Trump 51: The Lame Duck a l‘Orange

[GreyhoundFan]

Because Twitler wants to hold as many superspreader events as possible: "White House planning a packed season of holiday parties"

Quote

The White House began the annual holiday party season on Monday afternoon, officials said, kicking off a spate of indoor holiday parties that commemorate various religious traditions over the season.

While many public health professionals have asked Americans not to congregate in large group settings and avoid travel over the holidays because of the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 266,000 Americans and infected 13 million more, the White House is expected to throw more than a dozen indoor parties, including a large congressional ball on Dec. 10, officials say.

The parties will be paid for by the Republican Party, a person with knowledge of the planning said, and will cost millions of dollars.

The president and the first lady are determined to have a final holiday season in the White House, officials said, and concerns about spiking cases and deaths across the country have not stopped the events. Many of the administration’s supporters have taken a skeptical view of the restrictions over the virus and are choosing to attend, officials said.

Early Tuesday, Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, said protocols will be taken to protect guests at the parties.

“This includes smaller guest lists, masks will be required and available, social distancing encouraged while on the White House grounds, and hand sanitizer stations throughout the State Floor. Guests will enjoy food individually plated by chefs at plexiglass-protected food stations. All passed beverages will be covered. All service staff will wear masks and gloves to comply with food safety guidelines. Attending the parties will be a very personal choice,” Grisham said.

The events will include more than 50 people and could risk the health of White House staff and others who work the parties — along with contributing to a rise in coronavirus cases during an especially grim stretch of the pandemic. Most guests will not be tested in advance, an official said.

Across Washington, many trade associations, groups and other political entities are not having a holiday party this year, because of concerns about spreading the deadly virus. Millions of families across the country have also canceled their plans to gather together in large groups.

One White House ally said he had been invited to two parties already, while another said a formal invitation included no guidance on masks or social distancing. The events celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah and other religious holidays, and the invitees include donors, lawmakers, senior staffers on Capitol Hill, family members of White House aides, and prominent conservative supporters. The president and first lady Melania Trump usually make an appearance at such events, officials said.

The parties are a bipartisan annual tradition, and many guests residing outside Washington visit the city for the fetes. At least two White House allies from outside Washington said they’d been invited to parties this year. There is considerable interest among Republicans on Capitol Hill in attending the parties, a senior Republican aide said.

Some of the events are tours, while others are formal receptions with food and drink offerings. There will be two parties a day on some days, officials said.

Many of the guests in the White House were wearing masks on Monday, officials said, but some were not.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says indoor gatherings pose more risks than outdoor congregations, and “gatherings with more people pose more risk than gatherings with fewer people.” But the CDC does not have a limit on the number of attendees for gatherings.

Still, the administration’s leading scientists have asked Americans to be particularly careful over the holiday season. Anthony S. Fauci, the administration’s leading epidemiologist, warned about a rising surge in cases on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday due to holiday events.

“What we expect, unfortunately, as we go for the next couple of weeks into December, is that we might see a surge superimposed on the surge we are already in,” Fauci said. “I don’t want to frighten people, except to say it is not too late to do something about this.”

Fauci also floated some additional restrictions he said the country might have to consider. “We are going to have to make decisions as a nation, state, city and family that we are in a very difficult time, and we’re going to have to do the kinds of restrictions of things we would have liked to have done, particularly in this holiday season, because we’re entering into what’s really a precarious situation,” he said.

Fauci and other public health officials have touted a coming vaccine to encourage people to be careful this holiday season.

Trump has said he would oppose restrictions such as a shutdown and has not resisted attending large events, even after contracting the virus himself.

A number of events at the White House have previously been linked to coronavirus outbreaks, including a ceremony for Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination and an election night party. Besides the president, dozens of White House aides, including the chief of staff, the national security adviser and the press secretary, have contracted the virus.

Aides say the handling of the virus is one of the primary reasons Trump lost the election.

 

[Howl]

On 11/30/2020 at 3:26 PM, fraurosena said:

Federal Judge Advances Lawsuit Accusing Felix Sater of Laundering Loot Through Trump Properties

This is a pretty big deal.  Sater is a weird seedy but powerful character who spent some time in the big house for slashing a man with a broken beer bottle in a bar fight.  He's has been lurking in the background of everything, especially Russian connections.  He's committed major  financial crimes  to the max and never got charged because apparently he was (is?) a valuable government asset, although it sounds as though his shelf life in that regard has expired. 

Relative to the firehose of lies, John Brennan said today that the Trump administration has now surpassed Russia as a source of destabilizing disinformation. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Interesting info: "What the Trump family’s new political committees can and can’t do"

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One of the richest political action committees in the country is under the control of someone who will soon not be an elected official at all.

President Trump’s Save America PAC will be one of the primary beneficiaries of his campaign’s effort to wring every possible dollar out of his futile effort to overturn the results of the presidential contest. That effort generated $150 million in contributions over the course of November, more than Trump’s joint fundraising committee with the Republican National Committee raised in the second quarter of 2020. Not all that money goes to the Save America PAC, but a large chunk of it will.

The president isn’t the only Trump who appears to be exploring the boundaries of campaign fundraising. Aides to his son Donald Trump Jr. have formed a political action committee called Save the U.S. Senate PAC that is focused on the runoff elections in Georgia in early January. It will produce ads starring Trump Jr. that aim to boost turnout for the contests.

If you are not intimately familiar with the nuances of federal election law, you may be curious how money can be raised into these committees and how it can be spent. To explain, we reached out to Lawrence Noble, former general counsel to the Federal Election Commission and adjunct professor at American University’s Washington College of Law.

Save America PAC

What it can receive: Contributions from individuals or other committees of up to $5,000 per year.

What it can spend: The PAC can make contributions of $5,000 per year to other campaign committees — but is otherwise largely unlimited in how it spends what it has received.

Trump’s Save America PAC is a leadership PAC, a type of committee formed by current or former elected officials. Many prominent members of Congress, past and current, have similar committees, allowing them to take contributions that can be used to contribute to other candidates or to fund political activity.

Or, really, to fund basically anything. The money in the Save America PAC, unlike money contributed to a standard campaign committee, can be used to benefit Trump in innumerable ways. Memberships at golf clubs. Travel. Rallies. Even payments directly to Trump himself, as long as he declares it as income.

“With a candidate committee, there is a personal-use prohibition,” Noble explained. “So they cannot use money in a candidate committee for anyone’s personal use: They can’t pay exorbitant salaries, they can’t give gifts to people. If you’re talking about a leadership PAC or an independent expenditure PAC” — more on that in a bit — “there’s no prohibition on how they use the money.”

One restriction is that Trump can’t use all of that money to pay off the debt incurred by his actual presidential campaign. He can only give $5,000 to that campaign committee, same as any other. Given that the campaign has been so energetic about fundraising for the leadership PAC, either Save America has to pay the campaign for the cost of its email list or it is receiving a non-monetary contribution from Trump’s campaign itself that both entities would need to declare.

The goal here is to allow people like, say, former House speaker John A. Boehner to stay in the mix, raising some money to jet around and contribute to his old allies. But because of the relatively spare limitations imposed on such committees, there’s a lot of leeway in how the controlling candidate can use the money.

Donors to the committee, of course, probably don’t know any of this. Yes, there’s some fine print once you get to the contribution page explaining that the money given will go to Save America up to a certain point, but the impression one gets from the campaign’s voluminous emails is that the money will go to Trump’s dubious efforts to wrench a second term from the jaws of electoral defeat.

To some extent, it could. Rudolph W. Giuliani, for example, who serves as Trump’s personal attorney, occupies some nebulously defined space between Trump the individual, Trump the candidate and Trump’s actual campaign. Giuliani’s work directly for the campaign, like representing it in court, would have to be paid by the campaign. (According to the New York Times, he requested $20,000 a day for his efforts.) Other appearances, like the one Giuliani made Monday in Arizona, might be on Save America’s dime, depending on the role he’s playing. It’s all murky, probably delineated in documents drafted by lawyers who know where the lines are drawn and how pliable they happen to be.

Save the U.S. Senate PAC

What it can receive: Unlimited contributions from nearly anyone, including businesses (which seems likely) and labor unions (which doesn’t). It cannot take money from foreign nationals, however.

What it can spend: As much as it wants on whatever it wants, as long as it isn’t coordinating with a campaign committee or subsidizing campaign expenses, including by contributing to the campaign.

The PAC started by Trump Jr.’s aides — presumably with his blessing or input — has fewer boundaries on what it receives and slightly more on what it spends.

Save the U.S. Senate PAC can be given millions of dollars by corporations or individuals that are then spent on “independent expenditures.” The key word there is “independent”: The money can’t be spent in coordination with a political campaign.

The reason should be obvious. If the PAC could raise millions of dollars with the stroke of a pen and then be told by a campaign where to spend it, there would be no use in regulating how campaigns raise and spend money. They’d simply find big donors to give to IE PACs and then tell them how best to use it.

So when the Trump Jr. PAC hits the ground in Georgia, it can’t coordinate with the campaigns of the Republican Senate candidates or help cover the campaigns’ costs. It can’t, for example, pay 80 percent of the salary of a staffer for a candidate, allowing the campaign to pay one-fifth of what it would normally.

What it can do, though, is spend money on anything else. Noble’s explanation of how leadership PACs are unburdened by personal-use prohibitions applies here, too.

This is interesting to consider in the context of Kimberly Guilfoyle, Trump Jr.’s girlfriend. During the campaign, the Trump campaign was accused of hiding significant spending by passing it through companies operated by Brad Parscale, then Trump’s campaign manager. That reportedly included a salary for Guilfoyle, who was representing the campaign at events. With the creation of the Save the U.S. Senate, Guilfoyle could simply be paid directly by the PAC for the work she does — or for doing nothing. So, too, could Trump Jr. or the aides that set it up.

Again, there are a lot of ways in which things could get wonky. Political action committees are usually big, complicated endeavors that demand careful attention from experts to avoid crossing legal lines. But they were created under the assumption that they would be used in the way the creators envisioned: by good-faith political actors looking solely to bolster their political voice.

That’s not necessarily a fair assumption about what Trump plans to do.

“The problem with figuring all of this out is that it doesn’t appear that they’re actually following any strategic plan that fits within the campaign finance laws,” Noble explained. “I always feel like you’re chasing them, trying to figure out exactly what they’re doing and how it fits together.”

What has obviously happened so far is Trump and his team have figured out a way to parlay his base’s concerns about the election — concerns Trump has been hyping for months — into a well-stocked bank account with few limitations on how it is used.

 

[Not that josh's mom]

Holding a launch for his 2024 campaign during Biden's inauguration?  Just when I think he can't get worse.

[Ozlsn]

8 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

The events will include more than 50 people and could risk the health of White House staff and others who work the parties

Do staff have any legal recourse if they get sick in unsafe working conditions?

[47of74]

Yeah I’ve got some ideas 

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Although President Donald Trump hasn’t announced plans to build his library, presidential historian Michael Beschloss decided to ask Twitter followers where it should go  

 

Of course Twitterverse got a hold of this and has been providing helpful suggestions. 

[fraurosena]

12 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Interesting info: "What the Trump family’s new political committees can and can’t do"

 

How is this not the perfect set up for some money laundering and other shady financial shenanigans? They can receive whatever they want from whoever they want and spend it on whatever they want.

[insert expletives of your choice here]

[AmazonGrace]

This is what evil looks like.

 

Trump is not going to be happy until there is a civil war on his behalf.

[Shrubbery]

5 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

Trump is not going to be happy until there is a civil war on his behalf.

Yes, because that would mean he‘s relevant. And (in)famous. I guess to him having everything go up in flames is preferable to ending up in obscurity.

Also, dontcha know, it would be the bigliest civil war ever!

[Howl]

1 hour ago, Shrubbery said:

Also, dontcha know, it would be the bigliest civil war ever!

He'd have a tailor make up a generalissimo uniform with fringe-y epaulets so he could parade around and review the "troops." 

[47of74]

Yahoo asked Where is the orange fuck knob gonna live after Jan 20? 

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On Jan. 20, President-elect Joe Biden will move into the White House — and that means President Trump is going to have to find somewhere else to live. Since he changed his legal address from Trump Tower in New York City to his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., some have assumed that’s where he’ll go after leaving Washington.

He’s voted from that address in the most recent Florida primary and general election. Construction work and renovations are reportedly being done to expand the living quarters. And ABC News reported last week that members of his Secret Service detail have been asked if they’d like to relocate to the area.

There’s just one problem: Per an agreement with the town of Palm Beach, no one is actually allowed to live at Mar-a-Lago full time. Not even Donald Trump.

But that deal came with rules set forth by the town of Palm Beach, which Trump agreed to in a written contract. One of those rules is that none of its nearly 500 members is allowed to stay there for more than seven days at a time, or more than 21 days in a single calendar year.

If there was any justice it would be here...

 

[Cartmann99]

2 hours ago, 47of74 said:

On Jan. 20, President-elect Joe Biden will move into the White House — and that means President Trump is going to have to find somewhere else to live. Since he changed his legal address from Trump Tower in New York City to his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., some have assumed that’s where he’ll go after leaving Washington.

Gretchen Wilson has a song about closing time at a bar called "You Don't Have To Go Home."

Spoiler

 

The chorus:

You don't have to go home
But you can't stay here
You can walk, you can crawl
Get carried off by the law
But you will get the hell out of here
You don't have to go home
You don't have to go home
But you can't stay here

[47of74]

What a pissy little man baby

Quote

Donald Trump does not intend to go to Joe Biden’s inauguration as president in January, according to a report.

And the outgoing president will not even invite Mr Biden and Dr Jill Biden to the White House ahead of the 20 January event, according to NBCNews.

Mr Trump was invited to the White House by then president Barack Obama after his surprise defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

And Mr Trump could even announce his intention to run for the White House again in 2024 on inauguration day, according to Ken Dilanian of NBC News.

 Of course it's probably a good thing that he's not going to be there.  Less chance of him disrupting the event and maybe our M$M will grow a fucking spine and not cover his antics on that day.

[Cartmann99]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Becky]

7 hours ago, 47of74 said:

What a pissy little man baby

 Of course it's probably a good thing that he's not going to be there.  Less chance of him disrupting the event and maybe our M$M will grow a fucking spine and not cover his antics on that day.

AGREED.  The press should totally black out anything having to do with Donald Trump on January 20th.  Deny him his "ratings" and consign him to invisibility for the rest of his life.  

[AmazonGrace]

5 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

 

So if it's the last chance ever he's never going to get a second term? 

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

5 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

 

This stupid fucker.  If they terminated 230 FJ would have to shut down so can you imagine the big platforms like FB, Reddit, and Twitter.  

He just wants to sue Twitter for allowing #DiaperDon to trend.  

[onekidanddone]

10 minutes ago, HerNameIsBuffy said:

This stupid fucker.  If they terminated 230 FJ would have to shut down so can you imagine the big platforms like FB, Reddit, and Twitter.  

He just wants to sue Twitter for allowing #DiaperDon to trend.  

I’d never use the hash tag #diaperdon. I could use #diaperdon but I won’t use #diaperdon because #diaperdon is a fake hashtag implanted in Bill Gates’s vaccine by Hugo Chavez and Kraken Clinton. 
#diaperdon is fake news. #diaperdon is a product of George Soros. So in conclusion #diaperdon is #diaperdon. Okay?

Signed #diaperdon

[AmazonGrace]

 

[HerNameIsBuffy]

Was it discussed here that as of a few weeks ago special ops of the military now report directly to acting secretary of defense Chris Miller.  The Trump loyalist he just put into place after firing the SOD?

https://www.defense.gov/Explore/News/Article/Article/2419154/special-operations-leader-to-report-directly-to-acting-defense-secretary/

 

Apparently this happened November 17th but I hadn't heard.  

[AmazonGrace]

 

He's going to keep tantruming because $$$

[Cartmann99]

[Howl]

On 12/4/2020 at 2:40 PM, HerNameIsBuffy said:

Was it discussed here that as of a few weeks ago special ops of the military now report directly to acting secretary of defense Chris Miller.  The Trump loyalist he just put into place after firing the SOD?

There's huge crazy going on at the Pentagon, with wholesale replacements putting unqualified Trump loyalists in place at high levels.   Nine people on the Pentagon's Business Board were replaced with loyalists last week.  Word on the tweet, rumors really at this point, is that contracts are being let to Erik Prince affiliated entities in north Africa. 

Is Trump putting loyalists in place at the Pentagon to make a martial law end run around the election?  I really had thought that he'd go to Mar a Largo at Thanksgiving and not come back to DC.  I think I'm totally wrong -- Trump is desperate, absolutely desperate; he was afraid to leave DC and risk lose control. 

The count down to electoral college confirmation Dec. 14 has begun -- who the hell knows what will happen.  Trump called Gov. Kemp of GA and wanted him to call a special session of the GA legislature to determine their own slate of (Trump friendly) electors, putting Trump deep in WTAF territory, also blatant election interference.