Trump 40: Donald Trump and the Chamber of Incompetence

[onekidanddone]

4 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Oh those expressions are priceless. The young woman in the yellow top looks she smells something rotten (she does). The woman right be about to hurl all over Trump (I’d love for someone to do that). The player to the left is silently screaming and the player with long hair is thinking ‘So this is what hell looks like’. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"At Trump golf course, undocumented employees said they were sometimes told to work extra hours without pay"

Spoiler

HILLSDALE, N.Y. — His bosses at the Trump country club called it “side work.”

On some nights, after the club’s Grille Room closed, head waiter Jose Gabriel Juarez — an undocumented immigrant from Mexico — was told to clock out. He pressed his index finger onto a scanner and typed his personal code, 436.

But he didn’t go home.

Instead — on orders from his bosses, Juarez said — he would stay on, sometimes past midnight. He vacuumed carpets, polished silverware and helped get the restaurant at Trump National Golf Club Westchester in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., ready for breakfast the next day.

All off the clock. Without being paid.

“It was that way with all the managers: Many of them told us, ‘Just clock out and then stay and do the side work,’ ” said Juarez, who spent a decade at the golf club, before leaving in May 2018. “There was a lot of side work.”

Allegations that workers were routinely shortchanged on their pay at President Trump’s suburban country club are now the subject of an inquiry by the New York attorney general, whose investigators have interviewed more than two dozen former employees.

The inquiry could raise awkward political questions for Trump, who has made stopping illegal immigration a centerpiece of his presidency and his reelection campaign but faces allegations that his business benefited from low-paid, undocumented workers.

In interviews, six former Trump workers told The Washington Post that they felt systematically cheated because they were undocumented. Some told The Post about being denied promotions, vacation days and health insurance, which were offered to legal employees. The same pattern of unpaid labor was also described by a former manager.

Others recounted practices that could violate labor laws. Two told The Post that they had been required to do unpaid side work. Two others said managers made them work 60-hour weeks without paying them overtime.

A spokesman for the New York attorney general’s office confirmed that it had received complaints from workers about conditions at the club but declined to comment further.

The Trump Organization has denied the allegations, and workers who spoke to The Post did not keep paper records of the extra hours they said they worked.

But Juarez was among nearly 30 former employees at Trump’s golf courses in New York who met with prosecutors in February. They handed over pay stubs and W-2 forms and answered questions about their salaries, hours, tips and lack of benefits in one-on-one interviews over many hours, according to several workers. Some have follow-up meetings scheduled in coming weeks.

“They were focused on the payments,” Gabriel Sedano, who worked in maintenance at the club for 14 years, said of the prosecutors. “The days they paid us. The extra hours they didn’t pay us. The tips.”

Many who met with investigators were among those who were fired as part of a companywide purge of unauthorized workers earlier this year.

In a statement, the Trump Organization called the former workers’ accounts “nonsense.”

“The Trump Organization has extensive policies and procedures in place to ensure compliance with all wage and hour laws,” spokeswoman Kimberly Benza said, after The Post sent a brief description of the employees’ accounts. “This story is total nonsense and nothing more than unsubstantiated allegations from illegal immigrants who unlawfully submitted fake identification in an effort to obtain employment.”

In January, the company said it would start using E-Verify, a federal program that allows employers to check whether new hires are legally eligible to work in the United States.

The inquiry adds to the list of inquiries by New York state investigators and Democrats in Congress scrutinizing aspects of Trump’s life, including the business on which he built his fame and fortune.

Trump has decried unauthorized immigrants as a threat to the country’s safety and social fabric. He also has blamed undocumented workers for driving down wages and taking jobs that American citizens could perform.

But over the years, his company has routinely relied on that same low-wage, illegal labor, and his company has not explained how some employees kept their jobs for years despite lacking proper papers. Since December, The Post has spoken with 36 such people, who worked at four Trump golf courses and country clubs as well as a personal hunting lodge that his two adult sons own in Upstate New York.

Trump still owns his businesses, but he has handed over day-to-day control to his sons Donald Jr. and Eric. The company has said it did not know it employed workers who lacked legal status until this year, when an internal audit discovered that many had presented fraudulent papers.

One former manager from the Westchester club, who said he thought the undocumented workers at the club were exploited, described an environment where — in managers’ meetings — it was clear that supervisors not only knew these workers lacked authentic documents but used that information to meet the company’s cost-cutting goals.

The former manager said that “The City” — the club’s word for bosses at Trump Tower in Manhattan — was constantly demanding a reduction in overtime costs.

The solution, going back a decade at least, the former manager said, was to pressure the undocumented workers.

“You want to be here? Don’t clock in for overtime,” the former manager said, paraphrasing the message to these workers. “Clock out, and work off the clock.”

“There was a conscious effort to pay less wages, because they knew about the lack of documents,” said the former manager, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal company policy. “You know, where are they going to go?”

The former manager said that this period included a time when Dan Scavino — now the White House director of social media — was general manager of the Westchester club.

When The Post asked Scavino whether he had known about these practices, he said he was unaware of any violations and called the questions an “attempt to attack the President through me, one of his senior staff.”

“To my knowledge, Trump National is in compliance with the relevant state and federal labor laws, and during my employment, which was SIX YEARS ago, I was personally unaware of any violations of those laws,” Scavino said in a written statement issued through the White House press office. “If such violations occurred and I had been aware, I would have immediately addressed it, and stopped them.”

[The president’s sons entrusted their private hunting retreat to a caretaker. He was working in the country illegally.]

Trump’s Westchester club is tucked in the woods in the wealthy enclave of Briarcliff Manor, about an hour north of Manhattan along the Hudson River. The club drew on a community of immigrants from Ecuador and Mexico living in nearby Ossining to staff many manual-labor jobs. 

Former workers say getting hired was easy. Applicants could purchase fake green cards and Social Security numbers along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens that their bosses would place on file and generally not mention again. Nearly all employees interviewed say they are certain that their bosses knew their papers were fraudulent but hired them anyway.

On the job, however, things became more difficult. Employees without legal status often worked at the club for years on hourly wages that they said barely budged upward. They felt blocked from promotion opportunities, they said, and generally received no health insurance, retirement benefits or vacation days. Many said the company shaved hours off their paychecks.

Juan Pablo Morejon, a dishwasher from Cuenca, Ecuador, said he often worked into the early-morning hours cleaning up after banquets and parties but didn’t get paid for overtime. 

“I had to punch out and keep working,” he said. “When you left, they paid you eight hours, even if you worked 12 or 13 hours.”

Requiring employees to work unpaid hours is prohibited by New York labor law, lawyers practicing in the state said.

“Requiring employees to clock out and continue working is classic wage theft. You have to pay employees for all hours worked,” said Louis Pechman, a lawyer in Manhattan who said he has handled more than 200 cases involving allegations of wage theft. “Undocumented workers have the same rights as documented workers. It makes no difference.”

Morejon, who was hired at the club in 2012, said he regularly complained to superiors about missing hours and overtime on his paychecks. The issue came up again when he was fired last year. A supervisor had discovered that Morejon was using the same green card number as his nephew.  

“He told me to go back to Queens and get a new number, apply again, and you can continue working,” he said, echoing the experience of another former worker at the course who told The Post that he, too, was told to get new papers.

Morejon quit instead. “They would have eventually fired me anyway like the others,” he said.

Morejon, who spoke to prosecutors in February, said that the company owed him for his last 15 days of work but that he never received a final paycheck.

The supervisor could not be reached to comment. 

Two of Morejon’s dishwashing colleagues, Jose Blandon, 55, and his son, Wiston Blandon, 35, said they felt similarly shortchanged by the Trump Organization. The pair, from Nicaragua, got hired in 2016 after hearing from a friend “that they were letting people work there without papers, and that they needed dishwashers,” Jose Blandon said. 

Trump was campaigning for president at the time, and the two also were eager to work for a famous and powerful boss.

The enthusiasm quickly subsided. Jose Blandon said he felt overwhelmed by the demands of the job, working long hours and juggling dishwashing duties in the banquet kitchen and the Grille Room for club members.

On a few occasions, he said, he and his son would work about 60 hours one week, and their boss would have them work 20 the next. The paycheck cycle would average out to two 40-hour workweeks with no overtime. Jose Blandon complained about such practices but said he was told, “That’s why they hired you, to work.” 

“This bothered me a lot,” he said. “I felt this was labor abuse.” 

This practice — called “averaging hours” — is also prohibited by New York law, legal experts said.

“Can they be averaged? Absolutely not. Overtime is measured in terms of the week itself,” said James J. Brudney, a professor of employment law at Fordham University in New York. “If what they’re trying to say is that they’ll average overtime over a two-week period, they can’t do that.”

Some former Westchester managers disputed that the company exploited staff members or that it knew they did not have legal status.

“Anybody that applied and went through the application process was told you have to have valid ID, and everybody that applied provided that,” said one former manager involved in hiring who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal policies. “This isn’t a company that turns around and says, ‘You, you and you — come on board.’ Everything was done by government standards.”

The former manager added that salaried workers were offered a benefits package including health insurance, two weeks’ vacation after one year of employment, 401(k) contributions and sick days. All employees were paid more than minimum wage and were offered benefits if they worked enough hours to qualify for them.

“Several employees were there for several, several years,” the former manager said. “It’s pretty simple. Nobody goes to a job that they hate or that they’re treated badly at. You don’t work at a company for that long if it’s a bad company.” 

Murat Nalcioglu, food and beverage director in the Grille Room in 2016, also disputed that any employees were mistreated.

“It was a good work environment,” Nalcioglu said. “The Hispanics were treated as good as anybody else. They were obviously the hardest workers there. They were the majority of the team.”

As head waiter for a decade in the clubhouse restaurant, Juarez, who went by “Gabbie,” was well-known by members, including the Trumps. 

Before he became president, Trump often golfed on Sundays in Westchester then ate lunch at a circular corner table — Table 5 — with a view of a TV screen. 

Juarez mastered Trump’s finicky preferences. He knew to pour Trump’s Diet Coke from particular miniature glass bottles into a plastic cup, never letting Trump see anyone touch the straw.

In the clubhouse computer, Trump automatically got a hefty discount, Juarez recalled: at least half off everything he ordered. He could never be brought a bill.

“He would fire me for that,” Juarez said.

Juarez was 16 years old in 2001 when his sister persuaded him to leave their village at the base of a volcano outside Mexico City and join their father in New York. He started working as a busboy at an Italian restaurant in Queens and has been employed at more than half a dozen eateries since, he said, from fine dining restaurants to pizza joints. 

In 2008, his brother was working in the clubhouse restaurant of Trump’s Westchester club and recommended Juarez for the position of head waiter. He was hired using falsified documents he bought in Queens. 

The Grille Room was different from the other restaurants Juarez knew. He was paid hourly — $15 an hour when he started and $18 per hour when he left a decade later — but generally did not receive tips.

When the golf course closed for winter, Juarez was part of a skeleton staff that stayed on, organizing storage rooms and helping with painting and repairs. There were also odd jobs. He said he moved furniture in and out of apartments in Ossining that the Trump Organization rented for foreign workers on temporary visas who would fly in for the summer season.

Despite his decade of service and full-time work year-round, Juarez said he was not offered retirement, vacation or health insurance packages that other employees received. Every paycheck, taxes for Social Security and Medicare would be withheld — benefits he will never receive. 

Over his 10 years at the club, he earned an average of $31,600 per year and paid an average of $5,600 of that in federal and state income taxes, as well as Social Security and Medicare taxes, according to W-2 forms from the Trump Organization reviewed by The Post.

But those tax documents do not tell the whole story, he said.

Whenever Juarez clocked in and out at the fingerprint scanner, he kept a scrap of paper in his wallet to write down his hours as a way to double-check the computer.

“Every check, they were always short on the hours,” he said. “Always missing two hours, or four hours.”

He said he didn’t save the scraps of paper.

Last spring, Juarez quit to accept a new job, fearful that Trump would eventually fire all the employees with false papers.

In his time at the club, he enjoyed meeting many of the members, he said, and has some fond memories of the Trump family. But the working conditions weren’t fair, he said, and he thought he knew why.

“They treated us that way” because they were undocumented, he said. “They thought, ‘Oh, they’re not going to do anything about it.’ ”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

From Patti Davis: "Dear Republicans: Stop using my father, Ronald Reagan, to justify your silence on Trump"

Spoiler

Patti Davis is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Wrong Side of Night” and the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Dear Republican Party,

I have never been part of you, but you have been part of my family for decades. I was 10 years old when my father decided to stop being a Democrat and instead become a Republican. From that point on, you were a frequent guest at our dinner table — and an unwelcome one to me. I wanted to talk about my science project on the human heart, or the mean girls at school who teased me for being too tall and for wearing glasses. Instead, much of the conversation was about how the government was taking too much out of people’s paychecks for taxes and how it was up to the Republicans to keep government from getting too big.

You went from an annoying presence at the dinner table to a powerful tornado, lifting up my family and depositing us in the world of politics, which no one ever escapes. I know it’s not completely your fault. My father’s passion for America, his commitment to try to make a difference in the country and the world, and his gentle yet powerful command over crowds that gathered to hear him speak made his ascent to the presidency all but inevitable. He would have gotten there one way or another; it just happened to be as a Republican.

You have claimed his legacy, exalted him as an icon of conservatism and used the quotes of his that serve your purpose at any given moment. Yet at this moment in America’s history when the democracy to which my father pledged himself and the Constitution that he swore to uphold, and did faithfully uphold, are being degraded and chipped away at by a sneering, irreverent man who traffics in bullying and dishonesty, you stay silent.

You stay silent when President Trump speaks of immigrants as if they are trash, rips children from the arms of their parents and puts them in cages. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that my father said America was home “for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness.”

You stayed silent when this president fawned over Kim Jong Un and took Vladimir Putin’s word over America’s security experts. You stood mutely by when one of his spokesmen, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said there is nothing wrong with getting information from Russians. And now you do not act when Trump openly defies legitimate requests from Congress, showing his utter contempt for one of the branches of our government.

Most egregiously, you remained silent when Trump said there were “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis who marched through an American city with tiki torches, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

Those of us who are not Republicans still have a right to expect you to act in a principled, moral and, yes, even noble way. Our democracy is in trouble, and everyone who has been elected to office has an obligation to save it. Maybe you’re frightened of Trump — that idea has been floated. I don’t quite understand what’s frightening about an overgrown child who resorts to name-calling, but if that is the case, then my response is: You are grown men and women. Get over it.

My father called America “the shining city on a hill.” Trump sees America as another of his possessions that he can slap his name on. A president is not supposed to own America. He or she is supposed to serve the American people.

In their book “How Democracies Die,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt warned: “How do elected authoritarians shatter the democratic institutions that are supposed to constrain them? Some do it in one fell swoop. But more often the assault on democracy begins slowly.”

Trump has been wounding our democracy for the past two years. If he is reelected for another term, it’s almost a given that America will not survive — at least not as the country the Founding Fathers envisioned, and not as the idealistic experiment they built using a Constitution designed to protect democracy and withstand tyranny.

My father knew we were fragile. He said: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same.”

So, to the Republican Party that holds tightly to my father’s legacy — if you are going to stand silent as America is dismantled and dismembered, as democracy is thrown onto the ash heap of yesterday, shame on you. But don’t use my father’s name on the way down.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"For Trump, it’s always Infrastructure Week"

Spoiler

As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer sat down with President Trump at the White House on Tuesday to talk about an infrastructure bill, Trump’s acting chief of staff explained why they were wasting their time.

“Is an infrastructure deal realistic in 2019?” Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo asked Mick Mulvaney onstage at a Milken Institute event in California.

“Uhhh,” Mulvaney replied with a doubtful smile. He said Democrats want to “make a show,” but agreement “breaks down” over the administration’s determination to change environmental laws and other regulations. Anything else is “not acceptable to this president,” Mulvaney said, predicting that even the embattled trade deal Trump negotiated with Mexico and Canada has “a much better chance” of approval than an infrastructure deal.

Poof! There goes another Infrastructure Week.

For more than two years, Trump has been trying to roll out a giant infrastructure plan, as he promised during the campaign. At every step, the idea has faltered.

In June 2017, Trump pitched the framework of an infrastructure plan — but former FBI director James B. Comey’s testimony before the Senate immediately overshadowed the effort.

Trump tried again in August 2017 — but Trump’s response to the racist violence in Charlottesville totally eclipsed the effort.

A third attempt came in February 2018 — and was trampled by the resignation of a White House official over domestic-abuse allegations, the Parkland, Fla., shooting, the indictment of Russian Internet trolls and allegations of affairs by Trump.

With those and other false starts, “Infrastructure Week” has become a euphemism for the erratic nature of Trump’s presidency, which is in constant crisis but rarely gets stuff done. Each attempt to rally support for urgently needed infrastructure spending has been stepped on — usually by Trump himself.

The online Urban Dictionary defines Infrastructure Week as “a repeatedly failed attempt to stay on-task endlessly derailed by high-profile distractions caused by one’s own ineptitude.” National Journal reports some confusion between the original Infrastructure Week, an industry conference each May, and “the White House’s many futile attempts at its own.”

Trump tried to stick to his script Tuesday. He didn’t let cameras into his meeting with Pelosi and Schumer, avoiding the debacle that occurred at their last meeting, before the government shutdown. The two Democrats emerged full of optimism.

“That agreement would be big and bold,” Pelosi said of their agreement to spend $2 trillion over 10 years. “The leader from the Senate will announce how big and how bold.”

“Big and bold,” Schumer repeated. “This kind of a big, bold bill that we could pass would make America a better place,” he added.

They postponed for three weeks the contentious issue of how to pay for the big, bold bill.

But within minutes, Trump was tweeting about other matters: complaining about the Fed, criticizing European allies, threatening a “complete” embargo of Cuba and encouraging Juan Guaidó’s uprising against the Venezuelan government.

Doesn’t Guaidó know this is Infrastructure Week?

The website Jalopnik has chronicled Infrastructure Week’s torturous path since Trump’s campaign promise to deliver an infrastructure plan in his first 100 days.

Feb. 23, 2017: “Trump Trillion-Dollar Infrastructure Package Likely to Be Delayed.”

May 1, 2017: “Infrastructure plan ‘largely completed,’ coming in 2-3 weeks.”

June 5, 2017: “Trump opens ‘infrastructure week’ without a plan.”

Oct. 9, 2017: “9 Months Into Presidency, Trump Still Hasn’t Offered Infrastructure Plan.”

Dec. 14, 2017: “Trump’s Infrastructure Plan Is Almost Done — and Already Dead.”

Jan. 24, 2018: “Trump could reveal long-promised infrastructure plan within two weeks.”

Back in June 2017, before the phrase became a punchline, Vice President Pence proclaimed that “we’re actually calling it Infrastructure Week in this administration.” At the time, Trump predicted that infrastructure spending would “take off like a rocket ship.”

Or not. A couple of months later, Trump reiterated, “No longer will we allow the infrastructure of our magnificent country to crumble and decay.” But the crumbling continued.

A 53-page, $1.5 trillion plan Trump offered in February 2018 went nowhere, largely because it offered just $200 billion in federal funds. Trump and his own transportation secretary disagreed publicly over paying for it with a gas tax. Selling the doomed plan in March 2018, Trump argued: “I was always very good at building.”

Now, in the latest iteration of Infrastructure Week, Trump has no proposal. In Tuesday’s session, which both sides called productive, he readily agreed with Democrats on the $2 trillion target, and they put off the hard decisions for another day.

But by the time they announced the agreement, Mulvaney had already pronounced the latest infrastructure gambit an exercise in masochism. “Oww,” he said, gingerly taking his seat onstage at the Milken conference. “Kidney stones,” he reported. He paused. “It was a fun night,” he said. “But it’s better than going to the meeting with Chuck and Nancy at the White House.”

 

[fraurosena]

How to be a tantrumming toddler presidunce 101:

 

[Flossie]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

How to be a tantrumming toddler presidunce 101:

 

How true.  He's maligned the need for them and told us what we need to do so they don't have to work.  Everybody got their rakes handy?  Fire season is about to start and those forests won't rake themselves.

[Alisamer]

15 minutes ago, Flossie said:

How true.  He's maligned the need for them and told us what we need to do so they don't have to work.  Everybody got their rakes handy?  Fire season is about to start and those forests won't rake themselves.

Now, now... let's not forget his tireless campaigning against fire sprinkler laws in NY - there's been a couple fires in Trump Tower that gave the firefighters plenty of work to do! 

[fraurosena]

I could happily listen to this on repeat all day long.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Comey wrote an op-ed for the NYT about Dumpy: "James Comey: How Trump Co-opts Leaders Like Bill Barr"

Spoiler

People have been asking me hard questions. What happened to the leaders in the Trump administration, especially the attorney general, Bill Barr, who I have said was due the benefit of the doubt?

How could Mr. Barr, a bright and accomplished lawyer, start channeling the president in using words like “no collusion” and F.B.I. “spying”? And downplaying acts of obstruction of justice as products of the president’s being “frustrated and angry,” something he would never say to justify the thousands of crimes prosecuted every day that are the product of frustration and anger?

How could he write and say things about the report by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, that were apparently so misleading that they prompted written protest from the special counsel himself?

How could Mr. Barr go before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday and downplay President Trump’s attempt to fire Mr. Mueller before he completed his work?

And how could Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, after the release of Mr. Mueller’s report that detailed Mr. Trump’s determined efforts to obstruct justice, give a speech quoting the president on the importance of the rule of law? Or on resigning, thank a president who relentlessly attacked both him and the Department of Justice he led for “the courtesy and humor you often display in our personal conversations”?

What happened to these people?

I don’t know for sure. People are complicated, so the answer is most likely complicated. But I have some idea from four months of working close to Mr. Trump and many more months of watching him shape others.

Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man.

But more often, proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing. I think that’s at least part of what we’ve seen with Bill Barr and Rod Rosenstein. Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.

It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged, as they did at our private dinner on Jan. 27, 2017, because he’s the president and he rarely stops talking. As a result, Mr. Trump pulls all of those present into a silent circle of assent.

Speaking rapid-fire with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, Mr. Trump makes everyone a co-conspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. I have felt it — this president building with his words a web of alternative reality and busily wrapping it around all of us in the room.

I must have agreed that he had the largest inauguration crowd in history because I didn’t challenge that. Everyone must agree that he has been treated very unfairly. The web building never stops.

From the private circle of assent, it moves to public displays of personal fealty at places like cabinet meetings. While the entire world is watching, you do what everyone else around the table does — you talk about how amazing the leader is and what an honor it is to be associated with him.

Sure, you notice that Mr. Mattis never actually praises the president, always speaking instead of the honor of representing the men and women of our military. But he’s a special case, right? Former Marine general and all. No way the rest of us could get away with that. So you praise, while the world watches, and the web gets tighter.

Next comes Mr. Trump attacking institutions and values you hold dear — things you have always said must be protected and which you criticized past leaders for not supporting strongly enough. Yet you are silent. Because, after all, what are you supposed to say? He’s the president of the United States.

You feel this happening. It bothers you, at least to some extent. But his outrageous conduct convinces you that you simply must stay, to preserve and protect the people and institutions and values you hold dear. Along with Republican members of Congress, you tell yourself you are too important for this nation to lose, especially now.

You can’t say this out loud — maybe not even to your family — but in a time of emergency, with the nation led by a deeply unethical person, this will be your contribution, your personal sacrifice for America. You are smarter than Donald Trump, and you are playing a long game for your country, so you can pull it off where lesser leaders have failed and gotten fired by tweet.

Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you make further compromises. You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values.

And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.

I disagree with him that Barr and the Repugs are making a personal sacrifice for America. I think they are playing some nasty game.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The sanctification of Donald Trump" 

Spoiler

For his closest advisers, President Donald Trump is a godsend — literally.

Trump’s campaign manager says the president was sent by God to save the country. The White House press secretary thinks God wanted Trump to be president. And the secretary of State believes it’s possible that Trump is on a holy mission to protect the Jewish people from the threat of Iran.

Forget the allegations of extramarital affairs, the nonstop Twitter insults and the efforts to close the southern border to migrants. Trump’s allies insist that his presidency is divinely inspired.

“There has never been and probably never will be a movement like this again,” Brad Parscale, the president’s campaign manager, wrote Tuesday morning on Twitter. “Only God could deliver such a savior to our nation, and only God could allow me to help. God bless America!”

Parscale’s tweet, the latest example of a Trump adviser casting the president as a savior, comes as the White House is preparing to host religious leaders on Wednesday and Thursday for the National Day of Prayer, an annual event in which people of all faiths are encouraged to pray for the nation.

The president, who doesn’t regularly attend church services, has emerged as an unlikely ally of the evangelical right, building close relationships with influential conservative religious figures. The White House screened an anti-abortion movie earlier this month, part of a broader strategy to energize evangelical voters ahead of the 2020 elections by amplifying false claims about late-term abortions.

But for observers of American history and advocates for the separation of church and state, the assertions that Trump’s presidency is endorsed by God are alarming.

“Christians should beware of a political use of the word 'savior,' which goes to the very heart of our faith. This particular statement is a gross expression of Christian nationalism, which I define as equating Christian and American identities,” said Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Washington-based Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. “People of faith know that God is much larger than any one candidate, party, election or country.”

Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian, said, “What these political lieutenants are saying to the faithful is that, 'You have no choice; God has told you how you must vote.'

“Republican administrations historically have talked about individual rights, the autonomy of the individual, preventing government from dictating political choice," he said. "By bringing the sacred into politics, they are actually imposing a view onto his followers and depriving them of a freedom of choice.”

And even some of Trump’s most vocal evangelical backers have some qualms with the notion that God wanted him to win the presidency.

“If you give God credit for a good president, then you’ve got to blame God when you have a bad one. So I don’t think that’s the way to look at it,” Jerry Falwell Jr. told POLITICO, adding later: “I don’t think you can say that God gives us good leaders. What do you do when you get a bad one, say, 'God messed up'? That’s silly.”

Falwell, the president of Liberty University, has long maintained that he and other evangelicals support Trump because they agree with his policies, often seeming to dismiss allegations of marital infidelity and mistreating women. “I don’t think he needs to come forward. I think everyone knows his past,” Falwell told CNN last year when asked about allegations of past affairs.

“God called King David a man after God’s own heart even though he was an adulterer and a murderer,” Falwell said in 2016 after endorsing Trump. “You have to choose the leader that would make the best king or president and not necessarily someone who would be a good pastor.”

Falwell said he would be attend a National Day of Prayer dinner at the White House on Wednesday with the president and first lady Melania Trump.

Parscale, who did not respond to a text seeking comment, isn’t the first Trump ally to make the case that Trump is carrying out God’s will.

“I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times, and I think that he wanted Donald Trump to become president,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in an interview with Christian Broadcasting Network News earlier this year. Sanders did not comment for this story.

And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested in March that Trump might have been sent to protect the Jewish people from Iran.

“Could it be that President Trump right now has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace?” a reporter for the Christian Broadcasting Network asked Pompeo during a visit to Israel.

“As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible,” Pompeo replied.

Sanders was raised Southern Baptist, and Pompeo, according to a Washington Post article last year, often attends Eastminster Presbyterian Church in Kansas, which is affiliated with the conservative Evangelical Presbyterian Church.

Trump’s allies might have some backing from many Republicans. A Fox News poll released earlier this year found that 45 percent of Republicans believe God wanted Trump to be president. That figure is even higher among evangelicals.

Campaign advisers think evangelicals will be crucial to Trump’s reelection chances. And the president’s defenders argue that his opponents dismiss them at their peril.

“Liberals may have gotten a few chuckles out of Sanders’ remark, but they don’t seem to realize that the joke is actually on them,” Paula White, a pastor who leads Trump’s evangelical advisory board, wrote after the press secretary came under fire for her comments.

“No matter how much they try to deride religion in the news and popular culture, the vast majority of Americans are believers,” she added. “Furthermore, when you consider everything that President Trump has done for people of faith since taking office, it’s easy to see why so many of them agree with Sanders that Donald Trump is doing God’s work.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Congressional Democrats’ emoluments lawsuit targeting President Trump’s private business can proceed, judge says"

Spoiler

Democrats in Congress can move ahead with their lawsuit against President Trump alleging that his private business violates the Constitution’s ban on gifts or payments from foreign governments, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

The decision in Washington from U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan adopted a broad definition of the anti-corruption law and could set the stage for Democratic lawmakers to begin seeking information from the Trump Organization. The Justice Department can try to delay or block the process by asking an appeals court to intervene.

In a 48-page opinion, the judge refused the request of the president’s legal team to dismiss the case and rejected Trump’s narrow definition of emoluments, finding it “unpersuasive and inconsistent.”

The lawsuit is one of two landmark cases against Trump relying on the once-obscure emoluments clauses of the Constitution.

In a case brought in Maryland by the attorneys general of D.C. and Maryland, Justice Department lawyers representing the president have succeeded in temporarily blocking subpoenas for financial records and other documents related to Trump’s D.C. hotel.

The congressional case, brought by about 200 Democrats, extends beyond the hotel and provides a potential new avenue for investigators to gain access to a broader array of Trump’s closely held finances.

Trump’s lawyers argued that the prohibition applies only to payments received for government action taken by a president in his official capacity. The clause, they argue, should not be considered a blanket bar on private business transactions with foreign governments.

Sullivan noted that the lawsuit alleges the president — without seeking permission from Congress — has received payments for hotel rooms and events from foreign governments, as well as licensing fees paid by foreign governments for his show “The Apprentice” and intellectual property rights from China.

The emoluments cases, which could eventually end up at the Supreme Court, appear to mark the first time federal judges have interpreted these clauses and applied their restrictions to a sitting president. The lawsuits were early arrivals to what is now a wide range of investigations and legal battles over the president’s business interests and what information he and his family will be required to provide about them.

While special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has wrapped up his inquiry on Russian interference in the 2016 election, a half-dozen House committees are seeking financial information related to the Trump Organization, its accountants and lenders. The president and his family filed suit late Monday in New York against their biggest lender and one of their banks, to try to stop them from complying with subpoenas from congressional committees.

Led by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the Democrats filed their suit last year asking the court to force Trump to stop accepting payments they consider violations of the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause. They say the provision was designed to guard against undue influence by foreign governments by barring any “emolument” — meaning a gift or payment — without prior approval from Congress.

Sullivan agreed, writing that dictionaries from the era of the Founding Fathers, as well as legal historians and government practice, point to the broader definition backed by the congressional Democrats that “ensures that the clause fulfills this purpose” of excluding the possibility of corruption and foreign influence. Sullivan described the record as “overwhelming evidence” from “over two hundred years of understanding the scope of the clause to be broad.”

“The Court is persuaded that the text and structure of the Clause, together with the other uses of the term in the Constitution, support plaintiffs’ definition of ‘Emolument’ rather than that of the President,” the judge wrote.

Although the president gave up day-to-day management of his businesses — including residential, office, hotel and golf properties in the United States, Europe and South America, he still owns them and can withdraw money from them at any time. A number of foreign embassies and leaders have stayed in or held events at Trump’s D.C. hotel.

Congressional Democrats and their attorneys from the nonprofit Constitutional Accountability Center have argued the payments from foreign governments received by Trump through his extensive enterprises ought to be considered emoluments under the Constitution and thus deemed illegal.

In a tweet, Blumenthal called the opinion a “tremendous victory & vindication of a commonsense reading of the Constitution.” He added that “the next step should be discovery & full disclosure.” Nadler called the ruling “an important milestone in seeking to hold the President accountable” for what he called ongoing violations of the clause.

Justice Department attorneys have argued the case should be dismissed, saying the payments Trump receives for market-rate transactions are not emoluments.

One government attorney described the issue as “a political dispute,” arguing in court that members of Congress had additional ways of pressuring the president to change his behavior, such as holding hearings, passing legislation or withholding funding.

“We will continue to defend the president in court,” Justice Department spokeswoman Kelly Laco said in statement Tuesday in response to the ruling.

A Trump Organization spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sullivan had already ruled in September that the legislators had legal standing to sue. He wrote the case ought to be allowed to continue in part because the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause “requires the President to ask Congress before accepting a prohibited emolument.”

But Sullivan still needed to rule on questions that include whether the Founding Fathers’ definition of “emolument” was broad enough to include a foreign embassy paying the president to rent a hotel ballroom.

In his ruling, Sullivan acknowledged concerns from Trump’s lawyers, who said allowing the case to move ahead would impose “significant burdens” on a sitting president.

But clarifying the definition of the clause, the judge wrote, should ensure the president can abide by his oath of office.

The president’s argument “regarding the ‘judgment’ and ‘planning’ needed to ensure compliance with the clause is beside the point,” the judge wrote. “It may take judgment and planning to comply with the clause, but he has no discretion as to whether or not to comply with it in the first instance.”

Sullivan did not rule Tuesday on the Justice Department’s previous request to make an immediate appeal of his finding on standing. He asked the president and congressional Democrats to file additional briefings before the end of May.

Recent academic research appears to bolster the plaintiffs’ position. During the past 150 years, the Justice Department issued more than 50 opinions interpreting the foreign emoluments clause as prohibiting federal officials from accepting any benefit from foreign governments, “even if the benefit is small in size, if it is part of an arms-length transaction, if the benefit is funneled through an intermediary, or if the official’s government responsibilities don’t affect the foreign government,” according to new research from Kathleen Clark, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

Under Trump, that changed, with the Justice Department deciding in 2017 to side with Trump’s personal lawyers in arguing that the clause permits the president and all federal officials to accept unlimited money from foreign governments “as long as the money comes through commercial transactions with an entity owned by the federal official,” Clark wrote.

In his opinion Tuesday, Sullivan quoted extensively from the similar ruling by U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messitte in the emoluments case against Trump in Maryland. Justice Department attorneys and the president’s personal lawyers have appealed the ruling from Messitte, who had allowed the attorneys general to begin issuing subpoenas. That case is narrowly focused on transactions involving Trump’s D.C. hotel.

But a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit appeared skeptical during a March 19 hearing that Trump is illegally profiting from his D.C. hotel. The appeals court did not say when it would issue a ruling.

 

[Audrey2]

On 4/30/2019 at 10:05 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Trump is so misogynistic and so tone deaf that I'm surprised he didn't serve them salads because he knows all girls are watching their figures.

[laPapessaGiovanna]

10 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

Trump is so misogynistic and so tone deaf that I'm surprised he didn't serve them salads because he knows all girls are watching their figures.

They told him they were athletes, he would never have thought females! /s

[fraurosena]

11 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

“There has never been and probably never will be a movement like this again,”

Please Rufus, make it so!

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Drala]

14 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Comey wrote an op-ed for the NYT about Dumpy: "James Comey: How Trump Co-opts Leaders Like Bill Barr"

  Reveal hidden contents

People have been asking me hard questions. What happened to the leaders in the Trump administration, especially the attorney general, Bill Barr, who I have said was due the benefit of the doubt?

How could Mr. Barr, a bright and accomplished lawyer, start channeling the president in using words like “no collusion” and F.B.I. “spying”? And downplaying acts of obstruction of justice as products of the president’s being “frustrated and angry,” something he would never say to justify the thousands of crimes prosecuted every day that are the product of frustration and anger?

How could he write and say things about the report by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, that were apparently so misleading that they prompted written protest from the special counsel himself?

How could Mr. Barr go before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday and downplay President Trump’s attempt to fire Mr. Mueller before he completed his work?

And how could Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, after the release of Mr. Mueller’s report that detailed Mr. Trump’s determined efforts to obstruct justice, give a speech quoting the president on the importance of the rule of law? Or on resigning, thank a president who relentlessly attacked both him and the Department of Justice he led for “the courtesy and humor you often display in our personal conversations”?

What happened to these people?

I don’t know for sure. People are complicated, so the answer is most likely complicated. But I have some idea from four months of working close to Mr. Trump and many more months of watching him shape others.

Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man.

But more often, proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing. I think that’s at least part of what we’ve seen with Bill Barr and Rod Rosenstein. Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr. Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.

It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged, as they did at our private dinner on Jan. 27, 2017, because he’s the president and he rarely stops talking. As a result, Mr. Trump pulls all of those present into a silent circle of assent.

Speaking rapid-fire with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, Mr. Trump makes everyone a co-conspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. I have felt it — this president building with his words a web of alternative reality and busily wrapping it around all of us in the room.

I must have agreed that he had the largest inauguration crowd in history because I didn’t challenge that. Everyone must agree that he has been treated very unfairly. The web building never stops.

From the private circle of assent, it moves to public displays of personal fealty at places like cabinet meetings. While the entire world is watching, you do what everyone else around the table does — you talk about how amazing the leader is and what an honor it is to be associated with him.

Sure, you notice that Mr. Mattis never actually praises the president, always speaking instead of the honor of representing the men and women of our military. But he’s a special case, right? Former Marine general and all. No way the rest of us could get away with that. So you praise, while the world watches, and the web gets tighter.

Next comes Mr. Trump attacking institutions and values you hold dear — things you have always said must be protected and which you criticized past leaders for not supporting strongly enough. Yet you are silent. Because, after all, what are you supposed to say? He’s the president of the United States.

You feel this happening. It bothers you, at least to some extent. But his outrageous conduct convinces you that you simply must stay, to preserve and protect the people and institutions and values you hold dear. Along with Republican members of Congress, you tell yourself you are too important for this nation to lose, especially now.

You can’t say this out loud — maybe not even to your family — but in a time of emergency, with the nation led by a deeply unethical person, this will be your contribution, your personal sacrifice for America. You are smarter than Donald Trump, and you are playing a long game for your country, so you can pull it off where lesser leaders have failed and gotten fired by tweet.

Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you make further compromises. You use his language, praise his leadership, tout his commitment to values.

And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.

I disagree with him that Barr and the Repugs are making a personal sacrifice for America. I think they are playing some nasty game.

I've been puzzled about Barr's motivations.  I tend to believe he bought into the Repug hero myth of "standing in the gap" to protect the government from an incompetent president, even if that is egotistical, savior complex BS.  Some pundits suggest Barr took on the AG position to defend the institution of the presidency (as opposed to defending the man Donald Trump).  Barr's notion that the president, as head of the Justice Dept, cannot by definition obstruct justice makes no allowance for potential abuse of authority.  It's like Barr sees the institution as having a character of its own, completely separate from the person who animates the office.  With that kind of thinking, he has no defense against Trump's malevolent narcissism.  What I liked about Comey's editorial is the way he describes how Trump distorts social reality and co-opts the agency of the otherwise well-intentioned public servants who serve him.   People who make the mistake of thinking that because they are smarter than Trump, they can somehow out-play him truly underestimate the power of a sociopathic personality.  

[fraurosena]

1 hour ago, Drala said:

I've been puzzled about Barr's motivations.  I tend to believe he bought into the Repug hero myth of "standing in the gap" to protect the government from an incompetent president, even if that is egotistical, savior complex BS.  Some pundits suggest Barr took on the AG position to defend the institution of the presidency (as opposed to defending the man Donald Trump).  Barr's notion that the president, as head of the Justice Dept, cannot by definition obstruct justice makes no allowance for potential abuse of authority.  It's like Barr sees the institution as having a character of its own, completely separate from the person who animates the office.  With that kind of thinking, he has no defense against Trump's malevolent narcissism.  What I liked about Comey's editorial is the way he describes how Trump distorts social reality and co-opts the agency of the otherwise well-intentioned public servants who serve him.   People who make the mistake of thinking that because they are smarter than Trump, they can somehow out-play him truly underestimate the power of a sociopathic personality.  

Bill Barr is indebted in some way to Oleg Deripaska. (I posted about this in the Bill Barr thread, if you want to know more). That is all the motivation he needs to do what he does. There is no other ulterior motive. Anyone in this administration or part of the GOP that goes out of their way to protect the presidunce is in some way or other indebted to the Russians. It is certainly not an indebtedness to Trump. Trump is no mastermind, however much he'd like to think so himself. He's as much a Russian tool as they are, if not more so.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump touts new faith-based protections for health care workers at National Day of Prayer ceremony"

Spoiler

President Trump on Thursday announced a new rule allowing health providers, insurers and employers to refuse to provide or pay for services such as abortion, sterilization or assisted suicide that they say violate their religious beliefs during a speech before faith leaders gathered for the National Day of Prayer.

Conservative groups who have raised religious liberty concerns around such services welcomed the rule, while LGBT and women’s groups warned it would lead to discrimination and drastically reduced services for groups already marginalized by the health system since providers might decline to offer certain treatments, or refuse to treat gay and transgender people altogether.

The rule represents Trump’s latest effort to highlight religious liberty claims when they come into conflict with issues like access to medical care.

It’s also the third year that the president has used the 77-year-old annual multi-faith observance to make announcements addressing concerns of Christian conservatives, who are a large part of his base. During his first year in office, he promised to make it easier for religious leaders to speak openly about politics. On Thursday, he said the Johnson Amendment, which prevents churches from endorsing political candidates, has been effectively eliminated, though it would take Congress to officially strike the amendment.

At the White House Rose Garden ceremony Thursday, Trump noted the three black churches that were burned in Louisiana, along with the bombings of churches in Sri Lanka, the attack on a mosque in New Zealand and the attack on synagogue in Pittsburgh last year.

“We will fight with all our strength and everything that we have in our bodies to defeat anti-Semitism, to end the attacks on the Jewish people and to conquer all forms of persecution, intolerance and hate,” he said. Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who lost his finger during a shooting at his synagogue last week in Poway, Calif., thanked Trump for “being, as they say in Yiddish, ‘a mensch par excellence.’”

The final rule regarding health care, issued Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services, explicitly mentions abortion, sterilization, assisted suicide and advance directives as issues, and says that individuals and entities would be allowed to refrain from having to provide, participate in, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for, such services.

Such “conscience protections,” as conservatives describe them, have become a flash point in culture war debates in recent decades. In a high-profile battle with the Obama administration, several religious institutions objected to HHS’s mandate that employers must cover employees’ contraception.

The rule — at 440 pages in length — broadly defines or redefines key terms in the law such as discrimination, referrals and what it means to assist in a procedure. It also meticulously lays out religious exemptions in detail both in terms of the types of workers that are covered and specific situation that might arise. It includes protections for medical students, people who prep patients for the operating rooms, and charitable groups alike.

Office of Civil Rights Director Roger Severino said that under the Obama administration OCR received an average of 1.25 conscience related complaints each year. However, in the last fiscal year there were 343, reflecting what he said is a great need for such protections.

The rule expands on the powers of HHS’s Office for Civil Rights — requiring health care entities to maintain records and report and cooperate with OCR requests. These new mechanisms, Severino said, will make sure “Congress’ protections are not just empty words on paper.”

There are 25 provisions passed by Congress protecting conscience rights in health care. HHS officials contend that existing protections for health care providers have “proven inadequate” and that the new rule ensures the agency will have access to the “full set of tools appropriate for enforcing the conscience protections passed by Congress.”

Since it was first proposed last year, the proposal has drawn widespread criticism from civil rights who say it will provide cover for discrimination.

“This is a vicious and underhanded attack on the health and lives of patients, particularly targeting women and LGBTQ individuals,” Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement.

The Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, said it is particularly troubled the rule “would expand the ability of powerful health care, educational and social services institutions to impose their values and agenda on society.”

“Freedom of religion is a fundamental American value and is already protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. But that freedom doesn’t give individuals and organizations the right to impose their beliefs on others, to block patients from receiving information and care, or to discriminate,” said Adam Sonfield, a senior policy manager.

But religious conservatives say such protections are needed in the face of state and federal laws and regulations that mandate certain services.

“No health care worker should ever be forced to choose between their practice or their faith,” said Ashley McGuire, a senior fellow at The Catholic Association. "That principle is enshrined in countless laws and regulations but has been violated for far too long.”

Under Barack Obama, HHS replaced a rule passed during the administration of George W. Bush that was interpreted as allowing medical workers to opt out of a broad range of medical services. Obama’s narrower version left in place long-standing federal protections for workers who object to performing abortions or sterilizations, and it kept the ability for workers to file complaints.

 

[Dandruff]

Can medical workers who are being interviewed be asked about services they wouldn't be willing to provide as part of their job?

I feel strongly that people should be allowed to die with the same comfort and dignity that animals are often afforded.

[fraurosena]

No collusion. A lot of aiding and abetting though.

[thread]

 

Here's the unroll version, with my comments in cursive brackets in some places:

Quote

BREAKING (CNN): Former DNI Clapper Says Trump Campaign "Aided and Abetted" Russians

This is what I've been arguing since 2017—and laid out in my 2018 book Proof of Collusion. Aiding and Abetting is a collusive crime, impeachable, and not an offense the Mueller Report considered.

1/ The CNN anchor responded to Clapper by trying to get him to say that he wasn't using "aiding in abetting" in the legal sense, though I have no idea why she had the confidence to insist on that correction. Clapper didn't withdraw the comment, and declined to get into the law. [There's a new and very conservative CEO at CNN that could well be the cause of her unwillingness to admit he was using the terminology in a legal sense]

2/ There's never been a serious conversation on whether Trump's conduct meets the definition of aiding and abetting, not in the Mueller Report and not anywhere else. David Corn, Jim Clapper, myself, and others have made the argument, and it's never been refuted on its own terms.

3/ The requirements for aiding and abetting are very different than for conspiracy, and the facts undergirding the allegation quite different as well. For instance, it has *nothing at all* to do with any allegation there was a Trump-IRA or Trump-GRU conspiracy *before the fact*.

4/ When the former Director of National Intelligence, who knows perfectly well what the phrase "aiding and abetting" means, makes that allegation on CNN, I've no idea why a journalist hearing that attempts to shut down the conversation rather than inquiring about legal standards. [Again, that conservative boss]

5/ Sorry for the autocorrect typo in Tweet #1; it is, as you saw in all the other tweets in this thread, "aiding and abetting."

Perhaps if we'd been having this conversation all along, as we should have been, my phone's autocorrect would've known what I was typing as I typed it.

6/ What I want now is a serious national conversation, conducted on major media and using extensive citations to all the public evidence we have about what Trump and his campaign did, on the *critical* question of whether Trump committed the federal felony of aiding and abetting.

7/ After Trump and Flynn were made aware of Russian attacks against the United States in an August 17, 2016 classified briefing, both men willfully engaged in acts to induce the continuation of the very crimes they had already been conclusively informed of. And that is *illegal*.

8/ Given that no one significant in media *ever* alleged a before-the-fact conspiracy between Donald Trump and the IRA or GRU, with respect to Trump-Russia contacts alone the word "conspiracy" should've been used approximately 5% as frequently as the phrase "aiding and abetting."

9/ There *was* a "conspiracy" involving pre-election collusion, but it was a conspiracy between the *leaders of several foreign nations* to illegally aid Trump's election. (That's what the word "conspiracy" in the title of the sequel to Proof of Collusion refers to, by the way.)

10/ As to Trump, the key terms were always these:

1. Bribery
2. Money Laundering
3. Aiding and Abetting
4. "Compromised"

You can see for yourself how often those terms (all about "collusion") appear in the Mueller Report, as opposed to references to a conspiracy no one alleged.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]