Trump 40: Donald Trump and the Chamber of Incompetence

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump again jokes about staying on as president for more than two terms"

Quote

President Trump on Thursday joked about serving more than two terms as president, telling a crowd that he might remain in the Oval Office “at least for 10 or 14 years.”

Trump made the comments on the same day that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report was released to the public.

At an event for the Wounded Warrior Project, Lt. Gen. Michael S. Linnington, chief executive of the veterans charity, gave Trump a trophy to thank him for his support.

“Well, this is really beautiful,” Trump told the crowd in the East Room of the White House. “This will find a permanent place, at least for six years, in the Oval Office. Is that okay?”

After some laughter from the crowd, Trump continued: “I was going to joke, General, and say at least for 10 or 14 years, but we would cause bedlam if I said that, so we’ll say six.”

Trump also made a joke on the same topic last year. In a speech to Republican donors at his Mar-a-Lago estate, he praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for doing away with term limits.

“He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great,” Trump said, according to CNN. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.”

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

2 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump again jokes about staying on as president for more than two terms"

 

I need a shudder emoji.

[Audrey2]

Yikes! Trump already is a doddering old fool. Queen Elizabeth, who has around 20 years on him,  can think and govern circles around him.

He still strikes me as the young elementary school kid who announces, "Yeah? When I'm President I can do whatever I want and you can't stop me. Everyone will have to listen to me.)

[GreyhoundFan]

I love Jack Ohman:

 

 

[CTRLZero]

I watched All the President's Men last night.   The parallels were just stunning.  The movie ended too abruptly for my liking.  I really wanted to see the whole thing painfully unravel instead of the brief synopsis, but that's just me being evil.   ? 

[Cartmann99]

3 hours ago, CTRLZero said:

I watched All the President's Men last night.   The parallels were just stunning.  The movie ended too abruptly for my liking.  I really wanted to see the whole thing painfully unravel instead of the brief synopsis, but that's just me being evil.   ? 

If that's evil, then I need to get myself a Team Evil t-shirt. 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Cartmann99]

55 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

I keep expecting a group of pre-k children to appear and tell Trump that he needs to grow up and stop whining so much.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The art of loyalty, the pain of betrayal: Mueller shows how Trump has always operated"

Spoiler

The cavalcade of evidence in the Mueller report showing that President Trump repeatedly sought to limit, discourage and end the investigation into his campaign’s connections to Russia’s interference with U.S. elections may or may not fit the legal definition of obstruction, but it definitively demonstrates how Trump has always done business.

The president’s unique, norm-smashing way of doing his job is a reflection of his campaign promise to be the ultimate disrupter, the outsider who would “drain the swamp” and bust up Washington’s chummy power channels.

It is also an entirely predictable, steady continuation of a lifelong pattern. Trump has always operated as the boss of a tight, small circle of executives and enforcers. He has always demanded loyalty, searched for ways around established customs and defied the rules — painting himself as a pragmatic, practical, plainspeaking truthteller, and dismissing those who play by the rules as small-minded or petty.

When he asked then-FBI Director James B. Comey for loyalty; when he asked then-deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland to write a letter saying, falsely, that Trump didn’t direct national security chief Michael Flynn to talk to the Russian ambassador about U.S. sanctions against his country; when the president called his White House counsel, Donald McGahn, at home and directed him to have special counsel Robert S. Mueller III removed — in all these cases and in many more detailed in the report, Trump was acting in the way that got him where he is today.

The president portrayed in Mueller’s report is strikingly similar to the real estate developer, casino magnate and TV celebrity who spent four decades crafting a public image as a playboy billionaire with a populist touch and an outrageous mouth. Mueller’s investigators present a detailed narrative showing Trump calling aides at home at night, clearing the room to deliver a personal appeal, naming names and spewing insults — whatever it took to demand loyalty and hit back at perceived enemies.

In success and in failure, in his historic outsider campaign and in his bankruptcies and business collapses, Trump’s tactics have barely varied. He bullies, he praises, he uses the media to attack and insult. He talks to many and trusts few. He lives in the moment and ignores the past. He acts now and constructs rationales later.

Trump rose to celebrity and to power by forming close alliances with renegades and rogues, with lawyers who were willing to push people around, with union bosses and construction executives who had close ties to organized crime, and with his own top executives who could be relied on to keep secrets and work behind the scenes to make problems go away.

As a real estate developer in New York City and later as a casino magnate in New Jersey and elsewhere, Trump worked closely with all sorts of seedy characters, some of them mobsters. Trump came to believe that politics and real estate — two fields he saw as inextricably intertwined — were dirty businesses, shot through with corruption.

He built his business around his personal brand, his media-
fueled presentation of himself as a can-do billionaire who got results by doing end runs around the rules. Building his company as a tight family circle, bolstered by a tiny group of totally committed lawyers and executives, allowed Trump to withstand bankruptcies, business collapses, lawsuits, federal investigations and an avalanche of bad publicity.

So when he got to the White House, it’s no surprise that he expected similar loyalty and devotion from his closest aides. When he didn’t always get that loyalty in return, he was enraged. But as the Mueller report makes clear, the aides who refused to do his bidding may in the end be what saved the president from an obstruction charge.

Trump has argued throughout his career that the only people you can absolutely trust to provide total loyalty are blood relatives and a tiny inner circle of longtime employees.

McGahn, for example, listened to Trump’s directives about getting rid of Mueller and decided he’d prefer to “resign rather than trigger what he regarded as a potential Saturday Night Massacre,” as the report put it, referring to a key moment in the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard M. Nixon’s downfall.

Even one of Trump’s original political loyalists, former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, found a way to avoid executing the president’s order. After Trump dictated a message for Lewandowski to deliver to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, directing Sessions to publicly announce that the president had done nothing wrong and that Mueller’s investigation would be sharply limited, Lewandowski told Trump he’d do it. But instead, he passed the job along to another official, who, the report said, “was uncomfortable with the task and did not follow through.”

“The President’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful,” the report says, “but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

In his rhetoric and in his actions, Trump has veered far from the conventions of business or politics.

“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump asked in 2017, exploding in public frustration over the fact that his own attorney general had removed himself from supervision of the investigation into the president’s campaign.

Cohn, Trump’s first attorney and most valued adviser in the early years of his career, was a notorious rule-breaker, an aggressive advocate whose client list included alleged mob bosses and who was ultimately disbarred. Cohn taught Trump two of his most enduring mantras: Never back down, and when you’re hit, hit back a hundred times harder.

Cohn was fiercely loyal, and Trump has often lamented his inability to find a similarly tenacious and unstinting consigliere. At one point in 2017, according to the report, Trump blew up at McGahn, saying he wished Cohn was his attorney.

Sessions, too, did not fit the bill.

“What kind of a man is this?” Trump asked in a Fox interview last summer. “The only reason I gave him the job: Because I felt loyalty.”

But then, Sessions, in Trump’s view, failed to back up his boss. “Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president,” Trump told the New York Times in 2017. “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? . . . It’s extremely unfair — and that’s a mild word — to the president.”

Trump is the first president to lash out at advisers who cooperated with a federal investigation and to adopt the language of the mob to bash people such as Michael Cohen, his longtime attorney and fixer who spoke extensively to Mueller’s investigators.

“I know all about flipping,” Trump told Fox News. “For 30, 40 years, I’ve been watching flippers. Everything’s wonderful, and then they get 10 years in jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go.”

Before Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges, the president was complimenting him on Twitter because “he refused to ‘break’ — make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’ ”

As the report documents, Trump tried a similar strategy with Cohen, telling his longtime attorney to “stay strong.” When Cohen instead agreed to share what he knew with the special counsel, Trump turned on him, dubbing him a “rat.”

Trump’s ability to sound like a mobster, or at least the movie version of one, is a vital part of his charm and his effectiveness. Friends say he has an unusually intimate way of connecting, on the phone, in the office, on the golf course. He shares secrets, showers with praise — and when he deems it necessary, he delivers vague threats about the aggressive response he’ll have if things don’t go as he wants them to.

In 1987, before Trump published his first best-selling book, “The Art of the Deal,” he was a regional figure, a tabloid newspaper’s minor celebrity, something of a joke to many New Yorkers. But those who doubted him failed to see the appeal of the character he had built in his many media appearances — the rare rich guy who spoke like a blue-collar worker, who preferred cheeseburgers, hung out with his security guys rather than his fellow executives, and explained the world’s problems in simple, binary terms.

The book was a hit because its author displayed no moral qualms, wholly embracing the idea that the way you get things done is to do them, whatever it took. “Mr. Trump makes one believe for a moment in the American dream again,” the New York Times’s critic gushed in a review.

The rich kid whose classmates considered him a bully, the self-proclaimed king of debt who spent the meat of his career watching his enterprises fall into bankruptcies, became president of the United States.

As the Mueller report richly details, the way he got there and the way he has behaved there are virtually identical. What the American people and Congress make of that is the subject of the coming months of investigations, legal confrontations and, in a bit more than 18 months, an election.

 

[fraurosena]

Ser Ted Lieu is masterful.

 

[Audrey2]

56 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

I keep expecting a group of pre-k children to appear and tell Trump that he needs to grow up and stop whining so much.

Oh please can't we replace the FOX News channel with Daniel Tiger and Mr. Rogers? Maybe Donnie might learn something.

[onekidanddone]

We interrupt this thread to bring you a special weather announcement. Those of us in the DMV be careful out there

 

Edited April 20, 2019 by onekidanddone

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump targets Mueller report scapegoats"

Spoiler

A day after claiming that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report had vindicated him, President Donald Trump was in a foul mood about Mueller’s detailed findings, lashing out at the Russia investigator and fuming about aides who cooperated with him.

Close White House advisers said they expect Trump’s hottest rage in the coming days will be directed at former White House counsel Don McGahn, a source of some of the report’s most embarrassing findings about the president. Trump angrily tweeted on Thursday that the report contained “total bullshit” from people trying to make themselves look good and harm the president.

Trump’s obvious frustration was a sign that the White House’s victory lap on the Mueller report was premature. Although Trump celebrated the fact that the report did not find a conspiracy between his 2016 campaign and the Kremlin or that he obstructed justice, Trump seemed to be blaming scapegoats for the scathing media coverage that followed the report’s release — including McGahn.

The president and his former top White House lawyer had a tenuous relationship even before Mueller’s report detonated over Washington on Thursday. McGahn, who left his job in October 2018 after nearly two years, sat for roughly 30 hours of interviews with Mueller’s team and he plays a starring role in the report for his efforts to stop Trump from crossing the line into obstructing justice. One Friday morning headline capturing the capital’s post-Mueller consensus declared that McGahn had “saved Trump from himself” — a conclusion bound to irk a news-obsessed president who resents suggestions that his aides control him.

“Statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated & totally untrue. Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed,” Trump wrote in a string of tweets from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

The report made clear that a handful of staffers took notes of their interactions with the president including McGahn, former staff secretary Rob Porter, former chief of staff John Kelly and former deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland.

That revelation came as a shock to some of those who spoke to the special counsel’s team, some of whom told POLITICO they did not realize their interviews would be recounted in such detail in the report for public consumption. The president's reaction also frustrated Trump associates who privately noted that they had little choice but to comply with Mueller's requests for information — and who they stressed that the White House gave them permission to participate.

Trump complained that he was unable to push back on the claims made by his aides in Mueller’s report because of his decision not to sit down with Mueller in person. He also suggested he was unfairly thrown under the bus by those who had spoken freely to investigators.

“Because I never agreed to testify, it was not necessary for me to respond to statements made in the 'Report' about me, some of which are total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad),” he continued in another tweet.

He finished, with, "This was an Illegally Started Hoax that never should have happened, a big, fat, waste of time, energy and money - $30,000,000 to be exact. It is now finally time to turn the tables and bring justice to some very sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps even Spying or Treason. This should never happen again!"

Trump’s missives, sent as he kicked off Easter weekend at Mar-A-Lago, are signs that he will brood over the weekend over the report’s many damaging revelations. They also suggest that concerns among his current and former aides that the report might prompt him to seek retribution were well-founded.

Joining Trump in Florida this weekend are both his acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and White House counsel Pat Cipollone, neither of whom is known to have spoken to Mueller.

The anecdotes of White House staffers who worked in close proximity with Trump are littered throughout Mueller’s report, describing in detail the chaos of Trump’s presidency while undercutting his claim of “total exoneration” by Mueller.

Trump advisers who spoke to Mueller’s team counter that they were bound to comply with the special counsel’s interview requests — and they note the White House signed off on their participation.

“It’s not like somebody has a choice to cooperate,” said one of the people who sat for an interview

Even before he lashed out on Twitter Friday, Trump signaled privately to his aides that he was frustrated by their note-taking.

In one instance cited in the redacted report, which was released Thursday, the president apparently criticized McGahn for telling Mueller's investigators that Trump sought to have Mueller removed.

"Why do you take notes? Lawyers don't take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes," Trump is quoted as saying, to which McGahn responded that a "real lawyer" does.

Trump countered that he'd had "a lot of great lawyers" like Roy Cohn, who he argued "did not take notes."

A person close to the president said Trump was particularly annoyed by notes taken by Jeff Sessions’ then-chief of staff, Jody Hunt. Hunt captured Trump’s reaction to learning about the special counsel investigation in vivid detail.

“Oh my God,” the president told Sessions, according to Hunt’s notes. “This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.”

Since the report was released Thursday morning, several of Trump’s current aides have pushed back about how their comments were portrayed, appearing to engage in public damage control – even though their interviews with special investigators were under oath.

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Friday suggested the report put words in her mouth.

In an interview on “CBS This Morning,” Sanders was grilled over the revelation in Mueller’s report that she falsely told reporters in a press briefing that “countless” FBI agents had reached out to her to express their gratitude over Trump’s 2017 firing of Director James Comey. Sanders told Mueller’s office that the use of that word was a “slip of the tongue” despite her repeated assertion she’d received such messages.

She also told Mueller’s team that when she said during a White House press briefing that “countless” rank-and-file FBI agents had told her they’d lost confidence in Comey, she erred “in the heat of the moment.” The report concludes that the comment “was not founded on anything.”

Sanders said on Friday that “those were Mueller’s words,” adding: “I said that it was in the heat of the moment, meaning it wasn’t a scripted thing, it was something that I said and which is why that one word has become a big deal. But the big takeaway here is that the sentiment is 100% accurate.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I wish HBO would sue instead of sending a nicely worded tweet:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Mueller report puts it beyond dispute: Trump is profoundly corrupt"

Spoiler

Now that we finally have the (redacted) report from Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into the Russia scandal, we have many questions to confront, such as whether President Trump should be impeached. But the report has also given us many answers, and it’s worthwhile to step back and take careful note of what it has clarified.

There are some things that were matters of dispute or insufficiently documented before, but are no longer in question. Let’s run through them:

Vladimir Putin very much wanted Trump to become president of the United States, and undertook a comprehensive campaign to make sure it happened. At this point, Trump might be the only person left in America who disagrees with this fact — or pretends to, anyway — but Mueller’s report makes it irrefutable.

Trump, his family and his campaign may not have set up a criminal conspiracy to cooperate with Russia, but they were eager to accept the help. This, too, was widely known, but Mueller provides exhaustive detail on just how enthusiastic Trump and those around him were about Russia’s interference in the election: There were not just extensive contacts with Russians they hoped would help them; they also gleefully welcomed Russia’s cybertheft from Democrats. As the Lawfare team puts it, the best that can be said of them is that “the Russians and the Trump campaign shared a common goal, and each side worked to achieve that goal with basic knowledge of the other side’s intention.”

The president’s attempts to obstruct justice were comprehensive and far-reaching. Mueller’s report documents in extensive detail the actions Trump took to subvert the investigation, including urging officials to pressure the FBI, trying to fire the special counsel and lying to the public. We can argue about the degree to which Trump could be held legally accountable or whether the intervention of his aides (or more often, their refusal to act) kept those actions from crossing the line into criminality. But there is no longer any question that Trump attempted to obstruct justice.

Everyone around the president, and the president himself, acted as though they had something to hide on Russia. Donald Trump Jr. lied about the infamous Trump Tower meeting. George Papadopoulos lied to the FBI about the outreach from Russia that began the investigation. Michael Flynn lied to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador. Michael Cohen lied to Congress about the effort to secure Trump a multimillion-dollar deal to build a tower in Moscow. Paul Manafort lied about his relationship to the likely Russian intelligence asset to whom he passed polling data. Roger Stone allegedly lied about his contacts with WikiLeaks. President Trump lied seemingly every time Russia came up. If they were all innocent, they certainly weren’t acting like it.

Trump regularly instructs aides to lie to the public. Trump told Rod Rosenstein to claim that firing James Comey was his idea. Rosenstein refused, but Sean Spicer later told the lie to the press. Trump dictated a false statement to Hope Hicks for Trump Jr. to release about the infamous Trump Tower meeting. He instructed Donald McGahn to arrange for Mueller to be fired, then when the news got out, told McGahn to publicly deny it. He told Reince Priebus to tell K.T. McFarland to write a false email claiming that Trump never spoke to Flynn about Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador. If you’re having trouble following all this, that’s okay — the point is that Trump regularly ordered his aides to lie; sometimes they complied, and sometimes they didn’t.

There are also doubtless times when Trump aides lie on their own initiative, within a White House culture in which lying is just what everyone does. Sarah Sanders claimed that “countless” FBI agents contacted the White House to express support for the firing of Comey; she admitted to investigators that this was false (though she now claims it was a “slip of the tongue,” another obvious lie).

Nearly everything Trump called “fake news” turned out to be true. While news outlets might have made the occasional mistake (as they do on any story), over and over again important revelations were greeted by the president with the cry of “Fake news!”, only to be corroborated by the Mueller report. For instance, Trump claimed that reports that he had shooed other officials from the room so that he could speak to Comey about Flynn were fake; Mueller concludes that the known facts "support Comey’s description of the event.” Trump called reports that he ordered Mueller’s firing fake; these are extensively documented in the report.

Trump has no concern about whether his actions are illegal or unethical. While we have a lengthy record demonstrating Trump’s unethical and even lawbreaking ways — running scams that steal people’s life savings, abusing small businesspeople, committing tax fraud — the Mueller report documents how he brought that lack of moral compass to the Oval Office. It shows his boundless willingness to lie and have others lie for him, his complete disregard for any norm of integrity or propriety, and his belief that the entire U.S. government exists to serve his personal ends.

There were times when those around him, struck by a sudden attack of conscience or pushed beyond even their rather flexible limits, decide to push back: "The President's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests." But it leaves little doubt about who the president is and what kind of administration he is running.

This is a president who is deeply, profoundly corrupt in every sense of the word. While we can argue about what should be done about the facts laid out in the Mueller report, that is no longer in doubt.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

15 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

We interrupt this thread to bring you a special weather announcement. Those of us in the DMV be careful out there

 

We had a tornado touch down about a mile from my house. About 30 seconds after the tornado warning came over my phone I could hear the roar. We went and camped in the bathroom for about 20 minutes, since it's the only true interior room in my condo. Luckily, nobody I know was hurt.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The Ego Maniac in the Oval Is ‘Exonerated’"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — When it comes to presidential obstruction, at least Watergate started with a crime. A stupid crime, but a crime.

After 675 days, more than 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants, $30 million spent, endless jaw-jaw on cable and countless whiny Trump tweets, we have come down to one fundamental truth.

And it’s the same truth that has been terrorizing us all along: Donald Trump’s dirtbag machinations are driven by insane vanity.

The First Narcissist’s all-consuming blend of braggadocio and insecurity has turned Washington and its rickety institutions into a dystopian outpost of his id.

President Trump obstructed on nearly every page of Volume II of the Mueller report, even though Robert Mueller was too lost in legalese to throw the book at him. The report counts as the Worst Exoneration Ever, replete with incrimination.

And Trump’s motivation for trying to subvert justice and turn the White House into a writhing nest of liars? His ego.

He did not want people to think that the Russians were responsible for his election and that he was an illegitimate president.

And why was this the burr under his sociopathic saddle? Obviously, because he thinks he is an illegitimate president. He never expected to win.

The idea that he is in the Oval Office under false pretenses plays into his twisted sense of victimhood. The spoiled scion of Fifth Avenue somehow always finds a way to be aggrieved, a victim of the media, the deep state, “dirty cops,” note-taking aides and the elites — all out to get him.

It’s the same reason he is still talking at rallies about that “beautiful map” of his Electoral College victory, with its large swaths of red. And the same reason he focuses on ratings and crowd sizes and subscription numbers and all the other puerile citations of his ego arithmetic.

We can’t know for sure if there is a more sinister reason for Trump’s obstruction because Mueller didn’t put him under the interrogation lights. The special counsel did not provide any insight into whether Vladimir Putin has something on him.

All we know for now is that Trump’s advisers, talking under oath to federal prosecutors, attributed his actions to his fear of being seen as illegitimate.

“Several advisers recalled that the president-elect viewed stories about his Russian connections, the Russia investigations and the intelligence community assessment of Russian interference as a threat to the legitimacy of his electoral victory,” noted Volume II (which makes for far superior reading to Volume I).

Hope Hicks, the former Trump communications director, told investigators that Trump considered the assessment his “Achilles heel” because if people thought Russia helped him win, it would take away from his own accomplishment. Sean Spicer, Rick Gates and Reince Priebus echoed this point.

In other words, “boss man,” as Hicks called him, would be that most dreaded thing, the thing his father taught him to scorn, a loser, and he would be the thing he falsely accused Barack Obama of — illegitimate.

Despite the American carnage shown in the report, Republicans were mostly staring uncomfortably at their wingtips. Angry Democrats, if they had their way, would put Trump protector William Barr in the dock, right beside Trump.

The closest we get to a hero in the sordid report — as opposed to Kenneth Starr’s lurid report — is the former White House counsel Don McGahn.

While Trump was a whirl of ignorance, vindictiveness and self-destruction, some advisers stopped him from going over the edge by ignoring his “crazy shit,” as McGahn called it. When Trump complained that McGahn was taking notes, unlike Roy Cohn, McGahn explained that “real” lawyers take notes.

The president called McGahn at home twice on June 17, 2017 — which happened to be the 45th anniversary of the Watergate burglary — to order injustice at Justice by telling Rod Rosenstein to fire Mueller. Trump was using a lame pretext of a conflict of interest involving the Trump golf club in Virginia where Mueller had once been a member.

“McGahn recalled the president telling him ‘Mueller has to go’ and ‘Call me back when you do it,’” the report stated.

The White House counsel knew to hit the brakes and shelve Trump’s demand. As the report noted: “McGahn was concerned about having any role in asking the acting attorney general to fire the special counsel because he had grown up in the Reagan era and wanted to be more like Judge Robert Bork and not ‘Saturday Night Massacre Bork.’”

The thuggish Don in the White House obviously regards McGahn as his Sammy the Bull rat, calling him a “lying bastard.” On Friday, the president tweeted, not so cryptically: “Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed,” and later tweeted that it was “finally time to turn the tables” on some of those who have crossed him.

Of course, McGahn, the shaggy-haired libertarian who plays guitar in an ’80s cover band, needed to put up with the volatile president long enough to fulfill his own agenda: cementing the conservative majority on the Supreme Court and salting lower federal courts with hard-right conservatives who are going to be around for decades.

McGahn did Trump two huge favors. He kept him from firing Mueller, which would have put a nail in the presidential coffin. And he delivered Trump’s greatest triumph on the right, conspiring with Mitch McConnell to fill the courts with socially conservative judges intent on undoing government regulation.

Ironically, Trump’s most lasting legacy was engineered by the same guy who shivved the president hardest in the Mueller report.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump sues in bid to block congressional subpoena of financial records"

Spoiler

President Trump and his business sued House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) in a bid to block a congressional subpoena of his financial records on Monday.

The lawsuit seeks a court order to prevent Trump’s accounting firm from complying with what his lawyers say is an improper use of subpoena power by congressional Democrats.

“Democrats are using their new control of congressional committees to investigate every aspect of President Trump’s personal finances, businesses, and even his family,” the filing by Trump claims. “Instead of working with the President to pass bipartisan legislation that would actually benefit Americans, House Democrats are singularly obsessed with finding something they can use to damage the President politically.”

The filing, in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, further escalates a clash between the White House and the Democratic-controlled House over congressional oversight.

Last week, Cummings subpoenaed Mazars USA, an accounting firm long used by Trump.

"The president has a long history of trying to use baseless lawsuits to attack his adversaries, but there is simply no valid legal basis to interfere with this duly authorized subpoena from Congress," Cummings said in response. "This complaint reads more like political talking points than a reasoned legal brief, and it contains a litany of inaccurate information.  The White House is engaged in unprecedented stonewalling on all fronts, and they have refused to produce a single document or witness to the Oversight Committee during this entire year."

For more than a decade, Mazars and a predecessor firm signed off on financial statements for Trump that he used when seeking loans. Some of the statements include frequent exaggerations or inaccuracies and were accompanied by a note from the firm saying it was not responsible for the accuracy of the information.

The Oversight Committee on March 20 asked the company for copies of “statements of financial condition” and audits prepared for Trump and several of his companies, including the one that owns the Trump International Hotel in downtown Washington. The panel also requested supporting documents used to produce the reports and communications between the firm and Trump.

The company said last week that it “will respect the legal process and fully comply with its legal obligations.”

Lawyers for the president and the Trump Organization previously wrote in a letter to Mazars’s counsel that an expected committee subpoena “would not be valid or enforceable.”

In the complaint filed Monday, Trump’s lawyers argue that the subpoena of Mazars “lacks a legitimate legislative purpose” and is seeking information about Trump as a private citizen, before he took office.

“With this subpoena, the Oversight Committee is instead assuming the powers of the Department of Justice, investigating (dubious and partisan) allegations of illegal conduct by private individuals outside of government,” it says. “Its goal is to expose Plaintiffs’ private financial information for the sake of exposure, with the hope that it will turn up something that Democrats can use as a political tool against the President now and in the 2020 election.”

The complaint seeks a permanent injunction to prevent Cummings from taking any actions to enforce the subpoena, and a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction prohibiting Mazars from producing the requested information.

The Democrats’ requests for a decade of financial information followed accusations from Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen that Trump had inflated his worth to mislead his lenders and insurers.

During a late February hearing, Cohen provided copies of financial statements for 2011, 2012 and 2013, which he said Trump had sent to Deutsche Bank in pursuit of a loan to buy the NFL’s Buffalo Bills in 2014.

Cohen said the same sort of statement had been sent to Trump’s insurers in an attempt to lower Trump’s premiums by reassuring lenders about Trump’s ability to pay them.

Monday’s lawsuit comes amid a broader effort by Trump’s attorneys and the White House to resist congressional requests for information.

Earlier this month, the Treasury Department missed a deadline to hand over Trump’s tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee.

White House officials have also been digging in their heels on other requests related to Trump’s actions as president.

The administration has signaled that it does not plan to turn over information being sought about how particular individuals received their security clearances, Trump’s meetings with foreign leaders, and other topics that they plan to argue are subject to executive privilege, according to several aides familiar with internal discussions.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump is accused of gross abuse of his office. We’re not talking about the Mueller report."

Spoiler

PRESIDENT TRUMP is accused of a gross abuse of his office, and his administration has not provided Congress the information it needs to reach the truth of the matter. No, this has nothing to do with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian election interference. Instead, it concerns the $85.4 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger that the president reportedly sought to pressure the Justice Department to block.

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported last month that in 2017, Mr. Trump ordered Gary Cohn, then the director of the National Economic Council, to persuade antitrust authorities to file against AT&T’s purchase of the cable television company, which includes CNN. “I’ve mentioned it 50 times. And nothing’s happened,” the president allegedly said to John Kelly, who was chief of staff at the time. “I want that deal blocked!” Mr. Cohn, Ms. Mayer writes, told Mr. Kelly not to comply — but the Justice Department did bring suit and eventually lost in court.

Lawmakers have rightly been seeking more information about Mr. Trump’s alleged attempted meddling in the Antitrust Division’s decision, whether it was to reward Fox News because the outlet has been favorable to him or to hurt CNN because it has not. If he did intercede, it was a grave offense to press freedom and the rule of law, and one the president ought to be held accountable for. Unfortunately, accountability is not this administration’s strong suit: This week, the White House rejected a House Judiciary Committee request for documents on related discussions with the Justice Department, claiming executive privilege. The Justice Department, similarly, has yet to respond to multiple requests.

Even the appearance of impropriety in antitrust enforcement is damaging to public trust. T-Mobile executives spent $195,000 at the Trump International Hotel in Washington after the carrier announced its plan to purchase competitor Sprint. Any decision the Justice Department makes on the merger will now be viewed through that lens: The company has at least given the appearance of believing it could exert influence over enforcers through the chief executive. Who could blame consumers for thinking the same thing?

The Justice Department might have made its decision on the merits, as antitrust chief Makan Delrahim has insisted. Or Mr. Trump might have managed to persuade an associate to strong-arm the department. Or he might otherwise have signaled to Mr. Delrahim — who was on the record saying he did not “see this [merger] as a major antitrust problem” before he became Mr. Trump’s pick — what position he was expected to take. Unless the White House changes course or the Justice Department decides to be much more forthcoming, Congress will have to do more than ask nicely to find answers.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump says ‘nobody disobeys my orders.’ Here are 15 recorded instances of exactly that."

Spoiler

There is a narrative forming about the Mueller report. It says President Trump would be in a lot more trouble right now if those around him actually did what he told them to do. By essentially ignoring the boss on potentially obstructive acts, the narrative holds, these aides may have saved Trump from himself.

Needless to say, this is not the kind of narrative a proud man like Trump prefers. So, he did what he always does on stuff like this: Deny it, no matter how ridiculous that denial might be.

“Nobody disobeys my orders,” Trump assured Monday morning at the White House Easter Egg Roll.

How wrong he is. Let us count the ways.

The Mueller report includes many instances of aides declining to carry out Trump’s orders; The Washington Post’s James Hohmann recapped them on Friday. But it’s worth running through which ones actually involved orders that aides disobeyed. (For the purposes of this post, we’re not including mere suggestions, such as when Trump pressured then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to un-recuse himself and when Trump urged then-FBI Director James B. Comey to take it easy on Michael Flynn.)

Toward the bottom of the list, we have also added previously known incidents of top aides declining to carry out Trump’s orders.

The list:

1. White House counsel Donald McGahn: Declined to tell Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to fire Mueller.
2. Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski: Declined to apply pressure on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit the scope of the Russia probe.
3. Deputy Chief of Staff Rick Dearborn: Declined to give Sessions a typed note Lewandowski gave him relaying the president’s message.
4. Staff secretary Rob Porter: Declined Trump’s request to ask the No. 3-ranking official at the Justice Department, Rachel Brand, whether she wanted to be attorney general and take oversight of the Russia probe.
5. Transition team leader Chris Christie: Declined to call FBI Director James B. Comey and tell him that Trump liked him.
6. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein: Declined to do a news conference after Comey’s firing saying it was his idea.
7. Deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland: Declined to write an internal email stating Trump hadn’t told national security adviser Michael Flynn to talk during the presidential transition to the Russian ambassador about sanctions.
8. Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats: Declined Trump’s request to say there was no link between the Trump campaign and Russia.
9. Acting Attorney General Dana Boente: According to McGahn, Boente declined Trump’s request to state publicly that Trump wasn’t under investigation. (Boente said he didn’t recall this conversation.)
10. Chief of Staff Reince Priebus: Declined to get Sessions to resign.
11. Chief economic adviser Gary Cohn: Along with Porter, prevented Trump from pulling out of trade deals by pulling papers off his desk.
12. Chief of Staff John F. Kelly: Along with Cohn, declined to lobby the Justice Department to prevent the AT&T-Time Warner merger.
13. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis: Declined Trump’s request to assassinate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
14. Mattis: Declined Trump’s request to provide military options for Iran.
15. Unnamed officials: Ignored Trump’s directive to not endorse an agreement reached at the G-7 Summit.

That’s at least 15 instances of people declining to carry out significant requests from Trump — ones that involved war, people who needed to be independent of the White House and also misleading or false public statements about issues of importance. Among those reportedly ignoring Trump have been two chiefs of staff, a defense secretary (twice), other top Cabinet officials and two people who were at the time overseeing the Russia investigation.

 

[Flossie]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump says ‘nobody disobeys my orders.’ Here are 15 recorded instances of exactly that."

  Hide contents

“Nobody disobeys my orders,” Trump assured Monday morning at the White House Easter Egg Roll.

The Mueller report includes many instances of aides declining to carry out Trump’s orders...

1. Transition team leader Chris Christie: Declined to call FBI Director James B. Comey and tell him that Trump liked him.

Number 5 is my favorite:  

5.  Transition team leader Chris Christie: Declined to call FBI Director James B. Comey and tell him that Trump liked him.

Trump:  Did you tell him I liked him?
Christie:  No.  
Trump:  Wwwhhhhhyyyyy?
Christie:  I don't know.  It's just wierd.  Why don't you tell him yourself?
Trump:  I can't do that!  What if he doesn't like me back?  I'd just diieee!
Christie:  How about it I tell my brother?  He knows Trump.  How about that?
Trump:  Don't do that!  What if they just make fun of me instead?  I'd just ddiieee!
Christie:  Well, how about if I give him my dessert tonight and ask him then?  He'd have to do it then, it's in the bro code.
Trump:  You'd do that for me!?!  Yes, please do that.  I'd owe you!
Christie:  OK, I'll do that, and you'll owe me.
Trump:  But what if James doesn't like me back?  I'd jjuussttt  dddiieee!
Christie:  Do you want me to set this up or what?
Trump:  Do it.  *(To himself:  But if it doesn't work out, I'm blaming you.  And James.  And your brother.)

I'm sorry, that's so middle school.

[47of74]

Looks like all is not martial bliss at Malware-A-Tugjob

Quote

On Monday, a report from People Magazine detailed that President Donald Trump and Melania Trump got into an argument while having dinner at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

“Melania was upset and they had words with each other over something,” a source told People. The spat, which reportedly occurred in front of other people, happened on March 30, the source said.

 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

Dear fellow Americans,

we are tired of the Trump administration trying to bring us all back to the 19th century.

Signed The Rest of the World

Spoiler

The US is threatening to veto a United Nations resolution on combatting the use of rape as a weapon of war because of its language on reproductive and sexual health, according to a senior UN official and European diplomats.

Even after the formal monitoring mechanism was stripped from the resolution, the US was still threatening to veto the watered-down version, because it includes language on victims’ support from family planning clinics. In recent months, the Trump administration has taken a hard line, refusing to agree to any UN documents that refer to sexual or reproductive health, on grounds that such language implies support for abortions. It has also opposed the use of the word “gender”, seeing it as a cover for liberal promotion of transgender rights.

“We are not even sure whether we are having the resolution tomorrow, because of the threats of a veto from the US,” Pramila Patten, the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict, told the Guardian.

In cases of disagreement in the security council, member states often fall back on previously agreed text, but the US has made it clear it would no longer accept language from a 2013 resolution on sexual violence.

"They are threatening to use their veto over this agreed language on comprehensive healthcare services including sexual and reproductive health. The language is being maintained for the time being and we’ll see over the next 24 hours how the situation evolves,” Patten said.

“It will be a huge contradiction that you are talking about a survivor-centered approach and you do not have language on sexual and reproductive healthcare services, which is for me the most critical.”

In a draft of the resolution seen by the Guardian, the contentious phrase is only mentioned once, in a clause that “urges United Nations entities and donors to provide non-discriminatory and comprehensive health services, including sexual and reproductive health, psychosocial, legal and livelihood support and other multi-sectoral services for survivors of sexual violence, taking into account the specific needs of persons with disabilities.”

A spokeswoman for the US mission said it “does not comment on draft resolutions that are under active negotiation”.

European states, led by Germany, the UK and France, have been resisting abandoning the language on access to family planning and women’s health clinics, as they believe it would mean surrendering the gains of recent decades in terms of international recognition of women’s rights.

“If we let the Americans do this and take out this language, it will be watered down for a long time,” a European diplomat, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the negotiations, said. “It is, at its heart, an attack on the progressive normative framework established over the past 25 years.”

“Until the Trump administration, we could always count on the Americans to help us defend it. Now the Americans have switched camp,” the diplomat said. “Now it’s an unholy alliance of the US, the Russians, the Holy See, the Saudis and the Bahrainis, chipping away at the progress that has been made.”

Diplomats at the security council expect a long night of negotiations on the wording.

The latest version of the draft resolution recognises the work of the informal expert group on women, peace and security, but Patten had argued that the current system does not provide a consistent channel to bring violations on sexual violence to the attention of the security council.

A formal mechanism, with a panel regularly assessing compliance and recommending sanctions, would have given her more leverage on states and non-state groups.

“In the current draft as it stands, the formal mechanism is gone,” she said. “It’s very, very weak.” 

I am utterly disgusted. That the Holy See never fails to take the most backwards position regarding women's rights is expected even if depressing. Same for religious dictatorships like Saudi Arabia. But from the United States we had come to expect a better approach.