TRUMP is seriously dangerous

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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu May 03, 2018 7:49 am

WIRETAPS THAT'S WHY MR. 9/11 HAS GONE OFF THE DEEP END


Looks like Guiliani threw both Cohen and Trump under the bus...did he do it on purpose? trying to save your soul Mr. 9/11?


Rudy made a doodie
Image


4 possible felonies from Rudy Giuliani admission:
1. $130k payment to Stormy was in-kind coordinated contribution above limits
2. Cohen was a straw donor used to cover up true source of contribution
3. False statements on financial disclosures
4. False statements on banking forms



Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti just accused President Trump of the same federal crime that imprisoned former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who was convicted of illegally structuring hush money.


Michael Avenatti just accused Trump of a federal crime after bombshell Giuliani admission

By Grant Stern May 2, 2018

Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti just accused President Trump of the same federal crime that imprisoned former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, who was convicted of illegally structuring hush money to the boys he molested as an Illinois wrestling coach.

President Trump’s new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, just dropped a bombshell admission on live cable news during an interview with Sean Hannity, saying that Donald Trump reimbursed a $130,000 hush money payment from his lawyer Michael Cohen to porn star Stormy Daniels.

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Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti called into MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell and after a “speechless” moment on air, they dissected Rudy Giuliani’s mistaken interpretation of the campaign finance law applicable to the Stormy Daniels case.


Avenatti instantly recognized Giuliani’s statements as a potential violation of the Patriot Act, saying:

“The plot thickens, right?”

“I certainly hope that what Rudy Giuliani is not suggesting is, is that in fact, the reimbursement took place over several months, in an effort to avoid triggering a $10,000 monetary requirement relating to payments; namely if they structured reimbursement payments.”

“Again, I don’t have any basis that they did. But that statement causes me grave concern. If they structured reimbursements in amounts less of than $10,000 in an effort to potentially avoid detection; that’s a serious, serious problem.”

“That’s called structuring. It’s a violation of federal law. It’s a criminal act…”

“It doesn’t make any sense why this reimbursement took place over several months, it doesn’t make any sense unless they were trying to avoid detection.”

Structuring is a serious crime that Congress made illegal after the 9/11 attacks when they strengthened the Banking Secrecy Act to catch the money launderers funding terrorism who used small deposits to evade detection.

The penalty for a violation of greater than $100,000 in illegally structured transactions over a 12-month period is up to 10 years in prison and a $500,000 fine.


Disgraced former Republican Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison for violating the Patriot Act. He was released last year and registered as a sex offender.

Rudy Giuliani told his Fox News interviewer that Trump’s hush money payments were in fact reimbursed by the President “over the period of several months” and “funneled through a law firm.”

Depending on how the factual circumstances of Trump’s payments conform to Rudy Giuliani’s statements on Fox News tonight, the former New York Mayor’s admissions could result in the President facing unprecedented felony criminal charges very soon.


Watch Rudy Giuliani admitting to Sean Hannity that hush money payments were structured, which may violate the Patriot Act:
https://washingtonpress.com/2018/05/02/ ... admission/



GIULIANI: "I said, $130K? You're gonna, you're gonna do a couple checks for $130K."

A "couple" checks? You mean Trump split up the payment into arbitrarily chosen smaller amounts, so as to pay Cohen through a stream of disbursements with less recognizable dollar amounts? Huh.


Trump and Cohen refuse to disclose what they think is in the documents that were seized from Cohen making it hard for Trumps lawyers to prepare.

Guess Trump and Cohen don’t want to disclose their decades of Russian mob dealings

Comic Michelle Wolf Responds To Backlash: 'I'm Glad I Stuck To My Guns'
Image



Trump: Okay okay. I lied about my health. But I didn't fuck that sex worker, I'm rich, and I didn't collude with Vladimir Putin.


McDeere

"I was going to get this over with." Very revealing choice of words from Rudy to @costareports last night. Cuts against Trump's efforts this morning to paint last night's revelation as no big deal.

Connor Lynch


This is what happens when the government is forced to produce seized Cohen documents to the administration. 4 or 5 days ago is about when they began receiving rolling productions.

emptywheel

Replying to @realconnorlynch @McDeereUSA @costareports
Telling, too, that Giuliani invoked the Special Master.
https://twitter.com/realconnorlynch/sta ... 9205102594



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWJo05fDNus

emptywheel

What 2 people with knowledge of the legal proceedings against Cohen have an incentive to burn a wiretap?


Ah well. I just can't think WHO would want to burn this wiretap.

Cue Giuliani outrage tour "in response" to this news in 3 ... 2... 1...


Oh would you look at that?!?!

As if this was all scripted.emptywheel added,


NEW: Giuliani tells me he can't confirm there were wiretaps, hasn't been informed. But when read NBC report, he was furious. "If they picked up the president, they would have had to notify him." Said if true, wld be a "mockery" of attorney-client privilege and "gov't misconduct"

Dear Donald Trump:

You did the "tapp" story line already in season one.

This viewer demands that you not repeat your storylines like this. GIVE US NEW OUTRAGE!!!

Extra points for leaking it to NBC bc MSNBC will create an entire cable show to hype a wiretap against someone the Feds already said had had his content collected.

Well played, "tapp" producers. Well played.

Next up, Giuliani, who has promised his client he can end this investigation right away, will be calling for Rosenstein's head.

Remember: Sessions is not actually recused from the Cohen investigation.

Hey NY FBI office?

How do you like Rudy "Stormtroopers" 911 NOW?
https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/9 ... 9813977088



Laurence Tribe

To get a warrant to wiretap Michael Cohen’s phone conversations, the FBI had to comply with highly stringent rules and standards laid down by SCOTUS in Katz v. US, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), in an opinion I helped Justice Stewart draft for the Court as his law clerk.


At least one phone call between a phone line associated with Cohen and the White House was intercepted, a source said.

Federal investigators have wiretapped the phone lines of Michael Cohen, the longtime personal lawyer for President Donald Trump who is under investigation for a payment he made to an adult film star who alleged she had an affair with Trump, according to two people with knowledge of the legal proceedings involving Cohen.

It is not clear how long the wiretap has been authorized, but NBC News has learned it was in place in the weeks leading up to the raids on Cohen's offices, hotel room, and home in early April, according to one person with direct knowledge.

At least one phone call between a phone line associated with Cohen and the White House was intercepted, the person said.

Previously, federal prosecutors in New York have said in court filings that they have conducted covert searches on multiple e-mail accounts maintained by Cohen.

Spokespeople for the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI in New York declined comment.

Image: Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani visit the Milwaukee County War Memorial Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Aug. 16, 2016.
Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani visit the Milwaukee County War Memorial Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Aug. 16, 2016.Eric Thayer / Reuters
After the raid, members of Trump's legal team advised the president not to speak to Cohen, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

Two sources close to Trump's newest attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, say he learned that days after the raid the president had made a call to Cohen, and told Trump never to call again out of concern the call was being recorded by prosecutors.

Giuliani told Fox News Wednesday night that Trump repaid Cohen the $130,000 he used to keep the adult film star, Stormy Daniels, from going public with allegations about her affair with Trump.

Giuliani is also described as having warned Trump that Cohen is likely to flip on him, something Trump pushed back on, telling Giuliani that he has known Cohen for years and expects him to be loyal, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the conversations.

Giuliani and a lawyer for Cohen, Steve Ryan, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House referred NBC News to outside counsel.

It is unclear what incriminating information Cohen could give prosecutors on Trump, if he chose to cooperate. He represented Trump and the Trump Organization in its business dealings for nearly two decades before Trump became president. Special counsel Robert Mueller is interested in any information that federal investigators in New York may pick up that would be relevant to his investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Cohen has previously said publicly that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights if subpoenaed to avoid incriminating himself before a grand jury and there is no indication from public filings that Cohen is cooperating in the probe.

The Cohen investigation is being led by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan and the FBI. Investigators are looking into the $130,000 transaction between Cohen and adult film star Stormy Daniels, also known as Stephanie Clifford, who allegedly had an affair with Trump more than a decade ago, and a reported payment of S150,000 from American Media Inc., publishers of the National Enquirer, to a second woman who allegedly had an affair with Trump, Playboy model Karen McDougal.

The White House has denied allegations of the affairs.


Investigators are also seeking information about the 2005"Access Hollywood" tape in which Donald Trump was heard making vulgar boasts about women.

The bureau's interest in the "Access Hollywood" tape, on which Trump bragged to host Billy Bush that he would grab women "by the p---y," was first reported by the New York Times. "Access Hollywood" is an NBC Universal television program.

Material seized from Cohen's office, hotel room and home included taped conversations, as well as cellphones and hard drives.

Cohen has asserted in court that much of the material gleaned in the raids should be protected from the eyes of prosecutors under attorney-client privilege.

Former U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg, now an NBC News analyst, says there's a high bar for having a wiretap approved.

"The affidavits are typically highly detailed and carefully vetted by experienced lawyers," he said. "In all cases the wiretap must be approved by a federal judge."

Rosenberg said that wiretaps are usually approved for an investigation into a current crime and not solely for possible crimes that have been committed in the past.

"This is an exacting process where the government must demonstrate to a federal judge that there is an ongoing crime."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald ... es-n871011




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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby Cordelia » Fri May 04, 2018 2:01 pm

T. P.P. What a trio...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPgSDIphrEM
Image

(As usual Trump misread his cue and thought it said sway.)

"...executing American diplomacy with great vigor and energy." Did Pompeo really say that?

Pompeo Vows ‘Tough Diplomacy,’ Return of State’s ‘Swagger’

Flanked by President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promised Tuesday to conduct “tough diplomacy” and told employees at the agency he wants to restore its “swagger.”
https://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/ ... es-swagger


All 70,000 S. D. employees? I'm not getting much of a swagger vibe from Pompeo but who knows, maybe he'll suck up to Caligula, live up to his Roman profile, and become our new emperor.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri May 04, 2018 8:32 pm

Trump tells 57,000 Hondurans who’ve lived in the US for 20 years to get out

It’s yet another move that will turn people who are in the US legally into unauthorized immigrants.

Dara LindMay 4, 2018, 4:25pm EDT

This woman, a TPS (Temporary Protected Status) recipient from Honduras, was crying with joy when this picture was taken in 2014. But the Trump administration just announced she and 57,000 other Hondurans with TPS will lose their legal status after January 5, 2020.
Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty
By January 2020, the Trump administration will have turned 400,000 people who are currently in the US legally into unauthorized immigrants.

The administration announced Friday that it is going to stop granting Temporary Protected Status — a protection given to people in the wake of humanitarian disasters in their home countries — to 57,000 Hondurans who’ve been living in the US for 20 years. They’ll have one last chance to apply for TPS for 18 months and will lose their protections on January 5, 2020 — making them unable to work in the US legally as of that date, and vulnerable to deportation.

Over the next two years, the Trump administration will strip TPS from immigrants from six different countries — all but strangling the program.

It’s doing so because it claims that Honduras has recovered enough from a 1998 hurricane to be safe to return to. The fact that, right now, Honduras is a place people are trying to flee due to systemic gang violence and civil unrest isn’t an argument in TPS holders’ favor, to this administration. If anything, it’s another strike against them.

Donald Trump is tearing out Temporary Protected Status by the roots

Temporary Protected Status serves as a form of humanitarian relief, offered to nationals of countries struggling with the aftermath of war, natural disasters, or other humanitarian crises where conditions on the ground make it difficult for people to return safely. Ten countries — El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen — are currently in the program, which is overseen by the Department of Homeland Security and is granted in six- to 18-month intervals that can be renewed as long as DHS deems a designation necessary. Honduras has been granted TPS since 1999, in the wake of a 1998 hurricane.

Related

Trump’s attacks on humanitarian immigration just became a full-blown war

Fear itself: Donald Trump's real immigration policy

To enter the program, nationals of a designated country must clear a number of conditions: They must maintain a relatively clean criminal record and pass a background check, they must pay a $495 processing fee when they first apply for the program and every time their status is renewed, and they must reside in the United States at the time of their country’s designation. This usually means that TPS beneficiaries are undocumented immigrants who were already in the US, those who overstayed a visa, or those who hold some other form of temporary immigration status.

TPS beneficiaries are granted authorization to work in the US (and in some cases the ability to travel internationally) and a reprieve from deportation. But outside of that, TPS doesn’t grant many other benefits; beneficiaries do not have legal permanent resident status, and while a small number of beneficiaries may be eligible for green cards through the sponsorship of a US citizen family member, the program is not intended to provide a path to citizenship.

In practice, that means that once a country’s TPS is up for review, presidents have two choices: They could renew TPS for that country, kicking the can down the road; or they could terminate it and give thousands of people no way to stay in the US legally.

Unsurprisingly, most presidents have chosen the former. But equally unsurprisingly, the Trump administration is taking the opposite approach.

The administration has announced that it’s winding down TPS, with one final extension, for six of the 10 countries that currently have it: Sudan, Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Nepal, and now Honduras. Three of those — Haiti, El Salvador, and Honduras — make up the vast majority of all TPS recipients.

The Trump administration has extended TPS for two countries, South Sudan and Syria, though it’s prevented any Syrians who’ve fled to the US since August 2016 from signing up. (It hasn’t had the opportunity to review the TPS designations of Somalia or Yemen yet.)

The administration’s actions have extended TPS for about 7,600 people. They’ve marked an end to it for about 390,000.

The Trump administration has stripped TPS from 6 countries — Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan and Nepal — and extended it for only two.
The Trump administration has stripped TPS from six countries — Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, and Nepal — and extended it for only two.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Hondurans with TPS have lived in the US for 20 years. To Trump, that doesn’t matter.

Trump’s break with precedent on TPS reflects a philosophical difference. For past presidents — and many, if not most, Americans — an immigrant who’s lived, worked, and raised a family in the US for several years (especially if they’ve done so legally) is more sympathetic than a similar immigrant who’s never lived here. And to most politicians, it’s important for the US to continue to take in at least some people fleeing humanitarian peril.

This administration strongly rejects any idea that it bears a humanitarian responsibility toward migrants. To the contrary: Immigrants who come from countries the Trump administration looks down on or distrusts are often judged for that reason. The premise of the travel ban is that the US’s assessment of a foreign government should control whether or not it accepts its nationals as visitors or immigrants.

And there are multiple reports suggesting Trump himself thinks people from poor and unstable countries — “shithole countries,” if you will — should be treated with prejudice. When senators presented a proposal to Trump that would have allowed TPS holders living in the US to apply for green cards, Trump reportedly objected with, “Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out” — as if the Haitians living in the US with TPS counted as “more” for the US to take in.

Hondurans with TPS have been in the country for 19 years or longer — they’re only eligible if they were here on December 30, 1998 — and 98 percent of them arrived before 1997, according to the Center for Migration Studies estimates. Nearly a quarter of Hondurans with TPS were younger than 15 when they came to the US, meaning they’ve spent more of their lives here than there. And an estimated 53,000 US-born kids had at least one parent who benefits from Honduras’s TPS designation.

The fact that these people have now largely settled here is one of the chief arguments for keeping TPS protections — indeed, that’s the logic that’s led the government to renew TPS for Hondurans 10 times already. But to the Trump administration, this is evidence that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the TPS program.

Trump is trying to send Hondurans back — over the Honduran government’s objections — to a country their compatriots are fleeing

The administration’s case relies on a straightforward, but narrow, reading of the law that created TPS.

To them, the “conditions” that justified TPS for Honduras were the 1998 hurricane; Honduras has recovered from the 1998 hurricane; therefore TPS needs to end. “The Secretary determined that the disruption of living conditions in Honduras from Hurricane Mitch that served as the basis for its TPS designation has decreased to a degree that it should no longer be regarded as substantial,” the official statement read.

But the statute that created TPS also instructs the executive branch to consider whether there are “extraordinary and temporary conditions in the foreign state that prevent aliens who are nationals of the state from returning to the state in safety.” And human rights groups make the case that it’s hard to argue that Honduras in 2018 is a state that can be returned to in “safety.”

While the country’s homicide rate has dropped substantially in recent years, to 42.8 homicides per 100,000 people, that’s still among the highest homicide rates in the world (by comparison, the US’s rate is about 4 per 100,000). Furthermore, unrest in the country after its contested election in November 2017 — in which the incumbent president claimed victory after several suspicious events and irregularities — has led to the deaths of 40 Honduran protesters at the hands of police. The unrest is one of the main reasons that Hondurans make up a large share of asylum seekers who traveled to the US in the Pueblo sin Fronteras “caravan” that has attracted so much press attention.

Even the Honduran government doesn’t agree with the Trump administration’s assessment of the country. Honduran officials have been pulling every string they can in the US to lobby the Trump administration to extend TPS, according to Alan Gomez of USA Today. The country was one of only a handful of countries to side with the US in a United Nations vote condemning Trump’s decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem.

“We’ve demonstrated that we’re closely aligned with this country,” the head of the Honduran consulate in Miami told USA Today. “We’ve taken all their advice. The U.S. knows the efforts we’ve made. Now we’re asking for a favor, for help, for Honduras.”

Instead, the Trump administration is lashing out at both Honduras and Hondurans.

The Trump administration is creating more unauthorized immigrants than it can deport

On November 2, 2018, approximately 1,000 Sudanese will lose TPS and become vulnerable to deportation.

On January 5, 2019, approximately 5,300 Nicaraguans will lose TPS and become vulnerable.

On June 24, 2019, approximately 9,000 Nepalis will lose TPS and become vulnerable.

On March 23, 2019, up to 3,600 Liberians will lose their protections under Deferred Enforced Departure (a similar program to TPS) and become vulnerable.

On July 22, 2019, approximately 59,000 Haitians will lose TPS and become vulnerable.

On September 9, 2019, approximately 260,000 Salvadorans will lose TPS and become vulnerable.

On January 5, 2020, approximately 57,000 Hondurans will lose TPS and become vulnerable.

That’s nearly 400,000 people who have legal status right now but who, by 2020, will become unauthorized immigrants.

The Trump administration doesn’t have the resources to deport 400,000 people the minute they lose their protections. Threats about an end to TPS are really an attempt to encourage “self-deportation” — to get TPS holders to stop expecting they’ll be allowed to stay in the US forever and start working on a plan to return home.

It’s a strategy that might make sense if TPS holders were determined to stay in the US as long as it was legal for them to do so but to leave the minute they lost legal protections. But neither of those appears to be the case.

When Hondurans first qualified for TPS in 1999, more than 100,000 of them were protected, according to an estimate from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. That means that tens of thousands have left on their own (or adjusted to a more permanent legal status) even while they could have remained in TPS limbo indefinitely. The rest — the 57,000 or so who still have TPS, and who will lose it next year — have roots and decades here, and very little to return to.
https://www.vox.com/2018/5/4/17320352/t ... ted-status
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat May 05, 2018 5:23 pm

Revealed: Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal

Julian Borger
Last modified on Sat 5 May 2018 17.11 EDT

Israeli agency told to find incriminating material on Obama diplomats who negotiated deal with Tehran

Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal.

People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.

The extraordinary revelations come days before Trump’s 12 May deadline to either scrap or continue to abide by the international deal limiting Iran’s nuclear programme.

Jack Straw, who as foreign secretary was involved in earlier efforts to restrict Iranian weapons, said: “These are extraordinary and appalling allegations but which also illustrate a high level of desperation by Trump and [the Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, not so much to discredit the deal but to undermine those around it.”

One former high-ranking British diplomat with wide experience of negotiating international peace agreements, requesting anonymity, said: “It’s bloody outrageous to do this. The whole point of negotiations is to not play dirty tricks like this.”

Sources said that officials linked to Trump’s team contacted investigators days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago, his first foreign tour as US president. Trump promised Netanyahu that Iran would never have nuclear weapons and suggested that the Iranians thought they could “do what they want” since negotiating the nuclear deal in 2015. A source with details of the “dirty tricks campaign” said: “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it.”

Benjamin Netanyahu on Israeli television, describing how Iran has continued with its plans to make nuclear weapons.
Benjamin Netanyahu on Israeli television, describing how Iran has continued with its plans to make nuclear weapons. Photograph: Jim Hollander/EPA
According to incendiary documents seen by the Observer, investigators contracted by the private intelligence agency were told to dig into the personal lives and political careers of Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Kahl, a national security adviser to the former vice-president Joe Biden. Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.

Investigators were also apparently told to contact prominent Iranian Americans as well as pro-deal journalists – from the New York Times, MSNBC television, the Atlantic, Vox website and Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper among others – who had frequent contact with Rhodes and Kahl in an attempt to establish whether they had violated any protocols by sharing sensitive intelligence. They are believed to have looked at comments made by Rhodes in a 2016 New York Times profile in which he admitted relying on inexperienced reporters to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion to secure the deal. It is also understood that the smear campaign wanted to establish if Rhodes was among those who backed a request by Susan Rice, Obama’s final national security adviser, to unmask the identities of Trump transition officials caught up in the surveillance of foreign targets.

Although sources have confirmed that contact and an initial plan of attack was provided to private investigators by representatives of Trump, it is not clear how much work was actually undertaken, for how long or what became of any material unearthed.

Neither is it known if the black ops constituted only a strand of a wider Trump-Netanyahu collaboration to undermine the deal or if investigators targeted other individuals such as John Kerry, the lead American signatory to the deal. Both Rhodes and Kahl said they had no idea of the campaign against them. Rhodes said: “I was not aware, though sadly am not surprised. I would say that digging up dirt on someone for carrying out their professional responsibilities in their positions as White House officials is a chillingly authoritarian thing to do.”

A spokesman for the White House’s national security council offered “no comment” when approached. However, the revelations are not the first time that claims of “dirty tricks” have been aimed at the Trump camp. Special counsel Robert Mueller is leading an investigation into apparent attempts by Trump’s inner-circle to dig up damaging information on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Missiles are paraded through Tehran on Iran’s annual army day on 18 April.
Missiles are paraded through Tehran on Iran’s annual army day on 18 April. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images
Of particular interest is a meeting involving the US president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chair Paul Manafort and a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer who had promised damaging information about Clinton.

Trump has repeatedly signalled his intention to scrap the Iran deal, denouncing it as “the worst deal ever.” In a January speech the US president accused his predecessor of having “curried favour with the Iranian regime in order to push through the disastrously flawed Iran nuclear deal.”

Last Monday, Netanyahu, accused Iran of continuing to hide and expand its nuclear weapons know-how after the 2015 deal, presenting what he claimed was “new and conclusive proof” of violations.

However, European powers including Britain responded by saying the Israeli prime minister’s claims reinforced the need to keep the deal.

On Thursday the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres urged Trump not to walk away from the deal, warning that there was a real risk of war if the 2015 agreement was not preserved. The following day details emerged of some unusual shadow diplomacy by Kerry, meeting a top-ranking Iranian official in New York to discuss how to preserve the deal.

It was the second time in around two months that Kerry had met foreign minister Javad Zarif to apparently strategise over rescuing a pact they spent years negotiating during the Obama administration. Straw, who was foreign secretary between 2001 and 2006, said: “The campaign against the JCPOA has been characterised by abuse and misinformation. It is the best chance of ensuring Iran never develops a nuclear weapons programme, and it is insane to suggest abandoning the deal could do anything but endanger international security.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... CMP=twt_gu
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sat May 05, 2018 7:20 pm

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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun May 06, 2018 8:24 am

If Trump was willing to contract a foreign intelligence service to undermine U.S. policy as president, do you really think he wouldn't be willing to work with a foreign government to undermine his opponent as a presidential candidate?


((MRW))

So, Trump literally tore a page from the Putin Propaganda PlaybSo, Trump literally tore a page from the Putin Propaganda Playbook in a scheme (w. a foreign country) to deliberately lie to the American people and undermine the Iran deal. If that's not violating your oath and blatant corruption, please, tell me what is.


Norm Eisen

There’s a reason this has not happened since Nixon. It exposes the Trump aides to criminal and civil liability, depending on the nature of the “dirty ops,” see eg 18 USC 242, 50 USC 1809, 42 USC 1983. Team Trump is out of control. Expect an investigation.



Colin Kahl


<THREAD> According to this story, in May of last year, Team Trump asked an Israeli intel firm to dig up dirt on me as part of an effort to discredit the Iran deal.

Tonight, as my wife read this story, that date triggered a very creepy memory.


Revealed: Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal

Julian BorgerLast modified on Sat 5 May 2018 20.04 EDT
Israeli agency told to find incriminating material on Obama diplomats who negotiated deal with Tehran

Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal.

People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.

The extraordinary revelations come days before Trump’s 12 May deadline to either scrap or continue to abide by the international deal limiting Iran’s nuclear programme.

Jack Straw, who as foreign secretary was involved in earlier efforts to restrict Iranian weapons, said: “These are extraordinary and appalling allegations but which also illustrate a high level of desperation by Trump and [the Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, not so much to discredit the deal but to undermine those around it.”

One former high-ranking British diplomat with wide experience of negotiating international peace agreements, requesting anonymity, said: “It’s bloody outrageous to do this. The whole point of negotiations is to not play dirty tricks like this.”

Sources said that officials linked to Trump’s team contacted investigators days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago, his first foreign tour as US president. Trump promised Netanyahu that Iran would never have nuclear weapons and suggested that the Iranians thought they could “do what they want” since negotiating the nuclear deal in 2015. A source with details of the “dirty tricks campaign” said: “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it.”


Benjamin Netanyahu on Israeli television, describing how Iran has continued with its plans to make nuclear weapons. Photograph: Jim Hollander/EPA
According to incendiary documents seen by the Observer, investigators contracted by the private intelligence agency were told to dig into the personal lives and political careers of Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Kahl, a national security adviser to the former vice-president Joe Biden. Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.

Investigators were also apparently told to contact prominent Iranian Americans as well as pro-deal journalists – from the New York Times, MSNBC television, the Atlantic, Vox website and Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper among others – who had frequent contact with Rhodes and Kahl in an attempt to establish whether they had violated any protocols by sharing sensitive intelligence. They are believed to have looked at comments made by Rhodes in a 2016 New York Times profile in which he admitted relying on inexperienced reporters to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion to secure the deal. It is also understood that the smear campaign wanted to establish if Rhodes was among those who backed a request by Susan Rice, Obama’s final national security adviser, to unmask the identities of Trump transition officials caught up in the surveillance of foreign targets.

Although sources have confirmed that contact and an initial plan of attack was provided to private investigators by representatives of Trump, it is not clear how much work was actually undertaken, for how long or what became of any material unearthed.

Neither is it known if the black ops constituted only a strand of a wider Trump-Netanyahu collaboration to undermine the deal or if investigators targeted other individuals such as John Kerry, the lead American signatory to the deal. Both Rhodes and Kahl said they had no idea of the campaign against them. Rhodes said: “I was not aware, though sadly am not surprised. I would say that digging up dirt on someone for carrying out their professional responsibilities in their positions as White House officials is a chillingly authoritarian thing to do.”

A spokesman for the White House’s national security council offered “no comment” when approached. However, the revelations are not the first time that claims of “dirty tricks” have been aimed at the Trump camp. Special counsel Robert Mueller is leading an investigation into apparent attempts by Trump’s inner-circle to dig up damaging information on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Missiles are paraded through Tehran on Iran’s annual army day on 18 April. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images
Of particular interest is a meeting involving the US president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chair Paul Manafort and a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer who had promised damaging information about Clinton.

Trump has repeatedly signalled his intention to scrap the Iran deal, denouncing it as “the worst deal ever.” In a January speech the US president accused his predecessor of having “curried favour with the Iranian regime in order to push through the disastrously flawed Iran nuclear deal.”

Last Monday, Netanyahu, accused Iran of continuing to hide and expand its nuclear weapons know-how after the 2015 deal, presenting what he claimed was “new and conclusive proof” of violations.

However, European powers including Britain responded by saying the Israeli prime minister’s claims reinforced the need to keep the deal.

On Thursday the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres urged Trump not to walk away from the deal, warning that there was a real risk of war if the 2015 agreement was not preserved. The following day details emerged of some unusual shadow diplomacy by Kerry, meeting a top-ranking Iranian official in New York to discuss how to preserve the deal.

It was the second time in around two months that Kerry had met foreign minister Javad Zarif to apparently strategise over rescuing a pact they spent years negotiating during the Obama administration. On Sunday Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, will arrive in Washington, hoping to persuade Trump to keep the deal, known as the joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA).

Straw, who was foreign secretary between 2001 and 2006, said: “The campaign against the JCPOA has been characterised by abuse and misinformation. It is the best chance of ensuring Iran never develops a nuclear weapons programme, and it is insane to suggest abandoning the deal could do anything but endanger international security.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... clear-deal



Last year, my wife was serving on the fundraising committee of my daughter's public charter school in DC. One day, out of the blue, she received an email from someone claiming to represent a socially responsible private equity firm in the UK. 2/10



This "UK person" said "she" was flying to DC soon and wanted to have coffee with my wife to discuss the possibility of including my daughter's school in their educational fund network. 3/10


This was not a generic "Nigerian prince" scam. This person had all sorts of specific information on my wife's volunteer duties at an obscure DC elementary school. 4/10


There was a website for the firm (which no longer exists, by the way), but it had no depth to it, and there was no detailed information about the "UK person" who reached out to my wife. 5/10


My wife shared the email with me and a few people we know in both the finance and education fields. All agreed that the entire scenario seemed implausible and seemed like an approach by a foreign intelligence entity. 6/10

To test the implausibility, my wife kept trying to encourage the "UK person" over email to meet with other school fundraising officers & leadership while "she" was in DC, providing relevant contact info. But the "UK person" kept insisting that "she" had to meet with my wife. 7/10


At that point, my wife stopped corresponding.

This all happened in late May and early June of last year. 8/10



Perhaps it was just a coincidence that this obvious scam targeting my family had all the hallmarks of an intel op and coincided with Team Trump's reported efforts to "dig up dirt" on me. 9/10


But the fact that I even have to think about the possibility that my family was targeted by people working for the President is yet another sign of the fundamental degradation of our country that Trump has produced. 10/10
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby elfismiles » Sun May 06, 2018 8:36 am

Wow - I had just moments ago been on fb and larisa ah had posted the link to that Guardian headline, came to RI, selected 'view unread posts' and the first link i clicked on brought me to this same headline here -wasn't even looking for it. :zomg

Then searched google for "Colin Kahl" as I didn't recognize the name and screenshots of his twitter statements about this are top of the search.

https://twitter.com/ColinKahl/status/993000884169666561?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

Hooray internerts.

Now ... "leave the Iran deal ALONE!"

Image

seemslikeadream » 06 May 2018 12:24 wrote:
Norm Eisen

There’s a reason this has not happened since Nixon. It exposes the Trump aides to criminal and civil liability, depending on the nature of the “dirty ops,” see eg 18 USC 242, 50 USC 1809, 42 USC 1983. Team Trump is out of control. Expect an investigation.


Colin Kahl

<THREAD> According to this story, in May of last year, Team Trump asked an Israeli intel firm to dig up dirt on me as part of an effort to discredit the Iran deal.

Tonight, as my wife read this story, that date triggered a very creepy memory.

<snip>
[/b]
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun May 06, 2018 8:39 am

thanks

this is insane!!!!!

Should be the biggest story on the news networks right now.


Revealed: Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun May 06, 2018 1:54 pm

Laura Rozen

Thread. Sounds like MO used by Black Cube as documented in Ronan Farrow Weinstein exposeLaura Rozen added,
Colin Kahl

Last year, my wife was serving on the fundraising committee of my daughter's public charter school in DC. One day, out of the blue, she received an email from someone claiming to represent a socially responsible private equity firm in the UK. 2/10

Confirmed with @ColinKahl same fake firm name used to approach his wife that Black Cube used to try to suppress Harvey Weinstein stories

Fake firm that approached @ColinKahl wife (left). same fake firm per @RonanFarrow that went after weinstein accusers https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-des ... y-of-spies
Image
Image

Odds that Reuben Cap’ls (alias) “Adriana Gavrilo”= (aliases) “Diana Filip”/“Ana” =Stella Penn Pechanac?
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/former- ... -1.5464301 … @ColinKahl
Image
https://twitter.com/True_Benefits/statu ... 0284057602
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon May 07, 2018 11:17 am

Calling a Liar a Liar: It’s Time to Tell the Truth About Trump’s Fact-Phobia


I am the least dishonest person on the planet. Believe me. Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from DonkeyHotey / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from DonkeyHotey / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Here is something that doesn’t get said enough: Donald Trump, the president of the United States of America, seemingly can’t stop lying. It’s not that people don’t know. Everybody knows. Still, the media usually skirts around the subject that Trump is a huge liar.

The Washington Post’s fact-checking team revealed this week that Trump has made “3,001 false or misleading claims” so far in his presidency — an average of six per day.

The paper often awards him between one and four “Pinocchios” to show how far from the truth the president has strayed. Using the well-known children’s character whose nose got longer the more he lied is cute, but not at all helpful.

Because there is nothing cute or funny about the most powerful man in the world being unable to stop lying. Where is the value in sugarcoating it by saying that Trump’s statements are “false or misleading?” Sure, in some cases, he is just ignorant and doesn’t know the facts — which isn’t much better — but any sensible person would then keep their mouth shut to make sure they don’t say something false. Trump lacks that sensibility — or any type of filter that keeps him from lying constantly. He also keeps repeating lies that have already been disproven, which is clear evidence that this isn’t just about him being clueless.

Trump lies so much that he has overwhelmed the system. The media seems to be unable to deal with the tsunami of bullshit coming out of the president’s mouth.

So when Trump tells yet another lie, it barely registers.

Professional journalists are used to giving people the benefit of the doubt. Even if it seems apparent that somebody has committed a crime — for example, because they were caught in the act or there is a mountain of evidence — a credible news outlet will always put the word “alleged” in front of the supposed perpetrator’s name until he or she is convicted.

And in most cases, that is the right thing to do. After all, the word “lying” conveys intent. Can we really say with certainty whether a person meant to lie or simply misstated something, was unaware of the facts, didn’t remember something correctly, etc.? That is why journalists usually contrast a false statement with a fact to show that it is incorrect and allow readers to determine for themselves whether it was deliberate or not.

Trump no longer deserves that benefit of the doubt. In fact, every single statement of his within a news story should come with a disclaimer like, “The president is a known liar. Everything he says should be viewed in that context.”

It’s ironic that the man who was elected, in part, because his supporters like that he “says it like it is” — seems unable to actually do that.

Even his backers know — at least the ones who can tell the difference between the truth and a lie. Still, they can’t get themselves to call Trump a liar.

Earlier this week, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum came close when saying “The president says things that don’t comport with the facts. I don’t like calling people liars, but the reality is this president has a problem.”

But it’s not just Trump’s problem. It’s our problem. The president shouldn’t be a compulsive liar. While that should go without saying, in this case it must be said over and over again.

At this point, how can anybody — allies and adversaries alike — trust anything Trump says? Or take him seriously?

And the president’s supporters should be the first to point this out to him. Because by discrediting himself, he is hurting them. However, since Trump is not just a world-class liar but also vindictive, they are all too afraid to speak truth to power.

On Thursday night, Fox News host Neil Cavuto pointed out a bunch of Trump’s lies and he still couldn’t get himself to call the president a liar.

On the closest thing to state TV the US has ever seen, Cavuto said Trump is giving his opponents way too much ammunition.

“Maybe not intentionally. I’ll even give you the benefit of the doubt, Mr. President, and say, maybe not deliberately,” Cavuto stated in a four-minute monologue. “But consistently. Way too consistently.”

A bit later he was even clearer — and still stopped short of what needs to be said often and loudly.

“I’m not saying you’re a liar, I’m just having a devil of a time figuring out which news is fake,” Cavuto said. “Let’s just say your own words on lots of stuff give me, shall I say, lots of pause.”

This got Cavuto a lot of praise but isn’t this what any journalist should be doing? In fact, they should be much more outspoken about the president’s lies.

Because this stuff really matters. Trump has set the bar so low and shattered so many norms that the US will be paying for it for years. Just this week, we got confirmation of something everybody had already assumed — that the letter from his doctor proclaiming Trump would be the healthiest president ever had been dictated by Trump himself.

So in addition to bucking tradition and not releasing his tax returns, and therefore depriving the public of judging his business acumen — and possible ties to shady foreign moneylenders — voters were also deprived of an objective assessment of Trump’s state of health before he was elected.

Instead, they got more lies.

Understandably, the media is a bit touchy when it comes to Trump. The “fake news” label, which he slaps on any story he doesn’t like, not only gets under the skin of good journalists but it’s also sticking with Trump’s supporters, many of whom see the press as an enemy of the state.

That’s why it’s time to shatter some norms of our own and start treating Trump differently. While coverage of the president needs to remain fair, it also has to be accurate. And that means no longer giving him the benefit of the doubt and calling out Donald Trump for what he is: the worst liar to have ever occupied the office.
https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/05/06/calli ... ct-phobia/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon May 07, 2018 10:06 pm

CEO of Cambridge Analytica parent company compared Trump campaign to Hitler

The CEO of embattled consulting firm Cambridge Analytica's parent company compared the tactics used by President Trump in his 2016 campaign to those of Adolf Hitler.

A transcript of an interview released on Monday by the British Parliament's Digital, Media, Culture and Sport Committee reveals that SCL Group CEO Nigel Oakes said that Trump seized on anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. in the same fashion that Hitler demonized Jews to grow political support.

"Of course, Hitler attacked the Jews. He didn't have a problem with the Jews at all, but the people didn't like the Jews ... so he just leveraged an artificial enemy," Oakes told British academic Emma Briant.
"Well, that's exactly what Trump did. He leveraged a Muslim."

Oakes said that Trump seized on fears in the U.S. of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but questioned how much of a threat the militant group actually posed to Americans.

"ISIS is a real, but how big a threat is ISIS really to America?" Oakes said, according to the transcript.

As a presidential candidate, Trump vowed to crack down on radical Islamic terrorism.

Shortly after taking office, he issued an executive order barring citizens of several Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. — a directive that he said was necessary to safeguard the country against suspected terrorists.

That initial travel ban was blocked in the courts. A subsequent order issued in March also stirred legal opposition but was allowed to partially go into effect by the Supreme Court.

Trump issued a third version of the travel ban in September. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in that case next week, and a decision on its legality is expected in June.

Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm linked to Trump's campaign, has come under fire in recent weeks after it was revealed that it accessed the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users without their consent.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... ampaign-to
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They could still get him out of office.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby 82_28 » Sun Jun 03, 2018 1:51 am

Trump's 'cruel' measures pushing US inequality to dangerous level, UN warns

Donald Trump is deliberately forcing millions of Americans into financial ruin, cruelly depriving them of food and other basic protections while lavishing vast riches on the super-wealthy, the United Nations monitor on poverty has warned.

Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur who acts as a watchdog on extreme poverty around the world, has issued a withering critique of the state of America today. Trump is steering the country towards a “dramatic change of direction” that is rewarding the rich and punishing the poor by blocking access even to the most meager necessities.

“This is a systematic attack on America’s welfare program that is undermining the social safety net for those who can’t cope on their own. Once you start removing any sense of government commitment, you quickly move into cruelty,” Alston told the Guardian.

Millions of Americans already struggling to make ends meet faced “ruination”, he warned. “If food stamps and access to Medicaid are removed, and housing subsidies cut, then the effect on people living on the margins will be drastic.”

Asked to define “ruination”, Alston said: “Severe deprivation of food and almost no access to healthcare.”

Alston sounds the alarm in the final report of his investigation into extreme poverty in the US that is published on Friday and will be presented to the UN human rights council in Geneva at the end of June. His findings are based on a tour he carried out in December through some of America’s most destitute communities, from Skid Row in Los Angeles, through poor African American areas in Alabama, and the stricken coal country of West Virginia, to hurricane-racked Puerto Rico.

The report amounts to one of the most scorching assessments of Trump’s leadership in his 16 months in the White House. It is likely to spark debate across the political aisle as well as globally about the US president’s rapid drive towards heightened inequality.

The Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz told the Guardian it was profoundly important that international observers were speaking out about Trump’s impact. “This administration inherited a bad situation with inequality in the US and is now fanning the flames and worsening the situation. What is so disturbing is that Trump, rather than taking measures to ameliorate the problem, is taking measures to aggravate it.”

Top of the list of those measures was the $1.5tn tax cuts enacted by the Republicans last December that slashed corporate tax rates. “Can you believe a country where the life expectancy is already in decline, particularly among those whose income is limited, giving tax breaks to billionaires and corporations while leaving millions of Americans without health insurance?” Stiglitz said.

The UN monitor similarly excoriates Trump and the Republicans in Congress for passing a tax bill that “overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy and worsened inequality”. Alston added that “the policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege”.

He cautioned middle-class Americans from thinking they were immune from the lash of such policies, as Trump’s assault “bodes ill for society as a whole. The proposed slashing of social protection benefits will affect the middle classes every bit as much as the poor.”

The Federal Reserve annual economic survey released last week underlines the large pool of people who are vulnerable to any further erosion of the safety net. It found that four out of 10 Americans are so hard up they could not cover an emergency expense of $400 without borrowing money or selling possessions.

Cory Booker, the US senator from New Jersey, described the UN report as “disturbing, but unfortunately not surprising. We live in a land where great wealth lives alongside unconscionable poverty, and the Trump tax bill makes this dire situation worse by showering the wealthiest with huge tax breaks while Republican leaders seek to make drastic cuts to the social safety net.”

Booker, who has introduced legislation to combat poverty, said fellow policymakers should see Alston’s investigation as a wake-up call to take bold action, such as a jobs guarantee, healthcare for all and help for former prisoners to reintegrate in society. “People who disagree on politics can agree that no child in America should go to bed hungry, no home should lack access to a working sewer system, no illness should drive a family to bankruptcy.”

As one of the world’s wealthiest societies, the US is what Alston calls a “land of stark contrasts”. It is home to one in four of the world’s 2,208 billionaires.

At the other end of the spectrum, 40 million Americans live in poverty. More than five million eke out an existence amid the kind of absolute deprivation normally associated with the developing world.

The symptoms of such glaring inequality include:

Americans now live shorter and sicker lives than citizens of other rich democracies;
Tropical diseases that flourish in conditions of poverty are on the rise;
The US incarceration rate remains the highest in the world;
Voter registration levels are among the lowest in industrialised nations – 64% of the voting-age population, compared with 91% in Canada and the UK and 99% in Japan.

Against that backdrop, the UN rapporteur identifies a slew of what he calls “aggressively regressive” policies coming out of the Trump administration that are sending the country “full steam ahead” towards greater inequality. In addition to the tax breaks, there are new work requirements for welfare recipients, cuts of up to a third in the food stamp program, a recent proposal from housing secretary Ben Carson to triple the base rent for federally subsidized housing, and a burning of government regulations that offered protections to middle-class and poor families.

“This is an across the board attack on those who are living on the poverty line or below it,” Alston said.

The UN monitor contends that what amounts to Trump’s punishment of low-income Americans is based on an unfounded assumption that such people are lazy, work-shy and dedicated to defrauding the welfare system. Several senior government officials told Alston during his tour that scamming by welfare recipients was rampant, yet little convincing evidence was provided to support that caricature, he notes in his report.

The scrutiny now falling on Trump from the UN is significant in that the US stands increasingly as an outlier in the world community. Alston’s report adds to a mounting body of criticism emanating from global organisations warning the US that unless it pulls back from its current course it will end up isolated from all other developed countries.

The statistics speak for themselves. In 1980, the US and Europe stood side by side in terms of inequality – in both cases, the richest one percent earned about 10% of national income.

Fast forward to 2017, and in Europe the 1% has edged up to 12% of national income. But in America the same elite now gobbles up 20%.

Last year the IMF, a world body not renowned for being hyper-critical of countries that fail the poor, said: “The US economy is delivering better living standards for only the few. Household incomes are stagnating, job opportunities are deteriorating, prospects for upward mobility are waning and economic gains are increasingly accruing to those that are already wealthy.”

Stiglitz said: “It’s clear that this administration is totally out of step with the rest of the advanced world that is looking at the US more askance on so many levels. For Americans who are fighting against the abnormality of the Trump administration it is heartening and reinforcing to know that the rest of the world is becoming more resolved in how it deals with the post-Trump US.”


https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... easures-un
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jun 03, 2018 3:35 pm

Trump’s legal memo to Robert Mueller is a recipe for tyranny

A clear and present danger to the rule of law

Matthew YglesiasJun 3, 2018, 8:30am EDT

Essentially all presidents sooner or later end up commissioning lawyers to put forward an expansive view of presidential power, but those lawyers take pains to argue that they are not making the case for a totally unchecked executive whose existence would pose a fundamental threat to American values.

Donald Trump, however, is a different kind of president.

In a 20-page memo written by Trump’s legal team and delivered to Robert Mueller, as reported by the New York Time’s this weekend, they make an unusually frank case for a tyrannical interpretation of presidential power.

Trump’s lawyers say he has unlimited power over criminal justice

The key passage in the memo is one in which Trump’s lawyers argue that not only was there nothing shady going on when FBI Director James Comey got fired there isn’t even any potential shadiness to investigate because the president is allowed to be as shady as he wants to be when it comes to overseeing federal law enforcement. He can fire whoever he wants. Shut down any investigation or open up a new one.

Indeed, the President not only has unfettered statutory and Constitutional authority to terminate the FBI Director, he also has Constitutional authority to direct the Justice Department to open or close an investigation, and, of course, the power to pardon any person before, during, or after an investigation and/or conviction. Put simply, the Constitution leaves no question that the President has exclusive authority over the ultimate conduct and disposition of all criminal investigations and over those executive branch officials responsible for conducting those investigations.

This is a particularly extreme version of the “unitary executive” doctrine that conservative legal scholars sometimes appeal to (especially when there’s a Republican president), drawing on the notion that the executive branch of government — including the federal police agencies and federal prosecutors — are a single entity personified by the president.

But to push that logic into this terrain would not only give the president carte blanche to persecute his enemies but essentially vitiate the idea that there are any enforceable laws at all.

Donald Trump’s impunity store

Consider that if the memo is correct, there would be nothing wrong with Trump setting up a booth somewhere in Washington, DC where wealthy individuals could hand checks to Trump, and in exchange Trump would make whatever federal legal trouble they are in go it away. You could call it “The Trump Hotel” or maybe bundle a room to stay in along with the legal impunity.

Having cut your check, you’d then have carte blanche to commit bank fraud or dump toxic waste in violation of the Clean Water Act or whatever else you want to do. Tony Soprano could get the feds off his case, and so could the perpetrators of the next Enron fraud or whatever else.

Perhaps most egregiously, since Washington DC isn’t a state all criminal law here is federal criminal law, so the president could have his staff murder opposition party senators or inconvenient judges and then block any investigation into what’s happening.

Of course, as the memo notes, to an extent this kind of power to undermine the rule of law already exists in the form of the essentially unlimited pardon power. This power has never been a good idea and it has been abused in the past by George H.W. Bush to kill the Iran-Contra investigation and by Bill Clinton to win his wife votes in a New York Senate race. Trump has started using the power abusively and capriciously early in his tenure in office in a disturbing way, but has not yet tried to pardon his way out of the Russia investigation in part because there is one important limit on the pardon power — you have to do it in public. The only check on pardons is political, but the political check is quite real (which is why both Bush and Clinton did their mischievous pardons as lame ducks) and the new theory that Trump can simply make whole investigations vanish would eliminate it.

This issue is bigger than Comey or Mueller

Much of the argument about Trump and the rule of law has focused rather narrowly on the particular case of Comey’s firing and the potential future dismissal of Robert Mueller.

These are important questions, in the sense that an FBI Director is an important person and a special counsel investigation is an important matter, but the memo is a reminder that they offer much too narrow a view of what the real extent of the problem is here.

One of the main purposes of the government is to protect the weak from exploitation at the hands of the strong by making certain forms of misconduct illegal. Trump’s assertion that he can simply waive-away investigations into misconduct because he is worried that the investigation might end badly for his friends or family members is toxic to that entire scheme. Trump, like most presidents, has plenty of rich and powerful friends and a much longer list of rich and powerful people who would like to be his friends.

If he really does have the power to just make anyone’s legal trouble go away because he happens to feel like it, then we’re all in a world of trouble.
https://www.vox.com/2018/6/3/17421300/t ... w-subpoena
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Jun 09, 2018 10:03 am

could I despise him more?

Donald Trump Called Asbestos Poisoning A Mob-Led Conspiracy, Now His EPA Won’t Evaluate Asbestos Already In Homes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMp1a-ANZHY



Plane Crashes, WR Grace, Deadly Asbestos, WTC Collapse & Wellstone
https://www.democraticunderground.com/d ... 04x2047897


ASBESTOS: the REAL Reason behind 9/11?
https://www.democraticunderground.com/d ... =125x29373


201,183 pounds of pure asbestos fiber from Grace
https://www.democraticunderground.com/d ... 104x794774


Has she mentioned the source of all that asbestos?
https://www.democraticunderground.com/d ... 104x281118




seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 19, 2015 1:12 pm wrote:Image


Image
WTC responders illness worse than expected

The Paul Wellstone crash was.....
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... _id=561809

Plane Crashes, WR Grace, Deadly Asbestos, WTC Collapse & Wellstone
http://www.democraticunderground.com/du ... 28856.html

Wellstone Was Murdered"American Assassination," two professors explain how
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... id=2332485

Senator Paul Wellstone and Mozambique's President Samora Machel
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... id=2167138

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Donald Trump Called Asbestos Poisoning A Mob-Led Conspiracy, Now His EPA Won’t Evaluate Asbestos Already In Homes
Nicole Goodkind Newsweek

NICHOLAS KAMM VIA GETTY IMAGES
This story was produced and originally published by Newsweek and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Environmental Protection Agency will not consider the health risks and impacts of asbestos already in the environment when evaluating the dangers associated with the chemical compound, Scott Pruitt, the agency’s head, quietly announced last week. That means asbestos used in tiles, piping and adhesives throughout homes and businesses in the United States will remain largely unchecked and unaccounted for. Nearly 15,000 Americans die each year from asbestos-related diseases, but President Donald Trump has called the substance “100 percent safe, once applied.”

In his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback, Trump argued that the association of the chemical with health risks was part of a mob-created conspiracy. “I believe that the movement against asbestos was led by the mob, because it was often mob-related companies that would do the asbestos removal. Great pressure was put on politicians, and as usual, the politicians relented,” he wrote.

The Trump EPA’s decision came in response to new amendments made to the Toxic Substances Control Act in 2016. The additions to the bill mandate that the EPA perform safety reviews of certain chemicals, require testing and public notice of safety info for said chemicals and allow the EPA to ban certain uses of asbestos (previously, the EPA did not have the authority to do so).

The EPA announced last Friday that it would evaluate and require approval for new uses of asbestos but would not evaluate the health risks of asbestos already in the environment. “The end result will be a seriously inadequate risk evaluation that fails to address major contributors to the heavy and growing toll of asbestos mortality and disease in the United States,” said Linda Reinstein, president of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization in a statement.

Reinstein, whose husband developed Mesothelioma and passed away in 2006, told Newsweek that she met with Nancy Beck, deputy assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, on two occasions along with representatives from the AFL-CIO and the International Association of Fire Fighters. The group explained the hazards of legacy asbestos and presented over 100 studies confirming that low-dose asbestos exposure caused disease, but were shut down by Beck, she said. Beck was previously a senior director at the American Chemistry Council, a lobbyist group that represents Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto and ExxonMobil Chemical.

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In August of 2016, the American Chemistry Council sent a letter to the EPA urging the agency to carefully consider its decision regarding asbestos evaluation as the chemical is essential to the chlor-alkali industry, which creates chlorine and sodium hydroxide for industrial use. They asked the EPA to“take this into consideration as it determines whether to select asbestos among the initial 10 chemicals for risk evaluation” under the changes to the Toxic Substances Control Act. Chemical lobbyist agencies including American Chemical Council held at least four meetings with the EPA last year regarding asbestos policy.

“If you don’t evaluate the dangerous legacy of asbestos you don’t know how much contamination still exists in the United States,” Reinstein told Newsweek. “We know it’s in our homes, schools, workplace and environment but the average American can’t identify and evaluate the risk. We have taken risk evaluation off the table.”

The bipartisan updates made to the Toxic Substances Control Act by Congress were intended to give the EPA the ability to ban the use of these substances, some senators say. The environmental agency attempted to ban the use in 1989, but a federal court ruled that it lacked the authority to do so.

“In a bipartisan compromise, Congress moved to patch up the holes in our chemical review system when it updated the Toxic Substances Control Act. But Scott Pruitt and the Trump administration are presiding over an attack on not just the spirit, but also the actual content of the reform law,” said Senator Edward J. Markey, a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, in a statement. “Thousands of people die from asbestos-related cancers every year. Asbestos and other toxic substances will continue to contaminate our environment because Trump administration policies are contaminating the EPA.”

There’s a lack of basic information in the United States about the extent to which public and private structures are contaminated by the chemical. A recent report found that the government has no record of how many schools contain asbestos materials.

“EPA’s refusal to address longstanding concerns around the use and disposal of asbestos is further proof that Administrator Pruitt will bend over backwards to help industry, but won’t lift a finger to protect public health,” said Congressman Frank Pallone, Jr., ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

The EPA did say that it would take unprecedented action on asbestos by requiring new manufacturers and importers of asbestos to receive EPA approval before importing or processing the chemical. Reinstein, however, said that this is not a ban and that the largest users of asbestos will continue to use it.

Fifty-five countries including Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Israel and Japan have completely banned asbestos use. The White House referred Newsweek to the EPA and the EPA did not respond to a request for comment.
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Pulitzer-winning reporter @DavidCayJ: “The evidence suggests Trump is a traitor...He comes from a family of criminals. His grandfather made his fortune running whorehouses in Seattle. His father's business partner was a Gambino crime family assoc."
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Pulitzer-winning reporter David Cay Johnston: “The evidence suggests Trump is a traitor”

Investigative reporter who has covered Trump for 30 years dares to imagine impeachment — and President Nancy Pelosi

Chauncey DeVega

David Cay Johnston; Donald Trump (Simon & Schuster/Bonk Johnston/AP)
April 23, 2018 9:00am (UTC)

The saga of President Donald Trump consists of several parallel and intersecting stories.

There is the structural dimension. Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton was not entirely unpredictable or shocking. America's crisis in civic literacy, political polarization, rampant anti-intellectualism, deeply embedded sexism and racism, greed, broken schools and weakened democratic institutions, as well as a hollowed-out public sphere where people confuse celebrity with human worth, made the election of someone like Trump nearly inevitable.

There is Donald Trump the man, who seems to revel in the very worst human values. His closest family members -- including his father and grandfather -- taught him the "value" of unrepentant greed and ambition. He also displays the symptoms of malignant narcissism, as well as sociopathy. In all, Trump is a master of manipulation who leads a political cult.

How do these factors combine to form Donald Trump's presidency and the type of society that he and the Republican Party want to create? Are matters actually worse than they appear, in terms of how we assess the political and social crisis of Trump's presidency? What strategy should Democrats use to stop Trump and the Republican Party? If Trump is removed from office because of his increasingly obvious efforts to obstruct justice, how will his public respond? Will there be violence?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston. For 30 years, Johnston has covered Trump's life and career, as detailed in the bestselling book "The Making of Donald Trump." His new book is "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration is Doing to America."

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. A longer version of this conversation can also be heard on my podcast.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. A longer version of this conversation can also be heard on my podcast.

How was Donald Trump able to defeat Hillary Clinton and win the White House?

Well, a series of events came together. First of all, Hillary Clinton had a lot of baggage, and as Donna Brazile's book “Hacks” shows, she ran a poor campaign and did not listen to the advice of people who told her she needed to pay attention to what Trump was doing.

Secondly, the Republican challengers were a clown car of utterly unqualified people, which meant his lack of qualifications was not so noticeable. The one qualified candidate in that field was John Kasich.

Next, Donald ran on an economic platform that, on the surface, spoke to inequality and frustration. For example, in 2012, the bottom 90 percent of Americans reported a smaller income than in 1967. Donald tapped into that problem, but he’s a con artist who promised to drain the swamp and then stocked it with swamp monsters.

Another factor was the utter failure of journalists to vet Donald Trump. You can read about Barack Obama's kindergarten playmates in Indonesia by name, the boys he smoked dope with in high school by name and some of the women he dated in college by name. But The New York Times, in the 16 months from Trump's [campaign] announcement to Election Day, had exactly four references that had "Trump" and "Mafia" in the same story, and they were all in passing and inconsequential.

They also didn't report on the two income tax fraud trials that Trump lost. There was just a lot of stuff about Trump that was never reported because his campaign was like looking at a car crash on the other side of the highway, but it had dancing girls and a marching band and so you couldn't turn away from it.

For 40 years, the Republicans have done serious work preparing for the day when, as a minority party, they wanted to still be in control. So they have reduced the franchise. They've passed laws like this horrible law in Michigan that lets you throw out ballots on the most bogus grounds, entire precincts. All that combined to help Trump win the Electoral College.

Why were so many journalists and pundits unable to understand the true power of Trump's campaign? So much of what he did and continues to do is political performance art drawn from professional wrestling and reality TV. It isn't complicated.

Remember that campaign reporters cover the horse race. They focus on the sizzle and not the steak. Everybody was so taken by his unusual campaign that they just forgot about the basics.

You have studied and written about Donald Trump for three decades. What does the public need to know about his background, to understand his behavior as president?

Here are the key things people should know about Donald Trump. He comes from a family of criminals: His grandfather made his fortune running whorehouses in Seattle and in the Yukon Territory. His father, Fred, had a business partner named Willie Tomasello, who was an associate of the Gambino crime family. Trump's father was also investigated by the U.S. Senate for ripping off the government for what would be the equivalent of $36 million in today's money. Donald got his showmanship from his dad, as well as his comfort with organized criminals.

I think it is very important for religious Americans to know that Donald Trump says that his personal philosophy of life is revenge. He has called anyone who turns the other cheek -- which is a fundamental teaching of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount -- a fool, an idiot or a schmuck. Trump is a man who says things that are absolutely contrary to the teachings of the New Testament. He also denigrates Christians. Yet you see all of these ministers endorsing him.

I've followed Donald for 30 years. I don't see any evidence that he has changed, and he certainly hasn't repented, which is a fundamental Christian obligation.

He is a racist through and through. He has been found in formal judicial proceedings to discriminate against nonwhites in rentals and employment.

It's important to understand that Trump is aggressively anti-Christian, despite claiming to be one. He is bluntly a racist. Most importantly, he is literally ignorant about almost everything.

Trump's voters will not abandon him under any circumstances. He leads the Republican Party and thus has its news media and other resources at his disposal. Some folks believe that there will be a "blue wave" of Democratic votes that will wash him and the Republican Party out to sea in 2018 and 2020. I don't see that happening. I think Trump wins in 2020. Am I being too cynical?

Well, he may win again in 2020. The November elections are the most important American elections since the Civil War, and I'm including 1932.

Based just on normal historic averages, the Republicans should lose control of the House by about four seats. They should lose control of the Senate as well, although the map is pretty awful for the Democrats. If Republicans retain control, then I believe what will happen over time is that someone who shares Trump's dictatorial and authoritarian tendencies but doesn't have his baggage -- someone who is a competent manager and just as charismatic -- will eventually arise and you can kiss your individual liberties goodbye. That will take time, but it's the trend we are heading towards.

On the other hand, if enough people go to the polls -- remember, roughly 100 million people did not vote in 2016 -- if the Democrats get organized, if they can persuade the public they have an agenda that goes beyond just getting rid of Trump and they get control of Congress, they will move to impeach him. They need a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict him, but they will certainly move to have public hearings.

Is Trump an ideologue?

No. That's the whole point of the first chapter of my book, “President Like No Other.” The 44 previous presidents were all over the map. There were smart people and dumb people, there were people of impeccable integrity such as Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, there were absolute scoundrels like Warren G. Harding. We had a murderous racist in the White House whose painting hangs in the Oval Office, now looking down on Trump. What distinguishes all those presidents, particularly Chester Arthur, the one closest to Trump, is that they tried in the context of their times to make America better.

Donald Trump is a man with this desperate need for adoration. He is an empty vessel, the exact opposite of Henry David Thoreau -- a "life unexamined." His only philosophy is the glorification of Donald.

If you were going to consult with the Democratic Party about how to defeat Trump and the Republican Party, what would you suggest?

I think most of what Hillary said came across as "blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." What I would say to the Democrats is, "Your first and fundamental mission is to tell people what you are for." Not that you're against Trump. Being against Trump doesn't get you very far. It will get you some people who hate Trump. But what are you for? What you want to say is: We will get the incredible burden of health care off the back of small businesses. We will make it so you don't have to stick with an employer because you have health care and you don't want to run the risk of switching or losing it. We want to relieve business of the burden of health care like every other modern country, and it will save everyone money.

We want to invest in the future of America. So we will put more money into education and basic science. Did you know that half the economic growth in this country since the end of World War II can be traced to taxpayer investments in science?

We want investments at home that will create jobs. Our country is falling apart in front of our eyes. That will create an enormous number of jobs, but it will also make the economy more efficient. We want to invest in that future, which will make us all much better off. We're about building a prosperous future. We're not about looking back, as Donald Trump is, to the past.

This is a crucial point. People who've been had by con artists are ashamed, and the world is full of cases, I've written about some of them, you see see it in movies and TV shows. They just can't face the fact that they were tricked. It makes them feel stupid and foolish.

Well, people who got conned by Trump -- it's painful for many of them and they will do anything to avoid it. You don’t want to confront them, you don't want to make them feel stupid.

What do you think will happen with the Mueller investigation? Trump is not acting like an innocent person.

Well, Mueller has assembled an extraordinarily talented team. Here is what Mueller is going to find. Mueller has the Trump tax returns. A competent prosecutor would have them by now. The Trump tax returns are the beginning point. You have to get the books and records -- Donald has a long history of hiding books and records when they're sought by auditors. As for the Russians, it is beyond dispute at this point that the Trump campaign was actively involved in a conspiracy.

He's not exactly what Putin wanted, but most importantly, Trump's not Hillary Clinton, who would have gone up to the edge of war to make Putin give up Crimea. She made that very clear in a campaign. He would be in severe pain if he didn't give up the Crimean peninsula in eastern Ukraine. So he didn't want her, under any circumstances. Mueller is going to report on tax fraud, he's going to report on the Russians and he is going to show that the Trump campaign was knowingly being helped by the Russians. Remember that the Australian, Dutch and British intelligence agencies, and maybe others, went to the FBI, State Department and other contacts and said, "You folks have a problem. "

Where exactly Mueller will go beyond that, I don't know. His mission is the Russians, and the Russians are tied in with the tax returns. But remember this: The job of a prosecutor is not to bring the perfect case, it's not to bring the case that should be brought for political reasons. It's to bring the easiest, most solid case that wins. Mueller will do that. There is nothing that prevents indicting a sitting president, but it is an untested issue. Mueller is going to have to decide whether to indict him or to go to Congress.

If the overwhelming conclusion of the Mueller report is that the Russians put Trump in the White House, then you face a second terrible problem: What do you do about Mike Pence, who is also the beneficiary of Russian interference?

If the Congress impeaches and removes Trump and Pence, it will only be because the Democrats control Congress. So unless something else changes, we get President Nancy Pelosi. You can just imagine the people who will be in the streets screaming coup d’état if she's president. I think the only way to address that is for her, or whoever is speaker, to announce they will be a caretaker president who is not going to do anything extreme.

There is no good ending to the story. America will survive this, we'll get past it, but whenever Trump leaves, there's no good ending. If Trump is removed by impeachment or by the voters, whether in a Republican primary or a general election, I know what he will do. He's already told us what he will do by his actions. Trump will spend the rest of his days fomenting violence and revolution in this country.

He's careful not to directly say "revolution," but he will call the government illegitimate. He might even call it criminal, since he called Democrats who didn't stand up during his State of the Union speech treasonous. If they're going to impeach Trump, I believe they have to have a plan to indict, try, convict and imprison him. But Trump will be a role model for some people, and there may well be violence over it.

As Malcolm Nance and others have warned, Russia's interference in the 2016 election and likely infiltration of Trump's inner circle could be one of the worst intelligence disasters in American history, a failure of Benedict Arnold or Rosenberg proportions.

Let me be very clear and quotable about this. At an absolute minimum, Donald Trump has divided loyalties, and the evidence we already have suggests that Donald Trump is a traitor. In fact, I would say that the evidence we already have, the public materials such as emails for example, strongly indicate that Donald Trump is a traitor. However, I don't even think he understands what he's done.


https://www.salon.com/2018/04/23/pulitz ... QE.twitter
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jun 21, 2018 9:16 am

Melania and Donald Trump: The King and Queen of cruelty

Opinion 08:00 AM by Charles M. Blow New York Times
THE TRUMPS
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump during an event celebrating military mothers and spouses in the East Room of the White House in Washington, May 9, 2018. - DOUG MILLS , NYT

You just can't construct prisons for babies. You can't rip children from mothers and fathers. You can't use the power of the U.S. government to institute and oversee a program of state-sponsored child abuse. You can't have a system where the process and possibility of reunification is murky and maybe futile.

You can't do any of that and assume that decent people won't rise up in revolt.

Donald Trump learned that this week as an avalanche of indignation came down on him and his administration for his brutal, inhumane "zero tolerance" policy at the border, which was resulting in the terrible suffering of children and their parents.

Citizens were outraged. Politicians were outraged. Corporate leaders were outraged. Foreign leaders were outraged. The pope was outraged.

This is an immoral act of an immoral man, one who saw absolutely no flaw in using the anguish of children and families — people he viewed as deficient and less-than, "not their best" — as pawns in a political fight to force Congress to fund his ridiculous hate symbol: a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

He clearly didn't even think that this was a losing battle for him. He thought using border agents to abduct these children was a winning idea.

On Wednesday, The Associated Press reported: "President Donald Trump sees his hard-line immigration stance as a winning issue heading into a midterm election he views as a referendum on his protectionist policies."

A Republican member of Congress told CNN that Trump said on Tuesday during a closed-door meeting that "the crying babies doesn't look good politically."

Indeed, a CNN poll conducted by SSRS and released Monday found although two-thirds of Americans overall opposed the policy, a majority of Republicans supported it.

Think about that for a second. That to me goes beyond standard political tribalism. That ventures into the territory that Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., described last week: This is cultlike.

Trump's grip on the throat of the Republican Party is so strong that it no longer has breath or voice for objection.

As goes Trump, so goes it.

Not even the sight of devastated families could move the party that once called itself the party of family values. Not even the idea of "tender age" internment camps for babies could move the party built on the protection of "unborn babies."

The contradiction is abominable.

It's not that Trump and his family don't understand the downside of imposing even the smallest amount of stress on children. It's just that they value different children in differing degrees.

Melania Trump clearly thought that it was too traumatic to move the couple's young son to Washington during the school year, so she stayed with him in New York, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars for security.

As she told Us Weekly in January 2016 about talking to the couple's son about potentially moving to Washington:

"At that age, it's hard to explain to them. ... I tell him: Take it day by day, enjoy your life, live your meaningful life as I like to do. ... Of course, at that age, every child would worry, especially if they love school, if they love friends; they don't want to lose that. Everything is a new opportunity and it brings new friends and a new school. You never know, you never know what happens. Enjoy it day by day, live your life and don't stress yourself."

No, please don't stress yourself. Stress is for poor people, like immigrants.

Even though, as The New York Times reported, sparing their son from the stress of changing schools and moving from a luxury Manhattan apartment to one of the most famous and important residences in the world cost the New York Police Department an estimated $127,000 to $146,000 a day "to protect the first lady and her son while they reside in Trump Tower."

Melania Trump didn't move to the White House until last June.

In May 2017 Reuters reported:

"A federal spending agreement reached late on Sunday will reimburse New York City for money spent securing U.S. President Donald Trump and his family at Trump Tower in Manhattan."

Yes, she made an unusual step in publicly condemning the family separation policy, but she did so using her husband's false "both sides of the aisle" talking point. That was a lie. The president alone started this and had the power to end it.

Then she tweeted this tone-deaf, Marie Antoinette-ish statement, as her husband was still separating children from their parents and sending them to internment camps:

"A great visit with the King & Queen of Spain at the @WhiteHouse today. Queen Letizia & I enjoyed tea & time together focusing on the ways we can positively impact children."

Enjoyed tea? Positively impact children?

I just can't.

Now some people are reporting that she quietly pressured her husband behind the scenes to reverse the policy.

Is she or her husband going to visit the child internment camps he created, to see what they wrought and console the crying children there? Is either going to work tirelessly for the swift reunification of every single family that has been torn apart? Will either publicly apologize to the families who were damaged?

Until then, I give her no laurels. Donald and Melania are a team in this terror. They have worked together to make the abhorrent normal. They deserve each other; we deserve better.
https://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/8 ... f-cruelty/


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Trump aide Stephen Miller, meet your great-grandfather, who flunked his naturalization test

Stephen Miller with the document denying citizenship to his great-grandfather, Nison Miller. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: AP, background Getty Images)
A photo of Nison (aka Max) Miller stares out from the screen, sullen and stern, in faded black and white. “Order of Court Denying Petition” is the title of the government form dated “14th November 1932,” to which it is attached, the one in which Miller is applying for naturalization as an American citizen.

And beneath the photo, the reason given for his denial: Ignorance.

Nison Miller is the great-grandfather of White House adviser Stephen Miller, who has taken credit for being one of the chief architects of the administration’s family separation policy. And this 85-year-old document is just one bit of ammunition in a campaign being waged by the unofficial band that goes by the hashtag #Resistance Genealogy.

Believing that the past is prologue, they search online archives for nuggets about the ancestors of public figures and politicians who disparage today’s immigrants. They use tools they developed as a personal hobby to make the point that people like Miller are holding newcomers to a standard that their own forebears could not meet.

“Unless your ancestors came on a slave ship or you’re Native American,” you came here as an immigrant, says Jennifer Mendelsohn, who created the #resistancegenealogy hashtag last summer after Republican congressman Steve King or Iowa was quoted as saying “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” So she went on a genealogy website and quickly documented that King’s own grandmother was one such baby, arriving in 1894 from Germany as a 4-year-old, along with her infant siblings.


(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; background photo: Getty Images)
“The point isn’t to play ‘gotcha,’” says Renee Stern Steinig, a former president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Long Island, who first found the Miller naturalization application last summer. “It’s to show that we are a nation of immigrants, and you are here because someone else picked up and came here for a better life.” In fact, she is careful to point out that Miller’s great-grandfather being labeled “Ignorant” on that application was probably because he slipped up on a few questions on his citizenship test, not because he was in fact stupid or unworthy of being a citizen — an example of the same harsh, presumptive judgment that she believes is being used against today’s immigrants. Eventually he retook the test and became a citizen.

Another part of Stephen Miller’s family tree seems to have been the first skirmish on this genealogical battlefield. During the summer of 2016, before Steinig found great-granddad Nison, Rob Eshman of the Jewish Journal became intrigued by the apparent hypocrisy of Miller’s description of himself as a grandchild of Jewish refugees while portraying today’s immigrants as dangerous. He reached out to attorney E. Randol Schoenberg, who had famously won the case forcing the Austrian government to return a valuable painting by Gustav Klimt to the Jewish family from whom it had been stolen by the Nazis — the story that was the basis of the 2015 film “Woman in Gold.” Schoenberg has developed an expertise in tracing family histories.

Together he and Eshman followed Miller’s mother’s side (great-grandpa Max was on his father’s side) back to Wolf Lieb Glotzer and his wife, Bessie. That couple arrived from Belarus in 1903 with $8 to their name, escaping anti-Semitic pogroms. In an instance of what today would be called chain migration, they were joined by their son Natan and Wolf’s brother Moses, and eventually by another brother, Sam, who changed his name to Glosser. Sam Glosser was the maternal great-grandfather of Stephen Miller.

Eshman’s article laid out the story, concluding that “Miller demonstrates that in America, truly anything is possible: The great-grandson of a desperate refugee can grow up to shill for the demagogue bent on keeping desperate refugees like his great-grandfather out.”

Eshman went on to pose, and then refute, what has become the most familiar objection to these stories, writing: “But it’s different now, you say. Miller’s forebears came here legally…” It is an argument that Megan Smolenyak, a former chief family historian and spokesperson for Ancestry.com and a regular contributor to the TV series “Who Do You Think You Are?” hears regularly. “It’s a glib, easy response,” she says, “but it ignores history.”

Essentially all immigration was legal in America for its first 300 years, so yes, everyone who came during those centuries came here legally. Until the early 1920s, all people needed to do to move here was walk off a ship and prove they were basically sane and free of obvious communicable diseases. Had today’s existing and proposed rules been in effect back then, she says, a high percentage of the ancestors of current citizens would never have been admitted.

In addition, she says, many who think their ancestors entered completely legally are wrong. Fox contributor Tomi Lahren — who tweeted last year, “We are indeed a nation of immigrants. We are also a nation of laws. Respect our laws and we welcome you. If not, bye” — didn’t know that her great-great-great grandfather had been indicted for forging his naturalization papers until Mendelsohn tweeted that information back to her.


(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; background photo: Getty Images)
And Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, whose website states “I do not support a special pathway to citizenship that rewards those who have broken our immigration laws,” seems not to have known that his grandfather had lied during his naturalization process, but was permitted citizenship nonetheless, until Smolenyak found his naturalization papers.

Most interesting to Smolenyak is that this research “is so easy. You don’t have to go very far back.” It’s startling, she says, “how many of the people who are virulently anti-immigration are children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants. We should have to work a lot harder for these stories, but there they are, on the lowest, easiest branches.”

She originally expected that such views would be held by people whose stories go further back on the American timeline, but former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and his daughter, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, whose roots begin in the 1600s, are the exception. “Most of the rest of the time you think you’re going to have to really dig in and go very far back, you don’t,” she says. “Why are the children and grandchildren of immigrants so eager to keep immigrants out?”

It’s the desire to make that point — “to point out to people who are being needlessly mean and spreading misinformation that they are conveniently forgetting their own family, which in turn means forgetting our national commonality” — that keeps Smolenyak and others in this fight.

It’s why, when Miller said earlier this year that “we favor immigrants who speak English,” Mendelsohn responded with evidence that four years after Miller’s great-grandmother arrived in the U.S. in 1894 she was still speaking Yiddish.


(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; background photo: Getty Images)
And when Fox host Tucker Carlson asked, “Why does America benefit from having tons of people from failing countries come here?”, Mendelsohn found a memoir from Carlson’s great-grandfather talking about how he left the poverty of Italy for the promise of America.


(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; background photo: Getty Images)
Or when White House aide Dan Scavino vowed to end “chain migration,” Mendelsohn tweeted: “So Dan. Let’s say Victor Scavino arrives from Canelli, Italy in 1904, then brother Hector in 1905, brother Gildo in 1912, sister Esther in 1913, & sister Clotilde and their father Giuseppe in 1916, and they live together in NY. Do you think that would count as chain migration?”


(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; background photo: Getty Images)
Or when Lahren recently said, “You don’t just come into this country with low skills, low education, not understanding the language and come into our country because someone says it makes them feel nice. That’s not what this country is based on,” Mendelsohn parried on Twitter with: “Except the 1930 census says Tomi’s 3x great-grandmother had been here for 41 years and still spoke German. Her 2nd great-grandmother had been here for 10 yrs. Spoke no English.”


(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; background photo: Getty Images)
Ditto for when White House chief of staff John Kelly said on NPR that today’s immigrants are “not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society,” because they are uneducated, come from rural areas, and “don’t speak English.” Mendelsohn posted screenshots of documents showing all those things were also true of Kelly’s maternal ancestors.


(Photo illustration: Yahoo News; background photo: Getty Images)
With every flurry of immigration policy uproar comes a spike in interest in the #resistancegenealogy hashtag. So much research has been done at this point, that often the most active participants merely resurface earlier findings.

When Stephen Miller told the New York Times that the decision to begin separating children from their parents at the border was “simple” (in an interview he gave during what happens to be Immigrant Heritage Month in the U.S.), Steinig’s post about his great-grandfather’s naturalization problems found new life on Twitter.

Or when Goodlatte proposed legislation that would stop the separation of families but still detain children, telling NPR “It’s very important that people coming to this country not try to enter the country illegally,” Smolenyak reposted her story about his grandfather’s naturalization untruths.

This might look like “weaponizing genealogy” Smolenyak says, but in fact she believes it is just the opposite.

“The point is our commonality,” she says, “a reminder that this is everyone’s family.” Donald Trump’s grandfather, she noted, came here in part to avoid the draft in his native Bavaria while “his mother came here as a servant. Imagine if they tried to come today.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-aide-s ... 24658.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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