[AMV] Amerikaanse politiek #605 Stone Cold Crazy

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Op woensdag 13 maart 2019 12:27 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
Oeps, vergeten TT aan te passen. Oh wel.....[..]

Ik denk dan ook dat jij een verkeerd beeld hebt van de persoon Trump. In jouw beleving is de huidige POTUS een intelligente, sympathieke kerel. Dat baseer jij op het feit dat hij de Amerikaanse ambassade naar Jeruzalem heeft verplaatst. Iemand die zoiets doet, moet immers wel een geschikte peer zijn, nietwaar?

Trump is een grote, egocentrische lul. Snap werkelijk niet dat je dat niet in kunt zien.

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Op woensdag 13 maart 2019 12:30 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
[..]

Dat hij een poging waagt, daar is in principe niets mis mee. Het gaat echter fout als hij een zieke dictator veren in de reet gaat steken.[..]

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Op woensdag 13 maart 2019 12:30 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
[..]

Dat hij een poging waagt, daar is in principe niets mis mee. Het gaat echter fout als hij een zieke dictator veren in de reet gaat steken.[..]

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How the White House Is Spinning the North Korea Summit Collapse
The administration no longer thinks Trump alone can reach a deal with Kim Jong Un.

It’s now known rather famously, in Donald Trump’s Twitter feed at least, as the “walk”—the president cutting short his summit in Vietnam with Kim Jong Un because, per a wisdom that fast took root back in Washington, no nuclear deal was better than a bad one.

Since the standoff in late February, however, the reasons Trump walked and where he’s headed on North Korea have remained obscure. In a classified briefing last week to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the president’s special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, dropped a number of hints—including, according to one senator who was in the room, that the administration is now placing hope for a breakthrough in the lower-level negotiations it once ridiculed. Biegun himself has since argued publicly that even though the summit didn’t yield a deal, Trump’s personal diplomacy with Kim may yet compel the North Korean leader to direct those negotiating on his behalf to reach one.

A year ago, when Trump became the first U.S. president to agree to a meeting with his North Korean counterpart, a senior administration official declared that the history of unsuccessful working-level talks to denuclearize North Korea during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations “speaks for itself.” Under Trump, who cites his “great relationship” with Kim as the primary reason he will succeed where his predecessors failed, the approach has been to set a date and location for the leaders to get together and then have their deputies scramble to deliver results, rather than the other way around.

Critics have argued that in placing such emphasis on his personal dealings with Kim, Trump has undercut his advisers. After the second summit ended without a deal, however, the Trump administration is pointing to a silver lining: The summit’s collapse could paradoxically empower the leaders’ diplomats and technocrats.

Ahead of their meeting in Hanoi, “it just seemed pretty clear to [Biegun] that Kim was playing the waiting game for the one-on-one” with Trump, the Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy told me. Biegun’s argument is that walking away “sets the conditions for serious negotiations [by lower-level officials] that couldn’t happen until Kim realized he couldn’t pull one over on Trump.”

Asked for comment on these and other characterizations of Biegun’s briefing provided to The Atlantic by senators who met with him, a State Department spokesperson declined to “comment on remarks made in a classified setting.”

At a conference in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Biegun defended Trump’s approach of engaging directly with Kim. “We have tried for 25 years to percolate positions up from the working level to the leadership level, with no success,” he said. Kim is the only “one who can truly create the space for my counterparts sitting across the table from me to be flexible, to be agile, to be creative, to find solutions to these issues.”

Nevertheless, a senior State Department official conceded that Kim has yet to grant his subordinates space to negotiate. “We need the North Korean negotiators to have much more latitude than they did in the run-up to the summit on denuclearization,” the official said in a briefing with reporters last week, while stressing that Trump’s meetings with Kim were an indispensable feature rather than a bug in that effort.

Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin who also attended Biegun’s briefing, told me he still understands the leader-to-leader talks to be a critical component of the administration’s approach.

As Johnson sees it, Kim wrongly assumed that he could wring economic concessions from Trump for little in return, as North Korea’s leaders have done with previous American presidents. “Obviously, he came [to Vietnam] thinking he could talk Trump into a bad deal, and good thing he wasn’t able to,” the senator said.

But Murphy left Biegun’s briefing with the sense that both leaders—in spending the months following their first summit in Singapore pinning progress exclusively on their personal abilities to make a deal with each other—had made strategic mistakes ahead of Hanoi.

Kim’s was his “refusal to engage in any serious pre-negotiations” through his subordinates, Murphy told me. “Biegun was knocking at the door, day after day, and for the most part, nobody was answering. Kim seemed to make the calculation that he had buttered Trump up so sufficiently to be more likely to get what he wanted from Trump directly than through intermediaries.”

Biegun, who was appointed last August, managed to get meetings with his North Korean counterpart only in January, just as the second Trump-Kim meeting was announced. The State Department has acknowledged that Biegun’s talks with North Korean officials in the weeks before the summit didn’t make much headway on the core issue of denuclearization. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was reportedly snubbed by his North Korean counterpart even as Trump made his way to Vietnam on Air Force One.

Trump’s blunder, in Murphy’s telling, was that he “thought that by sheer force of personality in Hanoi, he could get Kim to agree to a comprehensive deal, which was never going to be possible, and so instead of immediately setting the table with some confidence-building measures, he went for the whole enchilada and lost badly.”

“I think Kim walked in thinking that his love letters [to Trump] were going to get sanctions released for something much less than full denuclearization,” Murphy said. “Trump thought that these love letters meant he was going to get full denuclearization for sanctions relief. I think it was pretty clear pretty quickly that neither of those things was going to happen.”

In his remarks on Monday, Biegun credited the leaders’ exchange of letters with breaking an impasse in working-level negotiations in late December. But he also confirmed Murphy’s distillation of the basic dispute in Hanoi. Kim, Biegun explained, offered to dismantle only a portion of his nuclear program at the country’s main Yongbyon facility in exchange for the United States lifting the bulk of international sanctions. (U.S. negotiators had dismissed this idea as unworkable in meetings with their North Korean counterparts in the weeks before the summit.) Trump’s counteroffer was for Kim to “go big” and commit to eliminating his entire weapons-of-mass-destruction program, including nuclear, chemical, and biological arms. In exchange, the United States would help transform North Korea’s economy and relationship with the United States. Each side balked at the other’s proposal.

Many experts had interpreted a speech Biegun had delivered at Stanford ahead of the Vietnam summit as a sign that the administration had recognized the folly of pressuring North Korea into swiftly giving up all its nuclear weapons—and was instead pivoting to a more protracted process of phased peace building, political normalization, sanctions relief, and rollback of the North Korean nuclear program. But on Monday, Biegun stated that the United States would not lift sanctions “until North Korea completes the process of denuclearization,” echoing an overlooked line from his Stanford speech. “We are not going to do denuclearization incrementally.”

What the United States and North Korea are engaged in, Biegun argued, “is much bigger than denuclearization” and of a different nature than what he characterized as Barack Obama’s narrow nuclear deal with Iran. That’s why at Stanford he sketched a vision of North Korea shipping out its last nuclear weapons, the United States removing sanctions and opening an embassy in Pyongyang, and the two sides signing a peace treaty at the same time.

The much-reported details of which nuclear facilities North Korea was willing to trade for which sanctions in Vietnam, in other words, are something of a red herring. What mattered is that the North Koreans viewed a partial nuclear agreement as the only way to move forward, and the Americans considered such a deal the surest way to move backward.

“What North Korea has done consistently in the past is promised to denuclearize and then, by the way, not do it, to get economic benefits, which provide their economy a lifeline … and then allow them to go back to the nuclear program,” National Security Adviser John Bolton said after Hanoi.

Biegun came across in his briefing as “pretty confident that [the administration’s] basic strategy here is the only one that’ll actually work,” said Johnson. “Nobody can predict what Kim Jong Un will do, but I didn’t sense any concern or panic … He fully realizes how difficult this is.”

Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, said his sense from the briefing was that the administration’s strategy is “we’re going to keep pressing economic sanctions, we think it’s having a toll on them, and they’ll eventually come around” to “make this grand deal,” despite signs that North Korea is finding ways to bypass sanctions, and China, the North’s principal trading partner, isn’t enforcing them as strictly as it once was.

The administration is characterizing Trump’s walk in Hanoi as a message to North Korea “that partial [nuclear] dismantlement is just not an acceptable place to end up,” he told me, and North Korea, with its renewed work at nuclear-weapons-related sites in recent weeks, is sending its own message that “we’re going to keep going forward unless you adopt the partial vision that we have of getting rid of these sanctions in exchange for [a] first step” on denuclearization. Each side, he noted, is trying to convey to the other “that we’re really serious: Your position is not acceptable.”

As Victor Cha, who negotiated with the North Koreans during the George W. Bush administration, recently noted, each side appears to have learned the same lesson in Hanoi: “Pressure works.” (“The pressure’s not on us,” Biegun declared this week, even as he admitted that “we don’t know” what North Korea’s revived activity at nuclear sites signifies.)

The infinite-loop debate about whether to go big or go small in their talks, Cha added, harks “back to the sort of negotiations that we have been in for the past 25 years.”

The “two leaders have learned that love does not conquer all,” Alexander Vershbow, the former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, said in his conversation with Cha.

In holding out for a Big Deal with North Korea, Trump is banking on the country’s leaders deciding to do what his own intelligence officials (and top advisers, such as Bolton) say is highly unlikely: fully give up a nuclear program they have invested heavily in for decades and come to consider essential for the survival of their regime. What the United States is now angling for, a year into its diplomacy with North Korea, is to have it all: breakthroughs in negotiations at both the leader and lower levels, an indefinite and unrelenting pressure campaign that produces a swift grand bargain on peace and denuclearization.

Such a deal would be an utterly unprecedented accomplishment if Trump pulls it off. But if the dim history of nuclear negotiations with North Korea isn’t exactly repeating itself in the wake of the Vietnam summit, it’s starting to rhyme.

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Op woensdag 13 maart 2019 12:50 schreef Monolith het volgende:
[..]

In mijn ogen zie je gewoon weer het aloude recept van chronische zelfoverschatting in combinatie met geopolitieke onervarenheid / incompetentie.

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NatashaBertrand twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 15:46:50 Manafort is now addressing the court. "In my previous allocation I told Judge Ellis I was ashamed for my conduct...I want to say to you now that I am sorry for what I have done and for all the activities that have gotten me here today." reageer retweet

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NatashaBertrand twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 15:49:34 Manafort: "As I've sat in solitary confinement, I've reflected on my life and can see I've behaved in ways that did not always comport with my personal values. ...my behavior in the future will be very different." Says he's "a different person" than he was in October 2017. reageer retweet

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NatashaBertrand twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 15:51:49 Manafort makes a last-ditch appeal: "Your honor, I will be 70 years old in a few weeks. My wife is 66. I am her primary caregiver...this case has taken everything from me already. Please let my wife and I be together." reageer retweet

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NatashaBertrand twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 16:24:54 Judge ABJ, pointedly: The question of collusion or conspiracy with Russia was not presented in this case, therefore it was not resolved in this case.(Manafort lawyer Kevin Downing had said last week that the Virginia trial proved there was no evidence of collusion.) reageer retweet

twitter:

kylegriffin1 twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 16:28:51 Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Manafort: "It's hard to overstate the number of lies, the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved." --@NBCNews reageer retweet

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NatashaBertrand twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 16:37:12 Judge ABJ: "The criminal conduct in this case was not an isolated, single incident...a significant portion of [Manafort's] career has been spent gaming the system." https://t.co/KXybUtDpqm reageer retweet

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kylegriffin1 twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 16:40:43 Judge Amy Berman Jackson: "All of this appeared to reflect his ongoing contempt for and the belief that he had the right to manipulate these proceedings, and the court order did not apply to him." —@NBCNews reageer retweet

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NatashaBertrand twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 16:43:37 Oof. Judge ABJ has called out Manafort over his comments today-- says they seem to have been prompted by the comments he made at the last hearing. Says "elements of remorse and acceptance of responsibility" in submissions so far have been "completely absent." reageer retweet

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etuckerAP twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 16:35:36 Judge Amy Berman Jackson: "Court is one of those places where facts still matter." reageer retweet

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NatashaBertrand twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 16:46:42 Judge ABJ has gone back to this now: "The 'no collusion' refrain that runs through the entire defense memorandum is unrelated to matters at hand." https://t.co/W7ta3hLi9d reageer retweet

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NatashaBertrand twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 16:48:39 "It's hard to understand why an attorney would write that...The 'no collusion' mantra is simply a non sequitur." It's also not accurate, since the investigation is ongoing, she says. reageer retweet

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ryanjreilly twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 16:48:16 Jackson says the "the no collusion refrain" that runs through defense documents has no relevance here. "The 'no collusion' mantra is simply a non-sequitur." Not particularly persuasive to say an investigation hasn't found anything when you've lied to investigators, she says. reageer retweet

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ZoeTillman twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 16:59:00 Jackson says 30 months of her sentence must be concurrent with the EDVA sentence, because the tax and reporting crimes were covered in both cases (and in EDVA he got 24 months for the tax crimes and 30 months for the reporting crime, to run concurrent) reageer retweet

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NatashaBertrand twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 17:01:31 BREAKING: Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentences Manafort to 60 months on count 1, which will run concurrent to 30 months of EDVA, and 13 months on count 2 to be served CONSECUTIVELY to sentence on count 1 and sentence imposed by EDVA. reageer retweet

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NatashaBertrand twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 17:02:42 This is 43 extra months, so almost 4 years in addition to the ~4 he received in EDVA. https://t.co/F1Tlf3WMXT reageer retweet

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NatashaBertrand twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 17:04:11 If my math is correct, subtracting the 9 months Manafort has already served that Ellis gave him credit for, Manafort is set to serve just under 7 years in prison. https://t.co/qv1GkoQBeh reageer retweet

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Op woensdag 13 maart 2019 17:05 schreef Tweek het volgende:
6 jaar dus, niet veel voor zijn misdaden.

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anniekarni twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 16:52:45 Ivanka didn't get a document request from House Democrats. But 52 individuals and organizations out of the 81 were asked to turn over documents related to Ivanka or her business interests. https://t.co/ErQGDUs6FN reageer retweet

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Rhona Graff, President Trump’s longtime executive assistant, was asked for documents related to foreign governments providing gifts or money to Ivanka Trump or her businesses.

Anatoli Samochornov, the Russian translator who sat in on a meeting between Trump campaign officials and Russian lobbyists, was asked to hand over handwritten notes showing any capital investment from Russian entities to Ms. Trump or her businesses.

And Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, was asked for any documents related to loans or capital investments from Russians directed to Ms. Trump.

The president’s eldest daughter and top White House adviser was notably absent from a blitz of document requests that the House Judiciary Committee sent earlier this month to 81 individuals and organizations linked to the president. House Democrats have been cautious about targeting Ms. Trump and the other Trump children as they investigate the president, worried about triggering a backlash.

But a close read of the document requests suggests they aren’t exactly tiptoeing around the first daughter, either.

Of the 81 document requests sent, 52 individuals and organizations were asked to turn over documents related to Ms. Trump or her business interests.

SPOILER

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Op woensdag 13 maart 2019 17:44 schreef westwoodblvd het volgende:
Dacht Manafort even goed weg te komen.

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En dit zijn state charges, hier kan Trump niet aan tornen.

twitter:

mj_lee twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 17:45:58 Literally within minutes of Paul Manafort sentencing, Manhattan DA announces Manafort indictment for "a yearlong residential mortgage fraud scheme" > https://t.co/KiWqqixx3G reageer retweet

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Op woensdag 13 maart 2019 17:49 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
En Manafort's advocaat staat nu weer te roepen dat er geen sprake collusion is. Hij komt alleen nauwelijks boven het geroep van een omstander uit: LIAR!

twitter:

ABC twitterde op woensdag 13-03-2019 om 19:34:22 BREAKING: Pres. Trump: "We're going to be issuing an emergency order of prohibition to ground all flights of the 737 MAX 8 and the 737 MAX 9, and planes associated with that line." https://t.co/8wZB1z9CPS https://t.co/ffAY0kn94p reageer retweet

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Op woensdag 13 maart 2019 19:49 schreef Monolith het volgende:
Er werd overigens nogal geklaagd over vermeende discriminatie in de toelating in het onderwijs in de VS en daar blijkt toch wel degelijk sprake van:
https://www.politico.com/(...)sion-scandal-1265869

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Op woensdag 13 maart 2019 20:40 schreef speknek het volgende:
[..]

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Many colleges enroll more students from the top 1 percent of earners than the bottom 60 percent combined.