Trump 35: Still an Asshole to Everyone but Ivanka

[GreyhoundFan]

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[GreyhoundFan]

[JMarie]

14 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I smell a lawsuit....

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[GreyhoundFan]

[47of74]

Spanky McFuckface just had his heck of a job brownie moment

Quote

President Donald Trump, facing a drastically revised death toll in Puerto Rico a year after dual hurricanes devastated the island, offered a still-rosy outlook of his administration's handling of the disaster on Wednesday.

"I think we did a fantastic job in Puerto Rico," Trump told CNN's Jim Acosta during an exchange with reporters at the White House. "We're still helping Puerto Rico."

It was an optimistic accounting of his administration's handling of the natural disaster, which left much of the US territory without power for weeks and resulted in thousands of deaths.

The island's governor formally raised the death toll from 64 to 2,975 on Tuesday following a study conducted by researchers at George Washington University.

Fuck you, Donnie.  Seriously.  You fucked the people of Puerto Rico over with that shit job after Maria.  So don't fucking tell me that you did a fantastic job.

[Gobsmacked]

On 29 August 2018 at 2:40 AM, Howl said:

I find the identical expression on each man's face fascinating.  It perfectly epitomizes Evangelical facial rictus resulting from selling your soul to the Devil: 

Ok, switch the music back on. Remember boys, don't move until the song starts if you want to win a goodie bag........

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

No reason you can't do war with your best friends 

 

[Ozlsn]

16 hours ago, SilverBeach said:

He has no business being POTUS, a cat or dog could do a better job

I vote for an octopus. Many arms, possibly psychic, concerned about the oceans. 

[fraurosena]

From which we can infer that the MSM got it right again, and somebody's book's got him riled.

I do like his sign off though. He really is the Enemy of the People.

[Cartmann99]

I see his Sugar Frosted Bullshit Flakes have kicked in, so now he's accusing NBC of altering the tape where he admitted he fired Coney because of Russia:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘Winter is coming’: Allies fear Trump isn’t prepared for gathering legal storm"

Spoiler

President Trump’s advisers and allies are increasingly worried that he has neither the staff nor the strategy to protect himself from a possible Democratic takeover of the House, which would empower the opposition party to shower the administration with subpoenas or even pursue impeachment charges.

Within Trump’s orbit, there is consensus that his current legal team is not equipped to effectively navigate an onslaught of congressional demands, and there has been broad discussion about bringing on new lawyers experienced in white-collar defense and political scandals.

The president and some of his advisers have discussed possibly adding veteran defense attorney Abbe Lowell, who currently represents Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, to Trump’s personal legal team if an impeachment battle or other fights with Congress emerge after the midterm elections, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Trump advisers also are discussing recruiting experienced legal firepower to the Office of White House Counsel, which is facing departures and has dwindled in size at a critical juncture. The office has about 25 lawyers now, down from roughly 35 earlier in the presidency, according to a White House official with direct knowledge.

Trump announced Wednesday that Donald McGahn will depart as White House counsel this fall, once the Senate confirms Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. Three of McGahn’s deputies — Greg Katsas, Uttam Dhillon and Makan Delrahim — have departed, and a fourth, Stefan Passantino, will have his last day Friday. That leaves John Eisenberg, who handles national security, as the lone deputy counsel.

Trump recently has consulted his personal attorneys about the likelihood of impeachment proceedings. And McGahn and other aides have invoked the prospect of impeachment to persuade the president not to take actions or behave in ways that they believe would hurt him, officials said.

Still, Trump has not directed his lawyers or his political aides to prepare an action plan, leaving allies to fret that the president does not appreciate the magnitude of what could be in store next year.

This account of the president and his team grappling with a potential crisis is based on interviews this week with 26 White House officials, presidential advisers, and lawyers and strategists close to the administration, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid.

Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani said he and the president have discussed the possibility that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III will issue a damning report to Congress.

“We’ve talked a lot about impeachment at different times,” Giuliani said. “It’s the only thing that hangs out there. They can’t [criminally] charge him.”

If Democrats control the House, the oversight committees likely would use their subpoena power as a weapon to assail the administration, investigating with a vengeance. The committees could hold hearings about policies
such as the travel ban affecting majority-Muslim countries and “zero tolerance” family separation, as well as on possible ethical misconduct throughout the administration or the Trump family’s private businesses.

White House officials defended Trump’s lack of preparation by saying he is focused squarely on helping Republicans preserve their majorities in the Nov. 6 midterm elections rather than, in the words of one senior official, “panicking about something that could happen.”

Any Democratic salvos would not happen until new members take office in January, which Trump advisers said seems like eons away in an administration juggling so many immediate problems. As a result, preparing for possible impeachment proceedings is not at the top of Trump’s to-do list.

“I don’t know if he’s really thought about it in depth yet,” Giuliani said.

One source of growing anxiety among Trump allies is the worry that the president and some senior White House officials are not anxious enough. Although Trump sometimes talks about impeachment with his advisers, in other moments, he gets mad that “the i-word,” as he calls it, is raised, according to his associates.

“Winter is coming,” said one Trump ally in close communication with the White House. “Assuming Democrats win the House, which we all believe is a very strong likelihood, the White House will be under siege. But it’s like tumbleweeds rolling down the halls over there. Nobody’s prepared for war.”

Trump has told confidants that some of his aides have highly competent lawyers such as Lowell, who represents Kushner, and William A. Burck, who represents McGahn as well as former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.

“He wonders why he doesn’t have lawyers like that,” said one person who has discussed the matter with Trump.

Another adviser said Trump remarked this year, “I need a lawyer like Abbe.”

Giuliani said that he has not heard of Trump considering adding Lowell to the team but that he would be a great choice because of his thorough and aggressive style.

“This president might like that better,” Giuliani said. “If he thinks someone isn’t being tough enough, he has a tendency to go out to defend himself. And that’s not good.”

Lowell declined to comment, and people familiar with the talks said it was unclear whether he would have the time for or interest in working for Trump, considering that he already represents Kushner.

Mark Corallo, a former spokesman for Trump’s legal team, recommended that the president hire lawyers who are “real scholars of the Constitution” and who are well versed in history’s impeachment proceedings for Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson.

“I would think that the type of lawyer most able to handle the impeachment scenario would be someone from the appellate and Supreme Court bar — someone of the Ted Olson or Paul Clement or Andy Pincus level, someone who knows how to make the kind of arguments should it come to a vote in the Senate,” Corallo said.

Emmet Flood, a White House lawyer and McGahn ally who handles the special counsel’s Russia investigation, has long been considered a top prospect to replace McGahn. People close to Flood said that if Trump offers him the counsel’s job, he would have to evaluate how best he could continue his priority of serving as the White House’s chief strategist with the Mueller probe.

Flood, often described as a lawyer’s lawyer, is in many ways the opposite of Trump and Giuliani, yet the president has told advisers he is impressed by Flood’s legal chops and hard-line positions defending the prerogatives of the White House.

“The next White House counsel needs to be prepared for a lot of interactions on the Hill,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.). “If the Democrats do take back the House, you can expect the White House counsel to be center stage in answering subpoenas and really in the middle of it all.”

White House officials said Trump is working hard on the campaign trail to prevent Democrats from winning a majority in either the House or the Senate.

“We don’t expect Democrats to take over,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “Democrats have no message other than to attack the president. . . . If they want to go backwards, they can vote for Democrats. If they want to continue moving forward under President Trump, they should vote for people that support his policies.”

White House aides, including deputy chief of staff Johnny ­DeStefano and political director Bill Stepien, have tried to ratchet down Trump’s expectations for the elections, saying that projections look grim in the House.

Some of Trump’s advisers, including recently departed White House legislative affairs director Marc Short, have said that Democrats winning the House could help the president’s reelection chances in 2020 if they overplay their hand going after Trump, as Republicans did in Clinton’s second term.

Trump has so far not accepted that argument, often saying that Republicans are going to keep the House, according to people familiar with the talks.

Many Trump associates inside and outside the government say the opposite. They warn that a Democratic House majority could all but paralyze the White House with investigations, requests for documents and calls to testify on any number of issues, including Trump’s businesses.

One adviser recalled recently telling Trump, “They will crush you if they win. You don’t want them investigating every single thing you’ve done.”

Another concern is that the White House, which already has struggled in attracting top-caliber talent to staff positions, could face an exodus if Democrats take over the House, because aides fear their mere proximity to the president could place them in legal limbo and possibly result in hefty lawyers’ fees.

“It stops good people from potentially serving because nobody wants to inherit a $400,000 legal bill,” said another Trump adviser.

Trump allies privately worry that the West Wing staff is barely equipped to handle basic crisis communications functions, such as distributing robust talking points to key surrogates, and question how the operation could handle an impeachment trial or other potential battles.

Trump sees the administration as having a singular focus — him — and therefore is less concerned with the institution of the presidency and not aware of the vast infrastructure often required to protect it, according to some of his allies.

During the impeachment proceedings against Clinton, the White House staffed a robust war room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building that included scores of lawyers, as well as communications staffers and other strategists.

Jack Quinn, who served as White House counsel under Clinton, said his office had at least 40 lawyers and as many as 60 during key times. He estimated that he spent between half and three-quarters of his time dealing with investigations.

“I appreciate that Rudy Giuliani is doing a lot of the public speaking and perhaps some other things,” Quinn said. But, he added, “it’s a little bit of a mystery to me who is doing the outside legal work.”

“The president needs to have the very best lawyers he can get both in the White House and outside representing him personally,” Quinn said.

Trump allies lament that the current administration has no such infrastructure and fret that there are no indications it is building one.

“What he really has to get ready for is an onslaught from all of these committees,” Giuliani said of congressional inquiries. “Because what the Democrats want is death by a thousand cuts.”

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

Today the presidunce is even more unhinged than usual. Is the abject fear of the inevitable bringing him close to a total breakdown?

 

[Cartmann99]

 

Hell, I hope he doesn't try to burn Camp David down in a fit of rage.

[fraurosena]

So that was what they were talking about on that tape!

National Enquirer Had Decades of Trump Dirt. He Wanted to Buy It All.

Quote

Federal investigators have provided ample evidence that President Trump was involved in deals to pay two women to keep them from speaking publicly before the 2016 election about affairs that they said they had with him.

But it turns out that Mr. Trump wanted to go even further.

He and his lawyer at the time, Michael D. Cohen, devised a plan to buy up all the dirt on Mr. Trump that the National Enquirer and its parent company had collected on him, dating back to the 1980s, according to several of Mr. Trump’s associates.

The existence of the plan, which was never finalized, has not been reported before. But it was strongly hinted at in a recording that Mr. Cohen’s lawyer released last month of a conversation about payoffs that Mr. Cohen had with Mr. Trump.

A tape of a 2016 conversation between Donald J. Trump and his former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, sheds new light on hush money payments to a former Playboy model — but questions remain.

“It’s all the stuff — all the stuff, because you never know,” Mr. Cohen said on the recording.

The move by Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen indicated just how concerned they were about all the information amassed by the company, American Media, and its chairman, David Pecker, a loyal Trump ally of two decades who has cooperated with investigators.

It is not clear yet whether the proposed plan to purchase all the information from American Media has attracted the interest of federal prosecutors in New York, who last week obtained a guilty plea from Mr. Cohen over a $130,000 payment to the adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, and a $150,000 payment to a Playboy model, Karen McDougal.

But the prosecutors have provided at least partial immunity to Mr. Pecker, who is a key witness in their inquiry into payments made on behalf of Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign.

The people who knew about the discussions would speak about them only on condition of anonymity, given that they are now the potential subject of a federal investigation that did not end with Mr. Cohen’s plea.

Lawyers for Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen declined to comment for this article as did American Media.

It is not known how much of the material on Mr. Trump is still in American Media’s possession or whether American Media destroyed any of it after the campaign. Prosecutors have not said whether they have obtained any of the material beyond that which pertains to Ms. McDougal and Ms. Clifford and the discussions about their arrangements.

For the better part of two decades, Mr. Pecker had ordered his staff at American Media to protect Mr. Trump from troublesome stories, in some cases by buying up stories about him and filing it away.

In 2016, he kept his staff from going back through the old Trump tip and story files that dated to before Mr. Pecker became company chairman in 1999, several former staff members said in interviews with The New York Times.

That meant that American Media, the nation’s largest gossip publisher, did not play a role during the election year in vetting a presidential candidacy — Mr. Trump’s — made for the tabloids.

Mr. Pecker also worked with Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen to buy and bury Ms. McDougal’s story of an affair with Mr. Trump, a practice known as “catch and kill.” Mr. Cohen admitted as much in making his guilty plea last week.

In August 2016, American Media acquired the rights to Ms. McDougal’s story in return for $150,000 and commitments to use its magazines to promote her career as a fitness specialist. But American Media never published her allegations about a relationship with Mr. Trump.

Shortly after American Media completed the arrangement with Ms. McDougal at Mr. Trump’s behest, a troubling question began to nag at Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen, according to several people who knew about the discussions at the time: What would happen to America Media’s sensitive Trump files if Mr. Pecker were to leave the company?

Mr. Cohen, those people said, was hearing rumors that Mr. Pecker might leave American Media for Time magazine — a title Mr. Pecker is known to have dreams of running.

There was perennial talk about American Media’s business troubles. And Mr. Trump appeared to take a world-wearier view of the wisdom of leaving his sensitive personal secrets in someone else’s hands:

“Maybe he gets hit by a truck,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Pecker in a conversation with Mr. Cohen, musing about an unfortunate mishap befalling his good friend.Image

Mr. Cohen, the former longtime lawyer for Mr. Trump, can be heard on the recording saying: “I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info, regarding our friend David.” David Pecker is the chairman of American Media, the parent company of the National Enquirer.

Mr. Cohen captured that conversation on a recording that his adviser released roughly a month before his guilty plea, which included two counts of campaign finance violations relating to the payments to Ms. Clifford and Ms. McDougal. The recording was given to CNN after Mr. Trump’s main lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, acknowledged its existence to The New York Times.

When The Times first reported that the recording had been discovered by the F.B.I., people close to Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump initially described it in the narrow context of Ms. McDougal’s deal.

But Mr. Cohen, in fact, indicates in the audio that he and Mr. Trump are speaking about an arrangement involving far more.

“I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info, regarding our friend David,” Mr. Cohen says in reference to Mr. Pecker.

The plan got far enough along that Mr. Cohen relays in the recorded conversation that he had discussed paying for all the information from American Media with the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg.

“I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up,” he says, adding about Mr. Pecker, “We’ll have to pay him something.”

In the end, the deal never came together.

When Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty, prosecutors said in court documents that Mr. Cohen and American Media did enter into a deal in which Mr. Cohen agreed to pay the company $125,000 for the rights to Ms. McDougal’s story.

After the deal was signed but before Mr. Cohen paid, prosecutors said, American Media backed out of the arrangement and warned Mr. Cohen to shred the paperwork (he did not).

Prosecutors said there had been discussions between Mr. Pecker and Mr. Cohen in which Mr. Cohen said American Media would be reimbursed for the payment to Ms. McDougal.

The notoriously frugal Mr. Trump balked at doing so, causing Mr. Pecker anxiety about explaining the payout to his board, according to a person briefed on the discussions. It was unclear whether Mr. Trump ever provided a reimbursement.

Mr. Weisselberg ultimately provided information about Mr. Cohen under a deal that protected him from self-incrimination. As prosecutors continue in their investigation, Mr. Weisselberg could serve them as a particularly helpful guide through the Trump Organization’s operations.

Mr. Pecker, whose company is expected to be of continued interest in the investigation, has a similar arrangement with prosecutors. Potentially as worrisome for Mr. Trump and his advisers, Mr. Pecker could be a particularly knowing guide through any other potentially illegal efforts made to protect Mr. Trump’s candidacy from his own less savory exploits.

“The only thing better than a single piece of evidence is multiple pieces of evidence,” said Jeff Tsai, a lawyer now in private practice who, as a Justice Department public integrity section lawyer, had served on the team that prosecuted Senator John Edwards on campaign finance charges in 2012.

He added, “Look to whom the government is reportedly giving immunity to. Those individuals are the ones who would have knowledge about what, if anything, the campaign at the highest, or lowest, or any level in between had on this issue.”

People with knowledge of American Media’s operations, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, described the files on Mr. Trump as mostly older National Enquirer stories about Mr. Trump’s marital woes and lawsuits; related story notes and lists of sensitive sources; some tips about alleged affairs; and minutia, like allegations of unscrupulous golfing.

As the Associated Press reported last week, some of the information was kept in a safe devoted to particularly sensitive material.

Many of the older National Enquirer stories are often not accessible through Google or databases like Nexis.

Several former American Media staff members said that at the very least, the material the company had on Mr. Trump would have put its flagship, The Enquirer, in a prime position to dominate on coverage of Mr. Trump’s scandalous past.

 

[Alisamer]

4 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

 

Hell, I hope he doesn't try to burn Camp David down in a fit of rage.

This is probably evil of me, but my first reaction to reading that was "Well, he can die too, if he wants that sort of attention!" 

I mean really. I don't really wish death on him (I'd rather see him in prison), but what sort of spoiled child is jealous that someone died and is getting honored?