently followed up.

Sater is a Russian-born longtime business associate of Trump’s who first met Cohen while they were both in high school. During the mid 2000’s, Sater worked with Trump’s real estate company to build hotels in Florida and New York. He also discussed potential projects in Russia with Trump’s company during that period. As part of his deal to build Trump-branded properties, Sater had an office in the Trump Organization’s Manhattan headquarters and a company business card. Sater was convicted on charges related to a stock fraud scheme orchestrated by Russian organized crime figures in 1998. He then became a federal informant who spent years providing crucial information to the government about mobsters and terrorists.

Sater declined to comment on this story beyond saying that his work to build a Trump Tower in Moscow began in 2003.

Correspondence provided by Sater to government investigators that was obtained by Buzzfeed showed that he reached out to Cohen in May 2016 and said Putin’s top spokesman Dmitry Peskov wanted to invite him to attend an economic forum in St. Petersburg the following month. Sater said Peskov wanted to talk with Cohen there and “possibly introduce” him to Putin. Peskov was the same official whom Cohen emailed in January 2016. According to Mueller’s charging documents, Cohen eventually told Sater he couldn’t make the trip to Russia “on or about June 14, 2016,” just as Trump was on the way to securing the Republican presidential nomination.

Trump never managed to build a skyscraper in Russia, but he has tried for the better part of three decades. His first attempt was in 1987, when he traveled to the former Soviet Union to examine possible building sites. According to Buzzfeed, Trump’s company announced another “exploratory trip” in 1996 and that he had his eye on an abandoned factory in the country in 2005.

Reports have previously emerged detailing Ivanka and Don Jr.’s involvement in the Trump Tower Moscow efforts. The Buzzfeed report revealed that Sater accompanied the two Trump children to Moscow in 2006. A source told Yahoo News that, while there, the pair held meetings about the project separately from Sater. “ The book “Russian Roulette,” which was written by Yahoo News chief investigative correspondent Mike Isikoff and by David Corn, detailed a 2013 effort that involved the Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov and his son Emin. According to the book, Don Jr. was “in charge” of that project and Ivanka “flew to Russia and scouted sites with Emin.” The Agalarovs helped Trump host his Miss Universe pageant in Russia in 2013 and helped arrange the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. The Trump Organization registered the web address TrumpTowerMoscow.com in December 2012. A source familiar with the deal said this was in conjunction with the work being done with Agalarovs.

Trump tweeted at Aras Agalarov about the deal on Nov. 11, 2013, two days after the pageant. He expressed optimism they would get the skyscraper built together.

“I had a great weekend with you and your family,” Trump wrote, adding, You have done a FANTASTIC job. TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next.”

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 30-11-2018 om 03:50:59 “This demonstrates the Robert Mueller and his partisans have no evidence, not a whiff of collusion, between Trump and the Russians. Russian project legal. Trump Tower meeting (son Don), perfectly legal. He wasn’t involved with hacking.” Gregg Jarrett. A total Witch Hunt! reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op vrijdag 30-11-2018 om 04:04:34 Alan Dershowitz: “These are not crimes. He (Mueller) has no authority to be a roving Commissioner. I don’t see any evidence of crimes.” This is an illegal Hoax that should be ended immediately. Mueller refuses to look at the real crimes on the other side. Where is the IG REPORT? reageer retweet

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 01:55 schreef trein2000 het volgende:

[..]

Je hebt gelijk! Ik had senaat in m’n hoofd...

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 01:19 schreef trein2000 het volgende:

[..]

Ik zie die Republikeinen nog wel een grotere truc uithalen. Namelijk aftreden, pardon, Trump VP maken, Pence aftreden en klaar. Dus ik denk idd dat het niet zoiets zal zijn. Het moet iets zijn wat z’n geloofwaardigheid bij de bevolking wegslaat. Dan durven er waarschijnlijk ook lui binnen de GOP tegen hem op te staan. Nu is ie nog te machtig binnen de GOP.

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 08:50 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

VP wordt niet gekozen door de president. Mochten Trump en Pence aftreden, dan zou Nancy Pelosi President worden. Ik heb veel geks gezien de afgelopen jaren, maar dat scenario gaat hem echt never nooit niet worden (tenzij Pence bv sterft oid).

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 08:50 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Dan zou Nancy Pelosi President worden. Ik heb veel geks gezien de afgelopen jaren, maar dat scenario gaat hem echt never nooit niet worden (tenzij Pence bv sterft oid).

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 08:54 schreef trein2000 het volgende:

[..]

Zoals westwood al zegt moeten beide kamers akkoord gaan. volgens mij wel op voordracht van de president...

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 08:57 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

[..]

Pence is te diep betrokken bij de malversaties van Trump. Hij is deelgenoot geweest van de campagne van 2016, en heeft er dus ook van geweten. Dat maakt hem dus NET zo strafbaar als Trump. Als Vicepresident is hij dus besmet. Pence probeert niet voor niets angstvallig in de luwte te blijven.

quote:

‘Tangled web’ in Bladen County has questions swirling about votes in the 9th District

Allegations of voting irregularities in and around Bladen County swirled on Thursday, with the North Carolina Democratic Party calling for an official hearing and a flurry of affidavits surfacing involving absentee ballots.

The allegations are apparently behind this week’s decision by the State Board of Elections and Ethics Reform to not certify the results of the congressional race in the 9th District.

The decision came after board member Joshua Malcolm of Robeson County cited what he called “unfortunate activities” in that part of the district. The board voted 9-0 not to certify the 9th District results.

Republican Mark Harris beat Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes. He carried Bladen County by 1,557 votes.

The man at the center of speculation about the alleged activities, McCrae Dowless, was paid by the Harris campaign as a contractor for the candidate’s top consultant.

In a letter to the chairman of the state elections board, Democratic Party attorney John Wallace urged the board to delay certification beyond Friday’s scheduled meeting.

“After pulling the fire alarm on Tuesday, the State Board cannot in good conscience certify the election three days later, when so much smoke continues to hang over this election,” he wrote.

Wallace went on to say a review of public records “confirms that serious irregularities and improprieties may have occurred.” Bladen County had the highest percentage of absentee ballot requests in the state. There, 7.5 percent of registered voters requested absentee ballots. In most counties it was less than 3 percent.

An analysis by Catawba College political scientist Michael Bitzer suggested more aberrations.

In seven of the eight counties in the 9th District, for example, McCready won a lopsided majority of the mailed-in absentee ballots. But not in Bladen County. There, Republican Mark Harris won 61 percent even though registered Republicans accounted for only 19 percent of the county’s accepted absentee ballots.

Unaffiliated voters accounted for 39 percent. Bitzer said Harris’ margin “could potentially come from all those unaffiliated voters.”

“But to have each and every one of those unaffiliated voters vote Republican, that’s pretty astonishing,” he added. “If that’s the case, there’s a very concerted effort to use that method to one candidate’s advantage. . . . But at that level there’s something else beyond a concerted effort that could be at work.”

In his letter to the board, Wallace included notarized affidavits from a handful of voters:

• Datesha Montgomery said that on Oct. 12, a woman came by her house and told her she was collecting absentee ballots. In the affidavit, Montgomery said she voted for two candidates: one for sheriff, the other for school board. The woman told her “the others were not important. I gave her the ballot and she said she would finish it herself. I signed the ballot and she left. It was not sealed up at any time.”

• Emma Shipman said a woman came to her house and told her she was assigned to collect absentee ballots. “I filled out the ballot while she waited outside and gave it to her. . . . She took the ballot and put it in an envelope and never sealed it or asked me to sign it. Then she left. . . . I thought she was legitimate.”

• Lucy Young said she received an absentee ballot even though she didn’t request one. She’d already voted early in person.

In 2016, then-Gov. Pat McCrory complained about what he called a “massive voting fraud scheme” in Bladen County. At the time, there was a protest filed by Dowless, a soil and water district supervisor. He claimed irregularities in mail-in absentee ballots.

This year he worked as a contractor for Huntersville-based Red Dome group, according to founder Andy Yates.

He was an independent contractor who worked on grassroots for the campaign, independent of the campaign . . . as he’s done for a number of campaigns over the years,” said Yates, Harris’ top strategist.

In this year’s primary, Harris won 437 absentee votes in Bladen to 17 for GOP incumbent Rep. Robert Pittenger. This month Harris won 420 absentee votes to McCready’s 258.

In the 2016 congressional primary, Dowless worked for Todd Johnson. Johnson got 221 absentee votes to 4 for Harris and 1 for Pittenger. In the district as a whole, Johnson finished third.

Dwight Sheppard, a fire investigator from Bladen County who also gave the Democratic Party an affidavit, said he believes Dowless is in the thick of the controversy. Dowless has denied any wrongdoing.

“It’s a tangled web when you start getting into it,” Sheppard told the Observer.

In the primary, Harris carried Bladen County by 852 votes. In the district, he defeated Pittenger by 828 votes.

Asked by text if he blamed his loss on any voting irregularities, Pittenger said, “Others can determine that. I won’t speculate.”

“Look at the votes,” he added. “Follow the money.”

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 09:06 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Klopt. Ik had hem al bijgewerkt, maar bedankt voor de correctie. Historisch gezien is het ook nog nooit gebeurd dat een nieuwe VP ingezworen is btw.

[..]

Dat kan best, maar politiek blijft politiek en ik kan me echt niet voorstellen dat er genoeg republikeinen in de senaat Pence zouden af zetten met Pelosi als president tot gevolg... hoe een hilarische plottwist dat ook zou zijn.

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 09:14 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Weer een updateje over de mogelijkewaarschijnlijk ogende stemfraude in NC-09:

[..]

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 09:27 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Nate Silver zei al op Twitter dat Bladen County de enige county in dat district was waar Republikeinen het ineens een stuk beter hadden gedaan dan 2 jaar geleden. En dat de Republikeinse kandidaat 96% van de absentee ballots had gewonnen. Wat opzich al verdacht is. Begint er aardig op te lijken dat er stemmen geronseld zijn van nietsvermoedende mensen.

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 09:44 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Het zou wel een bak zijn als na alle tamtam van de GOP omtrent kiezersregistratie en vermeende fraude van illegalen zij degenen zouden zijn die zich schuldig hebben gemaakt aan een dergelijk vergrijp.

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 09:50 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

[..]

De GOP heeft alweer wat gevonden om te klagen over fraude:
https://www.politico.com/(...)-republicans-1031072

quote:

Darry Sragow, the publisher of the California Target Book, a nonpartisan election resource, agrees that “for them to suggest the system here is rigged is beyond outrageous.’’

Sragow, who teaches election law at the University of Southern California, says the complaints are especially ludicrous in light of recent elections in Florida and Georgia, where he said Republicans have sought “to deny the right to vote to people of color, to college students and the poor people.''

Voting experts like Sragow say Republican critics are refusing to accept the realities of a solidly-blue state that has made every effort to make voting easier and more accessible: including early voting, vote by mail — now the preferred means for nearly two-thirds of state voters — and allowing voters to register and vote provisionally up until the day of the election. The changes were manifested in 2018 as millions of younger voters cast ballots for the first time — the overwhelming number of them Democratic, South noted.

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 10:18 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Moedwillig onbegrip van allerlei concepten omtrent het tellen van stemmen is wel een typisch GOP-dingetje ja. Het is feitelijk natuurlijk zoals Sragow aangeeft in het artikel:

[..]

Zolang de GOP de lijn Trump blijft volgen zullen ze noodgedwongen allerhande vormen van voter surpression moeten steunen omdat ze puur kijkend naar de popular vote onder het gehele electoraat steeds verder achter zullen gaan lopen.

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 09:49 schreef Montov het volgende:
Trump gaat niet aftreden en de GOP zal alles negeren of stilzwijgen. Ik verwacht geen concrete acties, zelfs niet wanneer het bewijs openbaar wordt. De les van Watergate voor de GOP is om de rangen te sluiten en nooit te knipperen met de ogen. En alle Law & Order mensen houden hun ogen dicht.

twitter:

kyledcheney twitterde op vrijdag 30-11-2018 om 16:06:34 NEWS: Manafort sentencing date tentatively set for March 5. Late January arguments about whether he breached his plea deal.Mueller team will file their argument that he breached the deal on Dec. 7 and defense has until January to respond. reageer retweet

twitter:

kyledcheney twitterde op vrijdag 30-11-2018 om 16:12:38 Biggest news of the morning: Prosecutors are considering retrying Manafort on the 10 charges that resulted in a hung jury in Virginia in August. They’re also still weighing whether to file new charges based on what they say is Manafort’s breach of the plea agreement. reageer retweet

quote:

In two major developments this week, President Trump has been labeled in the parlance of criminal investigations as a major subject of interest, complete with an opaque legal code name: “Individual 1.”

New evidence from two separate fronts of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation casts fresh doubts on Trump’s version of key events involving Russia, signaling potential political and legal peril for the president. Investigators have now publicly cast Trump as a central figure of their probe into whether Trump’s campaign conspired with the Russian government during the 2016 campaign.

Together, the documents show investigators have evidence that Trump was in close contact with his lieutenants as they made outreach to both Russia and WikiLeaks — and that they tried to conceal the extent of their activities.

quote:

A DC neighborhood group just voted to rename the street in front of the Saudi embassy for Jamal Khashoggi

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 20:56 schreef speknek het volgende:
‘Individual 1’: Trump emerges as a central subject of Mueller probe

[..]

https://www.washingtonpos(...)m_term=.4a232db6be9c

[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 23:24 schreef Tweek het volgende:

[..]

Weten we in ieder geval wat de titel wordt van de film over deze clusterfuck.

quote:

Op vrijdag 30 november 2018 23:24 schreef Tweek het volgende:

[..]

Weten we in ieder geval wat de titel wordt van de film over deze clusterfuck.

twitter:

AFP twitterde op zaterdag 01-12-2018 om 05:57:00 #BREAKING Former US President George H. W. Bush dies at 94: son https://t.co/NS0TsIe0Tu reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 1 december 2018 07:12 schreef Tweek het volgende:
Trump moet daar dus iets aardigs over zeggen.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op zaterdag 01-12-2018 om 06:49:46 Statement from President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump on the Passing of Former President George H.W. Bush https://t.co/qxPsp4Ggs7 reageer retweet

quote:

Trump’s acting attorney general once referred to the president’s behavior as ‘a little dangerous’ and ‘a little outlandish’

A review of hundreds of public comments by acting attorney general Matthew G. Whitaker shows that while he has primarily functioned as a defender of President Trump, he has also criticized the president on numerous occasions, sometimes harshly, while working as a commentator on radio and television.

Whitaker has repeatedly suggested that Trump plays with the truth. He has said Trump should release his tax returns and was “self-serving” in the way he fired FBI Director James B. Comey. Whitaker said during the run-up to the 2016 election that neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton was a very good option for the presidency. “I mean, both these candidates are unlikable,” he said.

The critique of the president by Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney who rose to prominence over the past four years as the head of a conservative nonprofit group, has often come in unguarded moments, and sometimes late into on-air discussions. “Sometimes I wonder if anybody has the president’s ear or if he just kind of watches news accounts and responds to, which is a little dangerous,” Whitaker said in June 2017 on a radio show.

(..)

Whitaker was perhaps most critical five months later when, as Trump fired Comey, the president asserted that the FBI director told him he was not under investigation.

In four radio interviews over two days, Whitaker repeatedly blasted Trump’s public letter to Comey as “self-serving.”

“That whole sentence about, you know, ‘We’ve talked three times and you’ve told me I’m not under investigation,’ I mean for a president to include that in a letter of termination is — just I’ve never seen anything like that,” Whitaker told WHO radio in Des Moines. “It’s so self-serving.”

(..)

Bron: WaPo

quote:

Op zaterdag 1 december 2018 07:24 schreef pullup het volgende:

[..]

Yup, alhoewel ik betwijfel of hij dit zelf geschreven heeft

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op zaterdag 01-12-2018 om 06:49:46 Statement from President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump on the Passing of Former President George H.W. Bush https://t.co/qxPsp4Ggs7 reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 1 december 2018 07:24 schreef pullup het volgende:

[..]

Yup, alhoewel ik betwijfel of hij dit zelf geschreven heeft

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op zaterdag 01-12-2018 om 06:49:46 Statement from President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump on the Passing of Former President George H.W. Bush https://t.co/qxPsp4Ggs7 reageer retweet

Former President Obama visits George H.W. Bush in Houston prior to passing

twitter:

BarackObama twitterde op zaterdag 01-12-2018 om 06:36:23 America has lost a patriot and humble servant in George Herbert Walker Bush. While our hearts are heavy today, they are also filled with gratitude. Our thoughts are with the entire Bush family tonight – and all who were inspired by George and Barbara’s example. https://t.co/g9OUPu2pjY reageer retweet

SPOILER

quote:

Op zaterdag 1 december 2018 06:01 schreef Houtenbeen het volgende:

twitter:

AFP twitterde op zaterdag 01-12-2018 om 05:57:00 #BREAKING Former US President George H. W. Bush dies at 94: son https://t.co/NS0TsIe0Tu reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 1 december 2018 14:48 schreef fliert het volgende:
Het echte vuurwerk kan natuurlijk ook van onze oosterburen komen. Misschien schat ik de situatie wat optimistisch in maar de invallen bij Deutsche Bank (Trump's favoriete geldschieter) kunnen wel eens vernietigend zijn voor wat er nog over is van Trump's geloofwaardigheid. Ik ben bang dat hij met Cohen's verklaringen weg kan komen met wat kleerscheurtjes.

quote:

Op zaterdag 1 december 2018 15:32 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Is eigenlijk bekend waar die inval betrekking op had? Trump is natuurlijk niet de enige klant die ze hebben...

quote:

The special counsel’s draft Statement of Offense for Jerome Corsi includes much extraordinary information. But what are the most legally significant details to emerge? At bottom, the draft court document supplies additional reason to believe that Bob Mueller can charge Trump Campaign associates and the campaign itself for violations of federal campaign finance law either directly under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) or as part of a conspiracy to defraud the United States by obstructing the capacity of the Federal Election Commission to enforce the FECA. The federal offense of a conspiracy to defraud the United States serves as the backbone of the special counsel’s February 2018 indictment of Russian nationals, which then raised the question whether the special counsel would subsequently indict any Americans for knowingly participating in the general conspiracy. The activities of Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi, and Ted Malloch, as shown by what Mueller decided to include in the draft document, points to legal jeopardy for them and any others who knowingly participated with them in this scheme with Wikileaks.

SPOILER

The draft Statement of Offense contains direct and circumstantial evidence of the following four facts:

1.Stone was acting in collaboration with or as an agent of the Trump Campaign in the pursuit of the Wikileaks documents
2.Wikileaks founder Julian Assange provided information directly to Trump campaign agents or associates as part of his group’s effort, in collaboration with the Russian government, to help the Trump campaign
3.Roger Stone had advanced knowledge about the specific content and timing of Wikileaks’ document releases, including Wikileaks’ possession of and plans to release Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta’s emails and documents purportedly related to Clinton’s health
4.Trump Campaign agents or associates coordinated campaign-related public communications with what Assange secretly told them were Wikileaks’ planned activities

As one of us (Bauer) has written, the February indictment of Russian organizations and individuals revealed the Kremlin to be operating, along with Wikileaks, as a veritable Super PAC in support for then-candidate Trump. The Trump campaign could not lawfully coordinate its political communications with Wikileaks without running afoul of federal campaign finance laws. As a foreign national, WikiLeaks may not provide anything of value to an America political campaign, and Americans could not knowingly and substantially assist Wikileaks’ illegal electioneering activity. The prohibition extends to solicitations of this campaign support by any agents of the Trump campaign. Moreover, the campaign finance law applies to Wikileaks’ activities in two ways: as an entity pursuing its own anti-Clinton political objectives, and as an agent of a foreign government, Russia, with which it was collaborating toward this end.

In other words, Mueller is working with an expansive legal framework that Congress designed to prevent foreign national influence in our elections and that legislators repeatedly amended over the years to root out loopholes and end-runs. The draft statement of offense contains facts that that would significantly strengthen the prosecution’s hand in building and bringing such a case.

It is worth emphasizing several pieces of information in light of this legal framework.

First, Mueller appears to believe Stone was acting in direct communication on campaign related matters on behalf of the Trump Campaign, serving as a strategic adviser well past the time his formal position ended in 2015. He spoke regularly with Donald Trump and sent the candidate memos on campaign strategy. Others such as Corsi knew of Stone’s role. The draft Statement of Offense says that Corsi “understood [Stone] to be in regular contact with senior members of the Trump Campaign, including with then-candidate Donald J. Trump” when Stone “asked Corsi to get in touch with [Wikileaks] about materials it possessed relevant to the presidential campaign.” This dovetails with the special counsel’s July 2018 indictment of Russian military intelligence officers, which also conspicuously states that Stone was “in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump” when he communicated privately with the Russian intelligence front Guccifer 2.0 in August of 2016.

These allegations are also consistent with other publicly available information. For example, in May 2016, when Michael Caputo, senior Trump campaign communications adviser, wanted someone to meet with a Russian who promised to provide the campaign derogatory information on Hillary Clinton, text messages reveal that Caputo asked Stone to do so, which Stone did and reported back. (Stone amended his congressional testimony after the revelation of his contacts with the campaign.)

Second, Stone’s written instructions to Corsi constituted an explicit solicitation of support: “Get to (Assange) [a]t Ecuadorian Embassy in London and get the pending (WikiLeaks) emails” (our emphasis added). The intent to solicit, in effect, could not be clearer.

Third, the draft Statement of Offense includes a significant new fact in the potential coordination between Wikileaks and the Trump circle—beyond just the release of the Podesta emails. In the course of informing Stone about the body of materials in Wikileaks’ possession and Assange’s plans for releasing them, Corsi wrote on Aug. 2: “Time to let more than [the Clinton Campaign Chairman] to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC. Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke — neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus.” And, indeed, what followed was a pivot in the Trump campaign toward a focus on Clinton’s health—so much so that Chris Matthews observed on Aug. 16, 2016, that a series of recent remarks by Trump on the campaign trail showed that a new “target seems to be the health of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.” Matthews was puzzled, “Well, why are they onto this? Why are they onto — what do they know? Is there something we don’t know in the health records, something — something that could change this election around?”

By the end of August, other news outlets observed the same pattern: “Trump surrogates—people chosen by the campaign to speak on his behalf—have told voters that Mrs Clinton suffered a stroke and has seizures.” A stroke – exactly what Corsi’s email to Stone on Aug. 2 suggested they emphasize in coordination with a coming Wikileaks’ release.

As an aside, we should note that the Kremlin’s influence campaign also considered Clinton’s health a focal point, according to the U.S. Intelligence Community’s January 2017 report. The report highlights the same month of August: “In August, Kremlin-linked political analysts suggested avenging negative Western reports on Putin by airing segments devoted to Secretary Clinton’s alleged health problems.” Rep. Jackie Speier also noted the timing of Trump’s statements and the Trump campaign’s advertisements concerning Clinton’s health in conjunction with the Kremlin’s social media campaign adopting the same theme in the same time frame. “What I’d like to understand is who was mimicking who?,” Rep. Speier asked social media companies.

But what about Wikileaks’ promised document dump related to Clinton’s health? If that never materialized, it could indicate that Corsi’s information was bunk. Wikileaks made good on its promise, however. In September, Wikileaks highlighted one of the Clinton State Department emails housed in its document database, raising the idea that she had blood clot issues affecting her brain.





But what about the strange reference in Corsi’s email to Stone referring to Wikileaks information on Clinton’s health as though it were connected to documents related to Podesta? That materialized as well. On October 24, Wikileaks released documents from the trove of stolen Podesta emails suggesting that Podesta and other members of the campaign were concerned about Clinton’s health.

The Trump circle quickly helped promote the Wikileaks documents. Corsi’s own Twitter account tracks the chronology from laying the groundwork in August to capitalizing on the Wikileaks Podesta release in October 2016.



For his part, Trump began hammering Clinton’s purported health problems again within two days of the Oct. 24 Wikileaks release. At a campaign rally on Oct. 26, he made a curt remark suggesting Clinton was exhausted at the end of the second debate. The following day at a campaign speech in Ohio, Trump elaborated suggesting Clinton almost collapsed after the second debate. “Of course she had a lot of people around; they had a lot of people around her, which was smart,” he added. His reference to Clinton’s health was a significant enough change in his regular stump speech that it made headlines. As the Washington Post reported at the time, however, “No evidence has emerged that Clinton was suffering physically during or after the debates.”

It is also important to note that throughout this period, Trump, Stone and Corsi knew that they were seeking campaign support from foreign nationals. WikiLeaks status as such was well known. By July of 2016, moreover, it was widely reported that the U.S. Government had identified the Russian government as the responsible party in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. In that same month, Donald Trump acknowledged the Russians’ involvement, publicly calling on them to find “missing” Clinton emails. So when Corsi refers in one of the newly revealed emails to the “hackers” who are supplying WikiLeaks, he would have understood, or had good reason to know, the identity of these hackers: the Putin regime.

In sum, the draft Mueller document adds materially to the existing record of Trump campaign support for and coordination with the Russian-WikiLeaks scheme to influence the outcome of 2016 presidential election through a program of political sabotage. There is no reason to doubt that more from the Mueller probe is yet to come. What is known already leaves little standing of Donald Trump’s repeated denial of “collusion.” There was collusion, and it occurred in violation of federal law.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op zaterdag 01-12-2018 om 15:30:00 Trump fundraiser and former deputy RNC finance chair Elliott Broidy received laundered funds, according to federal prosecutors. https://t.co/R0MM5cJa30 reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 1 december 2018 15:32 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Is eigenlijk bekend waar die inval betrekking op had? Trump is natuurlijk niet de enige klant die ze hebben...

quote:

Cohen: Trump Knew I Called Kremlin for Help With Trump Tower Moscow

The president downplays his knowledge of the project, but his ex-fixer says he knew a lot—and that a cover-up before Congress was crafted while talking to Trump’s lawyers.

https://www.thedailybeast(...)h-trump-tower-moscow

quote:

GOP seeks to limit Wisconsin early voting, strip powers from Tony Evers and Josh Kaul in lame-duck session (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

MADISON - Republican lawmakers are seeking to limit voter turnout and want to take away key powers from the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general before GOP Gov. Scott Walker leaves office in January.

The sweeping plan — to be taken up Tuesday — would remove Gov.-elect Tony Evers' power to approve major actions by Attorney General-elect Josh Kaul and give that authority to Republican lawmakers.

That could mean the campaign promise made by Evers and Kaul to immediately withdraw Wisconsin from a federal lawsuit to overturn the Affordable Care Act would likely be blocked.

A hearing that could stretch into the night is slated for 12:30 p.m. Monday before the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee. The two houses are expected to meet Tuesday to pass at least parts of their plan.

The 141-page plan goes further than what Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos suggested lawmakers would take up during the so-called lame-duck legislative session before Evers takes office.

"It’s real kind of inside baseball, kind of legislative stuff that it’s hard for me to believe people will get too excited about," Fitzgerald said three days before the plan was released.

But among the proposals are ones to limit the governor's powers, weaken the attorney general and restrict early voting to two weeks before an election. Currently, some communities provide as many as six weeks of early voting.

The early voting plan would be all but certain to draw a legal challenge given that a federal judge in 2016 struck down a similar law limiting early voting that he found "intentionally discriminates on the basis of race."

The measures would strip many powers from Kaul and eliminate a powerful office within the Department of Justice that was created in 2015 under Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel and handles high-profile cases on appeal.

Lawmakers are also considering separating the 2020 presidential primary election from an April spring election to reduce voter turnout in an effort to boost the election chances of a conservative Supreme Court justice. In another proposal, lawmakers will consider using new revenue from online sales taxes to slightly reduce the individual income tax rate.

"Wisconsin law, written by the Legislature and signed into law by a governor, should not be erased by the potential political maneuvering of the executive branch," Fitzgerald and Vos said in a statement about the slate of measures. "In order to find common ground, everyone must be at the table."

But Evers and Kaul said Republicans were ignoring the voters who elected them just three weeks ago.

"I’ve said all along I’m committed to working across the aisle, but I will not tolerate attempts to violate our constitutional checks and balances and separation of powers by people who are desperate to cling to control. Enough is enough," Evers said in a statement.

Democrats said Republicans were throwing a fit following the defeat of Walker and Schimel.

"It's clear they're out to try to cripple the incoming governor and attorney general as best they can," said Sen. Jon Erpenbach, a Middleton Democrat on the Legislature's finance committee. "It's a tantrum because Scott Walker lost. It's frustrating because they're not even giving Tony Evers a chance to be governor."

The legislation is wide-ranging and would limit Evers’ power in a host of ways. His agencies would have less freedom to run their programs. He would not be able to ban guns from the state Capitol without the OK of lawmakers.

The power of the incoming attorney general also would be greatly diminished.

The Legislature — not the attorney general — would have control of how to spend money from court settlements. The recently created office of the solicitor general, which oversees high-profile litigation, would be eliminated.

Legislators would gain the power to intervene in any litigation when a state law is challenged, and they would have the ability to appoint their own private attorneys — at taxpayer expense — to handle the case instead of the attorney general.

“This bill is a full-employment bill for Republican law firms,” said Madison attorney Lester Pines, who often defends Democrats. “It will drive up the cost through the roof.”

Legislators would also have the ability to sign off on court settlements.

In another change that has broad implications for the lawsuit over the Affordable Care Act, the Legislature’s budget committee — rather than the governor —would get to decide whether to continue or drop legal actions.

Covering pre-existing conditions

Even as they are making it harder to get out of the Obamacare lawsuit, Republicans are planning to pass a bill that would protect coverage of pre-existing conditions. Democrats said that legislation was inadequate because the protections would not go as far as the ones in Obamacare.

The proposals also include provisions aimed at protecting past measures they have already approved. One would compel Evers to implement a work requirement for some in the BadgerCare Plus health care program. Others would make it tougher for Evers to change rules affecting the state’s voter ID law or alter a new program to keep premiums down for people who get insurance through Obamacare’s marketplace for individuals.

The governor also would no longer be able to choose who leads the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., which oversees taxpayer-funded incentive packages provided to businesses in exchange for job creation.

Lawmakers would have more control over the jobs agency, which Evers has promised to disband and replace with a state Commerce Department. The WEDC board would choose the agency's leader instead of the governor.

“Our state must stay open for business," Fitzgerald and Vos said. "WEDC, our economic development agency, must continue to have the ability to help spur job creation and business opportunities without fear of being shut down."

Senate Minority Leader Jennifer Shilling and Assembly Minority Leader Gordon Hintz also could appoint one member each to the board, and Evers' appointments would be unchanged at six members.

Walker has shown support for some of the plans but has not said what he thinks of others. His aides did not say whether Walker backed the limits on early voting or other measures that came to light Friday.

Evers did not comment on the plans, but incoming Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes said the plan "is the path of most resistance."

"It’s the dysfunction people just said no to a few weeks ago," Barnes said on Twitter.

The Republican legislative leaders said theirs is "the most representative branch in government and we will not stop being a strong voice for our constituents.”

twitter:

ddale8 twitterde op zaterdag 01-12-2018 om 17:47:23 Michigan Republicans have also introduced an anti-democratic proposal to take power away from the newly elected Democratic governor and attorney general before they take office: https://t.co/n8qbEj22GM reageer retweet

quote:

Op zaterdag 1 december 2018 22:00 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Nou, Bush sr. was natuurlijk ook gewoon een rotzak. Maar hij was wel pragmatisch en had enige principes.

quote:

Op zaterdag 1 december 2018 22:12 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Nou, hij gaf iedereen die bij Iran-Contra betrokken was gratie om zichzelf in te dekken.

quote:

Op zaterdag 1 december 2018 22:15 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Dat laatste weet je niet. Was bovendien na zijn verkiezingsnederlaag... hij had het al veel eerder kunnen doen.

quote:

Op zaterdag 1 december 2018 22:05 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:

[..]

Everyone's a critic ...

Natuurlijk was het niet rozegeur en maneschijn, maar los van dat je het politiek oneens kan zijn met zijn keuzes zijn grote schandalen verder wel uit gebleven. Hij was ook bereid tot samenwerken met democraten en stond, zoals je zelf ook zegt, wel voor wat goede principes. Hij leek me best een fatsoenlijk mens, binnen het kader van zijn politieke visie.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel: 'Infantile' Trump Is No Patriot | The Beat With Ari Melber | MSNBC

quote:

President Trump’s lies about doing business in Moscow may not be crimes, but they could have serious implications for U.S. National Security. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters tells Ari Melber he “can’t imagine a more serious national security threat that a U.S. President who is compromised” by Russia and says he does not “buy” that Trump is a patriot, and does not believe “he would sacrifice his life to save the lives” of Americans.

quote:

Op zaterdag 1 december 2018 21:57 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Ergens misschien wel symbolisch, het overlijden van G. W. Bush ... de enige verkozen republikeinse president die nog wel ergens voor stond waar ik dan wel wat mee had zonder zweem van corruptie en criminaliteit sinds mogelijk Eisenhower of misschien moeten we nog verder terug?

[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Op zondag 2 december 2018 11:46 schreef Oostwoud het volgende:

[..]



Totaal in de "democraten zijn ten alle tijden goed"-bubbel, wat een jammerlijk onkritische houding. Alle vergrijpen die in deze reeks benoemd zijn over Republikeinen, zijn ook echt door Democraten uitgevoerd hoor.

Je kunt wel vallen over bijvoorbeeld gerrymandering, maar daar hebben de Democraten zich schuldig aan gemaakt sinds haar oprichting. Immigratie aanmoedigen zodat je meer stemvee krijgt is bovendien geen gijzeling van de democratie?

quote:

Op zaterdag 1 december 2018 21:57 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Ergens misschien wel symbolisch, het overlijden van G. W. Bush ... de enige verkozen republikeinse president die nog wel ergens voor stond waar ik dan wel wat mee had zonder zweem van corruptie en criminaliteit sinds mogelijk Eisenhower of misschien moeten we nog verder terug?

[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Trump to terminate NAFTA, pressuring Congress to approve new trade deal

President Trump said late Saturday that he plans to formally terminate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in an effort to pressure Congress to approve a new trade deal with Canada and Mexico.

“I will be formally terminating NAFTA shortly,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One while returning from the Group of 20 summit in Argentina.

“Then Congress will have a choice of approving the USMCA, which is a phenomenal deal,” he said, referring to the United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement. “Much, much better than NAFTA. A great deal.”

The president also called NAFTA a “disaster” for the U.S. -- a description he has used since the presidential campaign.

“It’s caused us tremendous amounts of unemployment and loss and company loss and everything else. That’ll be terminated,” he said.

“And so Congress will have a choice of the USMCA or pre-NAFTA, which worked very well. You got out, you negotiate your deals. It worked very well. Okay?”

Trump and the leaders of Mexico and Canada on Friday signed a revised North American trade agreement that rewrites many of the rules governing free trade and caps off a bitter trade dispute between the three nations.

The required congressional approval for the new pact is far from certain, however.

Democrats, who took control of the House in the midterm elections, have traditionally been skeptical of free trade and may be reluctant to hand Trump a political victory heading into the 2020 elections.

quote:

Given what politics looks like in America and around the world today, it’s easy to sigh and say George H.W. Bush belonged to an era that is gone and never coming back — where our opponents are not our enemies, where we are open to different ideas and changing our minds, where facts matter and where our devotion to our children’s future leads to honest compromise and shared progress. I know what he would say: “Nonsense. It’s your duty to get that America back.”

quote:

On Jan. 20, 1993, I entered the Oval Office for the first time as president. As is the tradition, waiting for me was a note from my predecessor, George Herbert Walker Bush. It read:

Dear Bill,

When I walked into this office just now I felt the same sense of wonder and respect that I felt four years ago. I know you will feel that, too.

I wish you great happiness here. I never felt the loneliness some Presidents have described.

There will be very tough times, made even more difficult by criticism you may not think is fair. I’m not a very good one to give advice; but just don’t let the critics discourage you or push you off course.

You will be our President when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well.

Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you.

Good Luck — George

SPOILER

No words of mine or others can better reveal the heart of who he was than those he wrote himself. He was an honorable, gracious and decent man who believed in the United States, our Constitution, our institutions and our shared future. And he believed in his duty to defend and strengthen them, in victory and defeat. He also had a natural humanity, always hoping with all his heart that others’ journeys would include some of the joy that his family, his service and his adventures gave him.

His friendship has been one of the great gifts of my life. From Indonesia to Houston, from the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast to Kennebunkport, Maine — where just a few months ago we shared our last visit, as he was surrounded by his family but clearly missing Barbara — I cherished every opportunity I had to learn and laugh with him. I just loved him.

Many people were surprised at our relationship, considering we were once political adversaries. Despite our considerable differences, I had admired many of his accomplishments as president, especially his foreign policy decisions in managing America’s response to the end of the Cold War and his willingness to work with governors of both parties to establish national education goals. Even more important, though he could be tough in a political fight, he was in it for the right reasons: People always came before politics, patriotism before partisanship. To the end, we knew we would never agree on everything, and we agreed that was okay. Honest debate strengthens democracy.

While we maintained a respectful, friendly relationship throughout my presidency, it was only when President George W. Bush asked us to jointly spearhead American relief efforts in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and again after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that we got to really know each other. When we met with children who lost their parents in the tsunami, he was moved almost to tears when they gave us drawings they’d made to capture their pain and slow recovery in grief counseling. When we were asked to speak together at Tulane’s graduation in 2006, I saw his genuine feeling for the students, many of whom had suffered in the flooding of New Orleans, and others who had shown heroism and love in caring for their neighbors. “Each of you here has inspired me,” he told them. “When I look at our world, the good I see far outweighs the bad, which maybe explains why I am a real optimist about the future that you all will be facing.”

Growing old did not rob him of his optimism or his love of competition and adventure. In his book of letters, there’s a wonderful one to his family about getting older, in which he crows about driving his speedboat off the Maine coast. “Still want to compete. I still drive Fidelity II fast — very fast. My best so far — 63 mph in a slight chop with one [Secret Service] agent on board.” I took more than one ride in that boat with him over the years. It was fun but not an experience for the faint of heart. It was the same driving spirit, coupled with heartfelt patriotism, which led him to volunteer for the Navy on his 18th birthday instead of attending Yale, becoming one of the youngest American pilots to get his wings. Even when he was later shot out of the sky, the sole survivor of his close-knit crew, he never feared to go up again — famously learning to skydive at 75.

After the war, he took a leap of faith by staking his and his family’s future in the Texas oil business and eventually got into politics. Fifty years ago this spring, as a congressman representing Houston, he voted for the Fair Housing Act of 1968, going against his nearly perfect record of conservative votes in Washington. When he returned to Houston, he held a town hall to explain his vote to a hostile crowd who thought he’d lost his mind. He believed that he could convince them it was the right thing to do, as long as they would hear him out. That evening, at least, he was right. When he was finished talking he got a standing ovation.

Given what politics looks like in America and around the world today, it’s easy to sigh and say George H.W. Bush belonged to an era that is gone and never coming back — where our opponents are not our enemies, where we are open to different ideas and changing our minds, where facts matter and where our devotion to our children’s future leads to honest compromise and shared progress. I know what he would say: “Nonsense. It’s your duty to get that America back.”

We should all give thanks for George H.W. Bush’s long, good life and honor it by searching, as he always did, for the most American way forward.

twitter:

Comey twitterde op zondag 02-12-2018 om 16:36:54 Grateful for a fair hearing from judge. Hard to protect my rights without being in contempt, which I don’t believe in. So will sit in the dark, but Republicans agree I’m free to talk when done and transcript released in 24 hours. This is the closest I can get to public testimony. reageer retweet

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Op zondag 2 december 2018 04:26 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

Retired Lieutenant Colonel: 'Infantile' Trump Is No Patriot | The Beat With Ari Melber | MSNBC

quote:

Senate headed for clash over Saudi Arabia

The Senate is barreling toward a floor brawl over how to respond to Saudi Arabia's role in the slaying of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Senators took a significant step this week advancing a bipartisan resolution to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen, marking a sharp break from President Trump, who has stood by Riyadh and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, even in the face of reports that the prince personally ordered Khahoggi’s death.

But now, lawmakers need to figure out what a final bill will look like as they prepare to take a next step of bringing the resolution up for debate — and a potentially raucous floor drama. The wars powers fight is uncharted waters for a Senate that has repeatedly rejected attempts to challenge the White House’s combat authority.

SPOILER

“This is new territory, I mean this hasn’t been done in the past, and I want to do everything I can to ensure that this is handled in a dignified manner,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.

First, senators will need to agree to proceed to the resolution — sponsored by Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) — that requires Trump to remove any troops in or “affecting” Yemen within 30 days.

But supporters are confident that they’ll easily overcome that procedural hurdle, which requires only a simple majority, after already securing 63 votes to advance it.

It’s what comes after that is causing heartburn for advocates of the resolution and leadership alike, who are hoping to get an agreement that would prevent an unwieldy debate that could otherwise derail the bill.

“I think this blows up the minute you get too far afield,” Murphy said, characterizing himself as open to “limited” and on-topic amendments.

Without a deal on how to move forward, senators are predicting a marathon floor session akin to the infamous “vote-a-ramas” that accompany budget resolutions, where any senator can force a vote on any amendment on any issue. That would allow any senator to bring up political lightening rods and force tough votes that would otherwise be prevented from coming to the floor.

“Absent a consent agreement, there is a potential for unlimited vote-a-rama where we could be voting on anything from immigration reform to criminal justice reform,” said Sen. John Cornyn (Texas), the No. 2 Senate Republican, adding the free-wheeling votes could be “rather confusing.”

SPOILER

Senators are jockeying to pitch their own proposals with no clear indication of which, if any, plans could wrangle together the votes needed to pass. Thirty-seven Republicans voted against the underlying resolution, though some might support competing proposals that would effectively replace the current bill.

Corker, who is retiring after this Congress, is working to draft a closely held amendment that, he says, would have “teeth” but let Congress “more fully express” itself.

“We’re … crafting what we believe would be a better approach to deal with the Saudi Arabia,” he said, but largely declined to comment further about what will be in his proposal.

Several Republican senators voted to advance the resolution last week because of the message it sent to the administration, instead of its actual substance. Instead, they are expected to try to substitute in their own bills.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) voted to discharge the resolution out of the Foreign Relations Committee because he is “pissed” about how the administration has handled Khashoggi’s killing at a Saudi consulate in Turkey and the absence of CIA Director Gina Haspel at last week’s briefing, a decision several senators described as a misstep by the White House.

“I’ve got a substitute that I think is better way of doing it. I’m talking to my colleagues about how we can better send a message,” Graham said.

The alternative option from Graham, which he introduced as a stand-alone bill with Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), would require sanctions within 30 days on anyone involved in Khashoggi’s death, including “any official of the government of Saudi Arabia or member of the royal family” determined to be involved.

It would also require a report within 30 days on the kingdom’s human rights record. And to help address the Yemen crisis, the bill would suspend weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and prohibit the U.S. military from refueling Saudi coalition aircraft.

Graham, reacting to a photo of the Saudi crown prince and Russian President Vladimir Putin warmly greeting each other at Friday’s Group of 20 summit, predicted in a tweet Friday that “the vote total is going up in the Senate to pass MBS sanctions legislation.”

SPOILER

Democrats’ opening salvo is to stick by the resolution as currently written. Murphy said it was “much more likely” that Democrats will try to get consent to have one vote on the resolution, and warned against watering down the resolution until it’s little more than a symbolic shot at the Saudi crown prince.

“There are strike-all amendments that would be too weak for me to support and I imagine the other cosponsors to support, but, listen, I get it, we’re super out of practice in legislating, so all of this sounds absolutely fantastical that we might have to make tough decisions about what amendments to support without compromising the underlying bill,” he added.

Key members and leadership are scrambling to cut a deal that would limit the floor drama, or, at the very least, require amendments be related to Saudi Arabia as they try to avoid a partisan trainwreck. Two Senate aides said Friday they had not yet reached a deal, with one predicting an agreement could happen on Monday.

Cornyn said he hoped once members realized what a open-amendment process would entail he hoped they would agree to a package of votes and avoid the free-for-all.

Corker warned that without a deal on limiting the Senate debate “all kinds of amendments” could be offered for a vote.

“The question is can we just limit [it] to things that are relative to Saudi Arabia and foreign policy,” he said.

And there's still time, senators argue, for the administration to head off support for Senate action by forcing Saudi Arabia to the table on other issues, such as a ceasefire in Yemen, before the Senate takes the next vote on its legislation.

Though frustration with Saudi Arabia — both for Khashoggi’s death and the years-long war in Yemen — has reached a fever pitch on Capitol Hill, the administration and Trump have so far signaled they are standing by the ally.

“If we abandon Saudi Arabia, it would be a terrible mistake," Trump told reporters this month, adding that “we may never know” who was ultimately responsible for the killing of Khashoggi.

The White House is threatening to veto the Senate resolution and dispatched Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to brief senators in an unsuccessful bid to squash it.

Murphy said that the looming Senate vote could be a “leverage moment” for the administration with Saudi Arabia and let them avoid a “messy” floor fight in Congress.

“I think there’s some Republicans that think the administration’s going to pull a rabbit out of the hat before a motion to proceed,” Murphy said. “So let’s see if the administration has anything to announce. If they don’t then the motion to proceed succeeds and we have to come up with some consent.”

twitter:

LindseyGrahamSC twitterde op vrijdag 30-11-2018 om 22:24:35 Birds of a feather.....One 'positive' after this display of affection -- the vote total is going up in the Senate to pass MBS sanctions legislation. https://t.co/HJLIkiQkZj reageer retweet

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Op zondag 2 december 2018 21:17 schreef JohnnyBraincloud het volgende:
Dank je voor deze link @Kijkertje
Ben een grote fan van de Coen Brothers

Maar serieus, trumps ego is inderdaad té groot om het grote geheel te zien.
Hoop dat deze seniel snel van het toneel verdwijnt.

Naast politieke gevolgen is zijn "administration" ook desdastreus voor hoe we met deze aardkloot omgaan, het constante liegen, 25thAmendment, een klimaat rapportage waarvan hij iets gelezen heeft maar niets gelooft, seismische tests in de oceaan...

Dit zielig excuus voor president moet gewoon weg.
Ik hoop dat Muellers werk zoden aan de dijk zet.

Gewoon te triest voor woorden dat zo'n figuur het heeft kunnen schoppen tot f-ing president...

[ afbeelding ]

[..]

Roger Stone: 'No evidence to support' that I was link between WikiLeaks and Trump

twitter:

ThisWeekABC twitterde op zondag 02-12-2018 om 15:42:44 Rep. Adam Schiff says Roger Stone is vulnerable to charges of lying to Congress."It also looks like Mr. Stone was attempting to enlist Mr. Corsi's help in covering for false testimony. So I think the testimony alone is reason for great exposure for Mr. Stone." #ThisWeek https://t.co/YMaqhyXUKI reageer retweet

Schiff on ABC’s This Week: The President and His Business are Compromised

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 05:00:25 China has agreed to reduce and remove tariffs on cars coming into China from the U.S. Currently the tariff is 40%. reageer retweet

quote:

The separate statements, which offered conflicting characterizations of what the agreement entailed, were vague on details. The U.S. statement highlighted a 90-day window it had created to push through trade talks with Beijing, while the Chinese statement made no mention of it. The Hill

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Op maandag 3 december 2018 05:49 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 05:00:25 China has agreed to reduce and remove tariffs on cars coming into China from the U.S. Currently the tariff is 40%. reageer retweet

Kan nog nergens een bevestiging vinden...

[..]

quote:

Last year, interest on the federal debt was $263 billion, or 1.4% of GDP. The Congressional Budget Office expects it will rise to $915 billion by 2028, or 3.1% of GDP.

Let’s stop right there for a minute.

The total projected 2028 deficit (on and off budget) is $1.5 trillion. Take that number with a grain of salt. They were only projecting the total debt for this year (2018) to increase $779 billion, when it actually rose $1.2 trillion including off-budget items.

The CBO also assumes no recessions, wars, or other crises in the next 10 years.

And yet they still project, even with optimistic assumptions, that interest on the debt will overtake defense spending plus other “discretionary” expenses.

It is quite likely that fiscal 2019 will see a $1.5 trillion deficit (assuming no recession), and that if (when) we have a recession, total debt will increase at least $2 trillion a year.

Given today’s $23 trillion of total debt, it’s very likely that by the mid-2020s we will have $30 trillion worth of debt—and see that $915 billion interest expense projected for the end of the decade.

But that’s not all...

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Op maandag 3 december 2018 09:21 schreef speknek het volgende:
Fiscal conservatives aan het werk tijdens hoogconjunctuur.

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Op maandag 3 december 2018 09:11 schreef rockstah het volgende:
Schuldsituatie escaleert verder:

https://www.forbes.com/si(...)t-default-is-coming/

[..]

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Op maandag 3 december 2018 13:53 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

De politieke erfenis van Paul Ryan..

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Op zondag 2 december 2018 13:22 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Inderdaad... Ik heb nergens beweerd dat democraten niet gerrymanderen. Sterker, die hele post gaat niet over gerrymanderen... Probeer het nog eens.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 14:30:46 I am certain that, at some time in the future, President Xi and I, together with President Putin of Russia, will start talking about a meaningful halt to what has become a major and uncontrollable Arms Race. The U.S. spent 716 Billion Dollars this year. Crazy! reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 16:24:37 “Michael Cohen asks judge for no Prison Time.” You mean he can do all of the TERRIBLE, unrelated to Trump, things having to do with fraud, big loans, Taxis, etc., and not serve a long prison term? He makes up stories to get a GREAT & ALREADY reduced deal for himself, and get..... reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 16:29:31 ....his wife and father-in-law (who has the money?) off Scott Free. He lied for this outcome and should, in my opinion, serve a full and complete sentence. reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 16:48:12 “I will never testify against Trump.” This statement was recently made by Roger Stone, essentially stating that he will not be forced by a rogue and out of control prosecutor to make up lies and stories about “President Trump.” Nice to know that some people still have “guts!” reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 16:56:06 Bob Mueller (who is a much different man than people think) and his out of control band of Angry Democrats, don’t want the truth, they only want lies. The truth is very bad for their mission! reageer retweet

quote:

Kudlow: US to end subsidies for electric cars, renewables

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Monday the Trump administration will end subsidies for electric cars and renewable energy sources, Reuters reports.

Kudlow said he expected subsidies for electric cars would end by 2020 or 2021, according to the report. The remarks were made in response to a question about what the administration would do about General Motors' plans to layoff 15,000 people and shutter five plants across North America.

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 17:37:38 Looking forward to being with the Bush Family to pay my respects to President George H.W. Bush. reageer retweet

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Op maandag 3 december 2018 21:47 schreef crystal_meth het volgende:

[..]

https://thehill.com/homen(...)newables-white-house

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Op maandag 3 december 2018 21:58 schreef Falco het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 17:37:38 Looking forward to being with the Bush Family to pay my respects to President George H.W. Bush. reageer retweet

Deze man...

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Op maandag 3 december 2018 22:06 schreef vipergts het volgende:

[..]

Mag hij wel komen dan, ik kan me indenken dat de Bushes niet op de man zitten te wachten.

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Op maandag 3 december 2018 20:31 schreef Montov het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 16:24:37 “Michael Cohen asks judge for no Prison Time.” You mean he can do all of the TERRIBLE, unrelated to Trump, things having to do with fraud, big loans, Taxis, etc., and not serve a long prison term? He makes up stories to get a GREAT & ALREADY reduced deal for himself, and get..... reageer retweet

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 16:29:31 ....his wife and father-in-law (who has the money?) off Scott Free. He lied for this outcome and should, in my opinion, serve a full and complete sentence. reageer retweet

Liegen zou inderdaad een volledige veroordeling moeten betekenen. "No Deals" with Russia? No Collusion?

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 16:48:12 “I will never testify against Trump.” This statement was recently made by Roger Stone, essentially stating that he will not be forced by a rogue and out of control prosecutor to make up lies and stories about “President Trump.” Nice to know that some people still have “guts!” reageer retweet

Als je Roger Stone gaat ophemelen, dan ben je wel heel wanhopig in het moeras aan het wegzakken.

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 23:00:17 CIA Director Gina Haspel will brief lawmakers tomorrow on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi after being criticized for her absence at a briefing on the killing last week. https://t.co/jXMOUNSB0k reageer retweet

twitter:

NatashaBertrand twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 23:11:18 DC and Maryland attorneys general say they're moving forward with subpoenas for records in their case accusing Trump of profiting off the presidency. https://t.co/ff8lDiohmH reageer retweet

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Special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors have told defense lawyers in recent weeks that they are “tying up loose ends” in their investigation, providing the clearest clues yet that the long-running probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election may be coming to its climax, potentially in the next few weeks, according to multiple sources close to the matter.

The new information about the state of Mueller’s investigation comes during a pivotal week when the special counsel’s prosecutors are planning to file memos about three of their most high profile defendants — former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen.

A Flynn sentencing memo is due Tuesday, and memos about Manafort and Cohen are slated for Friday. All three documents are expected to yield significant new details on what cooperation the three of them provided to the Russia investigation.

There has been much speculation that Mueller might file his memo in Manafort’s case under seal in order to prevent public disclosure of the additional crimes his office believes Manafort committed when he allegedly lied to prosecutors and broke a plea deal after agreeing to cooperate.

But Peter Carr, spokesman for the special counsel, confirmed to Yahoo News on Monday that the Manafort memo “will be public,” although he added there could be some portions that are redacted or filed as a sealed addendum. The Manafort memo has been requested by the federal judge in his case so that prosecutors could, for the first time, spell out what matters they believe Manafort has lied to them about.

The fact that Mueller is planning a public filing about Manafort suggests he may no longer feel the need to withhold information about his case in order to bring additional indictments against others. That would be consistent with messages his prosecutors have given defense lawyers in recent weeks indicating that they are in the endgame of their investigation.

“They’ve been telling people they are tying up loose ends and trying to conclude,” said one source familiar with the communications between Mueller’s office and defense lawyers who represent key witnesses in the case.

SPOILER

That message was reinforced to some degree Monday when Mueller’s office talked to congressional investigators as part of an ongoing discussion about whether new subpoenas for testimony by House and Senate committees might interfere with Mueller’s investigation.

The response, which surprised one investigator, was that it would not, at least in matters relating to alleged obstruction by the White House in the Russia investigation itself. “What we were told is that the investigation has reached a mature enough stage that they’ve basically talked to everybody they want to talk to,” said a knowledgeable source who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Mueller’s office declined any public comment when asked to confirm that account, leaving open the possibility that there still could be a few witnesses yet to be questioned. Another source indicated that Mueller’s office is still asking congressional investigators to stay away from some other witnesses. But if true, the response on Monday could also be an indication that the special counsel does not plan to press for a face-to-face interview with President Trump, who submitted written responses to Mueller’s team in mid-November on matters relating to the Russia probe. The president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, did not respond to a request for comment.

By all accounts, last week’s guilty plea by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was one of Mueller’s more significant documents. It revealed that during the 2016 presidential campaign, Cohen was in direct discussion with an assistant to Dmitri Peskov, the press secretary for Russian President Vladimir Putin, about securing financing and land for the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen told Mueller’s prosecutors that he briefed Trump about the plans on multiple occasions and that discussions about the Moscow skyscraper continued until June 2016 — six months after he previously had told Congress he pulled the plug on the project.

Cohen is due to be sentenced in federal court in New York next week. While Mueller has not yet filed a sentencing memo in that case, Cohen’s lawyers have asked that he avoid jail entirely, and Mueller’s sentencing memo is due Friday. The president, meanwhile, offered his own suggestion — that his former lawyer should be jailed and “serve a full and complete sentence” — in a tweetstorm early Monday.

The only other publicly known matter Mueller is believed to be focused on relates to former Trump adviser Roger Stone and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi — both of whom have been aggressively investigated to determine if they had advance communications with WikiLeaks or associates of the group about its plans for the release of stolen emails of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential election.

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In mid-May 2017, Paul Manafort, facing intensifying pressure to settle debts and pay mounting legal bills, flew to Ecuador to offer his services to a potentially lucrative new client — the country’s incoming president, Lenín Moreno.

Mr. Manafort made the trip mainly to see if he could broker a deal under which China would invest in Ecuador’s power system, possibly yielding a fat commission for Mr. Manafort.

But the talks turned to a diplomatic sticking point between the United States and Ecuador: the fate of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

In multiple meetings with Mr. Manafort, Mr. Moreno and his aides discussed their desire to rid themselves of Mr. Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, in exchange for concessions like debt relief from the United States, according to three people familiar with the talks, the details of which have not been previously reported.

They said Mr. Manafort suggested he could help negotiate a deal for the handover of Mr. Assange to the United States, which has long investigated Mr. Assange for the disclosure of secret documents and which later filed charges against him that have not yet been made public.

Within a couple of days of Mr. Manafort’s final meeting in Quito, Robert S. Mueller III was appointed as the special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election and related matters, and it quickly became clear that Mr. Manafort was a primary target. His talks with Ecuador ended without any deals.

SPOILER

There is no evidence that Mr. Manafort was working with — or even briefing — President Trump or other administration officials on his discussions with the Ecuadoreans about Mr. Assange.

Nor is there any evidence that his brief involvement in the talks was motivated by concerns about the role that Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks played in facilitating the Russian effort to help Mr. Trump in the 2016 presidential election, or the investigation into possible coordination between Mr. Assange and Mr. Trump’s associates, which has become a focus for Mr. Mueller’s team.

Mr. Manafort and WikiLeaks have both denied a recent report in The Guardian that Mr. Manafort visited Mr. Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in 2013, 2015 and 2016.

But the revelations about Mr. Manafort’s discussions in 2017 about Mr. Assange in Quito underscore again how his self-styled role as an international influence broker intersected with the questions surrounding the Trump campaign.

And the episode shows how after Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Manafort sought to cash in on his brief tenure as Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman even as Mr. Mueller’s investigators were ramping up their inquiry.

While Mr. Moreno and his team continued to explore the possibility of Chinese investment, the talks proceeded without Mr. Manafort, who was becoming toxic in Washington as investigators closed in. And, with the United States Justice Department and intelligence agencies stepping up their pursuit of Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks, Mr. Moreno’s team increasingly looked to resolve their Assange problem by turning to Russia.

In the months after Mr. Moreno took office, the Ecuadorean government granted citizenship to Mr. Assange and secretly pursued a plan to provide him a diplomatic post in Russia as a way to free him from confinement in the embassy in London. (That plan was ultimately dropped in the face of opposition from British authorities, who have said they will arrest Mr. Assange if he leaves the embassy.)

Jason Maloni, a spokesman for Mr. Manafort, said that it was Mr. Moreno — not Mr. Manafort — who broached the issue of Mr. Assange and “his desire to remove Julian Assange from Ecuador’s embassy.” Mr. Manafort “listened but made no promises as this was ancillary to the purpose of the meeting,” said Mr. Maloni, adding “There was no mention of Russia at the meeting.”

Late last year, Mr. Mueller’s team charged Mr. Manafort with a host of lobbying, money laundering and tax violations in connection with his consulting work for Russia-aligned interests in Ukraine before the 2016 election. Mr. Manafort was convicted of some of the crimes and pleaded guilty to others as part of an agreement to cooperate with prosecutors. But prosecutors said last week that he violated the deal by repeatedly lying to them. Mr. Manafort remains in solitary confinement in a federal detention center in Alexandria, Va., waiting for a judge to set a sentencing date.

All along, Mr. Manafort and his allies have maintained that his foreign consulting work was aligned with United States interests, though his clients and their initiatives often provoked Washington’s ire.

The trip to Ecuador was part of a whirlwind world tour that represented the last gasps of Mr. Manafort’s once lucrative career.

In those final months, Mr. Manafort pitched officials from a range of governments facing a variety of challenges, from Puerto Rico to Ecuador to Iraqi Kurdistan to the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Manafort, who served on the board of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation in the Reagan administration, presented himself as a liaison to the new Trump administration and, in some cases, as a broker for arranging investments from a fund associated with the state-owned China Development Bank.

In Quito, he told Mr. Moreno’s team that he could arrange a major cash infusion from the Chinese fund in the Ecuadorean electric utility, and could ease any potential concerns from the Trump administration about such an investment, according to people involved in arranging the meetings.

The week after the Quito trip, Mr. Manafort traveled to Hong Kong to meet with representatives from the China Development Bank’s fund to discuss the possible investment in Ecuador, as well as a proposal being pushed by Mr. Manafort to buy Puerto Rico’s bond debt, possibly in exchange for ownership of the island’s electric utility.

In both cases, Mr. Manafort assured the Chinese, he could win support from Washington, despite Mr. Trump’s oft-expressed qualms about China.

Brokering a deal to bring Mr. Assange to the United States could have been even more complicated. Not only had Mr. Assange not been charged at the time of Mr. Manafort’s trip, but Mr. Assange’s work was — and remains — a particularly fraught matter for Mr. Trump and his team.

Mr. Trump and his allies had cheered on WikiLeaks during the campaign, when it released troves of embarrassing internal emails and documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. Since then, though, the United States intelligence agencies and Mr. Mueller’s team have demonstrated that the documents were stolen by Russian government agents, 12 of whom were charged by Mr. Mueller.

Mr. Assange had been pursued by Swedish prosecutors on a rape charge from 2010 that was dropped last year. The Ecuadorean Embassy in London granted him asylum in the summer of 2012. That was under Mr. Moreno’s predecessor, Rafael Correa, whose political identity was based partly on his antagonism toward the United States.

During Mr. Correa’s last day in office, the Ecuadorean government wrote a letter repeating its requests to Britain to accept Mr. Assange’s asylum status. The letter asserts that United States officials had left “no doubt about their intention to persecute Mr. Assange with the aim of punishing him for alleged offenses.”

Mr. Moreno had signaled during his campaign that he would like to wash his hands of Mr. Assange. And last December, Ecuador began carrying out the plan to move Mr. Assange to Russia as a diplomat, which would require him to become an Ecuadorean citizen.

In a citizenship interview at the embassy in London, Mr. Assange explained that he wanted to become a citizen because “I’ve been welcomed here for the last five years and I feel practically Ecuadorean,” according to a written summary of the meeting.

Within 10 days, Mr. Assange was granted citizenship, according to documents released by Paola Vintimilla, an Ecuadorean lawmaker who opposes Mr. Assange’s presence in the embassy. But a subsequent effort to grant Mr. Assange diplomatic status, and the immunity that would come with it, was rejected by the British government.

twitter:

StevenTDennis twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 23:39:54 New on @TheTerminal: Chuck Grassley refusing Blumenthal's request to have committee re-interview Don Jr., says "there is nothing inconsistent" about his statement to the committee that he was aware "peripherally" of the Trump Tower Moscow proposal... reageer retweet

twitter:

ddale8 twitterde op dinsdag 04-12-2018 om 05:35:57 Greta Van Susteren asked Trump about climate change. Talking nonsense as usual, he said the problem is that other countries have "not-good air that comes over to the United States." He said of China's Xi: "He's got to do something with his climate." https://t.co/1L3ennh0z8 https://t.co/W6XIRWVmDC reageer retweet

twitter:

ddale8 twitterde op dinsdag 04-12-2018 om 05:38:40 This is the climate version of his immigration rhetoric. When other countries send their air, they're not sending their best. reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 4 december 2018 06:00 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:

twitter:

ddale8 twitterde op dinsdag 04-12-2018 om 05:35:57 Greta Van Susteren asked Trump about climate change. Talking nonsense as usual, he said the problem is that other countries have "not-good air that comes over to the United States." He said of China's Xi: "He's got to do something with his climate." https://t.co/1L3ennh0z8 https://t.co/W6XIRWVmDC reageer retweet

[ afbeelding ]

twitter:

ddale8 twitterde op dinsdag 04-12-2018 om 05:38:40 This is the climate version of his immigration rhetoric. When other countries send their air, they're not sending their best. reageer retweet

quote:

Op dinsdag 4 december 2018 10:01 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:

[..]

Dat geratel van Trump went nooit. Mijn hemel, wat kraamt die man een onzin uit.

quote:

Op maandag 3 december 2018 21:58 schreef Falco het volgende:

twitter:

realDonaldTrump twitterde op maandag 03-12-2018 om 17:37:38 Looking forward to being with the Bush Family to pay my respects to President George H.W. Bush. reageer retweet

Deze man...

quote:

Op dinsdag 4 december 2018 11:00 schreef Sloggi het volgende:

[..]

Hij bedoelt het goed, het komt er alleen een beetje rottig uit.

quote:

Op dinsdag 4 december 2018 11:00 schreef Sloggi het volgende:

[..]

Hij bedoelt het goed, het komt er alleen een beetje rottig uit.

quote:

Op dinsdag 4 december 2018 11:00 schreef Sloggi het volgende:

[..]

Hij bedoelt het goed, het komt er alleen een beetje rottig uit.

quote:

Op dinsdag 4 december 2018 11:05 schreef AnneX het volgende:

[..]

Op die manier kun je wel onderscheid maken in “eigen” tweets en tweets van de staf, zoals de eerste tweet reactie op overlijden vanuit Argentinië.

Overigens heeft ie het wel zwaar: klampt nu Melania overal vast.

quote:

Op dinsdag 4 december 2018 11:05 schreef AnneX het volgende:
Overigens heeft ie het wel zwaar: klampt nu Melania overal vast.

quote:

Op dinsdag 4 december 2018 12:14 schreef RM-rf het volgende:

[..]

En gaat als burger, die militaire dienst ontweken heeft, salueren alsof hijzelf een militair was (maar vergeet dat je de duim niet mag krommen), bij de kist van een gedecoreerde oorlogsheld (ook de laatste president die actief tijdens een oorlog gediend heeft).

heeft niemand hem eerder verteld dat dat gewoon geen goed idee is, jezelf als burger bepaalde streng gereguleerde militaire praktijken toe-eigenen, en doen alsof je één van hen bent?
(was een goed moment geweest toen hij datzelfde deed voor een noord-koreaanse generaal, wat een affront was eigenlijk voor het hele amerikaanse leger)

twitter:

SecretaryZinke twitterde op vrijdag 30-11-2018 om 18:02:35 My thoughts on Rep. Grijalva’s opinion piece. #TuneInnForMore https://t.co/VMGxdtHwvU reageer retweet

twitter:

ddale8 twitterde op dinsdag 04-12-2018 om 16:01:01 Fast! Trump has gone from "it's an incredible deal" to "seeing whether or not a REAL deal with China is actually possible," and "China will be buying massive amounts of product from us, including agricultural," to "China is supposed to start buying Agricultural product." https://t.co/WPa8mSYsjc reageer retweet

twitter:

ddale8 twitterde op dinsdag 04-12-2018 om 16:23:53 Local Tariff Man Still Doesn't Appear To Understand Foreign Countries Don't Pay His Tariffs, Americans Do https://t.co/4SFvd94JgD reageer retweet

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op dinsdag 04-12-2018 om 17:00:02 Why hasn't President Trump, who says he cares about the integrity of elections, tweeted about what's going on in the North Carolina 9th? reageer retweet

twitter:

PhilipinDC twitterde op dinsdag 04-12-2018 om 17:30:05 Lies being re-tweeted by the President: Europe is obviously not burning, and “we want Trump” is not being chanted through the streets of Paris. Also, the fuel taxes are not radical leftist and France is not socialist. Any other lies? https://t.co/fOZSvAPMYW reageer retweet

twitter:

politico twitterde op dinsdag 04-12-2018 om 17:55:00 Breaking: Thousands of sensitive emails were stolen from the National Republican Congressional Committee in a major hack during the 2018 election https://t.co/X0CAw2ykuX reageer retweet

quote:

Exclusive: Emails of top NRCC officials stolen in major 2018 hack
Republican leaders were not informed until POLITICO contacted committee officials about the incident.

The House GOP campaign arm suffered a major hack during the 2018 election, exposing thousands of sensitive emails to an outside intruder, according to three senior party officials.

The email accounts of four senior aides at the National Republican Congressional Committee were surveilled for several months, the party officials said. The intrusion was detected in April by an NRCC vendor, who alerted the committee and its cybersecurity contractor. An internal investigation was initiated and the FBI was alerted to the attack, said the officials, who requested anonymity to discuss the incident. (Politico).

SPOILER

However, senior House Republicans -- including Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) -- were not informed of the hack until POLITICO contacted the NRCC on Monday with questions about the episode. Rank-and-file House Republicans were not told, either.

Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), who served as NRCC chairman this past election cycle, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Committee officials said they decided to withhold the information because they were intent on conducting their own investigation, and feared that revealing the hack would compromise efforts to find the culprit.

"We don't want to get into details about what was taken because it's an ongoing investigation," said a senior party official. "Let's say they had access to four active accounts. I think you can draw from that."

The hack became a major source of consternation within the committee as the midterm election unfolded. The NRCC brought on the prominent Washington law firm Covington and Burling as well as Mercury Public Affairs to oversee the response to the hack. The NRCC paid the two firms hundreds of thousands of dollars to help respond to the intrusion. The committee's chief legal counsel, Chris Winkelman, devoted hours of his time to dealing with matter.

Party officials would not say when the hack began or who was behind it, although they privately believe it was a foreign agent due to the nature of the attack.

Donor information was not compromised during the intrusion, the party officials said.

"The NRCC can confirm that it was the victim of a cyber intrusion by an unknown entity. The cybersecurity of the Committee's data is paramount, and upon learning of the intrusion, the NRCC immediately launched an internal investigation and notified the FBI, which is now investigating the matter," said Ian Prior, a vice president at Mercury.

Prior, a former Justice Department official and NRCC operative, has been working with the committee to deal with the matter.

"To protect the integrity of that investigation, the NRCC will offer no further comment on the incident," Prior added.

An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on its investigation into the incident.

None of the information accessed during the hack -- thousands of emails from senior NRCC aides -- has appeared in public, party officials said. And they said there were no attempts to threaten the NRCC or its leadership during the campaign with exposure of the information.

Yet the fact that the NRCC was hacked and withheld that information is likely to prove embarrassing at a time when Republicans are grappling with an election in which they lost 40 seats and control of the House.

Rep. Tom Emmer (Minn.) will take over as NRCC chairman this cycle, a selection that was directlyapproved by McCarthy. Emmer is in the process of hiring his own senior aides for the committee, a normal procedure when a new chairman takes over a party committee. Emmer was first briefed on the hack on Monday evening.

Cybersecurity remains a pressing concern for politicians and political committees, heightened by the high-profile Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chief John Podesta during the 2016 election cycle. It's not clear, however, what the NRCC could have done to avoid this intrusion.

The hack was first detected by an MSSP, a managed security services provider that monitors the NRCC's network. The MSSP informed NRCC officials and they, in turn, alerted Crowdstrike, a well-known cybersecurity firm that had already been retained by the NRCC.

Like other major committees, the NRCC also had security procedures in place before the election cycle began to try to limit the amount of information that could be exposed to a potential hacker. It also employed a full-time cybersecurity employee.

quote:

“We want Trump” being chanted through the streets of Paris

quote:

You know what’s been overheard in some of the cheering over there? I kid you not. I know friends who are there. There are some people wearing the yellow vests chanting, “We want Trump” among the rioters in Paris. “We want Trump.”

quote:

Puck6T9
?

@Puck6T9
9m9 minutes ago
More
Replying to @charliekirk11 @realDonaldTrump
This is how trump spreads propaganda. This tweet is a flat out lie. Rush Limbaugh posted a article on iheart radio with the clams "friends told him" French was saying this. Now trump has this guy repeat it as truth. Trump can now repeat it as true.

quote:

Op dinsdag 4 december 2018 18:16 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:
Avenatti's presidentiële campagne is - godzijdank - over voordat 'ie überhaupt begonnen is:

[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Op dinsdag 4 december 2018 18:35 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]

Politico daarover:
https://politi.co/2G0LlTw

Zat er zelf ook niet op te wachten. Ik zie toch liever politiek die over de inhoud gaat.

quote:

Op dinsdag 4 december 2018 18:47 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Dit tweet Nate Silver er over:

Avenatti was polling at 1 percent. His handling of Julie Swetnick was a disaster. He was recently charged with domestic violence. He doesn't have Trump's instincts and Democrats don't have an appetite for a Trump-like candidate. He would have lost badly and embarrassed himself.

quote:

Op dinsdag 4 december 2018 18:47 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:

[..]

Dit tweet Nate Silver er over:

Avenatti was polling at 1 percent. His handling of Julie Swetnick was a disaster. He was recently charged with domestic violence. He doesn't have Trump's instincts and Democrats don't have an appetite for a Trump-like candidate. He would have lost badly and embarrassed himself.