[AMV] Amerikaanse politiek #805 Mailbomb

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 16:50 schreef theunderdog het volgende:

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Ja, of Biden. De man die bijna eigenhandig verantwoordelijk was voor wetgeving waardoor tussen 1990 en 2000 het aantal, voornamelijk gekleurde, gevangenen verdubbelde.

Trump draaide dit terug.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 17:09 schreef Montov het volgende:

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Wat betekent bijna eigenhandig verantwoordelijk voor wetgeving?

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 17:28 schreef speknek het volgende:

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Helemaal niet.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 17:28 schreef speknek het volgende:

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Helemaal niet.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 18:12 schreef theunderdog het volgende:

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https://blackagendareport(...)estroyed-black-lives

Dit is zeker ook niet waar?

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I recently resigned as a senior analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency after experiencing firsthand the actions of U.S. government leaders to suppress nonviolent dissent during the recent nationwide protests for racial justice. I was among the thousands of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters tear-gassed in Lafayette Square and nearly knocked to the ground by the downdraft from a military helicopter hovering over Pennsylvania Avenue. In the course of my work, I have watched autocratic leaders around the world employ similar tactics, actions that often precede broader uses of violence against domestic opposition. Unidentified federal forces in cities across the United States committing abuses against demonstrators is an evolution in the Trump administration’s authoritarian approach to dissent, not an anomaly.

I left government service after more than a decade because I lost faith in the courage of the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to refuse unlawful orders from the President. They effectively labeled me and other Americans expressing our views in a peaceful assembly as enemies. They authorized troops to use overwhelming force and set a dangerous precedent by enabling the president to ignore state and local officials’ objections and deploy federal forces in response to popular protests. While the military is, thankfully, out of the spotlight for now, the president has turned to other eager allies — in the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice — who believe their components of the federal government can clamp down on dissent with a veneer of legality.

I have seen up close the president’s disdain for democratic values, and recent events should be put in the context of a continuous slide toward authoritarianism. In 2015, I was detailed to the White House as an apolitical civil servant on the National Security Council (NSC) staff. My term was set to conclude in January 2017, but I agreed to extend for two months at the request of NSC leaders to support an orderly transition between administrations. I briefed President Donald Trump before several introductory calls to foreign heads of state, and as is customary, I listened in and prepared the official transcripts. I was appalled by the ways he actively undermined the democratic principles we have long aspired to model and to advance globally.

In my years analyzing foreign political and military decision-making for senior policymakers, part of my job was to observe whether foreign governments protected their national security services from politicization and whether they committed abuses against their own populations. These are critical measures of the health of a democracy, and failures not only disqualify countries from U.S. partnership but also can be a warning sign that a country may play a destabilizing role in the world. Our laws enshrine a fundamental belief that a nation’s security forces should defend, not undermine, the core principles of democracy, and that they are not a leader’s personal tool to silence critics and retain power. Respect for this principle is one of the starkest lines dividing democratic and authoritarian leaders, and I see grave similarities between events in our country and the processes by which autocratic leaders have brought their countries to the brink of civil conflict and beyond.

Each day, Trump’s approach looks more like the autocrats I warned about as an analyst. I am alarmed by the decision to send federal forces to Portland and additional cities, over local objections, as well as the abusive approach of those forces to protesters in operations well beyond their normal jurisdiction. The use of intelligence elements to monitor citizens engaging in constitutionally-protected activity is deeply disturbing and strikingly similar to illegal domestic spying that prompted the Church Committee in 1975 and resulted in our modern intelligence oversight structure. Set against the backdrop of the dereliction and callous disregard for the more than 160,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19, I fear the president and his allies may choose further escalation in an attempt to avoid the personal consequences of defeat in November.

I saw several patterns repeated in the behavior of foreign leaders who lacked majority support and refused to respect their constitutions and constituents. They ignored or manipulated facts, rejected legitimate criticism, sought to disenfranchise opposition voters, invited foreign interference, and planted seeds of doubt about their own institutions and electoral processes. They also identified security elements willing to spy on their own citizens and to use force to put down protests calling for the leader to step down. Sadly, the similarities to current events in the United States are striking.

But some of the same situations I watched overseas give me reasons to be hopeful. I have seen several authoritarian leaders attempt but ultimately fail to subdue populations deeply committed to advancing democratic values – including Yahya Jammeh in The Gambia and Blaise Compaore in Burkina Faso. In these cases, massive turnout for elections and non-violent protest as part of disciplined and enduring social movements were vital to resetting the course of countries on our current trajectory.

These basic acts of civic participation, undertaken by millions, help rebuild the foundations of democracy and bolster governing institutions against efforts to tear them apart. It is up to all of us to ensure historic and safe participation in this election, and to be prepared to peacefully reject any efforts to subvert the will of the people.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 17:58 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

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En sinds wanneer kan Trump wetgeving terugdraaien, eigenlijk?

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 18:13 schreef Monolith het volgende:

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Onderhondje is zoals de Jeugd van Tegenwoordig zou zeggen "een sjembek dat zeurt, maar hij weet niet watskeburt".

Een senator is nooit eigenhandig ergens verantwoordelijk voor, want die kan hooguit wetgeving aandragen waar zowel huis als senaat goedkeuring voor moeten geven. De betreffende wet uit de jaren '90 was vooral een stokpaardje van Clinton, hoewel Biden de versie in de senaat heeft opgesteld.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 10:25 schreef Dejannn het volgende:
Kortom, hij had het gehoord en had eigenlijk geen idee.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 19:58 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

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Lulkoek. Verder heeft Trump geen enkele EO uitgevaardigd die de wet waar jij het over hebt buiten werking stelt.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 20:41 schreef theunderdog het volgende:

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https://www.vox.com/polic(...)-crime-police-orders

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 20:56 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

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Dat heeft totaal niets met de wet waar jij het over had te maken.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 20:56 schreef AnneX het volgende:
@:Kijkertje ...wat een verhaal.
“Veel officials namen ontslag zonder uitleg. Kyle Murphy (DIA senior analyst) wil zijn ei wél kwijt in een op-ed:“

Trump's Authoritarian Leanings Threaten To Corrupt 2020 Election | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 19:46 schreef theunderdog het volgende:

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Hetzelfde als wat ik zeg, maar dan met heel veel woorden.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 21:05 schreef Monolith het volgende:

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Je snapt er geen zak van, maar dat is feitelijk de samenvatting van je gehele oeuvre hier.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 21:12 schreef AnneX het volgende:
[ twitter ]
Democratie wordt afgevoerd.🇺🇸

Rachel Maddow kan ik nu niet luisteren/ kijken. Wordt morgen.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 21:51 schreef trein2000 het volgende:

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Schande.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 21:12 schreef theunderdog het volgende:

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Jij bent vooral erg agressief. Jammer, die vijandelijke, onbeschaafde houding.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 22:00 schreef SnertMetChoco het volgende:

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Zelfs al was ik het qua beleid helemaal eens met de republikeinen, was dit diskwalificerend om voor ze te stemmen. Ongelofelijk.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 22:20 schreef AnneX het volgende:
[ twitter ]
Voor degenen, die niet alles op twitter ( kunnen) volgen...

Zou Lincoln project het filmpje kunnen plaatsen op fox? en in swing states, als die er nog zijn.
Het heeft langzamerhand toch geen zin meer: die hard reps veranderen toch niet meer van mening.

VoteVets - War on USPS

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 22:40 schreef viagraap het volgende:
Aan de ene kant is het aanvallen van Biden op zijn mooie woorden ter verdediging van die crime bill iets wat je best kunt doen, doen/deden Bernie en Warren supporters ook al tijdenlang. Aan de andere kant laat je dan een blinde vlek zien voor het showmanship dat nu eenmaal inherent is aan de politieke poppenkast die in de VS (heftiger dan in Nederland) al gaande is sinds de Derde Weg van 'links'.

Destijds was het voor Biden gewoon een carrièremove, zoals in Nederland tweedekamer-leden zich weleens hogerop proberen te werken bij hun eigen partij op deze wijze.

Maar om dan vervolgens te beweren dat Trump die hele zaak ongedaan heeft gemaakt in minder dan één termijn is natuurlijk van een andere orde. De orde der dommen of de orde der demagogen. Kies zelf maar.

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Former FBI lawyer set to plead guilty to altering email during Russia investigation

(CNN)An FBI lawyer who worked on the surveillance warrant of former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page plans to plead guilty Friday to making a false statement in an email as part of an investigation into the Russia investigation.

Kevin Clinesmith plans to admit to one charge of altering an email to another official in 2017 that said Page wasn't a previous government source, when he had been one.
Clinesmith had also been critical of President Donald Trump when he worked for the FBI.

Friday's charge represents the first public production from the highly anticipated Durham investigation and will likely provide political fodder for Trump amid a storm of negative headlines regarding his management of the coronavirus pandemic.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 23:32 schreef Mike het volgende:
Vandaag heeft het onderzoek van John Durham naar fouten bij het Ruslandonderzoek naar Trump een eerste resultaat opgeleverd. Kevin Clinesmith, een ex-FBI agent, gaat schuldig pleiten aan het aanpassen van een e-mail:
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_{bron: https://edition.cnn.com/2(...)linesmith/index.html}

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 23:35 schreef SnertMetChoco het volgende:

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Van deze meneer was toch al maanden geleden bekend dat hij dit gedaan had?

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 22:46 schreef Monolith het volgende:

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Neu, het slaat ook helemaal nergens op. Kijk Trump laat ook precies zien waar hij voor staat in deze tijd met veel demonstraties. Wat Trump betreft worden vreedzame demonstraties gewoon beëindigd met traangas en gummiknuppels. Die man wil niets liever dan "Mr. Law & order" zijn. Dan kun je natuurlijk heel moeilijk je tegenstanders law & order beleid uit hun verre verleden gaan aanwrijven.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 23:37 schreef Mike het volgende:

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Ik kende hem nog niet, maar blijkbaar is nu alles pas rond voor een veroordeling.

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 23:37 schreef Mike het volgende:

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Ik kende hem nog niet, maar blijkbaar is nu alles pas rond voor een veroordeling.

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Russia Inquiry Review Is Said to Criticize F.B.I. but Rebuff Claims of Biased Acts (NYTimes)

A watchdog report will portray the pursuit of a wiretap of an ex-Trump adviser as sloppy, but it also debunks some accusations by Trump allies of F.B.I. wrongdoing.

[...]

Investigators for the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, uncovered errors and omissions in documents related to the wiretapping of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page — including that a low-level lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, altered an email that officials used to prepare to seek court approval to renew the wiretap, the people said.

Mr. Horowitz referred his findings about Mr. Clinesmith to prosecutors for a potential criminal charge. Mr. Clinesmith left the Russia investigation in February 2018 after the inspector general identified him as one of a handful of F.B.I. officials who expressed animus toward Mr. Trump in text messages and resigned about two months ago, after the inspector general’s team interviewed him.

Though Mr. Trump’s allies have seized on the messages from Mr. Clinesmith and his colleagues as proof of anti-Trump bias, Mr. Clinesmith has not been a prominent figure in the partisan firefight over the investigation. His lawyer declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for Mr. Horowitz.

[...]

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 00:25 schreef Sjemmert het volgende:
Dat Clinesmith de bak in zal gaan was al duidelijk na het Horowitz rapport. Hopelijk volgen er meer.

Blijkbaar heeft hij een plea deal gesloten nu, zal hij er nog een paar bij naaien ?

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 01:23 schreef SnertMetChoco het volgende:

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Vrij selectieve blik op gerechtigheid heb je, met het voorstaan van een bijna-pardon voor Stone en anti-rechtstatelijke interventie van Barr bij Flynn.

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A. Information about Page's Prior Relationship with Another U.S. Government Agency and Information Page Provided to the Other Agency that Overlapped with Facts Asserted in the FISA Application

The OI Attorney told us that it is relevant to know if the target of a FISA is or had been working on behalf of another U.S. government agency to "make sure that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing" when seeking FISA authority. As noted previously, according to the 01 Attorney, it would have been a significant fact if Page had a relationship with the other U.S. government agency that overlapped in time with his interactions with known Russian intelligence officers described in the FISA applications because it would raise the issue of whether Page interacted with the Russian intelligence officers at the behest of the other agency or with the intent to assist the U.S. government. Evans told us that information about a FISA target's relationship with another U.S. government agency is typically included in a FISA application. Evans also stated that 01 would work with the FBI to fully understand any such relationship and describe it accurately in the relevant application.

Toward that end, on September 28, 2016, the OI Attorney emailed Case Agent 1 a draft of the FISA application, copying other members of the Crossfire Hurricane team. In a comment in the draft application, the OI Attorney asked "do we know if there is any truth to Page's claim that he has provided information to [another U.S. government agency]-was he considered a source/asset/whatever?" In response to the OI Attorney's question, on September 29, Case Agent 1 inserted the following comment in the draft:

"He did meet with [the other U.S. government agency], however, it's dated and I would argue it was/is outside scope, I don't think we need it in. It was years ago, when he was in Moscow. If you want to keep it, I can get the language from the [August 17 Memorandum] we were provided [by the other U.S. government agency]."

294 Based upon this response, the 0I Attorney did not include information about Page's prior relationship with the other agency in the FISA application.

However, the information Case Agent 1 provided to the 0I Attorney was inaccurate. As described in the August 17 Memorandum from the other U.S. government agency to the FBI, Page first met with the other agency in April 2008, after he left Moscow (Page had lived in Moscow from 2004 to 2007), and he had been approved as an operational contact for the other agency from 2008 to 2013. Additionally, rather than being outside the scope of the FISA application, the FISA application included allegations about meetings that Page had with Russian intelligence officers that Page had disclosed to the other agency. Specifically, according to the August 17 Memorandum, Page provided information to the other agency in October 2010 about contacts he had with a Russian intelligence officer (Intelligence Officer 1), which the other agency assessed likely began in 2008. Page's contacts with Intelligence Officer 1 in 2007 and 2008 were among the historical connections to Russian intelligence officers that the FBI relied upon in the first FISA application (and subsequent renewal applications) to help support probable cause. 295 The August 17 Memorandum stated that Page told the other agency that he met with Intelligence Officer 1 four times, characterized him as a "compelling, nice guy," and described Intelligence Officer l's alleged interest in contacting an identified U.S. person. According to the August 17 Memorandum, the employee of the other U.S. government agency who met with Page assessed that Page "candidly described his contact with" Intelligence Officer 1. Page's relationship with the other agency was not mentioned in any of the four FISA applications.

Further, the FBI had information in its own files indicating that Page had told the FBI about meeting with the other U.S. government agency after the period he lived in Moscow and during the period alleged in the FISA application. For example, according to the FBI Electronic Communication (EC) documenting a June 18, 2009 FBI interview of Page, Page had informed the FBI agents that "due to his work and overseas experiences, he has been questioned by and provides information to representatives of the [other U.S. government agency] on an ongoing basis," and that the "interviewing agents acknowledged this fact, and stated to Page that no questions would be asked about Page's dealings with the other U.S. government agency during the interview." According to another FBI EC, Page told the FBI during a June 2013 interview that, although he had not spoken to the other U.S. government agency for "about a year or so" Page had spoken to them "since his last interview with the FBI."


The Woods File for the first FISA application, which was prepared by Case Agent 1, included the EC documenting the 2009 FBI interview of Page. Additionally, Case Agent 1 received an email on August 10, 2016, containing an attachment titled "Carter Page-Profile," which had been prepared by a Crossfire Hurricane Staff Operations Specialist (SOS). The profile, dated August 1, 2016, quoted the 2009 EC regarding Page's statements to the FBI about his contact with the other U.S. government agency. We did not find any electronic communications indicating that the FBI provided 0I with this Carter Page profile.

We asked Case Agent 1 about his knowledge in 2016 of Page's historical contacts with the other U.S. government agency and Case Agent l's response to the 01 Attorney's question on September 29, 2016, about any such contacts. Case Agent 1 told us that he did not recall his state of knowledge in 2016 regarding Page's history with the other U.S. government agency, but said he believed that he likely would have reviewed the August 17 Memorandum about Page sent to the Crossfire Hurricane team by the other U.S. government agency. He said he recalled believing that Page's involvement with the other U.S. government agency was "dated." After reviewing a synopsis of the information contained in the August 17 Memorandum during his OIG interview, Case Agent 1 reiterated to the OIG that he believed the information was dated, but also said that he "probably saw it." According to Case Agent 1, "I think I would have reviewed it with the team. I think that it would have been, you know, as we looked at it. It wasn't just me. But, we, you know, there was a determination made that it was dated." Case Agent 1 also said it was possible that he never reviewed the August 17 Memorandum from the other U.S. government agency.

The 01 Attorney told us that he could not recall much about the issue of Page's historical contacts with the other U.S. government agency. After being shown his exchange with Case Agent 1 on September 29, 2016, the 01 Attorney stated that if Case Agent 1 told him that Page's contacts with the other U.S. government agency were "out of scope" and dated, then he would have deferred to Case Agent 1 's assessment on this issue. The 01 Attorney also told us, after being informed about information in the August 17 Memorandum from the other U.S. government agency, that if 01 had been aware of this information at the time the application was being prepared, 01 would have discussed it internally and likely would have disclosed the information to the FISC to "err on the side of disclosure." When we discussed the information in the August 17 Memorandum with Evans, he responded similarly and told us "I think it would go in the application somewhere, be it in a footnote or elsewhere, if for no other reason than it also goes to the question of where the person's loyalties lie."

As described later in Chapters Seven and Eight, none of the three renewal applications described Page's prior historical contacts and relationship with the other U.S. government agency, even after the FBI received additional information from the other agency in June 2017. In April and May 2017, following news reports that the FBI had obtained a FISA targeting Carter Page, Page gave interviews to news outlets denying that he had collected intelligence for the Russian government and asserting instead that he had previously shared information that he had learned with the U.S. intelligence community. In mid-June 2017, in response to concerns expressed by members of the Crossfire Hurricane team, the OGC Attorney contacted the other U.S. government agency by email to seek clarification about Page's past status with that agency. The other U.S. government agency responded by email to the FBI OGC attorney by directing the attorney to memoranda previously sent to the FBI by the other U.S. government agency that informed the FBI that Page did previously have a relationship with that other agency and that the last contact occurred in July 2011. The email also stated, using the other agency's terminology, that Page had a relationship with that other agency. However, when asked about Page's prior status with that other agency by a Crossfire Hurricane supervisor, SSA 2, who was going to be the affiant on the final FISA renewal application, the OGC Attorney told SSA 2 that Page had never had a relationship with the other U.S. government agency. In addition, the OGC Attorney altered the email that the other U.S. government agency had sent to the OGC Attorney so that the email stated that Page had not been a source for the other agency; the OGC Attorney then forwarded the altered email to SSA 2, who told us he relied on the email. Shortly thereafter, SSA 2 served as the affiant on the final renewal application, which was again silent on Page's prior relationship with the other U.S. government agency.


294 As noted previously, on or about August 17, 2016, the Crossfire Hurricane team received information from another U.S. government agency detailing Carter Page's relationship with that other agency.

295 The other agency did not provide the FBI with information indicating it had knowledge of Page's reported contacts with another particular intelligence officer. The FBI also relied on Page's contacts with this intelligence officer in the FISA application.

SPOILER

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

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Just How Far Will Trump Go?
The president has dramatically accelerated the pace of his efforts to weaponize the federal government to his advantage.

President Donald Trump’s open admission yesterday that he’s sabotaging the Postal Service to improve his election prospects crystallizes a much larger dynamic: He’s waging an unprecedented campaign to weaponize virtually every component of the federal government to partisan advantage.

Trump is systematically enlisting agencies, including the Postal Service, Census Bureau, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security, that traditionally have been considered at least somewhat insulated from political machinations to reward his allies and punish those he considers his enemies. He is razing barriers between his personal and political interests and the core operations of the federal government to an extent that no president has previously attempted, a wide range of public-administration experts have told me.

“There’s always been temptation … but no president in modern times has taken action so explicitly and obviously—or transparently—to influence and actually direct these agencies to favor the party in power,” Paul Light, a public-service professor at New York University, told me. “None. None.”

Presidents have always put their stamp on the federal government. It’s common for regulatory agencies, for instance, to dramatically shift direction in their attitude toward Big Business when partisan control of the White House changes. And presidents have always rewarded their political supporters, at times causing scandals because of questionable Cabinet appointments or procurement decisions.

But no matter which individuals were appointed to lead them, some agencies have always been considered more protected from politics. It’s those barriers that Trump, with the tacit support of congressional Republicans, is steadily dismantling. Presidents have used the Postal Service to reward loyalists with jobs since the country’s earliest history. But they didn’t expect what Trump does from the agency. “The whole spoils system goes back to having supporters who were appointed as postmasters,” says Kedric Payne, the general counsel of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center and a former top official at the Office of Congressional Ethics. “But it wasn’t to disrupt the election.”

The result of Trump’s moves: an executive branch whose full reach and power is being conscripted to serve the president’s immediate interests. “All of it comes from a place that whatever is in his personal interest—whether it’s financial, reputational, or political—if it benefits him, the government is merely a tool for serving himself,” Walter Shaub, the director of the Office of Government Ethics under former President Barack Obama, told me. “He has simply crossed lines that no one would even conceive of crossing in the past.”

His determination to harness federal power to his personal advantage links his choices throughout his presidency, including funneling federal dollars into businesses he owns and withholding military aid for Ukraine in exchange for an election favor, the actions that led to his impeachment in the House last year.

Experts I spoke with said that Trump has dramatically accelerated the pace of his efforts to weaponize federal actions since his Senate acquittal, when every Republican, except Utah’s Mitt Romney, voted to dismiss the charges against him with no sanction and not even a full-scale trial to explore the evidence.

Beyond his recent efforts to impede mail delivery, Trump has:

• Rapidly purged inspectors general across the federal government, replacing five of them within a short period, including the intelligence-community IG who forwarded to Congress the whistleblower complaint that triggered Trump’s impeachment.
• Openly pressured the Justice Department to back off the prosecution of his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and to request more lenient sentencing for his ally Roger Stone. Trump later commuted Stone’s sentence outright.
• Deployed federal law-enforcement officials from the Department of Homeland Security to confront protesters in Portland, Oregon, and other cities over the explicit objection of governors and mayors.
• Enlisted the military into his campaign against protesters, drafting Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley to accompany him during his walk to St. John’s Church in Washington, D.C., after armed personnel forcibly cleared out peaceful protesters. The decision prompted so much concern in the military that Milley later apologized.
• Taken repeated steps to manipulate the results of the decennial census in a manner that could undercount people of color and benefit the Republican Party. The Supreme Court stopped Trump from adding a citizenship question to the census, but the administration now says it intends to exclude undocumented immigrants from the population counts used to apportion congressional seats and Electoral College votes among the states. It also announced it will cut off efforts to contact households that haven’t responded to the census on September 30, despite the disruption caused by the coronavirus outbreak. Census experts and former Census Bureau directors have said that such a truncated schedule is guaranteed to undercount minorities.

The deployment of federal agents this summer may represent the most tangible manifestation of Trump’s determination to wield the federal government as a weapon against his political enemies. Light, who has studied the federal government’s operations for decades and is usually no alarmist, describes it as “shocking.” Sending those assets into cities over the objection of their mayors, he told me, “does resemble the early days of a police state, I’m sorry to say it.”

But if those deployments comprise the most visceral example, Trump’s attempts to manipulate the census may provide the most revealing measure of just how much he’s willing to distort federal operations to benefit himself and his party—and how far congressional Republicans will go in abetting him.

In the past, the census has occasionally faced questions about its accuracy. But never before has there been evidence of a president deliberately trying to skew the results in a manner that helps one party. “I don’t think there’s ever been a charge that the census was systematically unfair,” says Donald Kettl, a longtime scholar of federal administration, now at the University of Texas at Austin.

Until now, the reason for avoiding census tampering has seemed obvious: It was thought that everyone benefits from an accurate count (just as everyone was thought to benefit from an apolitical military, among other institutions Trump has tried to manipulate). Billions of dollars in federal aid are tied to population, so presumably every state would want as many of its people counted as possible. “A complete count is important no matter what state you are in, because so many federal and state programs are tied to the numbers of people,” Steve Murdock, who served as the Census Bureau’s director under President George W. Bush, told me. “You don’t gain much by not counting the people you have to provide services for.”

But in a political environment defined by widening polarization along racial and geographic lines, that traditional restraint has apparently broken down. Hardly any congressional Republicans have raised concerns about Trump’s determination to curtail the census count. That includes Republicans from highly diverse states across the Sun Belt, which are likely to be among the biggest losers if minority populations are systematically undercounted, both in terms of federal aid and the apportionment of congressional seats and Electoral College votes. This week, I asked the offices of GOP senators from Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Georgia if they had any objection to Trump short-circuiting the census count. All refused to respond, except Florida’s Marco Rubio, whose staff referred me only to a comment he’d made on a related issue, Trump’s effort to exclude the undocumented from apportionment. (And even on that question, Rubio avoided taking a definitive position.) Republican governors in those states have not raised concerns publicly either.

“I am just dumbfounded,” said Murdock, who also served for many years as Texas’s state demographer. “I don’t know why Texas would let this happen. The elected officials should be screaming: ‘Count those people; we are providing services for them.’”

Although the House has approved legislation extending the deadline for reporting census results until next April, giving the bureau more time to reach unresponsive Americans, the Senate has refused to consider the measure. Instead, just as with Postal Service slowdowns that may disproportionately hurt rural communities, many Republicans appear to have concluded that they are willing to accept collateral damage to their own constituencies for the partisan gain Trump’s actions could provide. Counting fewer people of color in Texas or Florida might mean fewer federal dollars, and even less representation in Congress. But it also could benefit Republicans in next year’s redistricting, making it tougher for civil-rights groups to legally challenge gerrymandered lines for providing insufficient representation to minorities.

“Republicans are in on the deal,” says Simon Rosenberg, the founder of the Democratic research-and-advocacy group NDN, referring to the GOP’s effective approval of Trump’s actions concerning both the census and the Postal Service. “They want Trump to blunt the size of the Democratic victory this year at all costs … They want Trump to stick his finger in the demographic dam that could make them the minority party for a generation.”

This corrosive synergy binds other elements of Trump’s campaign to weaponize more federal functions. Payne says Trump’s offensive has proceeded in two stages. First, he systematically defied congressional oversight—ignoring subpoenas and demands for testimony—and fired inspectors general who were in his path. Congressional Republicans helped by supporting his defiance of oversight and voting almost unanimously not to punish his actions in Ukraine. With those potential sources of resistance blunted, Payne says, Trump has moved more openly than before to manipulate federal operations that will directly influence the outcome of this election (the Postal Service) and the distribution of political power for years to come (the census).

“Where now that you have no recourse that Congress can take to impeach or investigate the administration, and you don’t have the IGs, that lays the groundwork to then go after these positions that could influence the election,” Payne says.

By politicizing agencies so overtly, Trump is creating a situation in which the right will accuse Joe Biden, if he wins, of engaging in political manipulation simply by reverting them to their more traditional roles. Conservatives, for instance, will surely scream if a President Biden removes loyalists whom Trump has installed in inspector-general positions.

An even more dramatic outcome of Biden winning in November: Some experts believe that his administration could reopen the census before transmitting the data for reapportioning congressional seats. Under current federal law, Trump must transmit the results to Congress for reapportionment purposes by year’s end. But some believe a President Biden could order the bureau to spend several more months pursuing the households it has not yet reached. “The next president can say, ‘I decertify it,’” says Robert Shapiro, who helped oversee the 2000 census as the Commerce Department’s undersecretary for economic affairs under Bill Clinton. “You can say, ‘I’m not going to redo it, [but] we are going to carry out the operation that was truncated.’” (There’s no apparent precedent for reopening the census during a change of administrations, which means that the Supreme Court would likely decide whether doing so is legal if Biden takes that route.)

And if Trump wins? The public-administration experts universally told me that the accelerating pace of Trump’s excesses—without meaningful complaint from congressional Republicans—signals that in a second term, he is likely to push much further in refashioning the federal government for his own ends.

Rosenberg framed Trump’s actions in dramatic terms. Trump, in his combative speeches around the July 4 holiday, claimed that “far-left fascism” is trying to “overthrow” and “destroy” American “civilization”—allegations that could justify almost any level of “authoritarian crackdown by the government of the United States against the president’s domestic political opponents,” Rosenberg argues. “We are watching an authoritarian in action before our eyes. And we haven’t woken up to the significance of what we are seeing, frankly.”

Those are accusations that have rarely been directed at an American president. But as students of democracy point out, the pattern of subordinating all government operations to the interests of one party, and even one individual, is a core characteristic of illiberal and authoritarian countries. Shaub, like Rosenberg, sees exactly that end point. “I think if he’s reelected, the republic may die—and I’m having to force myself to say ‘may’ so I don’t sound like a complete alarmist,” Shaub, now a senior adviser to the government-watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said starkly. “But I don’t see how the government can survive four more years of this … Whatever your worst fears are for whatever comes next aren’t as bad as it will be, by a long shot.”

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 17:09 schreef Montov het volgende:

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Wat betekent bijna eigenhandig verantwoordelijk voor wetgeving?

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 12:09 schreef Tijger_m het volgende:

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Nee, 3 strikes laws zijn nog steeds actief, zowel op Federaal als staats nivo.

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 13:35 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Pence blijkt ook campagnegeld te hebben gebruikt om zijn hypotheek te betalen en credotcardrekeningen te voldoen lees ik net in een al wat ouder artikel.
Nogal hypocriet van onze mannenbroeder.

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 13:47 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Wapo

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 12:22 schreef AnneX het volgende:
Nou, het was niet altijd “botertje tot de boom” tussen Obama en Biden ( en Hillary).
https://www.politico.com/(...)-relationship-393570

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Op vrijdag 14 augustus 2020 19:39 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
Kevin Clinesmith gaat schuldig pleiten wegens het knoeien met een email mbt Carter Page:

[ twitter ]

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 14:10 schreef Ulx het volgende:
Ik kwam er via twitter, en laat ik nou net verzocht zijn geen tweets meer te posten moet het zo.

De WAPO heeft een zoekfunctie.

Sorry voor de overlast.

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 16:35 schreef AnneX het volgende:
[ twitter ]

...

P.S. Was het een goeie philips medical deal?

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 18:00 schreef Hyperdude het volgende:

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Phillips is niet Philips.

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 18:17 schreef nostra het volgende:

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Dit gaat gewoon om "onze" Philips, ondanks de spelfout in de eerste alinea.

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 18:17 schreef nostra het volgende:

[..]

Dit gaat gewoon om "onze" Philips, ondanks de spelfout in de eerste alinea.

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 19:25 schreef AnneX het volgende:
Het artikel is nog beter. Not. Zelfs niet geleverd.
Frans van Houten, een trotse Nederlandse koopman.
Ik zie hem nog glimmen in een talkshow. #trots.

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 14:49 schreef Ryan3 het volgende:

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Even voor de goede orde: is dit nu de #Obamagate dan?

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White House Plants Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theorists Among Reporters in Briefing Room
At every briefing this week, the president took a question from a website dedicated to smearing his political rivals.

IN AN APPARENT effort to make his daily news conferences even more like campaign events than they already are, the White House press office has been packing the briefing room with supporters of President Donald Trump from far-right media outlets who can be relied on to toss him softball questions and initiate attacks on his political rivals.

Clearly in on the plot, Trump solicited a question each day this week from one of the guests invited by his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, to stand at the back of the room — where representatives of One America News, The Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit compromised the health of reporters by violating social distancing and mask-wearing guidelines.

On Monday, Trump called on Chanel Rion, a far-right Republican operative and conspiracy theorist now working as a correspondent for One America News, a San Diego cable channel dedicated to spreading lies about Joe Biden and elderly protesters battered by the police.

Rion gave Trump the opportunity to unleash a familiar riff from his pre-pandemic rallies by suggesting to him that Biden might have been considering President Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, Susan Rice, as his running mate because, “she can best cover up a lot of the Obamagate surveillance crimes that have taken place during your campaign.” Trump responded by accusing Obama and Biden of “probably treason.”

The next day, Rion triggered another familiar Trump diatribe by asking for his take on the resignation of Carmen Best, the first Black woman to lead Seattle’s police force, after the city council voted to cut her department’s budget. “What does this say about our country?” Rion asked Trump. “And what does this say about the Defund Police movement?” The president replied by repeating the lie that Seattle’s Democratic mayor had let “a radical left group, Antifa and others, take over a big portion of the city.”

On Wednesday, Rion drew Trump’s attention to what looked like a fairly lame conservative prank — the fact that the obscure website antifa.com was suddenly redirecting traffic to Biden’s campaign site. Suggesting that this stunt might somehow indicate support for Biden from the loose network of antifascist groups Trump has falsely portrayed as a shadow army, Rion asked if the president thought Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, should “publicly denounce the Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?”

“They should,” Trump replied. “I think they’re afraid to. In my book, it’s virtually a part of their campaign: Antifa.” There was nothing remotely surprising in Trump making the absurd argument that Biden, a centrist Democrat, is secretly part of an antifascist subculture, but Rion’s play-acting as a White House correspondent is not intended to elicit any new information from the president. The point of these exchanges is to shield Trump from actual questions about his failure to lead a coordinated federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic and to give him an opportunity to repeat lines he has already rehearsed, delivered as if they were answers to questions of vital importance.

Rion, who has been attending briefings as a guest of the White House press secretary since April, previously traveled to Ukraine with the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to promote false accusations about Biden spread by the pro-Russian lawmaker Andriy Derkach. An American intelligence assessment released last week concluded that Derkach was involved in a Russian plot to undermine Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party by “spreading claims about corruption — including through publicizing leaked phone calls” from 2016 between the former vice president and Ukraine’s president.

On Thursday, shortly after Trump praised the crackpot legal scholar who invented a racist conspiracy theory that Harris was not eligible to be vice president, even though she was born to immigrant parents in Oakland, he turned again to Rion. This time, however, she asked if he would, instead, take a question from Emel Akan of The Epoch Times, another of his press secretary’s guests from an equally rabid pro-Trump media outlet.

When Trump agreed, Akan asked him how the U.S. would respond to “the recent attack on press freedom in Hong Kong,” specifically the arrest of the publisher of the popular Apple Daily tabloid news site, Jimmy Lai, who has been an outspoken critic of the pro-Beijing leadership in the semiautonomous Chinese city. Lai could be charged with “collusion” with the United States for meeting Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington last summer to discuss Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protest movement.

Although Trump began by saying, “Well, I think it’s a terrible thing,” he appeared to have little familiarity or interest in the subject of press freedom, or democracy in Hong Kong, pivoting quickly into his stock complaints about China’s trade policies. He even seemed to gloat a bit when he said that, as a result of the U.S. withdrawing the “tremendous financial incentives” for businesses based in Hong Kong, American companies might profit from the crackdown on the territory.

“We’ve now withdrawn all of those incentives. It’s going to be very hard for Hong Kong to compete,” Trump said. “And I will tell you that the United States… will end up making a lot more money because of it, because we lost a lot of business to Hong Kong,” he added. “We made it very convenient for people to go there, for companies to go there. We’ve withdrawn all of that and the United States will be a big beneficiary from an economic standpoint.”

While Trump’s answer was not the kind of stirring endorsement of press freedom Akan might have expected from an American president, inciting an attack on China’s government was probably gratifying to the owners of The Epoch Times. The paper is owned by members of the dissident Chinese Falun Gong spiritual movement who have spent heavily to promote Trump as a useful battering ram against their ultimate enemy: the Chinese Communist Party that considers the banned sect a cult. An Epoch Times coronavirus explainer video echoes Trump’s rhetoric that China is to blame for the global pandemic, but urges people to call it not “the China Virus,” as Trump does, but the “CCP Virus.”

The White House press secretary’s invitation to the Epoch Times writer to participate in the briefing alongside reporters and photographers from some of America’s leading news organizations is remarkably brazen given that last year, when The Epoch Times was the largest buyer of pro-Trump ads on Facebook outside of the president’s own campaign, the site spent heavily to promote the baseless conspiracy theory that Biden had abused his power as vice president in 2016 to protect his son’s business interests in Ukraine.

Since then, the site has been banned from advertising on Facebook, after NBC reported that the newspaper had secretly placed Facebook ads promoting President Trump. Last week, Facebook also removed 303 fake accounts linked to The Epoch Times for spreading misinformation about Covid-19 and pro-Trump conspiracy theories about supposedly shadowy figures behind the ongoing racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

On Friday, after Trump twice refused to answer a question from The Associated Press about whether he believes the QAnon conspiracy theory in which he is a central figure, he solicited one from Alicia Powe, a proponent of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory who writes for the far-right Gateway Pundit blog.

Powe, who has claimed that the Clinton Foundation controls the FBI and is stifling investigations of child sex-trafficking rings and the murder of Seth Rich, asked Trump to comment on the accusation that Biden had claimed credit for the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

Powe’s question was based on a blog post by the founder of Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, which amplified an attack on Biden from the Kremlin-owned site Russia Today. Hoft’s post also quotes the analysis of Heshmat Alavi, a supporter of a militant Iranian cult called the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, who, as my colleague Murtaza Hussain revealed last year, is a fictional character.

McEnany did not respond to a question about whether she or someone else in her office invited Powe to the briefing on Friday, but Powe is a former blogger for WorldNetDaily, the far-right website that helped create the racist “birther” conspiracy theory to undermine President Barack Obama. Alyssa Farah, the White House director of strategic communications, is the daughter of Joseph Farah, who founded WorldNetDaily. In the 1990s, Joseph Farah was a leading proponent of the conspiracy theory that deputy White House counsel Vince Foster might have been murdered.

The presence of Rion, Akan and Powe also infuriated the White House Correspondents Association, whose members have agreed to send only 14 reporters a day during the pandemic, to maintain safe social distance. The WHCA also wants the aisles at the sides and the back of the room to be open for photographers and video crews to operate safely. “It is outrageous that the White House continues to invite ‘guests’ to press briefings, putting the health and safety of everyone in that workspace at greater risk,” the WHCA president, Zeke Miller, said in an email. “The WHCA’s social distancing guidelines were crafted in consultation with the White House based on the recommendations of the CDC and the nation’s leading public health professionals. Trampling on those guidelines endangers the critical work of reporters who have maintained independent press coverage of the presidency throughout the pandemic.”

Unlike the original, freewheeling coronavirus task force briefings — which came to a sudden halt in April when Trump mused that doctors should “check” to see if injecting patients suffering from Covid-19 with bleach or isopropyl alcohol, or exposing them to ultraviolet light, might cure them — the president’s current news conferences are much shorter and seem designed mainly to get his lengthy, written opening statements on the air and get him out of the briefing room after taking just a handful of questions.

Trump’s opening statements at the latest briefings are often nakedly political in nature, featuring crude, jarring attacks on Biden and other Democrats. “Today, we saw Joe Biden continue to politicize a pandemic and to show his appalling lack of respect for the American people. That’s what it is,” Trump said at the start of Thursday’s briefing. “At every turn, Biden has been wrong about the virus, ignoring the scientific evidence and putting left-wing politics before facts and evidence.”

After then blatantly lying about Biden’s suggested response to the pandemic in the most idiotic terms — “Sleepy Joe rejects the scientific approach in favor of locking all Americans in their basements for months on end” — Trump concluded, with a stunning lack of self-awareness: “To Joe, I would say: Stop playing politics with a virus. Too serious. Partisan politics has no place here. It’s a shameful situation for anybody to try and score political points while we’re working to save lives and defeat the pandemic.”

Trump’s prepared remarks at these briefings almost always feature highly misleading health and economic statistics intended to convey the false impression that the federal government’s pandemic response is the envy of the world.

At Tuesday’s briefing, for example, Trump said in his opening statement: “Since the end of July, the seven-day average for cases in the United States has fallen by nearly 20 percent, but the virus continues to increase in nations across the globe. Last week, France and Germany both recorded their highest daily number of new cases in three months — not that I want to bring that up, but might as well explain it to the media.” While those statistical measures of the increase by percentage of new cases in Europe and decrease by percentage in the U.S. were accurate, what they hid was the fact that, in raw numbers, the pandemic is obviously far less under control here than there. The day Trump made those remarks, 53,315 new Covid-19 infections were confirmed by testing in the U.S. Germany’s highest number of daily infections in three months, recorded this week, was 1,445. Cases are down more in the U.S. but from a very high level to a slightly less high level. In much of Europe, cases are rising but from very low baseline. Adjusted for population, the U.S. recorded 154 new cases per million on Friday, while France had 41 and Germany 17.

While the pandemic is resurgent in many parts of the world, Trump has been unable so far to brow-beat the public into accepting his obviously false claims that things are better in the United States than in Europe or Asia. A new poll released by Monmouth University on Thursday showed that 52 percent of Americans “think the United States’ handling of the pandemic is worse than other countries,” while just 15 percent feel the U.S. is doing a better job than others and 29 percent say it is doing about the same.

https://theintercept.com/(...)rters-briefing-room/

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 21:12 schreef Montov het volgende:

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Normaal citeer ik alleen een aantal interessante blokken, maar dit artikel is in zijn geheel het lezen waard.

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 21:57 schreef Sjemmert het volgende:

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Hahabaha

Lachwekkend stuk !

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 22:16 schreef Momo het volgende:
Misschien een domme vraag, maar is het normaal om via post te stemmen voor de verkiezingen of is dit ineens een ding vanwege Corona?

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 22:18 schreef AnneX het volgende:

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Gebeurde altijd al.
De military in het buitenland, Amerikanen in Europa en overal.

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 22:19 schreef Momo het volgende:

[..]

Maar dat is denk ik maar een hele kleine fractie normaal (<1%)?

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 22:19 schreef Momo het volgende:

[..]

Maar dat is denk ik maar een hele kleine fractie normaal (<1%)?

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 23:53 schreef Zwoerd het volgende:
Als je ziet hoe mensen daar uren in de rij moeten staan om een stem uit te brengen, verbaas is me dat er niet meer via de post gestemd wordt.

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Op zaterdag 15 augustus 2020 23:53 schreef Zwoerd het volgende:
Als je ziet hoe mensen daar uren in de rij moeten staan om een stem uit te brengen, verbaas is me dat er niet meer via de post gestemd wordt.

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Op zondag 16 augustus 2020 00:17 schreef DonDruiper het volgende:
Zoals ik het begrijp stoppen Trump & Co de funding voor USPS zodat ze de mail in ballots niet kunnen verwerken?

Dat mag allemaal maar?

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Op zondag 16 augustus 2020 00:19 schreef SnertMetChoco het volgende:

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Hangt er vanaf wat je bedoelt?! De USPS heeft meer geld nodig en daarvan zei Trump dat hij dat om die reden blokkeert. Hij blokkeert niet al toegewezen geld. Het lijkt mij wel dat hij zijn ambtseed overschrijd, maar ja, als de republikeinen het geen reet interesseert sta je met lege handen.

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Op zondag 16 augustus 2020 00:21 schreef DonDruiper het volgende:

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Een dictatuur dus.

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Op zondag 16 augustus 2020 00:45 schreef AnneX het volgende:
Ja zeg...jullie mogen de links en tweets wel lezen hoor, die ik vanmorgen plaatste over het dumpen van usps materieel dat wordt is afgevoerd en vernietigd!

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Op zondag 16 augustus 2020 00:51 schreef SnertMetChoco het volgende:

[..]

Ik had het al gelezen... wat bedoel je?

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Biden Floats Baseless Election Conspiracy

Editor’s note: Joe Biden’s June 23 remarks that President Donald Trump “wants to cut off money for the post office so they cannot deliver mail-in ballots” have been confirmed — by the president himself.

In an Aug. 13 interview, Trump admitted that he opposes a coronavirus pandemic relief bill crafted by the House Democrats because it includes funding for the U.S. Postal Service and state election officials — money that Trump said is needed to allow the Postal Service to handle an expected surge in mail-in voting.

For an update, see our story, “Trump Proves Biden Right on USPS Funding, Mail-In Ballots.”

https://www.factcheck.org(...)election-conspiracy/

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Op zondag 16 augustus 2020 09:24 schreef theunderdog het volgende:
Het blijft toch bijzonder dat mensen op democraten blijven stemmen. Je hoeft alleen maar naar plaatsen als Chicago. Portland. New York te kijken of te realiseren wat voor ramp beleid je krijgt.

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Op zondag 16 augustus 2020 09:24 schreef theunderdog het volgende:
Het blijft toch bijzonder dat mensen op democraten blijven stemmen. Je hoeft alleen maar naar plaatsen als Chicago. Portland. New York te kijken of te realiseren wat voor ramp beleid je krijgt.

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Op zondag 16 augustus 2020 09:32 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Het is veel beter als Amerika volledig republikeins word. Dan is de EU in no time een supermacht naast China.

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Op zondag 16 augustus 2020 09:39 schreef theunderdog het volgende:

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LOL, dat denk ik niet.