UN votes to condemn the rich asshole's Jerusalem decision
BY MAX GREENWOOD - 12/21/17 12:17 PM EST
The United Nations on Thursday delivered a stinging rebuke of President the rich asshole's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, casting an overwhelming vote condemning the move and calling on the U.S. to withdraw the decision.
The final vote count in favor of the resolution was 128. Nine countries opposed the resolution while 35 abstained.
The resolution — essentially a formal statement of a U.N. opinion — is not legally binding. But it represents a condemnation of the rich asshole's decision and exerts political pressure on him to reverse the move.
Some of the United States' closest allies moved to condemn the decision. The United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan, among others, voted in favor of the resolution. Other allies, such as Canada, Mexico and Australia, abstained.
In the run-up to the General Assembly vote, the rich asshole and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley sought to warn countries against opposing the rich asshole administration's Jerusalem decision.
“The United States will remember this day in which it was singled out in this assembly for the very act of exercising our right as a sovereign nation,” Haley said ahead of the vote. “We will remember it when, once again, we are called up to make the world’s largest contribution to the U.N., and we will remember it when many countries come calling on us to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit.”
Haley sent a letter to members of the international body this week, warning that the rich asshole had instructed her to take stock of the countries that voted in favor of the resolution. The president followed up on that warning on Wednesday, suggesting at a Cabinet meeting that the U.S. could cut off foreign aid for countries that opposed the U.S. in the vote.
"They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars, and then they vote against us," the rich asshole said. "Well, we're watching those votes. Let them vote against us, we’ll save a lot. We don't care."
The General Assembly vote came days after the U.S. vetoed a similar resolution in the U.N. Security Council. The panel's other 14 members voted in favor of that measure, a move that Haley called an "insult" to the U.S.
Shortly after the Security Council vote, Arab and Muslim leaders at the U.N. called for an emergency special session of the General Assembly to discuss America's Jerusalem decision.
In a defiant speech ahead of the General Assembly vote on Thursday, Riyad al-Maliki, the Palestinian foreign affairs minister, cast the rich asshole administration’s Jerusalem decision as an affront to regional peace and security that has isolated the U.S. from the international community.
“Does the United States not wonder why it stands isolated in this position?” he asked.
In a blunt response, Haley warned the international body that the U.S. would remember the betrayal by the U.N., and that the vote would do nothing to affect the rich asshole administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move its embassy there.
“America will put our embassy in Jerusalem. That is what the American people want us to do, and it is the right thing to do,” she said ahead of the vote. “No vote in the United Nations will make any difference on that. But this vote will make a difference in how Americans view the U.N.”
the rich asshole’s decision earlier this month to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was widely condemned by other world leaders, particularly in Arab and Muslim-majority countries, who warned that the move threatened to undermine stability in the region.
The move also threatened to derail future peace talks between Israelis and the Palestinians, and potentially diminished Washington’s role in them.
the rich asshole has vowed to broker negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians, which he has called the “ultimate deal.” But Arab and Muslim leaders have said his Jerusalem decision essentially disqualifies the U.S. from being the broker of such peace talks.
Israel has long considered Jerusalem its capital, and the city is the country’s seat of government. The Palestinians have aspired for decades to establish the capital of a future Palestinian state in the city’s eastern sector.
The U.S. and the international community have historically remained neutral on the matter and said the status of Jerusalem would have to be resolved in peace talks.
In making his announcement on Jerusalem earlier this month, the rich asshole cautioned against perceiving the move as the U.S. taking a side on boundaries in peace negotiations and said the U.S. would still support a two-state solution.
— This story was updated at 1:15 p.m.
Intel experts agree with James Clapper: Putin is handling the rich asshole as a Russian asset
Jeff Stein
Posted with permission from Newsweek
Last May, a top White House national security official met in Washington with senior Russian officials and handed over details of a secret operation Israel had shared with its U.S. counterparts. The meeting shocked veteran U.S. counterspies. The American official was not arrested, and he continues to work in the White House today, albeit under close scrutiny.
That official, of course, was Donald Trump. The president’s Oval Office meeting with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and its then-ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak—which only Russian photographers were permitted to record—sparked a media brushfire that was quickly overtaken by more revelations of secret contacts between Trump associates and Kremlin agents. But the incident was not forgotten by American and Israeli security officials, or by longtime foreign intelligence allies of the U.S., who now wonder if the president can be trusted to protect their most guarded secrets.
For over a year, the question of collusion has driven various investigations into what’s become known as Russiagate. Special counsel Robert Mueller has been pursuing questions of whether Team Trump, which included the president’s son Donald Jr. and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, actively coordinated the Trump campaign with the Kremlin to hurt Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. That suspicion was bad enough, but now a far more grim consensus is developing in the topmost circles of the U.S. national security establishment: The president has become a pawn of America’s adversary, Russian President Vladimir Putin. It’s a nightmare scenario even the writers of House of Cards would have discarded as implausible.
Until now. In a December 18 interview on CNN, retired Air Force Lieutenant General James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, virtually called Trump a Putin puppet. The Russian president, Clapper noted, is a former KGB “case officer,” or spy recruiter, who "knows how to handle an asset, and that's what he's doing with the president. That’s the appearance to me." (Pressed to clarify his “asset” comment, Clapper said, “I’m saying this figuratively.”)
“Wow,“ tweeted former CIA Russian hand John Sipher. “The rest of us try to find other clever ways to say the same thing. Good on him for having the courage to call out Putin's behavior. Our president shouldn't have fallen for it.”
Veteran spy handlers have judged Trump an easy mark for Putin, who spent years in the KGB sizing up and exploiting a target’s vulnerabilities. They note how easily he falls for praise, as when Putin thanked him and the CIA for helping him thwart a bomb attack plot in St. Petersburg. “POTUS is a [spy] handlers' dream,” Asha Rangappa, a former special agent in the FBI’s counterintelligence division, said. “He responds, without fail, to praise and flattery and telegraphs his day-to-day thoughts on Twitter. Likewise, said Harry “Skip” Brandon, a former FBI deputy assistant director of national security and counterterrorism. “He often very publicly states he goes by his instincts. If that is accurate, he may be the ultimate unwitting asset of Russia.”
Related: Pressure from Trump on Russia may be bending CIA, former analysts say
And so on. The steady drip of revelations emerging from multiple Trump investigations—his business deals with Russian investors, his associates’ many undeclared meetings with Kremlin agents, his resistance to accepting evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and his indiscretion with Israeli intelligence—draws a far darker picture.
Some veteran intelligence operators think it’s well past time to shift the narrative on Trump’s disturbing affinity for Putin, which the president insists is innocent and good for world peace. “Everyone continues to dance around a clear assessment of what's going on,” says Glenn Carle, a former CIA national intelligence officer responsible for evaluating foreign threats. “My assessment,” he tells Newsweek, “is that Trump is actually working directly for the Russians.”
The Israelis can’t say they weren’t warned. In January 2017, a few weeks before Trump’s inauguration, top U.S. intelligence officials welcomed a delegation of their Israeli counterparts to Washington. The meeting proceeded uneventfully, according to veteran Israeli intelligence journalist Ronen Bergman, although the Americans vented their dismay over a president who had loudly disparaged their past work. “Just as their meeting was wrapping up,“ according to Bergman and a later report in Vanity Fair, “an American spymaster solemnly announced there was one more thing: [that] they believed that Putin had ‘leverages of pressure’ over Trump.” His advice: “Be careful.“
Five months later, the Israelis came to rue what they had shared with Trump’s new CIA director, former Republican Representative Mike Pompeo. They were astonished to read media reports that Trump had told the Russian foreign minister and ambassador about their top secret operation in Syria to penetrate a cell of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS). U.S. intelligence experts assumed the Russians had shared the information with their allies in Iran, Israel’s mortal enemy .
Clapper, now writing a book about his intelligence career, told Newsweek by email that “the Israelis were/are upset about it, since it proves once again we can’t be trusted to keep the secrets we share with them.”
Some of America’s closest intelligence allies were also upset by Trump’s leak, a top former national security official tells Newsweek, on the condition he not be identified when discussing such sensitive issues. “I hear the Brits are reluctant to share” intelligence on Russian subversion, he says, “not as much for security reasons as for political—they don’t wish to get crosswise with [Trump].”
Another analyst, Joseph Fitsanakis, co-editor of the Intel News blog, said relations between the U.K.’s spy chiefs and the Trump administration “are extremely tense.” During the 2016 campaign, he recalled, Trump riled London with an unsubstantiated claim that its version of the National Security Agency, the Government Communication Headquarters (better known as GCHQ), had eavesdropped on his communications. He refused to apologize.
Lower-level U.S. and foreign intelligence officials customarily find ways to deal with such high-level friction. But Trump’s repeated attacks on NATO have not only frustrated Washington’s closest allies but also raised questions as to whether the president has been duped into facilitating Putin’s long-range objective of undermining the European Union. “Some Western European colleagues are saying that sharing has been strictly limited to [counterterrorism] and some maritime [intelligence],” Fitsanakis says. “There's almost no sharing on Russia.”
How Trump’s attacks on “radical Islamic terrorism” will play out in the CIA’s relations with the spy services of Arab, African and Asian nations is not known. Historically, Langley has relied on such local partners to share its insights and intelligence on militant groups, —sometimes to its regret when double agents wormed their way into their ranks.
Israeli officials uncharacteristically howled publicly about Trump’s “betrayal” in May and have only recently calmed down. Still, their anger could be detected months later, when a former Mossad deputy director, Ram Ben Barak, did an interview with The Cipher Brief’s Kim Dozier. “The rule is, if I give you information to help you, you do not give this information to another side without my permission,” Ben Barak said. “I am sure he will not do it again because, you know, it hurts the relationship.”
But all signs point to Trump not caring who gets hurt if it serves his interests—and vanity. Despite constant evidence of Russian interference throughout the summer of 2016, culminating in a January report by Clapper and Jeh Johnson, his Department of Homeland Security counterpart, saying the Kremlin had worked to put Trump in office, the president evidently permitted his incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, to intrigue with the Russians over lifting sanctions—and apparently didn't care enough to fire him after learning Flynn had lied about it to the FBI. Flynn’s later indictment and plea deal, Trump tweeted, was “a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!"
All this was going on, despite an explicit warning from the FBI to Trump soon after his nomination about potential espionage threats from Russia, according to NBC News. FBI agents also visited longtime Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks only days after the inauguration, saying that certain named Russian agents were trying to penetrate the new administration. Hicks, who says she forwarded the warning to White House counsel Donald McGahn, has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
Continually jousting with Trump over his denial that any of this amounted to “collusion” with the Russians is a distraction, say veteran intelligence hands. It amounts to looking for an explicit quid pro quo that may not exist. It misses, moreover, “what is right under our noses,” wrote Rangappa, the former FBI counterintelligence agent, along with Sipher, the onetime CIA Moscow station chief, and Alex Finley, a former CIA operations officer, in a joint piece for the Just Security website. “There is no question that Russia made multiple, unprecedented attempts to penetrate a U.S. presidential campaign, that its approaches were not rebuffed, and that its contacts were sensitive enough that everyone, to a person, has concealed them.
“These facts might never be adjudicated inside a courtroom,” they added. “They may not even be illegal—but they present a clear and present national security threat that we cannot ignore.
That official, of course, was Donald Trump. The president’s Oval Office meeting with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and its then-ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak—which only Russian photographers were permitted to record—sparked a media brushfire that was quickly overtaken by more revelations of secret contacts between Trump associates and Kremlin agents. But the incident was not forgotten by American and Israeli security officials, or by longtime foreign intelligence allies of the U.S., who now wonder if the president can be trusted to protect their most guarded secrets.
For over a year, the question of collusion has driven various investigations into what’s become known as Russiagate. Special counsel Robert Mueller has been pursuing questions of whether Team Trump, which included the president’s son Donald Jr. and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, actively coordinated the Trump campaign with the Kremlin to hurt Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. That suspicion was bad enough, but now a far more grim consensus is developing in the topmost circles of the U.S. national security establishment: The president has become a pawn of America’s adversary, Russian President Vladimir Putin. It’s a nightmare scenario even the writers of House of Cards would have discarded as implausible.
Until now. In a December 18 interview on CNN, retired Air Force Lieutenant General James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, virtually called Trump a Putin puppet. The Russian president, Clapper noted, is a former KGB “case officer,” or spy recruiter, who "knows how to handle an asset, and that's what he's doing with the president. That’s the appearance to me." (Pressed to clarify his “asset” comment, Clapper said, “I’m saying this figuratively.”)
“Wow,“ tweeted former CIA Russian hand John Sipher. “The rest of us try to find other clever ways to say the same thing. Good on him for having the courage to call out Putin's behavior. Our president shouldn't have fallen for it.”
Veteran spy handlers have judged Trump an easy mark for Putin, who spent years in the KGB sizing up and exploiting a target’s vulnerabilities. They note how easily he falls for praise, as when Putin thanked him and the CIA for helping him thwart a bomb attack plot in St. Petersburg. “POTUS is a [spy] handlers' dream,” Asha Rangappa, a former special agent in the FBI’s counterintelligence division, said. “He responds, without fail, to praise and flattery and telegraphs his day-to-day thoughts on Twitter. Likewise, said Harry “Skip” Brandon, a former FBI deputy assistant director of national security and counterterrorism. “He often very publicly states he goes by his instincts. If that is accurate, he may be the ultimate unwitting asset of Russia.”
Related: Pressure from Trump on Russia may be bending CIA, former analysts say
And so on. The steady drip of revelations emerging from multiple Trump investigations—his business deals with Russian investors, his associates’ many undeclared meetings with Kremlin agents, his resistance to accepting evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and his indiscretion with Israeli intelligence—draws a far darker picture.
Some veteran intelligence operators think it’s well past time to shift the narrative on Trump’s disturbing affinity for Putin, which the president insists is innocent and good for world peace. “Everyone continues to dance around a clear assessment of what's going on,” says Glenn Carle, a former CIA national intelligence officer responsible for evaluating foreign threats. “My assessment,” he tells Newsweek, “is that Trump is actually working directly for the Russians.”
The Israelis can’t say they weren’t warned. In January 2017, a few weeks before Trump’s inauguration, top U.S. intelligence officials welcomed a delegation of their Israeli counterparts to Washington. The meeting proceeded uneventfully, according to veteran Israeli intelligence journalist Ronen Bergman, although the Americans vented their dismay over a president who had loudly disparaged their past work. “Just as their meeting was wrapping up,“ according to Bergman and a later report in Vanity Fair, “an American spymaster solemnly announced there was one more thing: [that] they believed that Putin had ‘leverages of pressure’ over Trump.” His advice: “Be careful.“
Five months later, the Israelis came to rue what they had shared with Trump’s new CIA director, former Republican Representative Mike Pompeo. They were astonished to read media reports that Trump had told the Russian foreign minister and ambassador about their top secret operation in Syria to penetrate a cell of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS). U.S. intelligence experts assumed the Russians had shared the information with their allies in Iran, Israel’s mortal enemy .
Clapper, now writing a book about his intelligence career, told Newsweek by email that “the Israelis were/are upset about it, since it proves once again we can’t be trusted to keep the secrets we share with them.”
Some of America’s closest intelligence allies were also upset by Trump’s leak, a top former national security official tells Newsweek, on the condition he not be identified when discussing such sensitive issues. “I hear the Brits are reluctant to share” intelligence on Russian subversion, he says, “not as much for security reasons as for political—they don’t wish to get crosswise with [Trump].”
Another analyst, Joseph Fitsanakis, co-editor of the Intel News blog, said relations between the U.K.’s spy chiefs and the Trump administration “are extremely tense.” During the 2016 campaign, he recalled, Trump riled London with an unsubstantiated claim that its version of the National Security Agency, the Government Communication Headquarters (better known as GCHQ), had eavesdropped on his communications. He refused to apologize.
Lower-level U.S. and foreign intelligence officials customarily find ways to deal with such high-level friction. But Trump’s repeated attacks on NATO have not only frustrated Washington’s closest allies but also raised questions as to whether the president has been duped into facilitating Putin’s long-range objective of undermining the European Union. “Some Western European colleagues are saying that sharing has been strictly limited to [counterterrorism] and some maritime [intelligence],” Fitsanakis says. “There's almost no sharing on Russia.”
How Trump’s attacks on “radical Islamic terrorism” will play out in the CIA’s relations with the spy services of Arab, African and Asian nations is not known. Historically, Langley has relied on such local partners to share its insights and intelligence on militant groups, —sometimes to its regret when double agents wormed their way into their ranks.
Israeli officials uncharacteristically howled publicly about Trump’s “betrayal” in May and have only recently calmed down. Still, their anger could be detected months later, when a former Mossad deputy director, Ram Ben Barak, did an interview with The Cipher Brief’s Kim Dozier. “The rule is, if I give you information to help you, you do not give this information to another side without my permission,” Ben Barak said. “I am sure he will not do it again because, you know, it hurts the relationship.”
But all signs point to Trump not caring who gets hurt if it serves his interests—and vanity. Despite constant evidence of Russian interference throughout the summer of 2016, culminating in a January report by Clapper and Jeh Johnson, his Department of Homeland Security counterpart, saying the Kremlin had worked to put Trump in office, the president evidently permitted his incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, to intrigue with the Russians over lifting sanctions—and apparently didn't care enough to fire him after learning Flynn had lied about it to the FBI. Flynn’s later indictment and plea deal, Trump tweeted, was “a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!"
All this was going on, despite an explicit warning from the FBI to Trump soon after his nomination about potential espionage threats from Russia, according to NBC News. FBI agents also visited longtime Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks only days after the inauguration, saying that certain named Russian agents were trying to penetrate the new administration. Hicks, who says she forwarded the warning to White House counsel Donald McGahn, has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
Continually jousting with Trump over his denial that any of this amounted to “collusion” with the Russians is a distraction, say veteran intelligence hands. It amounts to looking for an explicit quid pro quo that may not exist. It misses, moreover, “what is right under our noses,” wrote Rangappa, the former FBI counterintelligence agent, along with Sipher, the onetime CIA Moscow station chief, and Alex Finley, a former CIA operations officer, in a joint piece for the Just Security website. “There is no question that Russia made multiple, unprecedented attempts to penetrate a U.S. presidential campaign, that its approaches were not rebuffed, and that its contacts were sensitive enough that everyone, to a person, has concealed them.
“These facts might never be adjudicated inside a courtroom,” they added. “They may not even be illegal—but they present a clear and present national security threat that we cannot ignore.
Nicolle Wallace: ‘I can’t get my brain around’ GOP attacks on ‘Republican-led law enforcement agencies’
'Deadline: White House' host Nicolle Wallace (Screen capture)
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Former communications director to President George W. Bush’s White House Nicolle Wallace expressed her incredulity on Thursday that Republicans are now attacking “Republican-led law enforcement agencies” in their zeal to protect President some rich asshole from the Russia probe by discrediting the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller.
“I can’t get my brain around the insurrection in the Republican party against Republican-led law enforcement agencies,” she said. “I can’t shove the round pegs into the square boxes.”
“And unlike you,” Wallace said, pointing to John Podhoretz, “it’s driving me crazy.”
Watch the video, embedded below:
‘The world is laughing at us’: Ex-CIA officer slams the rich asshole and Haley’s UN threat as ‘diplomatic prostitution’
some rich asshole (Screengrab) and Nikki Haley (Twitter)
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CNN counterterrorism analyst Phil Mudd on Thursday slammed some rich asshole and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley over the administration’s threat to withhold aid funding from the United Nations.
The UN General Assembly voted Thursday to condemn the rich asshole’s decision to officials recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel—prompting Haley to promise the United States “will remember this day” and hold the offending nations accountable.
Former CIA Director John Brennan broke his Twitter silence to slam the rich asshole’s UN threat, calling it emblematic of “narcissistic, vengeful, autocrats.” Mudd’s message to Breann was to “settle down.”
“He was a great GIA director, I served beside him at the CIA,” Mudd began. “Settle down. Let me explain why: there’s a rare humorous moment here on ‘The Situation Room.’”
“We’re going to walk out when 128 countries—including the leading countries around the world—say, ‘You, the Americans, are a bunch of morons,’ and threaten them?” Mudd asked rhetorically. “You know what everybody else is saying, Wolf? ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’”
“Twenty-eight countries said we’re a bunch of idiots,” Mudd added, calling the rich asshole administration’s threat “a joke.”
“I don’t think we need to get excited,” Mudd argued. “I think the rest of the world is laughing at us.”
Asked by Blitzer if he thinks the rich asshole will actually cut funding for nations, Mudd replied, “No way!”
“Not a chance,” Mudd continued. “… Do you think the president’s going to get on the phone and say because of one vote that’s non-binding in the U.N. we’re going to back down on our partnership with you as you kill ISIS partners in Egypt? That is not going to happen.”
“Let me be blunt here, Wolf: this is diplomatic prostitution,” Mudd said. “We’re telling people unless you vote with us, we’re not going to give you money, and if your heart doesn’t agree with American policies, we’re not going to support you in terms of U.S. aid.”
“It’s not going to happen,” he added.
Watch below:
By Joshua Keating
DEC. 21, 2017, 12:12 PM
The U.N. General Assembly is expected to vote shortly on a resolution calling on the U.S. to withdraw its recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. (Update, 12:31 p.m.: The resolution passed by a 128–9 vote.) As with other recent votes on this topic, this was expected to be a lopsided result, with only South Sudan, Guatemala, and a handful of Pacific island states joining the U.S. and Israel.
President the rich asshole raised the anticipation around the vote Wednesday by suggesting the U.S. would cut aid to countries that voted for it. Following up on Ambassador Nikki Haley’s vow that the U.S. would be “taking names” at today’s vote, the rich asshole got more specific, telling reporters, “For all these nations, they take our money and then vote against us. They take hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions of dollars and then they vote against us. Well, we’re watching those votes. Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care.”
While at this point, we shouldn’t underestimate this administration’s capacity for petty, self-destructive behavior, we still shouldn’t take this threat literally. There may be some form of retaliation, but it’s hard to imagine the U.S. will cut aid to all the countries. The country that sponsored the Security Council resolution, Egypt, is a major recipient of U.S. military aid, and as Israeli journalist Barak Ravid notes, if the rich asshole were to cut that aid, the first person to object would be Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In a speech before the assembly today, Haley warned member states, “The United States will remember this day in which it was singled out for attack.” Referring to U.S. funding to the U.N. as a whole, she said, “We have an obligation to demand more of our investment. If our investment fails, we have an obligation to spend our resources in more productive ways.” This seems to be a suggestion that the U.S. would cut funding to the UN as a whole, so that’s a hefty threat. U.S. contributions account for about one-fifth of the UN’s budget.
This is an absurdly disproportionate response to a not-that-significant event. This is a nonbinding resolution against a purely symbolic U.S. action. The U.N. General Assembly votes every year to condemn the U.S. embargo on Cuba (most recently by a vote of 191–2) with little discernable effect.
The main political goal of this resolution was to demonstrate the political isolation of the United States’ policy toward Israel, which is also not exactly news. This has become a somewhat major event only because the rich asshole and Haley are turning it into one—another example of this administration prioritizing domestic political symbolism over any conceivable foreign policy goal.
Thanks to the rich asshole’s and Haley’s statements, the U.S. is now in a position where it either sabotages important security relationships and deepens its own isolation by following through on their threat, or undermines the credibility of future ultimatums by balking on it.
the rich asshole administration targets certain words, and the bureaucracy pushes back
Updated: DECEMBER 21, 2017 — 11:23 AM EST
The rich asshole administration is waging a linguistic battle across official Washington, seeking to shift public perception of key policies by changing the way the federal government talks about climate change, scientific evidence, and disadvantaged communities.
The push drew fresh attention after employees at the Department of Health and Human Services were told to avoid certain words — including “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” and “diversity” — when preparing requests for next year’s budget. But the effort to disappear certain language and replace it with other terms is much broader, sparking resistance from career officials in multiple federal agencies, outside experts, and congressional Democrats.
Climate change, for example, has for months presented a linguistic minefield; multiple references to it have been purged repeatedly at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department. In late summer, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention issued a document to employees and contractors bearing a column of words and phrases to be avoided, alongside a column of acceptable alternatives. The one-page “language guidance” document recommends using “all youth” instead of “underserved youth,” referring to crime as a “public issue/public concern” rather than a “public health issue/public health concern,” and describing young people who commit crimes as “offenders” rather than “system-involved or justice-involved youths,” according to a copy of the document obtained by the Washington Post. The document also says to avoid “substance abuse disorder” in favor of “substance abuse issue.” That runs counter to attempts by experts to raise awareness that substance abuse is a disease.
On Wednesday, a Justice Department official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that “the recommended terminology is intended to be more accurate and better reflect Justice Department priorities.”
The desire to literally change the conversation in Washington is nothing new. For decades, incoming administrations have sought to advance their political agendas by rebranding existing initiatives and lifting new words to prominence in White House news releases. After winning the election on a vow to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Barack Obama dropped George W. Bush-era references to the “global war on terror,” creating a new budget category labeled “overseas contingency operations.” Meanwhile, Obama appointees at HHS abandoned the term “unaccompanied alien children,” replacing it with “unaccompanied minors.” (The current administration has reverted to “alien children,” which is statutory language.)
But even in the context of this historical tug-of-war, the chasm between President the rich asshole’s top deputies and the federal workers charged with carrying out government policies appears particularly wide.
“The administration correctly understands that they are battling a hostile bureaucracy,” said Barry Bennett, a GOP consultant who advised the president during last year’s general election. “The left likes to think that words are very important, particularly if it’s words they don’t like. Well, the right thinks that, too.”
The debate erupted last week after HHS officials instructed employees to avoid certain words when drafting the department’s fiscal 2019 budget request. A budget request describes an agency’s work and mission, establishes priorities, and sends a broad message about the direction of federal policy under an administration. The instructions were part of a one-page “style guide,” obtained by the Washington Post, that was included in a much longer budget-guidance document. The style guide lists “vulnerable,” “diversity,” and “entitlement” as “words to avoid” when drafting the agency’s fiscal 2019 budget request — except “when the terms are referenced within a legal citation or part of a title.”
HHS spokesman Matt Lloyd confirmed that agency officials created the document but said they did not ban any words outright. The document was distributed to budget offices in the department’s operating divisions, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration, an HHS official said.
At a budget meeting last week at the CDC in Atlanta, employees were also told to avoid four additional words and phrases: “fetus,” “transgender,” “evidence-based,” and “science-based.” The origin and intention of that verbal direction remains somewhat murky.
In an email, Lloyd said that “HHS and its agencies have not banned, prohibited or forbidden employees from using certain words.” Instead, Lloyd said, employees have “misconstrued guidelines provided during routine discussions on the annual budget process. It was clearly stated to those involved in the discussions that the science should always drive the narrative.”
But an official at another HHS agency who was briefed last week on use of “vulnerable,” “diversity,” and “entitlement” said the message was clear. “It was interpreted as ‘you are not to use these words in the budget narrative,’ ” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal agency communications.
Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the HHS budget, interpreted the agency’s guidance as “more silly than sinister,” saying it shows the “bureaucracy trying to react to what they think the new administration wants to hear.”
Agency officials are writing budgets “to make the case” for their priorities with both the rich asshole White House and the GOP-controlled Congress, Cole said, meaning they have to write in a way their audience “might actually read.”
Cole noted that Obama administration officials referred constantly to climate change, assuming that would “unlock the door” to congressional funding. Now, Cole said, the term has essentially vanished from budget discussions across departments. A top EPA appointee has instructed officials to eliminate it in grant solicitations and has zeroed out funding for several initiatives that mention the term. And some career officials have cut it from public communications material for fear of angering the rich asshole appointees.
Colorado College environmental science professor Miroslav Kummel, for example, had agreed to teach an “Introduction to Global Climate Change” class at the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument this summer. But then a volunteer with the monument’s Friends Group informed him that he would have to revise his syllabus.
“Unfortunately, I had to send your write-up to the National Park Service Climate Change office in Fort Collins for review,” the volunteer wrote in an email. “The NPS has been told that Climate Change must not be part of the message. All references to it in future documents, orientation talks, etc. will not be allowed.”
Kummel declared the instruction “not acceptable” and threatened to pull out. The group ultimately relented, and he went on with the class. Park Service spokesperson Jeremy Barnum said in an email that friends groups “are independent organizations” separate from the agency and officials were not aware of any effort by headquarters “to prevent the professor from delivering his presentation as planned.”
The Justice Department’s move to censor the discussion about juvenile justice has alarmed longtime advocates. Marcy Mistrett, chief executive of the Campaign for Youth Justice, who has seen the document, said referring to youths who have committed crimes only as “offenders” defines them too narrowly. “They are still children.”
She added: “It’s just very unusual to go that far into the weeds and actually handpick out words that are common words in a field.”
Advocates said the difference in emphasis is already having an impact. A 2016 solicitation for proposals to provide mentoring to child victims of sex trafficking specifically cited LGBTQ youth, who make up a significant portion of the trafficked population, Mistrett said. This year, a similar solicitation for proposals contained no such mention.
Allies of the administration, while maintaining that no words have been banned outright under the rich asshole, said word choices have also affected policies important to conservatives. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the antiabortion political action committee Susan B. Anthony List, argued that getting rid of the term “fetus,” for example, would be a welcome change.
“The language we use to describe unborn human beings doesn’t just follow cultural attitudes, it actually has shaped them and made unthinkable atrocities sound palatable,” Dannenfelser said. “We are glad to see the administration working to humanize widely used terms that will shape the next generation’s attitudes toward life.”
The Washington Post’s Sarah Kaplan and Amy Goldstein contributed to this report.
AMERICA
U.N. Votes Overwhelmingly To Condemn U.S. Decision On Jerusalem
December 21, 201712:11 PM ET
The United Nations General Assembly has overwhelmingly rejected the rich asshole administration's decision to recognize the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. By a 128-9 vote Thursday, the diplomats gathered in New York City ignored U.S. objections and approved a nonbinding resolution calling on countries to avoid moving their embassies to Jerusalem.
Among the countries that voted in favor of the resolution are many traditional U.S. allies, including the United Kingdom and France. Israel, which celebrated the rich asshole's decision earlier this month, joined the U.S. in voting against the measure. Thirty-five countries abstained, including U.S. allies Canada and Australia.
128 countries voted in favor of the resolution rejecting President Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, 9 voted against, 35 abstained.
How each country voted:
Earlier in the day, before the assembly voted on the largely symbolic declaration, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley expressed her resistance in no uncertain terms.
"The United States will remember this day in which it was singled out for attack in the General Assembly for the very act of exercising our right as a sovereign nation," Haley said Thursday.
"We will remember it when we are called upon to once again make the world's largest contribution to the United Nations. And we will remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit."
President the rich asshole announced earlier this month his administration's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and begin the process of moving the U.S. Embassy to the disputed city. The move bucked decades of U.S. diplomatic policy and fulfilled a key campaign promise — but it also immediately set off a widespread backlash in countries around the world, who believe it would significantly undermine the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, who also claim Jerusalem as the capital of a prospective state.
As Israel lauded the move, the country's Arab neighbors condemned it as a violation of an international resolution that forbids attempts "to alter the character and status" of the city before the peace process has concluded. And beyond the Middle East, countries across the West quickly reiterated that their own embassies would not move from their present locations in Tel Aviv.President the rich asshole announced earlier this month his administration's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and begin the process of moving the U.S. Embassy to the disputed city. The move bucked decades of U.S. diplomatic policy and fulfilled a key campaign promise — but it also immediately set off a widespread backlash in countries around the world, who believe it would significantly undermine the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, who also claim Jerusalem as the capital of a prospective state.
Meanwhile, in the Palestinian territories, protests escalated into clashes between demonstrators and Israeli authorities. And rocket fire from the Gaza Strip was answered with Israeli airstrikes.
The U.N. Security Council sought earlier this week to vote on a measure that would have demanded that states refrain from placing their diplomatic missions in Jerusalem. Without naming the U.S. or the rich asshole, the resolution nevertheless would have proclaimed the rich asshole's decision null and void. Every country on the council, including U.S. allies, voted for the measure Monday — but the U.S., which holds veto power, blocked the vote.
As NPR's Daniel Estrin notes, the Palestinian delegation would not let the matter rest there. "With this U.N. vote [Thursday], the Palestinians want to show the U.S. that the majority of the world backs their positions," he told Morning Edition.
"And it's part of a bigger diplomatic move that the Palestinians are making to sideline the U.S. in the peace process. They think America has taken Israel's side on the sensitive issue of Jerusalem."
Haley, for her part, decried what she sees as building anti-Israeli sentiment in the U.N.
"To its shame, the United Nations has long been a hostile place for the state of Israel," Haley told the General Assembly on Thursday. "It's a wrong that undermines the credibility of this institution and that, in turn, is harmful for the entire world.
"I've often wondered why, in the face of such hostility, Israel has chosen to remain a member of this body," she added. "And then I remember that Israel has chosen to remain in this institution because it's important to stand up for yourself."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu applauded the U.S. vote — and named Haley specifically in his praise Thursday: "Thank you, President rich asshole and Ambassador Haley, for standing up for Israel and standing up for the truth," he said. "Ultimately, the truth will prevail."
Yet the members of the assembly overwhelmingly lined up against the two countries — and several explicitly rejected the pressure Haley and the rich asshole had been seeking to exert on them, including Haley's threat that she'll take note of "those countries who vote against us."
"History records names," Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said Thursday, "it remembers names — the names of those who stand by what is right and the names of those who speak falsehood. Today we are seekers of rights and peace."
UN General Assembly rejects the rich asshole's Jerusalem move
12-21-17
A resounding majority of United Nations member states has defied unprecedented threats by the US to declare President some rich asshole's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital "null and void".
The non-binding resolution was approved at a UN General Assembly emergency meeting on Thursday with 128 votes in favour and nine against, while 35 countries abstained.
It passed despite intimidation by the rich asshole, who had threatened on Wednesday to eliminate financial aid to member states who would vote against his decision, while Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, had warned that she would be "taking names" of those countries.
Shortly after the vote, Palestinian leaders called the vote a victory for Palestine and thanked the UN member states that rejected the rich asshole's unilateral move "despite all the pressure exerted on them".
"This decision reaffirms once again that the just Palestinian cause enjoys the support of international community, and no decisions made by any side could change the reality, that Jerusalem is an occupied territory under international law," Nabil Abu Rudeina, spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said in a statement.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator, condemned Washington's decision but said the UN vote showed respect for the rule of law.
"It's a day of shame to those who stood shoulder to shoulder with the occupation and settlements against international law," he said.
"But we appreciate very much that the majority of the international community decided, in spite of the threats and intimidation of the US, to stand tall with wisdom, far-sightedness, international law and the rule of law - and not the rule of the jungle."
Today, the international community once again showed that dignity and sovereignty are not for sale.#Turkey #Palestine and all other co-sponsors thank every country that supported #UNGA resolution on Palestine.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign minister, also welcomed the result of the vote on Twitter, calling it "a resounding global NO to the rich asshole regime's thuggish intimidation" at the UN.
For his part, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had earlier called the UN a "house of lies", condemned the "preposterous" vote and thanked the rich asshole for his stance on Jerusalem.
"I do appreciate the fact that a growing number of countries refused to participate in this theatre of the absurd," he said in a televised statement.
"So I appreciate that, and especially I want to again express our thanks to President the rich asshole and Ambassador Haley, for their stalwart defence of Israel and their stalwart defence of the truth."
'Great humiliation'
The session on Thursday at the 193-member body was held at the request of Arab and Muslim countries after the US vetoed the same measure in the Security Council on Monday. The US was outnumbered 14 to 1 in that vote.
While the Security Council's five permanent members - the US, Britain, France, China and Russia - had veto power on Monday's vote, there are no vetoes at the General Assembly.
Similar to the Egyptian-drafted text that was blocked by Washington on Monday, the draft resolution approved on Thursday did not mention the US by name but expressed "deep regret at recent decisions" concerning Jerusalem's status.
Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera's senior political analyst, called the result of the General Assembly vote a "great humiliation for the US".
Bishara said that most UN member states that voted in favour of the draft resolution did not necessarily do so to back the Palestinians but to support "international legality".
"They voted for what they saw as a violation of international law," he said.
"The resolution starts by naming several UN Security Council resolutions, where the US either voted for or abstained, saying that Israel cannot annex East Jerusalem; that Israel cannot export its own population to East Jerusalem; that Israel cannot continue with the settlement building in East Jerusalem and so on," added Bishara.
"All in all, 128 countries voted for international law."
Embassy move
In addition to recognising Jerusalem as Israel's capital, the rich asshole announced on December 6 that the US would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
No country currently has its embassy in the city, which is home to holy religious sites and has particular significance for Muslims, Christians and Jews.
The US decision triggered a series of protests in the occupied Palestinian territories, as well as major international cities - from Jakarta, through Istanbul, to Rabat.
The status of Jerusalem has long remained a sensitive topic and one of the core issues in the Israeli-Palestine conflict.
After occupying the city's eastern part in the 1967 War, Israel annexed the territory. In 1980, it proclaimed it as its "eternal, undivided capital."
The Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, however, see East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.
They have warned that any change to the status quo would mean the end of the peace process premised on a two-state solution.
Thursday's vote was reminiscent of a session in 2012, when an overwhelming majority backed Palestine's upgrade in the UN to non-member state status.
In that vote, some 138 countries supported the upgrade, while nine - including the US, Israel, Canada and several South Pacific countries - voted against.
Mother fuckers are scared now.
Three House Republicans publicly undermining FBI have been in talks with the rich asshole about Mueller probe: report
Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and President some rich asshole (Photos: Screen capture and AFP)
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Three House Republicans who are leading a public insurgency against special counsel Robert Mueller have been in contact with the White House and some rich asshole, Business Insider reports.
In recent weeks, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) have all spoken with the rich asshole—and have all expressed concern, or outright indignation, with Mueller’s probe.
In a lengthy interview with CNN’s John Berman Wednesday, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) intimated he’s been in contact with the White House about Mueller’s investigation into the rich asshole campaign and transition team.
“Have you had conversations, or has your office had conversations, with the White House about the Mueller investigation?” Berman asked.
Jordan, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee alongside Gaetz and DeSantis, told Berman he speaks with the White House “about all kinds of things.”
“We’ve had talks with the White House about tax policy, we’ve had talks about Obamacare, of course we’ve had talks with the White House,” he replied. Jordan also defended his line of questioning in House judiciary hearings—which in recent weeks have focused exclusively on the nature of anti-the rich asshole text messages sent by FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
“I did not talk to the White House about what kind of questions I was going to ask [in those hearings],” Jordan insisted, arguing his questions were “driven by the evidence we’ve received in the last several weeks.”
During a Dec. 7 House Judiciary Committee hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray, Jordan demanded to know whether there was a link between Strzok and the infamous the rich asshole-Russia dossier. In that testimony, the Ohio Republican accused the FBI of “working with the Democrats’ campaign, to take opposition research, dress it all up and turning it into an intelligence document to take it to a FISA court so they can spy on another campaign.”
Wednesday, Jordan continued pushing anti-FBI rhetoric, claiming a “huge anti-the rich asshole bias” at the bureau that “actually [tried] to make sure some rich asshole wasn’t the president.”
As Business Insider notes, on Dec. 8, Florida Republicans Gaetz and DeSantis hitched a ride on Air Force One with the president as he traveled to Pensacola, FL for a rally. According to Politico, Gaetz “counseled” the rich asshole during that trip, claim’ing he is “concerned that this investigation was infected with bias.”
“That’s why you guys have got to do your job,” the rich asshole told Gaetz.
And a great job their doing. Gaetz, who introduced a resolution in the House calling for Mueller’s recusal from the Russia probe, has been working nonstop to convince the public of a deeply-rooted anti-the rich asshole bias in the FBI and Department of Justice.
Wednesday, he sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein demanding answers about the FBI’s handing of the rich asshole dossier. He also demanded to know whether FBI agent Strzok sent or received any documents “related to the ‘tarmac meeting’ of former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President William Clinton.”
In an interview on Fox News that same day, Gaetz called for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “shut down this biased investigation,” arguing “senior levels of the FBI have been infected with an intractable bias that seemed to favor Hillary Clinton and work against President some rich asshole.”
“It’s time for Bob Mueller to put up or shut up,” Gaetz said.
DeSantis is also leading the charge against Mueller. In August, he floated an Amendment to end the special counsel investigation. “No fishing expeditions,” he told Fox News at the time. “Put up or shut up and let’s get on with the American people’s business.”
Jordan, Gaetz and DeSantis aren’t the House Republicans working to discredit the Russia investigation. As Politico reported Wednesday, House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) is leading a small group of House Republicans to secretly build a case against senior officials at the FBI and DOJ—particularly surrounding the rich asshole dossier.
Nunes, who worked on the rich asshole’s transition team, has been challenging the Russia collusion narrative since the inauguration. In April, he sparked political uproar after hastily calling a press conference to publicly accuse the Obama administration of “unmasking” members of the rich asshole team. It was later revealed Nunes received that information during a clandestine meeting with White House officials.
Nunes “temporarily stepped aside” from leading the House Intelligence Committee investigation amid an ethics probe, but in June, the California Republican admitted that didn’t really mean much.
“I can do whatever I want, I’m the chairman of the committee,” Nunes said.
Bannon mulls 2020 presidential run — and thinks ‘childlike’ the rich asshole has ‘lost a step’: report
Steve Bannon (Photo: Screen capture)
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Former top White House political strategist Steve Bannon reportedly thinks that President some rich asshole has clearly “lost a step” — and he believes that he might make a better choice to lead the country as the Republican nominee in 2020.
In a new profile of Bannon from Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, it’s reported that the former the rich asshole campaign manager told a confidante that he’d consider a presidential run in 2020 if the rich asshole chose not to run for a second term.
“Bannon has also remarked on the toll the office has taken on the rich asshole, telling advisers his former boss has ‘lost a step,'” reports Sherman. “‘He’s like an 11-year-old child,’ Bannon joked to a friend in November.”
In his interviews with Sherman, Bannon always maintained that he had great respect for the rich asshole — however, he didn’t hide the fact that he had regularly become frustrated at the direction the rich asshole White House had taken since the president won the election in 2016.
“I realize in hindsight I was just a staffer, and I’m not a good staffer,” Bannon admitted. “I had influence, I had a lot of influence, but just influence.”
One prominent Republican also said that Bannon hated giving the rich asshole the final say on policy matters because Bannon believes the rich asshole is “dumb and crazy.”
UN Defies the rich asshole's Threats by Passing Resolution on Jerusalem
12-21-17
The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly backed a measure critical of President some rich asshole’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel despite U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s warning that the move could put funding for their nations and the global body at risk.
The non-binding UN resolution passed on Thursday by a vote of 128-9, with 35 nations abstaining. The U.S. vote in opposition was joined by countries including Guatemala, Nauru and Micronesia. Key abstentions came from Australia, Canada, Argentina and Romania.
“The United States will remember this day when it was singled out for attack in the General Assembly,” Haley said at the United Nations podium ahead of the vote. “We will remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they often do, to pay even more. This vote will be remembered.”
The U.S. threat was repudiated by speakers from countries supporting the resolution, which says the status of Jerusalem must be resolved through negotiations. A similar resolution had 14 votes in favor in the 15-member Security Council last week, prompting Haley to exercise the first U.S. veto since 2011.
“We were all asked to vote no or face the consequences,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said before voting began. “Some even threatened to cut development aid. This is bullying. It is unethical to think that the votes and dignity of member states are for sale.”
The debate follows the rich asshole’s Dec. 6 announcement, which included a decision to begin moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. The announcement prompted criticism across the Middle East and from key U.S. allies in Europe, who said it would harm efforts to foster Middle East peace.
Palestinian officials said the rich asshole’s decision disqualified the U.S. from being a mediator in any Israel-Palestinian negotiations.
Haley’s threat carries weight because the U.S. is the largest contributor to UN operations. Based on a formula agreed to by member nations, the U.S. provides 28.5 percent of the $7.3 billion UN peacekeeping budget and 22 percent of the core budget of $2.7 billion. Haley walked out of the General Assembly soon after her speech, though members of the U.S. delegation remind behind, awaiting the vote.
Except for Israel, which supports the U.S. position, most major U.S. allies opposed to the rich asshole’s decision stayed away from the podium Thursday. Countries speaking in support of the measure included North Korea, Yemen, Turkey, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, South Africa and Iran. Those nations also came under intense fire by Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon.
‘Puppet Masters’
“Those who support today’s resolution are like puppets pulled by the strings of the Palestinian puppet masters,” Danon said. “If this body were really united for peace, it would pass a resolution condemning Palestinian violence.”
Haley this week warned other countries against supporting the resolution, saying the rich asshole “has requested I report back on those countries who voted against us.”
the rich asshole weighed in on the Jerusalem vote on Wednesday.
“I liked the message that Nikki sent yesterday at the United Nations to all of those nations that take our money and then they vote against us in the Security Council, they vote against us potentially at the assembly,” the rich asshole said. “They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars and then they vote against us. Well, we’re watching those votes. Let ’em vote against us."
On this day, no45 threatened multiple countries simply because they didn't agree with him.
What an asshole. This is not how you run the country or work with other countries, only a tyrant does such things.
the rich asshole threatens to cut aid to U.N. members over Jerusalem vote
WASHINGTON/UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.S. President some rich asshole on Wednesday threatened to cut off financial aid to countries that vote in favor of a draft United Nations resolution calling for the United States to withdraw its decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
“They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars, and then they vote against us. Well, we’re watching those votes. Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care,” the rich asshole told reporters at the White House.
SPONSORED
The 193-member U.N. General Assembly will hold a rare emergency special session on Thursday - at the request of Arab and Muslim countries - to vote on a draft resolution, which the United States vetoed on Monday in the 15-member U.N. Security Council.
The remaining 14 Security Council members voted in favor of the Egyptian-drafted resolution, which did not specifically mention the United States or the rich asshole but which expressed “deep regret at recent decisions concerning the status of Jerusalem.”
U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley, in a letter to dozens of U.N. states on Tuesday seen by Reuters, warned that the rich asshole had asked her to “report back on those countries who voted against us.”
She bluntly echoed that call in a Twitter post: “The U.S. will be taking names.”
Several senior diplomats said Haley’s warning was unlikely to change many votes in the General Assembly, where such direct, public threats are rare. Some diplomats brushed off the warning as more likely aimed at impressing U.S. voters.
According to figures from the U.S. government’s aid agency USAID, in 2016 the United States provided some $13 billion in economic and military assistance to countries in sub-Saharan Africa and $1.6 billion to states in East Asia and Oceania.
It provided some $13 billion to countries in the Middle East and North Africa, $6.7 billion to countries in South and Central Asia, $1.5 billion to states in Europe and Eurasia and $2.2 billion to Western Hemisphere countries, according to USAID.
Miroslav Lajcak, president of the General Assembly, declined to comment on the rich asshole’s remarks, but added: “It’s the right and responsibility of member states to express their views.”
A spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also declined to comment on the rich asshole’s remarks on Wednesday.
“I like the message that Nikki sent yesterday at the United Nations, for all those nations that take our money and then they vote against us at the Security Council, or they vote against us potentially at the assembly,” the rich asshole said.
‘BULLYING’
the rich asshole abruptly reversed decades of U.S. policy this month when he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, generating outrage from Palestinians and the Arab world and concern among Washington’s Western allies.
He also plans to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. The draft U.N. resolution calls on all countries to refrain from establishing diplomatic missions in Jerusalem.
A senior diplomat from a Muslim country, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of Haley’s letter: “States resort to such blatant bullying only when they know they do not have a moral or legal argument to convince others.”
Responding directly to that comment on Twitter, Haley said: “Actually it is when a country is tired of being taken for granted.”
A senior Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, described Haley’s letter as “poor tactics” at the United Nations “but pretty good for Haley 2020 or Haley 2024,” referring to speculation that Haley might run for higher office.
“She’s not going to win any votes in the General Assembly or the Security Council, but she is going to win some votes in the U.S. population,” the Western diplomat said.
A senior European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed Haley was unlikely to sway many U.N. states.
“We are missing some leadership here from the U.S. and this type of letter is definitely not helping to establish U.S. leadership in the Middle East peace process,” the diplomat said.
Israel considers Jerusalem its eternal and indivisible capital and wants all embassies based there. Palestinians want the capital of an independent Palestinian state to be in the city’s eastern sector, which Israel captured in a 1967 war and annexed in a move never recognized internationally.
“The first name that she should write down is Bolivia,” Bolivia’s U.N. Ambassador Sacha Sergio Llorentty Solíz said of Haley’s message. “We regret the arrogance and disrespect to the sovereign decision of member states and to multilateralism.”
Reporting by Roberta Rampton; writing by Doina Chiacu; editing by Jonathan Oatis and David Gregorio
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
some rich asshole ranted again on social media, this time giving a special shout out to Fox News in his attack on the media.
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Published on: 21 December 2017
From the start of his campaign for president over two and a half years ago, some rich asshole has been engaged in a war of words with the majority of the mainstream media. In his most recent posts on social media, the president continued that feud.
the rich asshole on Twitter
It all started during some rich asshole's campaign announcement back in the summer of 2015 when he addressed the issue of illegal immigration and referred to those coming to the United States from Mexico as "rapists" and "murderers." The response from most in the media was negative as it set the stage for a clash between both sides in the years to come. Following his election win over Hillary Clinton last November, the rich asshole has only increased his trash talk against the press, saving only praise for conservative news outlet #Fox News, including their morning program "#Fox and Friends." With other news outlets like NBC, ABC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post all getting slammed by the president over their coverage, it's been made clear that Fox News is the only main news source that the billionaire real estate mogul trusts.
As seen on his #Twitter feed on December 21, the rich asshole is doubling down on his attack on the media.
Was @foxandfriends just named the most influential show in news? You deserve it - three great people! The many Fake News Hate Shows should study your formula for success!
Taking to Twitter on Thursday morning, some rich asshole decided to give credit to his favorite cable news show, while targeting the competition in the process. "Was Fox and Friends just named the most influential show in news?" the rich asshole rhetorically tweeted. "You deserve it...three great people!" he added, before noting, "The many Fake News Hate Shows should study your formula for success!"
The Massive Tax Cuts, which the Fake News Media is desperate to write badly about so as to please their Democrat bosses, will soon be kicking in and will speak for themselves. Companies are already making big payments to workers. Dems want to raise taxes, hate these big Cuts!
In an additional tweet, some rich asshole went back to attack the media over their reporting of the recently passed Republican tax bill. "The Massive Tax Cuts, which the Fake News Media is desperate to write badly about so as to please their Democrat bosses, will soon be kicking in and will speak for themselves," the rich asshole wrote.
The tax bill, which has received massive backlash from the majority of the American people, passed the Senate and House of Representatives on Wednesday and has been sent to the president's desk for a signature.
Moving forward
As 2017 comes to an end, some rich asshole's first year in office will likely be remembered as being surrounded by controversy. Despite his own personal opinion, the latest polls show the rich asshole with an approval rating as low as 32 percent, the lowest for any president during their first year in office in recent American history.
the rich asshole Just Gave His Buddies At Fox News An Award And It’s Ridiculous
President some rich asshole has a deep relationship with Fox and Friends, with the president habitually tagging them on Twitter. He watches them so much that he has now praised the show after a news site noted that the network is “most influential” — simply because the president watches it. On Thursday morning, President the rich asshole tweeted “Was @foxandfriends just named the most influential show in news?” and adding that the three hosts — Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt, and Brian Kilmeade — “deserve it.” Forever on his “fake news” spiel, the president also quipped that “fake news” should follow their formula for success.
Mediaite was the website that has crowned Fox and Friends as an influential show because they have managed to catch the attention of the president. It’s an opinion blog that covers politics and entertainment as it intersects the media industry, frequently from a right-wing viewpoint. Founded by Dan Abrams, a web entrepreneur and the chief legal affairs anchor for ABC and analyst for NBC news, Abrams’ website stated that President the rich asshole “regularly starts his day watching Fox & Friends and then tweets about whatever they cover, and however, they cover it.” Mediaite also added that the three hosts are the most “influential media people in the entire world.
Fox and Friends is President the rich asshole’s Safe Space
President the rich asshole has abysmal approval ratings, and the Republican Party that he represents has been hollowed out by his public lunacy and his administration’s self-interests. Red states have been flipping to Democrat, Republicans are losing seats in positions of power, and the president’s approval rating in the first eleven months has been the lowest of any sitting president in modern history — and the ratings have barely crept out of that black hole.
Fox News network has buckled down and has become a lapdog for the president, covering his lies and attempting to influence public opinion about the president even when he does things that are against the interest of the American people.
There is no safe space like Fox News when it comes to the rich asshole – since taking office, he has sat down with the news network for more than a dozen interviews, largely avoiding other outlets that my dare criticize and trigger him.
But the entire story of the rich asshole’s self-congratulatory behavior is told in the way he tweets. Even when “complimenting” someone else, it seems more like a pre-emptive “you’re welcome” for allowing them to share oxygen with him:
December 21, 2017
889 Views
Michelle Bachmann spoke at the Annual Value Voters Summit and said some strange things. She currently serves on President the rich asshole’s evangelical advisory board. At the summit, during an interview with Sirius XMProgress, she assured her faithful followers that our president is NOW a “committed believer” of Jesus Christ and “a man of faith” who has “asked God for help and wisdom.” HuffingtonPost.
As soon as those disciples in that audience heard Michelle Bachmann say that, they all released a sigh of relief. If you’ve been paying attention to our president, it really doesn’t look as if he is a man of faith. After all, the rich asshole’s tax policy that was just passed, sure as heck fire, won’t help any of those evangelicals. In fact, the rich asshole’s actions are seemingly performed to serve only one person, himself. But, I guess if Michelle Bachmann says it, we should take her word for it.
At this same Voters Summitt, Joel Brind, a college biology professor from New Hamburg, New York got an enormous applause when he said that if there was Twitter back then, Jesus would have used it just like the rich asshole does.
I wouldn’t restrict it to just [the rich asshole’s] tweets. His communications in general are tactically [emulating Christ]. I don’t want to be misinterpreted to say that everything he says is equivalent to gospel. I mean, he’s on the right side, and his tactics are more reminiscent of Christ, of the tactics that Christ used when he walked the earth and which he admonished his followers to use also. HuffingtonPost
I wonder which “tactics” of Trumps’ are similar to Christs’?
I’m sure Michelle Bachmann would have no problem supplying an answer for that question. Bachmann is one of the rich asshole’s greatest fans. Bachmann worships some rich asshole. He is not a politician to her. According to her lofty praise, some rich asshole is actually divine.
When asked about the rich asshole’s rise to power, she said that it
just wasn’t in the natural. This was in the supernatural where God sovereignly, I believe, answered the prayers of believers beseeching him, and he’s given us a reprieve.”
I bet you that all of those women that he sexually assaulted would disagree. Also, the hundreds of defendants in the rich asshole University class action, who claimed that the rich asshole took their money for an education but gave nothing in return, would also disagree.
Michelle Bachmann apparently is such a keen speaker of Christ, that the rich asshole made her a part of his Evangelical Advisory Board. The primary function of this board is to convince the rich asshole’s religious base that religion is very important to him. Like everything the rich asshole does, this evangelical board is just smoke and mirrors. Other religious elites in this group are radio host James Dobson, Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., Faith and Freedom Coalition founder Ralph Reed and more than two dozen others.
New York City megachurch pastor A.R. Bernard was another name in the group. A few months ago, he stepped down. After the rich asshole praised white supremacy, A.R. Bernard left. What is the point to work in a group aimed at spreading religion and love, when your ultimate boss is unable to condemn the KKK?
Is Michelle Bachman really in the position to be speaking for the Lord? A few months ago, a clinic that was accused of practicing the “pray away the gay” therapy, run by Michelle Bachmann’s husband, got into some legal trouble. NBCNews
For starters, the clinic failed to properly maintain patient records. These clinics were also found to have taken $137,000 from Medicaid.
It is embarrassing that I actually come from the same country as someone who would take her spiritual guidance.
Jerusalem vote: the rich asshole threatens to cut aid to countries opposing U.S.
byNEWS
DEC 21 2017, 12:40 PM ET
President some rich asshole's threat to cut off U.S. funding to countries that oppose his decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital has raised the stakes in Thursday's U.N. vote and sparked criticism at his tactics, which one Muslim group called bullying or blackmail.
U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley hinted in a tweet and a letter to most of the 193 U.N. member states on Tuesday that the U.S. would retaliate against countries that vote in favor of a General Assembly resolution calling on the president to rescind his decision.
She said the rich asshole asked her to report back on countries "who voted against us" — and she stressed that the United States "will be taking names."
At the start of a Cabinet meeting in Washington on Wednesday, the rich asshole went further, telling reporters that Americans are tired of being taken advantage of and praised the U.S. ambassador for sending the "right message" before the vote.
"For all these nations, they take our money and then vote against us. They take hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions of dollars and then they vote against us," the rich asshole told reporters at the Cabinet meeting. "We're watching those votes. Let them vote against us."
"We'll save a lot. We don't care," he said, alluding to U.S. aid.
Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, tweeted: "Our government should not use its leadership at the UN to bully/blackmail other nations that stand for religious liberty and justice in Jerusalem. Justice is a core value of Christianity, Judaism and Islam."
Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan responded Thursday by accusing the U.S. of buying support in exchange for foreign aid.
"some rich asshole, you cannot buy Turkey's democratic will with your dollars," Erdogan said in a speech in Ankara. "I hope and expect the United States won't get the result it expects from [the U.N.] and the world will give a very good lesson to the United States.”
The resolution, which was overwhelmingly approved on Thursday by a 128-9 vote, with 35 abstentions, is co-sponsored by Turkey, chair of the summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and Yemen, chair of the Arab Group at the U.N.
The Palestinians and their Arab and Islamic supporters sought the General Assembly vote after the U.S. on Monday vetoed a resolution that would have required the rich asshole to rescind his declaration on Jerusalem as Israel's capital and not move the U.S. Embassy there.
Ambassador Rhonda King of the tiny Caribbean nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines sent Haley a letter saying that her country treasures the United States "as an enduring ally" but will vote against the rich asshole's action.
"Sometimes, friends differ; on Jerusalem, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines respectfully differs from the USA; and so, too, do many of the staunchest friends and allies of the USA," King wrote. "We gently urge yet again that the government of the USA rethink its position and approach on this entire matter."
What impact the threats from the rich asshole and Haley will have remains to be seen.
Israel has also been conducting a global lobbying campaign against the resolution, government officials said Wednesday. The vote will show whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has succeeded in his efforts to drum up new pockets of support in the developing world.
Netanyahu acknowledged Thursday the vote would likely pass by a wide margin but said Israel "completely rejects this vote before it is made."
Haley said in her letter, reportedly sent to over 180 countries that the rich asshole administration is "simply asking that you acknowledge the historical friendship, partnership, and support we have extended and respect our decision about our own embassy."
DECEMBER 21, 2017 / 12:29 PM / UPDATED 5 MINUTES AGO
Over 100 countries defy the rich asshole, vote for Jerusalem U.N.resolution
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - More than 100 countries defied President some rich asshole on Thursday and voted in favor of a United Nations General Assembly resolution calling for the United States to withdraw its decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
the rich asshole had threatened to cut off financial aid to countries that voted in favor. His warning did appear to have some impact with nine countries voting against the resolution and 35 abstaining. A total of 128 countries voted for the resolution.
December 21, 2017
Linley Sanders
Posted with permission from Newsweek
President Donald Trump needs to make a New Year's resolution to power off the television if he wants Americans to think he's a good commander in chief.
Trump makes an effort to watch at least four hours of television daily—sometimes up to eight when his schedule allows—and a new poll indicates that Americans think it's hurting his job performance. A survey from POLITICO/Morning Consult revealed that 45 percent of Americans see Trump's media consumption as negatively impacting "his job performance as president." The poll was conducted between December 14 and 18.
Only 20 percent of the 2,000 people surveyed saw Trump's television-viewing habits in a positive light, while 35 percent either thought it had no impact on his job performance or documented no opinion. The negative outlook on Trump's hobby follows record-low national approval ratings and dips of approval in Republican-held states.
Was @foxandfriends just named the most influential show in news? You deserve it - three great people! The many Fake News Hate Shows should study your formula for success!
The president's adoration for cable news is well-documented through his active Twitter account, which frequently becomes a live commentary on the news of the day. On Thursday, he posted his congratulations to Fox & Friends for being considered the "most influential show in news," a recognition that comes in part because of the president's favor and interaction with the morning show.
During Trump's first year in the White House, he tweeted about Fox News around 160 times, according to an archive of his Twitter. His commentary on the show is overwhelmingly positive, matching its symbiotic coverage of his time in office. Trump also tweets about other television programs like CNN and MSNBC, but the commentary is usually negative, and he interchangeably refers to the media organizations as " fake news."
The same poll asked Americans how many hours of television would be appropriate for the president to limit himself to every day— 31 percent thought one to two hours would suffice for Trump and 17 percent said he should forgo the cable box altogether. Only 8 percent of Americans thought Trump should be watching more than six hours of television daily.
More than 60 percent of those surveyed believe that elected members of Congress should consume less than four hours of television each day. The majority of the surveyed group acknowledged overwhelmingly that he or she consumes less than four hours of television regularly.
AN URANIUM ONE INVESTIGATION? THE RICH ASSHOLE’S JUSTICE DEPARTMENT TALKING TO FBI AGENTS ABOUT ALLEGED HILLARY CLINTON SCANDAL
‘BLAH BLAH BLAH f*ck the poor’: Ivanka comes on Fox News to talk tax policy — and gets destroyed by Twitter
Ivanka the rich asshole appears on Fox News (screen grab)
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Ivanka the rich asshole was blasted on Twitter on Thursday after she appeared on Fox & Friends to applaud the Republican tax bill as a win for the “middle class” and predicted that it would eventually erase the federal deficit.
After the hosts of Fox & Friends praised the president’s daughter for her role in passing the tax bill, she explained that she would be traveling around the country early next year to celebrate with the American people.
“I’m really looking forward to doing a lot of traveling in April when people realize the effect that this has,” she said. “The vast majority will be [doing their taxes] on a single postcard.”
But many Twitter users, who were not impressed with Ivanka the rich asshole’s knowledge of tax policy, pointed out that the ich asshole family stands to benefit greatly from the tax bill.
Read some of the tweets below.
.@IvankaTrump: "@POTUS was very clear that he really wanted to ensure that this bill accomplished two goals: Of enabling American businesses to grow and be competitive and... to target relief for middle-income families." pic.twitter.com/GSMbd7nAMC
Hey numb skulls ask Ivanka how all her sweat shops in China are doing @foxnewspolitics @CBSThisMorning @GMA@CNNPolitics @MSNBC @foxandfriends
.@IvankaTrump on tax reform: "This is an historic milestone, an historic accomplishment." pic.twitter.com/Fv0yWC1BiE
.@IvankaTrump: "The Child Tax Credit was doubled." pic.twitter.com/xvt1dvLQGC
.@IvankaTrump on tax reform: "This is an historic milestone, an historic accomplishment." pic.twitter.com/Fv0yWC1BiE
That is a load of horse manure.
This unjust, unfair, deficit busting abomination of a bill is class warfare on a grand scale that benefits people like Ivanka Trump and literally kills her fellow Americans in the process.
Don't believe the Trump-GOP-Fox lies.
You are such a witch I'm sure you could care less because now you're richer than rich I hate you I Ivanka Trump for everything you stand for
Hey Ivanka maybe you could ask your husbsnd not to try and throw people in jail for owing him rent ? For the holidays ?
.@IvankaTrump on tax reform: "This is an historic milestone, an historic accomplishment." pic.twitter.com/Fv0yWC1BiE
Tune in to @foxandfriends in a few minutes (8:30 am EST) as we discuss yesterday’s historic passage of #TaxReform
.@IvankaTrump: "The average American family can't come up with $400 in the event of an emergency, and my father is committed to changing that." pic.twitter.com/a3ju367HM6
The Senate has passed the #TaxCutsandJobsBill. These landmark tax cuts are a major win for the American people!#MAGA
Tune in to @foxandfriends in a few minutes (8:30 am EST) as we discuss yesterday’s historic passage of #TaxReform
.@IvankaTrump: "I'm really looking forward to doing a lot of traveling in April when people realize the effect that this has... The vast majority will be [doing their taxes] on a single postcard." pic.twitter.com/D2bB7WgPIL
.@IvankaTrump: "@POTUS was very clear that he really wanted to ensure that this bill accomplished two goals: Of enabling American businesses to grow and be competitive and... to target relief for middle-income families." pic.twitter.com/GSMbd7nAMC
The way Ivanka Trump said two hilariously dumb things in one sentence is a good example of how power inevitably turns humans into morons twitter.com/FoxNews/status…
I admit I have not read the tax bill, and only peripherally followed the substantive developments, but this isn't true, is it? The reform will allow most people to actually just file their returns via a "single postcard"?
And while is Ivanka even part of this? twitter.com/FoxNews/status…
Ivanka thinks the tax bill will affect your returns this coming April. It won’t. twitter.com/MollyJongFast/…
Um, Hey, Ivanka, April is when people will do their taxes for 2017, not 2018. As your tax advisor about it. twitter.com/FoxNews/status…
Clearly @IvankaTrump has never filed her own taxes before.
Psst.. Ivanka, normal people will file 2017 taxes in 2018. Ain't gonna be no postcard, though I actually like that idea. twitter.com/FoxNews/status…
Report: FBI agents quizzed about Uranium One deal
Greg Price
Posted with permission from Newsweek
The Justice Department has reportedly started questioning FBI agents about evidence they discovered in a previous investigation into the controversial Uranium One deal, as the country’s top law enforcement agency deals with allegations of bias from Republicans and President Donald Trump.
Related: The Hillary Clinton Russia Uranium One conspiracy theory makes no sense
The internal questioning comes after an assistant attorney general told the head of the House Judiciary Committee, in a letter sent last month, that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had “directed” federal prosecutors to determine if another special counsel was needed to investigate Uranium One, NBC News reported Thursday.
The FBI agents have recently been asked whether there was “any improper effort to squash a prosecution,” according to the report, and to “describe the results of their probe.”
Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd told House Judiciary Chairman and Representative Robert Goodlatte (R-Va.) in the letter dated November 13: “These senior prosecutors will report directly to the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General, as appropriate, and will make recommendations as to whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources, or whether any matters merit the appoint of a Special Counsel.”
Goodlatte and other members of the committee previously sent letters to Justice on July 27 and September 26 and asked for a second special counsel. They were concerned about how former FBI Director James Comey and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch handled Clinton’s private email server investigation.
Those cries were echoed by Trump’s legal team last week when they asserted conflicts of interest existed within Justice and the FBI and that another special prosecutor was needed.
"The Department of Justice and FBI cannot ignore the multiple problems that have been created by these obvious conflicts of interests,” Trump attorney Jay Sekulow told Axios. “These new revelations require the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate."
For months now, the Uranium One deal has become a rallying cry for Republicans and Trump over accusations of corruption within the Justice Department and the FBI. They’ve charged the agencies with unfairly targeting the president and favoring former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in her private email server investigation and Uranium One.
The controversy involves Clinton Foundation donors and allegations of Clinton helping to approve the sale of a Canadian uranium company to Russian nuclear agency Rosatom in 2009 when Clinton was secretary of state. Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, also received a $500,000 fee to speak at a Russian bank that was promoting Uranium One stock.
However, numerous reports have shown Clinton was not part of the sale’s approval, which included nine different government agencies and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Related: The Hillary Clinton Russia Uranium One conspiracy theory makes no sense
The internal questioning comes after an assistant attorney general told the head of the House Judiciary Committee, in a letter sent last month, that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had “directed” federal prosecutors to determine if another special counsel was needed to investigate Uranium One, NBC News reported Thursday.
The FBI agents have recently been asked whether there was “any improper effort to squash a prosecution,” according to the report, and to “describe the results of their probe.”
Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd told House Judiciary Chairman and Representative Robert Goodlatte (R-Va.) in the letter dated November 13: “These senior prosecutors will report directly to the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General, as appropriate, and will make recommendations as to whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources, or whether any matters merit the appoint of a Special Counsel.”
Goodlatte and other members of the committee previously sent letters to Justice on July 27 and September 26 and asked for a second special counsel. They were concerned about how former FBI Director James Comey and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch handled Clinton’s private email server investigation.
Those cries were echoed by Trump’s legal team last week when they asserted conflicts of interest existed within Justice and the FBI and that another special prosecutor was needed.
"The Department of Justice and FBI cannot ignore the multiple problems that have been created by these obvious conflicts of interests,” Trump attorney Jay Sekulow told Axios. “These new revelations require the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate."
For months now, the Uranium One deal has become a rallying cry for Republicans and Trump over accusations of corruption within the Justice Department and the FBI. They’ve charged the agencies with unfairly targeting the president and favoring former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in her private email server investigation and Uranium One.
The controversy involves Clinton Foundation donors and allegations of Clinton helping to approve the sale of a Canadian uranium company to Russian nuclear agency Rosatom in 2009 when Clinton was secretary of state. Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, also received a $500,000 fee to speak at a Russian bank that was promoting Uranium One stock.
However, numerous reports have shown Clinton was not part of the sale’s approval, which included nine different government agencies and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
the rich asshole’s UN threat backfires after Canada changes its vote to avoid being seen as his ‘puppet’: report
some rich asshole (Screen cap).
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President some rich asshole on Wednesday issued a direct threat against countries that voted in favor of a United Nations resolution that condemned the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
“They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars, and then they vote against us,” the rich asshole said of countries that planned to vote for the resolution. “Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care.”
However, the rich asshole’s threat seems to have already backfired, as Israeli reporter Barak Ravid says he’s received word that Canada will abstain from voting on the UN resolution after having previously planned to vote with the United States against it.
“Canada considered voting against the UNGA resolution on the rich asshole’s Jerusalem announcement but changed vote to abstention after hearing the rich asshole’s threats in order not to be perceived as US puppet, Western diplomats tell me,” Ravid reported.
Despite the rich asshole’s threats, the UN General Assembly is still expected to vote overwhelmingly in favor of the resolution.
‘Oh my God, is that SNL?’: Watch Don Lemon burst out laughing over Republicans’ effusive the rich asshole praise
CNN's Don Lemon (screengrab)
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CNN’s Don Lemon on Wednesday could hardly get through a discussion about the GOP’s celebration on the White house lawn, repeatedly bursting into laughter at footage of grown Republican congresspeople heaping effusive praise on some rich asshole.
From Speaker of the House Paul Ryan extolling his “exquisite presidential leadership” to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell touting his “year of extraordinary accomplishment,” Republican leaders on Wednesday lined up to stroke the president’s ego following the passage of the historic tax overhaul.
“There was a festival of flattery on the White House lawn today to celebrate the passage of the Republican tax cut bill,” Lemon began.
“Oh my god, is that ‘SNL’?” Lemon asked, laughing. “Is that real? Complimenting President the rich asshole has become something of a ritual at the White House, but have other presidents expected such praise?”
Lemon brought on presidential historians Timothy Natale and Douglas Brinkley to discuss the scene at the White House, but could barely introduce them before once again breaking into laughter.
“Listen, you—what is going on here?!” Lemon asked. “By the way, you gentlemen look so handsome. You’re such fantastic historians. I am just honored to be on television with you.”
Rolling footage of a large crowd of Republicans applauding the rich asshole in unison, Lemon exclaimed, “Oh, my gosh, look at them!”
Brinkley noted that since the president is sitting at a meager 35 percent approval rating, the passage of the GOP tax bill is “worth high-fiving.”
“It is an historic victory,” Brinkley said. “But I think the exaggeration of having to kiss the ring of some rich asshole—it almost seems like a scene out of ‘The Godfather’ we just saw, not what you would expect from the president of a democracy.”
“I haven’t heard this kind of sycophancy since I listened to the Nixon tapes where Henry Kissinger is telling the president what a remarkable human being he is,” Natale added.
Watch below:
‘Prepare for the coming storm’: Dems’ new House Judiciary pick signals they’re ready to impeach the rich asshole
some rich asshole (Shutterstock)
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House Democrats recently elected Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) to fill their top spot on the House Judiciary Committee by a wide margin — and there are signs that it’s because they think he’s best suited to prosecute an impeachment case against President some rich asshole.
As the Washington Post’s Paul Kane writes, Nadler’s selection to represent the Democrats as ranking member on the Judiciary Committee is “the clearest sign yet of how seriously House Democrats consider the possibility of a full-blown constitutional showdown with the rich asshole.”
Even though most Democrats won’t publicly talk about impeaching the rich asshole should they retake control of the House in 2018, Kane notes that Nadler’s background makes him an ideal choice to lead any impeachment charge. In particular, he says that Nadler is a constitutional law expert who also battled the rich asshole in the 1980s to impede his efforts to develop on New York’s Upper West Side.
“There is nobody better prepared, if the president messes around with the Constitution, to handle it than Jerry Nadler,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), a Nadler ally.
Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-VA), meanwhile, explained that Nadler was in the best position to make “the constitutional argument” against the rich asshole’s presidency — and he said it was a sign that Democrats needed to “prepare for the coming storm.”
BY LUKE HARDING ON 12/21/17 AT 8:00 AM
It sounded like an exhausted parent scolding a tantrum-prone toddler with a penchant for tossing toys from his stroller.
In November 2008, Steven Molo, an attorney for Deutsche Bank, wrote a letter to the Supreme Court of New York about one of the company’s most troublesome clients. At issue was $640 million that client had borrowed in 2005 to fund construction of a new hotel in Chicago. The client had personally guaranteed the loan, but a few years later, the Great Recession devastated the economy, and he defaulted on his payment, with $330 million outstanding. Deutsche was seeking an immediate $40 million from the client, plus interest, legal fees and costs.
The debtor in question: some rich asshole, the future president of the United States.
Instead of paying up, the New York real estate mogul countersued, claiming the 2008 crash was a force majeure event—one that Deutsche had helped precipitate. Therefore, he argued, he wasn’t obliged to pay back the money. Instead, he claimed Deutsche owed him money—about $3 billion in damages.
In response, Molo drew up a withering document, contrasting the rich asshole’s frivolous writ with his long career of boasting about how rich he was:
the rich asshole proclaims himself “the archetypal businessman, a deal-maker without peer.” the rich asshole has stated in court he is worth billions of dollars. In addition to substantial cash, personal investments and various other tangible assets, he maintains substantial interests in numerous extraordinary properties in New York and around the country.
Those assets included hotel projects in seven U.S. cities, as well as in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Panama and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, the lawyer noted. There were also casinos and golf courses scattered all over the world.
The same day the rich asshole argued that the Great Recession meant he didn’t need to pay back his debts, he gave an interview to The Scotsman newspaper. After a two-year fight, he had gotten approval from the Scottish government for a new resort near Balmedie in Aberdeenshire—and he was thrilled. “The world has changed financially, and the banks are all in such trouble,” he told the paper, “but the good news is that we are doing very well as a company, and we are in a very, very strong cash position.” the rich asshole said he didn’t have any exposure to the stock market, had bought the Scottish land for cash and was now well placed to build “the world’s greatest golf course.” Two weeks later, George Sorial, a rich asshole Organization executive, assured The Scotsman that the tycoon had a billion dollars earmarked for the course.
If those statements weren’t damning enough, Molo’s affidavit cited the real estate tycoon’s literary works, which summarized his insouciant attitude toward paying back other people’s money. the rich asshole, the attorney observed, provided extensive advice on how to do business in his half-dozen or so books. In How to Get Rich, the rich asshole advises readers to use the courts to “be strategically dramatic.” In Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and in Life, he boasts of how he “love[s] to crush the other side and take the benefits.” the rich asshole’s strategy—honed during his terrible financial struggles with lenders during the 1990s—“was to turn it back on the banks…. I figured it was the bank’s problem, not mine,” Molo quoted him as saying, in connection with unpaid debt.
As a result of these maneuvers, by the mid-2000s, U.S. financial institutions had stopped lending to the rich asshole for his building projects. Deutsche was the only one still willing to work with him.
After the rich asshole burned the bank, Deutsche shunned him as well. But the rich asshole soon found a creative way to get off its blacklist—and return to solvency.
‘Are You Fucking Kidding Me?’
Two years after Molo wrote his letter to the court, the rich asshole settled his feud with the German bank. How he did it was bizarre: He paid back Deutsche with a massive lifeline—from Deutsche. Only this time he eschewed its real estate team—which wanted nothing to do with him—and got a loan from its private wealth division. This group typically deals with high-net-worth individuals, not real estate transactions, but in 2010 it not only lent him the money he owed its real estate team but also reportedly gave the rich asshole another $25 million to $50 million in credit.
Deutsche employees in New York were surprised by the bank’s decision. When asked whether it was normal to give more money to a customer who was a bad credit risk and liked to sue, one former senior staff member at the bank put it succinctly: “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Over the next few years, the money kept rolling in for the rich asshole. He took out two mortgages against a resort in Miami and a $170 million loan to finish his hotel in Washington, D.C. According to Bloomberg, by the time the rich asshole was elected president of the United States in November 2016, he owed Deutsche around $300 million, an unprecedented debt for an incoming president. (His June financial disclosure showed he owes the bank $130 million, which is due in full in 2024.)
The loans to the rich asshole weren’t the only abnormal behavior at Deutsche. Around the same time he received his new line of credit, the bank was laundering money, according to the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS). Russian money. Billions of dollars that flowed from Moscow to London, then from London to New York—part of a scheme for which European and American regulators eventually punished the bank.
Was the timing of this illicit operation and the loans to the rich asshole coincidental? Or evidence of something more sinister—a critical chapter in the president’s long history of suspicious business deals with Russian and post-Soviet oligarchs? In January, the rich asshole claimed the former, tweeting in his usual bombastic style: “I have nothing to do with Russia—no deals, no loans, no nothing.” But the president’s refusal to accept the assessment of his intelligence agencies—that Moscow meddled in the 2016 election—has, among other things, fueled suspicions about his ties to Russia.
Robert Mueller is now trying to find out the truth about those suspicions. The special counsel is investigating Russian interference—from the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to alleged coordination between the rich asshole campaign and Moscow. So far, his team has charged key the rich asshole campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates with money laundering, as well as other offenses. He’s also gotten two former advisers, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, to plead guilty to lying to the FBI and cooperate with the probe.
Now, however, Mueller appears to be following the money, trying to determine if the rich asshole has a financial connection to Russia—one that might at least partly explain his behavior. In December, the German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that the special counsel’s office has subpoenaed Deutsche Bank, demanding data and documents related to people or entities tied to the president and those close to him. The White House says the subpoena doesn’t directly pertain to the rich asshole or his family’s accounts. But if the president has a dark Russian secret, the German banking giant’s money-laundering scandal may be key to finding out what it is.
Friends With Kremlin Benefits
The story of how Deutsche became embroiled in the rich asshole-Russia probe dates back to 2005, when the German lender bought UFG, a boutique investment bank, to acquire an entry point into Moscow. UFG’s co-founder and chairman was Charles Ryan, a charming American banker with libertarian views. Ryan’s partner was Boris Fyodorov, a finance minister under former Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The bank straddled West and East, and was international and local.
The man behind Deutsche Bank’s aggressive expansion was Anshu Jain, its future co-CEO. He persuaded Ryan to stay on and head up Deutsche’s new Moscow office, and he came up with a controversial strategy to tap into potentially huge Russian profits: forge relationships with state partners. He wanted, in effect, to become friends with the Kremlin. One way of doing this was to hire people with connections. Among them: Russia’s most powerful banker, Andrey Kostin, who had served as a Soviet diplomat in Sydney and London. (Intelligence sources think he was a KGB spy. Like many others who spoke to me for this story, they did so anonymously because they weren’t authorized to talk to the press.) In the 1990s, he became head of Vnesheconombank (VEB), a state development institution described by one former CIA analyst as the “Kremlin’s cookie jar.” Then Vladimir Putin made Kostin head of Vneshtorgbank (VTB), another state-run bank, after which Kostin expanded it to operate in 19 countries.
VTB worked in many countries with minimal oversight, which meant the Kremlin could use it for espionage. In 2005, VTB absorbed two banks traditionally used in Soviet times for spying and shifting currency to Western communist parties. These were the Moscow Narodny Bank, based in London, and Euro-bank, in Paris.
Meanwhile, Jain and Deutsche Bank recruited Kostin’s 20-something son, Andrey. In spring of 2007, the young Kostin moved from a posting in London to Deutsche Bank in Moscow.
Suddenly, Kostin’s son got massive flows of business, a high-level banking source told me. And it appeared his father may have helped: Deutsche did a series of lucrative trades with VTB. According to the source, the German bank’s Moscow subsidiary began posting profits of $500 million to $1 billion a year, with VTB generating somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of all revenue.
Other investment banks based in Moscow were chagrined and suspected that Deutsche owed its success to its alliance with Russian state interests. “They were doing some very curious things,” says Christopher Barter, the CEO of Goldman Sachs Moscow at the time. “Nobody could make sense of their business. We found the nature and concentration of their business with VTB quite galling. Nobody else could touch VTB.”
Everyone in Moscow understood that VTB was more than a bank. It had ties to Russian intelligence. Putin’s Federal Security Service (FSB) spy chief, Nikolai Patrushev, and his successor, Alexander Bortnikov, both sent their sons to work at VTB. The bank’s deputy chief executive, Vasily Titov, chaired the FSB’s public council.
VTB may have also had contacts with the rich asshole associates, according to The New York Times. In November 2015, a few months after the rich asshole announced he was running for president, one of his business partners, Felix Sater, wrote an email to the rich asshole lawyer Michael Cohen, saying VTB had agreed to bankroll the rich asshole Tower Moscow project. the rich asshole signed a letter of intent for the deal. When the project stalled, Cohen tried reaching out to Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitri Peskov, to help jump-start it. But it ultimately failed.
Kostin, the VTB banker, says he doesn’t know Sater and never had any role in the real estate deal. “We never, ever heard about this case,” he told the Times. “It’s absolutely wrong information; it’s absolutely fake news.”
During those negotiations, Sater—the son of a Russian mafia boss—saw things differently. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” he wrote to Cohen about the rich asshole Tower Moscow plans. “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
Shady Trades and Endless Vodka Shots
Well before Sater went looking for a deal there, the Russian capital was awash with petrodollars and opportunity. At the start of the new millennium, Moscow was an alluring destination for Western expatriates. Especially for young single males. There were the devushki—long-legged Russian girls, some from Moscow, some newly arrived from the provinces—who were keen to meet foreigners and practice their English. There were the nightclubs, the parties, fueled by toasts and endless vodka shots. And the friendships, always more intense than those at home.
But there was a dark side to this new Russia—as one of those attracted by its offer of riches discovered. Tim Wiswell grew up in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, about 100 miles northeast of New York City. He was more of a repatriate than an expat: His father had worked in oil and gas in Russia. When he was 17, Wiswell spent a year at the Anglo-American School in Moscow and then returned to the United States for college. In his mid-20s, Wiswell went back to Moscow and got a job with Alfa, the private bank owned by the oligarch Mikhail Fridman. From there, he moved to Deutsche Bank. By age 29, he was head of Russian equities. He found a Russian girlfriend—Natalia Makosiy, an art historian whom he met at a Moscow dinner party and later married.
In the wake of the 2007-2008 crash, profits from the bank’s Russian business plummeted. Traders were now under pressure to increase revenue. But after Wiswell took over around 2009, business was suddenly improving. And Barter suspects that “something nefarious” was going on at Deutsche during that time period.
After the crash, Barter says, he was approached by “broker types, not very senior,” seeking to do large, unexplained volumes of trades with Goldman Sachs. These were on behalf of major Russian clients. The brokers declined to identify their counterparties. Their names were concealed beneath “shell company after shell company,” Barter says, making a due diligence impossible. He turned this business down “in five seconds.”
The same entities approached Wiswell and company, and got better results. Between 2011 and February 2015, Wiswell presided over a money-laundering scheme run from the equities desk of Deutsche Bank’s Moscow office, according to a report from the DFS, and more than $10 billion was shifted from Russia to the West.
The method was simple but effective. In Moscow, a Russian client bought blue-chip Russian stocks from Deutsche Bank Moscow in companies like Gazprom or Sberbank. The payments were in rubles. The size of a typical order was $2 million to $3 million. Shortly afterward, a non-Russian “customer” sold exactly the same number of securities to Deutsche Bank in London, paying in dollars.
There was no economic logic to these “mirror trades,” the DFS report found. The buyers and sellers were ostensibly different, but in reality, one in the same. At least 12 entities used the scheme to surreptitiously convert rubles into dollars. The money was interred in offshore accounts. Those involved moved billions out of one Deutsche location in Moscow to another location in New York through offshore territories such as Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands. There were nearly 6,000 of such transactions, and nobody in New York, London, Frankfurt or any other international financial centers seemed to notice.
When outsiders raised concerns—like a European bank, for example—Wiswell swatted them aside. The DFS report said he told the European bank not to worry. Wiswell approved the trades with anonymous Russian clients. He “threatened” and browbeat his colleagues on several occasions, a New York regulator said, according to the report, “when it appeared they had not moved quickly enough to facilitate transactions.”
In Moscow, Wiswell’s 20-person equities desk was made up of Russians and Americans. One of its duties was to keep clients happy. That might mean extravagant skiing trips and visits to elite nightclubs. One of Wiswell’s business (and skiing) partners was Dmitry Perevalov, the owner of a Moscow fund called Lanturno. About seven years ago, for his 40th birthday, Perevalov flew a group of people on a private jet to Mauritius. The jet belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church’s most important bishop, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, but Perevalov chartered it for the occasion. His guests stayed at the luxurious Four Seasons hotel in Anahita, on the east coast of the Indian Ocean island. Some invitees scarcely knew their host, a former bartender. Those who were his friends—including Wiswell—called him Dima.
One guest who met Wiswell at the party described him as charismatic and charming, a tall, handsome, all-American guy. This person also said Wiswell came across as a “major lightweight” in terms of banking and finance. “He had nothing special going for him. I remember him speaking pretty poor Russian. We wondered whether he was doing kosher business.”
Perevalov flew in a popular performer to crown his birthday celebration—the Russian rapper Timati, who gave a concert. Under a starry sky, guests danced to Timati’s hit “Welcome to St. Tropez”:
Too much money in the bank account
Hands in the air
Make you scream and shout
Drinks, private villas, waterskiing in the lagoon—everything was taken care of. “I was wondering: Who the fuck is paying for all this?” the guest told me. “It was crazy.”
Lightweight or not, Wiswell was getting rich. While the mirror trades were happening, Wiswell’s wife became the owner of two offshore companies—one in the British Virgin Islands, one in Cyprus. In 2015, a counterparty paid $250,000 into her account. This was for “financial consulting.” Similar payments, totaling $3.8 million, were made through two companies in Belize. These payments were “undisclosed compensation,” the DFS found—“a bribe.” Which bank cleared them? Deutsche Bank in New York.
According to journalist Ed Caesar, there were further payments made to the Wiswells. The idea of the money was “to hook you, so you are not going to do unexpected things,” one Moscow broker told Caesar in an article published in The New Yorker. These payments were always made in cash and always delivered in a bag.
The end of this scheme came in August 2015, when Deutsche Bank suspended Wiswell and then fired him. After that, he disappeared. There were Facebook postings from Southeast Asia and Bali, where the Wiswells went with their two small children. (He is now allegedly back in Moscow.) His lawyer, Ekaterina Dukhina, declined to comment on his case, but in his wrongful-dismissal suit against Deutsche, Wiswell said he was merely the fall guy for the bank’s wrongdoing. He also claimed that around 20 colleagues, including two senior managers in London, knew all about the trades.
The scandal was a grievous blow to Deutsche Bank’s reputation. And an expensive one. About 10 days before the rich asshole’s inauguration, the DFS—which has the power to suspend any bank with a branch in New York—fined the bank $475 million. London’s Financial Conduct Authority imposed a £163 million ($218 million) penalty. (The Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York are still investigating the bank’s role in the scandal.
The bank carried out an internal review, which didn’t identify the Russians behind the scheme. It’s still unclear who they were or where the billions went. Or where the money came from in the first place.
What is clear, however, from the DFS report and conversations with sources in Moscow is that a Kremlin bank, VTB, run by proxies of the FSB, had seemingly captured Deutsche Bank’s Moscow outpost. The German bank’s London and New York divisions were economic beneficiaries of this arrangement, as they facilitated the illegal flight of capital by some well-connected Kremlin insiders.
While this was going on, Deutsche Bank in New York was lending hundreds of millions of dollars to the future American president, a man known to be litigious and a credit risk. My Guardian colleague Nick Hopkins and I wanted to find out if the rich asshole’s loans and the money-laundering scandal were connected. But Deutsche Bank stonewalled us; its policy was to say nothing about its clients, including the president.
The Russian Laundromat
In late 2016, that question and others led Hopkins and me to a man now at the center of Mueller’s inquiry: Christopher Steele. This was before the world knew he was behind the famous dossier, raw intelligence alleging, among other things, that Russian intelligence had years of compromising information on the rich asshole, some of it sexual in nature. Hopkins knew Steele, but neither of us were aware of what he was sitting on in that dossier.
We met on a Thursday afternoon, weeks before Christmas, when London’s streets were crowded with shoppers. Steele had agreed to chat over 4 o’clock tea. We tried a café and wine bar called Balls Brothers—and found a tucked-away table. I went to the bar and came back with drinks: beer for Steele, Coke for Nick, pot of tea for me.
Steele clearly likes being in the shadows, away from publicity or fuss. In the world of corporate intelligence, the fewer people who know what you are doing, the better. “Have you heard of me?” he asked.
I confessed I hadn’t. I knew most of the people in London who were focused on Russia, but not Steele.
“Good,” he said. “That’s how I like it.”
For the next 45 minutes or so, we asked Steele about the rich asshole’s connections to Moscow. He offered helpful hints about following the money but little more.
In addition to questions about Deutsche Bank, we inquired about another Russian money-laundering operation, one that involved Putin’s cousin Igor. Between 2010 and 2014, Moscow bankers were sending cash out of the country through something called the Global Laundromat—a scheme that cleaned at least $20 billion, according to investigators in Moldova and the Balkans, though the true figure may be much greater.
This is how it worked: Shell companies in the United Kingdom “lent” money to one another, at least on paper. Russian businesses underwrote these “loans.” Company A would default on paying back Company B. Typically, a Moldovan citizen was involved. The companies would obtain a court judgment in Moldova asking the Russian firms to settle the debt. And voilà! The Russian businesses would legally transfer hundreds of millions of dollars to a bank in Moldova’s capital, Chisinau. From Chisinau, the money went to a bank in Latvia, Trasta Komercbanka. From there, the cash went everywhere, to 92 countries, much of it vanishing offshore.
The Latvian bank required a corresponding Western financial institution to process its dollar-denominated transactions. Most U.S. banks, including JPMorgan Chase, refused to offer banking services to Trasta, given the city of Riga’s reputation as a European money-laundering hub. Only two Western banks agreed, according to Moldovan and Latvian investigators. Both were German: Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank. Once again, Deutsche was the entry point for criminal Russian money into the global financial system, the investigators found. (The bank severed its relationship with Trasta shortly before Latvian officials shut down the bank in 2016 for money laundering.) According to the DFS, Deutsche was reluctant to classify Russia as a “high-risk” location for money laundering.
When Hopkins and I asked Deutsche Bank about the scandal, we were rebuffed. So we talked to current and former Deutsche Bank staff. According to one senior ex-employee, who worked in equities in Asia and New York, the bank’s problems went way beyond these scams. The 2008 crash hit Deutsche Bank hard, the employee said. In order to cover up holes in the balance sheet, a few members of staff took part in risky, complex and possibly illegitimate forms of finance. These practices were extensive, the person alleged. They might have involved innovative and opaque ways of getting outside parties to underwrite risky loans, the banker added, using structures to disguise who ultimately are the lenders and the beneficiaries.
Such impenetrable structures have led some to wonder whether Deutsche’s unusual loans to the rich asshole and its Russian money-laundering schemes were connected.
Adding to the intrigue: the statements of the rich asshole’s own children. In May, for instance, golf writer James Dodson said that during an interview more than three years ago, the rich asshole’s son Eric boasted that his father’s company had access to Russian money. “We don’t rely on American banks,” Dodson said the rich asshole told him. “We have all the funding we need out of Russia.” (Eric the rich asshole later denied he made this claim.) Years earlier, at a real estate conference in 2008, some rich asshole Jr. said, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.” He later added, “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
In an interview with Prospect magazine, Richard Dearlove, the former head of British secret intelligence service MI6, summed up the suspicions surrounding the alleged connection between the rich asshole, Russia and Deutsche Bank. “What lingers for the rich asshole may be what deals—on what terms—he did after the financial crisis of 2008 to borrow Russian money when others in the West would not lend to him.”
According to our sources inside Deutsche Bank, the rich asshole’s bid to become president made him a politically exposed person, or PEP. Banks scrutinize such individuals carefully because they’re often targets for illicit financial schemes. Deutsche reviewed its lending to the rich asshole and his relatives. Its goal was to discover if there was a Russian connection to the rich asshole’s loans. The DFS also requested information from the bank about its dealings with Russia. The sources were vague about the review, who carried it out and what its precise conclusions were. But they insist that no trail to Moscow was ever discovered.
Other sources suggest the review was cursory, but Deutsche hasn’t released any information about it, so there’s no way to evaluate either claim. Meanwhile, the rich asshole refuses to release his tax filings, breaking decades of precedent.
Over the past year, U.S. lawmakers such as Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, have urged the bank to privately hand over its internal review—along with information about the rich asshole’s accounts—but Deutsche declined to do so, citing privacy rules.
Now, nearly a year after BuzzFeed published Steele’s dossier, the bank is handing records over to Mueller, as the special counsel tries to figure out if there is a connection between the Russian laundromat and the president of the United States.
They Went to Jared
The special counsel’s inquiry could also reach people in the rich asshole’s orbit. Many were clients of Deutsche Bank—and also credit risks. Among them is Jared Kushner, the rich asshole’s son-in-law, who is trying to salvage a massive—and reportedly imperiled—investment in 666 Fifth Avenue, a prominent piece of Manhattan real estate. His relationship with Deutsche emerged in 2013, when he apparently ordered a flattering profile of the rich asshole’s wealth manager, Rosemary Vrablic, by his newspaper, The New York Observer.
In a letter this spring to Bill Woodley, Deutsche Bank’s U.S. CEO, Senator Chris Van Hollen expressed concerns about the bank’s lending to Kushner, who had a $25 million line of credit with the German institution. In October 2016, it loaned him $285 million. The cash was used to replace an existing loan on the old New York Times building, which Kushner had bought the previous year from Lev Leviev, a businessman from the former Soviet Union.
The bank made the loan at a time when Kremlin representatives were eager to speak to the rich asshole’s son-in-law, according to a timeline laid out in Kushner’s testimony to Congress. In April, he first met Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, when the rich asshole gave his foreign policy speech at D.C.’s Mayflower Hotel—just a handshake and pleasantries, Kushner said. Next came a meeting at the rich asshole Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Moscow lawyer who sat down with Kushner, Manafort and the rich asshole Jr. They talked about dirt on Hillary Clinton and repealing the Magnitsky Act, an Obama-era law that leveled sanctions against Russians accused of human rights abuses. Then, on November 16, Kislyak got in touch again. By this point, it was clear that Kushner would become senior adviser to the president.
There was another Kushner-Kislyak meeting, on December 1 at the rich asshole Tower. Flynn, the rich asshole’s adviser, was present too, as Kushner made an unusual proposal: He asked Kislyak if it would be possible to set up a secret and secure communications channel between the rich asshole transition team and the Kremlin. The purpose, it seems, was to keep their conversations hidden from the outgoing Obama administration and U.S. intelligence. Could this be done, Kushner wondered, by using Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States? The inquiry was staggeringly naïve. If Kushner or Flynn were to drop by the Russian Embassy, U.S. intelligence would certainly notice.
The FBI hadn’t bugged that conversation but learned of it when Kislyak reported to his superiors back in Moscow. According to FBI intercepts of those Russian communications, Kislyak was taken aback by Kushner’s request. It was unlikely Moscow would allow any American to use its encrypted networks. The rich asshole transition team said nothing about these secret negotiations. One person who knew the details was so alarmed he sent The Washington Post an anonymous note about it, explaining what had happened.
Russia, it seemed, didn’t need to expend much effort to get close to the rich asshole’s aides. Kislyak came up with a suggestion of his own, according to Kushner’s testimony. Perhaps Kushner would like to meet with another person from Moscow, someone with “a direct relationship” to Putin?
During a meeting between Kislyak and Kushner’s assistant, Avi Berkowitz, on December 12, they agreed on the details of this meeting. Putin’s emissary turned out to be a banker, or, more accurately, a banker-spy. His name was Sergey Gorkov, and he was the head of VEB, the state development bank, which Kostin had run, and whose board Putin had chaired during his four years as prime minister. He had trained in the 1990s at the FSB’s academy before joining energy company Yukos and state-run Sberbank. Like VTB, Sberbank was allegedly an arm of the Kremlin. It was the official sponsor of the 2013 Miss Universe contest in Moscow, attended by the rich asshole and hosted by Emin Agalarov, the pop-star son of Aras Agalarov, who worked with the rich asshole to bring the pageant to Russia. Eight days after the contest, Sberbank announced it was lending Agalarov $1.3 billion to finance new projects. One of those under consideration was the rich asshole Tower Moscow. In February 2016, Putin promoted Gorkov to VEB chief.
The bank’s mission was to support Moscow’s political programs. It provided capital to build facilities at the Sochi Olympics and fund secessionist rebels in eastern Ukraine. These top-down ventures lost money. VEB had large debts. The United States had included VEB, VTB and Sberbank in the sanctions it passed in 2014 after Putin annexed Crimea. And Gorkov’s job was to restore the bank’s fortunes.
Gorkov was well prepared for his meeting with Kushner. He was, after all, a graduate of the Dzerzhinsky Higher School, a KGB training center. He flew in from Moscow bearing gifts. Among them: soil from the town of Novogrudok in northwest Belarus, where Kushner’s paternal grandmother grew up. In 1941, the German army arrived, and the town’s Jewish inhabitants were rounded up and forced to live and work in an agricultural college. Around half were executed. The survivors dug a tunnel, and in September 1943 they crawled out, fleeing into the forest.
This information and much more would have been included in the FSB’s Kushner file. Gorkov’s presents were chosen to remind the young the rich asshole adviser of his origins in a part of the world that once belonged to the Soviet Union, and of his spiritual roots. (This subtlety was wasted. In his written testimony to Congress, Kushner said Putin’s messenger had given him a “bag of dirt.” It came from “Nvgorod,” he wrote, spelling his grandmother’s birthplace incorrectly.)
This meeting occurred on December 13, and according to Kushner, Gorkov introduced himself and “made some statements about the Russian economy.” The banker said he was friendly with Putin, expressed disappointment about the state of U.S.-Russian relations under President Barack Obama and “his hopes for a better relationship” in the future, Kushner told congressional committees.
There was no discussion of lifting sanctions, Kushner said. Nor was he offered any commercial deals. Kushner characterized the encounter as brief, meaningless. But there’s no official record of what was said in the meeting, so this is hard to verify. After all, it was difficult to discuss the Russian economy without mentioning its depressed state. Gorkov then flew directly from New York to Japan, where Putin was attending a summit. He would likely have reported the details of the meeting then.
Kushner’s official account to Congress on his dealings with Kremlin representatives is 11 pages long. It’s a flat, sterile document, clearly reviewed by his lawyers. In his version, there was no wrongdoing, just a series of inconsequential meetings during a hectic campaign. Kushner said in written evidence to Congress that he even forgot Kislyak’s name. There was no secret channel. Nor did he rely on “Russian funds” to finance his business. In short, a nothing burger with Russian dressing.
Despite these protestations, it’s clear Russian intelligence found it easy to access the rich asshole’s inner circle. Ambassadors, lawyers, bankers...all made their way to the rich asshole Tower in 2016. All were welcomed and listened to. Gorkov was part of them, but the cast also included Kislyak, Veselnitskaya and the Agalarovs and other unknown actors working behind the scenes.
Targeting Kushner was logical. He was soon to become a federal employee. His White House portfolio included tax policy, the military and international affairs. In a protean White House—where anyone could be fired—Kushner’s status as the president’s son-in-law made him unfireable.
During his meetings with Russians, Kushner apparently said nothing about Moscow’s attack on American democracy during the presidential campaign, nothing about hacking the Democratic National Committee or circulating fake news on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. He also kept his meetings with the Russians secret. So did the rich asshole administration. In his security clearance form, Kushner didn’t mention Gorkov or Kislyak. (Kushner said this was an accident, an administrative error by an underling.)
The American public found out about these meetings only because of a steady stream of leaks—leaks that would eventually offer Mueller some important clues.
Ursa Major
Today, the questions Mueller is asking seem to be the same questions that led us to meet with Christopher Steele last year. Namely: Was the rich asshole hiding a connection to Russian money? And if so, was Moscow blackmailing him with that information? And how?
On the campaign trail—and well before he became a candidate—the rich asshole’s praise of Putin was effusive and unwavering. He called him a strong leader and claimed they’d spoken and gotten along well. His fidelity to Russia’s president has continued in the White House, even as he lambasted other world leaders, turned on aides and allies, fired the head of the FBI and publicly humiliated his attorney general. Shunning Putin would have been the savvy political move, but he has refused to do so.
Republicans have criticized Steele’s dossier because the DNC and Clinton campaign helped pay for it. But the document offers a compelling explanation for the president’s unusual behavior vis-à-vis Russia. First, there was Moscow’s alleged kompromat operation against the rich asshole going back three decades. If the president had indulged in compromising behavior, whether sexual or otherwise, Putin likely knew of it. Second, there was the cash from Russian oligarchs that went into the rich asshole’s real estate ventures—and the prospect of a lucrative deal to build a hotel and tower in Moscow, a project that was still being negotiated as the rich asshole addressed adoring crowds on the campaign trial. Finally, there were the Deutsche Bank loans that rescued the rich asshole after the crash. They had come from a bank that was simultaneously laundering billions of dollars of Russian money. (Though parts of Steele’s dossier remain unverified, some of his claims have been substantiated. The former spy told his friends he believes the document is about 70 to 90 percent accurate.)
And then there are the people in the president’s inner circle. Wherever you look, there is a link to Russia. His pick for secretary of state? Rex Tillerson, a figure known and trusted in Moscow, and recipient of the country’s Order of Friendship. Former national security adviser? Flynn, a beneficiary of undeclared Russian money. Campaign manager? Manafort, longtime confidant to ex–Soviet oligarchs. Foreign policy adviser? Carter Page, whom Russia tried to recruit as a spy. Commerce secretary? Wilbur Ross, an entrepreneur with Russia-connected investments. Personal lawyer? Cohen, who sent emails to Putin’s press secretary. Business partner? Sater, who sent Flynn a plan to lift Russian sanctions. And so on.
It was almost as if Putin had picked the rich asshole’s Cabinet. The U.S. president, of course, did the choosing, but the pattern of all these individuals, and their alignment with Russian interests, forms a constellation. Call it Ursa Major. A big Russian bear Robert Mueller is now hunting—at Deutsche Bank and beyond.
This article was adapted from Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped the rich asshole Win by Luke Harding. Copyright © 2017 by Luke Harding. Reprinted by permission of Vintage, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
the rich asshole Threatens to End American Aid: ‘We’re Watching Those Votes’ at the U.N.
WASHINGTON — President the rich asshole issued a threat on Wednesday to cut off American aid to any country that votes for a resolution at the United Nations condemning his recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
some rich asshole’s statement, delivered at a cabinet meeting in which he exulted over the passage of a tax overhaul, followed a letter to General Assembly members from the American ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, in which she warned that the United States would take note of countries that voted in favor of the measure.
“All of these nations that take our money and then they vote against us at the Security Council or they vote against us, potentially, at the Assembly, they take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars and then they vote against us,” some rich asshole said.
“Well, we’re watching those votes,” he added. “Let them vote against us; we’ll save a lot. We don’t care.”
It is difficult to see how some rich asshole can make good on that threat because it could involve cutting off financial assistance to the country’s most strategic allies in the Middle East. Some of those programs, like Egypt’s, are congressionally mandated. While the president can hold up aid unilaterally as a form of leverage, canceling it would require new legislation.
To repeat that hackneyed saying: ln international relations, there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies. There are only permanent...
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