Trump 38: Donald Trump and the Wall of Lies

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, WiseGirl said:

Side note just what do the Russians have on all you GOP? 

They all received (big) donations or got other aid from Russian sources. They are all complicit in the blatant treason happening right now. They all need to be outed and ousted. 

[fraurosena]

Great Rufus Reindeer!

The implications of McConnell and Nunes knowing are humungous. At the bare minimum their actions to protect the presidunce are obstruction of justice. At the worst, their actions are treasonous. 

I'm inclined to think it's the latter.

 

[fraurosena]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Trump has tweeted seven times recently about being in the WH. I am beginning to think that he's not there

[Destiny]

Trump has tweeted seven times recently about being in the WH. I am beginning to think that he's not there

You are not saying the Orange Menace could *gasp* lie, are you?

[Gobsmacked]

He has put weight on, aged a lot and looks 'blurred' around the edges over the past two years. 

[Destiny]

He has put weight on, aged a lot and looks 'blurred' around the edges over the past two years. 

Just imagine if he actually worked instead of laying around having executive time.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset"

Spoiler

On Friday, the New York Times reported that “in the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.” That investigation may well be continuing under the auspices of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. We don’t know what Mueller has learned. But we can look at the key, publicly available evidence that both supports and undercuts this explosive allegation.

Here is some of the evidence suggesting “Individual 1” could be a Russian “asset”:

— Trump has a long financial history with Russia. As summarized by Jonathan Chait in an invaluable New York magazine article: “From 2003 to 2017, people from the former USSR made 86 all-cash purchases — a red flag of potential money laundering — of Trump properties, totaling $109 million. In 2010, the private-wealth division of Deutsche Bank also loaned him hundreds of millions of dollars during the same period it was laundering billions in Russian money. ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,’ said Donald Jr. in 2008. ‘We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia,’ boasted Eric Trump in 2014.” According to Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s guilty plea of lying to Congress, Trump was even pursuing his dream of building a Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign with the help of a Vladimir Putin aide. These are the kind of financial entanglements that intelligence services such as the FSB typically use to ensnare foreigners, and they could leave Trump vulnerable to blackmail.

— The Russians interfered in the 2016 U.S. election to help elect Trump president.

— Trump encouraged the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails on July 27, 2016 (“Russia, if you’re listening”), on the very day that Russian intelligence hackers tried to attack Clinton’s personal and campaign servers.

— There were, according to the Moscow Project, “101 contacts between Trump’s team and Russia linked operatives,” and “the Trump team tried to cover up every single one of them.” The most infamous of these contacts was the June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower between the Trump campaign high command and a Kremlin emissary promising dirt on Clinton. Donald Trump Jr.’s reaction to the offer of Russian assistance? “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

— The Trump campaign was full of individuals, such as Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Michael Flynn, with suspiciously close links to Moscow.

— Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for free and was heavily in debt to a Russian oligarch, now admits to offering his Russian business partner, who is suspected of links to Russian intelligence, polling data that could have been used to target the Russian social media campaign on behalf of Trump.

— Trump associate Roger Stone, who was in contact with Russian conduit WikiLeaks, reportedly knew in advance that the Russians had hacked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails. (Stone has denied it .)

— Once in office, Trump fired Comey to stop the investigation of the “Russia thing” — and then bragged about having done so to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister while also sharing with them top-secret information. Later, Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions because he would not end the special counsel investigation that resulted after the firing of Comey. As Lawfare editor Benjamin Wittes argues, “the obstruction was the collusion” — Trump has been effectively protecting the Russians by trying to impede the investigation of their attack on the United States.

— Trump has refused to consistently acknowledge that Russia interfered in the U.S. election or mobilize a government-wide effort to stop future interference. He has accepted Putin’s protestations that the Russians did not meddle in the election over the “high confidence” assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that they did.

— Like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the Justice Department and the FBI (“a cancer in our country”) — two institutions that stand on the front lines of combatting Russian espionage and influence operations in the United States.

— Again, like no previous president, Trump attacks and undermines the European Union and NATO — he has suggested that France should leave the E.U. and that the United States should leave NATO, reportedly saying, “NATO is as bad as NAFTA.” The E.U. and NATO are the two major obstacles to Russian designs in Europe.

— Trump supports populist, pro-Russian leaders in Europe, such as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France, just as the Russians do.

— Trump has praised Putin (“a strong leader”) while trashing just about everyone else from grade-B Hollywood celebrities to leaders of allied nations. Trump even praised Putin for expelling U.S. diplomats and, notwithstanding instruction from his aides (“DO NOT CONGRATULATE”), congratulated Putin on winning a rigged reelection.

— Trump was utterly supine in his meetings with Putin, principally in Hamburg and Helsinki. Even more suspicious, according to a Post article on Saturday, Trump “has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with . . . Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials . . . Several officials said they were never able to get a reliable readout of the president’s two-hour meeting in Helsinki.”

— Trump defends the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and repeats other pro-Russian talking points.

— Trump is pulling U.S. troops out of Syria, handing that country to Russia and its ally Iran.

— Trump has effectively done nothing in response to the Russian attack on Ukrainian ships in international waters, thereby encouraging greater Russian aggression.

— Trump is sowing chaos in the government, most recently with a record-breaking partial government shutdown and “acting” appointees in key posts such as the Defense Department and Justice Department, thus furthering a Russian objective of undermining its chief adversary.

Now that we’ve listed 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset, let’s look at the exculpatory evidence. . .

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I can’t think of anything that would exonerate Trump aside from the difficulty of grasping what once would have seemed unimaginable: that a president of the United States could actually have been compromised by a hostile foreign power.

In his own defense, Trump claims he has been tougher on Russia “than any other President,” but literally in the next sentence he says, “getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.” When the United States actually has taken steps to get tough with Russia in the past two years, it has usually been the work of Congress (the 2017 Russia sanctions bill) or Trump aides (expelling 60 Russian diplomats). The Post reports that Trump was “furious” when his administration was portrayed as being tough on Russia, and NBC News reports that he instructed subordinates never to publicly discuss plans to sell weapons to Ukraine.

This is hardly a “beyond a reasonable doubt” case that Trump is a Russian agent — certainly not in the way that Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames were. But it is a strong, circumstantial case that Trump is, as former acting CIA director Michael Morell and former CIA director Michael V. Hayden warned during the 2016 campaign, “an unwitting agent of the Russian federation” (Morell) or a “useful fool” who is “manipulated by Moscow” (Hayden). If Trump isn’t actually a Russian agent, he is doing a pretty good imitation of one.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

Be Best

[Audrey2]

13 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 That's a lot of words for "yes"

And do you get to use the firings of investigators as proof they're crooked if you're the one who had them fired?

In the words of the great W.C. Fields, "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit." (at least I found it attributed to him.)

[AmazonGrace]

Be Bestest

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Look Mr President, when you get asked if you're a spy you're supposed to say no. Do you think you can manage to remember it next time? 

 

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Party on, chill out, dudes 

 

[AmazonGrace]

This is a thing that the president of the United States said.

[Gobsmacked]

 

1 hour ago, AmazonGrace said:

Party on, chill out, dudes 

 

Take a holiday, let me arrange a play date with Vlady. We (oops) I mean I, need time to get my story straight. Nothing to see here folks of the free press. Nope. Nothing at all. 

Ps send me a post card!

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Trump-Putin revelations tell us what we knew all along"

Spoiler

The brain of Homo sapiens has a fatal attraction to secrets. What we see before our eyes is never sufficient; we want to know what lies behind it, what explains it, what’s the deeper meaning. The compulsion to get beneath the surface of things lies at the heart of what makes some people scholars or scientists. It’s also at the heart of what makes some people conspiracy theorists. More to the point, it explains why so many are excited by recent “revelations” about President Trump and his relationship with Vladimir Putin, even though they are telling us nothing new.

The reporters’ diligence is to be commended, and every detail adds nuance. But the truth is that Trump’s connection to Putin has been out in the open for years, long before he decided to run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. He has lavished praise on the Russian leader, in many forms of media, since at least 2013, when he speculated on Twitter that Putin might become his “new best friend.” His business relationships with Russia and Russians go back even further, to a 1987 trip to Moscow, which Trump said he made at the invitation of the then-Soviet ambassador. Kremlin state media has been openly promoting him and his political views since at least 2014, when Trump gave an interview to Fox News extravagantly praising the Sochi Winter Olympics.

During the election campaign, Trump openly hired, as his campaign manager, a man who had spent most of the previous decade promoting Russian interests in Ukraine. He openly called for Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s email. He openly echoed the Russian state media’s slogans and conspiratorial language all the way through the latter part of his campaign, claiming, for instance, that President Barack Obama created the Islamic State terrorists and that Hillary Clinton would start World War III.

Throughout this period, Russia backed him with a sophisticated online campaign designed to inspire his voters and put others off from voting at all. Some of that campaign has been revealed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, but some of it was visible to anyone who read English-language Russian state media such as Sputnik or RT. Since his inauguration, Trump has shared U.S. secrets with the Russian foreign minister in the Oval Office, appeared cowed by the Russian president at a Helsinki news conference, if not frightened of him, and repeatedly sought to meet Putin without officials present or even, at one point, his own translator.

The question, then, is not why the FBI launched a counterintelligence investigation into Trump in the days after he fired James B. Comey as FBI director, as the New York Times revealed Friday, but why are we surprised? And why did it take so long? Why didn’t it begin in 2013 or 2014? Why didn’t it begin, for that matter, in 1987? Nor should anyone be surprised to learn, as The Washington Post reported over the weekend, that Trump has failed to give a proper accounting of his meetings with Putin to any of his State Department officials, any of his intelligence officers, anyone at all. Of course he hasn’t: His relationship with Russia is perverse and peculiar — we can all see that — so he doesn’t want anyone to learn anything more about it.

Still, the vigil awaiting Mueller’s final report continues, as if it were going to tell us something revolutionary and new. The human brain loves secrets, and we trust “confidential” information from hidden sources more than information that appears before our own eyes. So, yes, bring on more evidence, which will reveal more of what we already know.

 

[Palimpsest]

@GreyhoundFan, thanks.  That article pretty much sums up my feelings.  What took them so long!

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an interesting comparison between Dumpy and Pelosi: "Nancy Pelosi Spanks the First Brat"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — Two men, sons of immigrants, rising to be the head of their own empires, powerful forces in their ethnic communities. Both dapper and mustachioed with commanding personalities. And both wielding a potent influence on the children who learned at their knees and followed them into the family businesses.

But here’s the difference: Big Tommy D’Alesandro Jr. taught little Nancy how to count. Fred Trump taught Donald, from the time he was a baby, that he didn’t have to count — or be accountable; Daddy’s money made him and buoyed him.

Fred, a dictatorial builder in Brooklyn and Queens from German stock, and Big Tommy, a charming Maryland congressman and mayor of Baltimore from Italian stock, are long gone. But their roles in shaping Donald and Nancy remain vivid, bleeding into our punishing, pressing national debate over immigration, a government shutdown and that inescapable and vexing Wall.

At this fraught moment when the pain of the shutdown is kicking in, President Trump and Speaker Pelosi offer very different visions — shaped by their parents — of what it means to be an American.

When Trump gave his Oval Office address, the framed photo of his dad was peering over his shoulder. In her House speaker’s office in the Capitol, Pelosi prominently displays a photo of herself at 7, holding the Bible as her father is sworn in as Baltimore mayor in 1947.

D’Alesandro was a loyal New Deal Democrat, just as Pelosi — the first daughter to follow her father into Congress — is a resolute liberal. She grew up in a house with portraits of F.D.R. and Truman.

Donald Trump spent most of his life as a political opportunist, learning from his dad that real estate developers must lubricate both sides of the aisle. Trump was once friendly with Pelosi, sending her a note in 2007 when she won the speaker job the first time — with a boost from his $20,000 donation to the party — calling her “the best.” (Unlike with “Cryin’ Chuck,” Trump has not gone for the jugular with a nasty nickname for Pelosi.)

In her memoir, Pelosi recalled that her Catholic parents “raised me to be holy.” She told me, “My mother and my father instilled in us, public service is a noble calling” and to “never measure a person by how much money they had.”

A constant stream of strangers lined up at their house in Baltimore’s Little Italy, seeking food and help. One of Pelosi’s most arresting memories, she told CNN’s Dana Bash, was giving immigrants who came to the door advice on how to get into the projects or to the hospital.

Alexandra, Pelosi’s documentarian daughter, recounts this anecdote: Her son, Thomas — who was named after Big Tommy and who stood at the speaker’s side as she reclaimed her gavel — wanted an Xbox in 2017, so he set up a lemonade stand in Manhattan and raked in $1,000.

His grandmother sat him down and asked, “That’s going to the victims of Hurricane Harvey, right?”

He set up the stand again the next year and was once more schooled by his grandmother asking, “That’s going to the victims of the California wildfires, right?”

Contrast that with Don Jr.’s uncharitable message on Instagram on Tuesday: “You know why you can enjoy a day at the zoo? Because walls work.”

Where the D’Alesandros saw the downtrodden and immigrants as people to weave into the American dream, the Trumps saw suckers to squeeze.

According to The Times’s blockbuster tax investigation, Fred lavished Donald with three trust funds and $10,000 Christmas checks. When Donald was 8, he was already a millionaire, thanks to his tax-scamming father. Fred Trump was hauled before a congressional panel investigating whether he had looted government money through fraud. (One congressman said the patriarch’s chicanery made him “nauseous.”)

By the time Donald was 27, he had fully absorbed Trump family values, a callous inversion of noblesse oblige: He and his father were getting sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent to blacks. As Woody Guthrie, who lived in a Fred Trump complex near Coney Island, wrote in a song, “I suppose/Old Man Trump knows/just how much/racial hate/he stirred up/in the bloodpot of human hearts.” Not quite the same as “This Land Is Your Land.”

Fred’s favorite parlor trick was calculating big numbers in his head. But when Howard Stern had Donald, Ivanka and Don Jr. on his show in 2006 and asked them a multiplication question, they were all stumped.

Over the years, Fred funneled tens of millions of dollars to clean up Donald’s messes. The father even gave the son $3.5 million in chips to save an Atlantic City casino. By the time he was in his 40s, Donnie’s allowance was more than $5 million annually. No wonder he’s still an infant.

When Trump said he could “relate” to federal workers who are now going without pay, it may have been the most audacious lie he told all week. He may know what it’s like to go from bankruptcy to bankruptcy — though always with a paternal safety net — but he has no idea of what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck, much less none at all.

As Pelosi told reporters: “He thinks maybe they could just ask their father for more money. But they can’t.” She also leveled the barb on Trump in person.

Pelosi deploys what she calls her “mother of five” voice on our tantrum-prone president, perhaps in an effort to reparent him. But how do you discipline the world’s brattiest 72-year-old?

 

[fraurosena]

Of course we believe such an honest person, don't we?

 

[AmazonGrace]

Well I believe he does not work. That I can tell you. But is he doing the bidding of oligarchs who work with Vlad?

Speaking to farmers 

 

Daniel Dale factchecking thread 

He is obsessed with women with tapes over their mouths

 

 

[Cartmann99]

 

We're in the midst of the longest government shutdown on record, and this idiot is concerned about making sure the media reports on his standing ovations 

Pathetic.

[AmazonGrace]

He still can't read