FULL SPEECH: At Davos, the rich asshole touts reforms: 'America is open for business'
BY THE HILL STAFF — 01/26/18 10:54 AM EST 76
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
On Friday, January 26, President the rich asshole spoke in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum, touting the recently passed tax reform and cuts in regulation and pushed for "fair and reciprocal trade ... a system that works not just for the U.S., but for all nations."
A full transcript of the rich asshole's speech is below:
It’s a privilege to be here at this forum an business and science diplomacy and people from world affairs gathered for many, many years to discuss how we can to advance prosperity and peace. I'm here to represent the interests of the America people and affirm America's friendship and partnership in building a better world.
Like all nations represented at this great forum, America hopes for a future which everyone can prosper and every child can grow up free from violence, poverty, and fear. Over the past year, we have made extraordinary strides in the U.S. We're lifting up forgotten communities, creating exciting new opportunities, and helping every American find their path to the American dream. The dream of a great job, a safe home and a better life for their children.
After years stagnation the nights is once again experiencing strong economic growth. The stock market is smashing one record after another, and has added more than $7 trillion in new wealth since my election. Consumer confidence, business confidence, and manufacturing confidence are the highest that they have been in many decades.
Since my election we've created 2.4 million jobs and that number is going up very, very substantially. Small business optimism is at an all-time high. New unemployment claims are near the lowest we've seen in almost half a century. African-American unemployment reached the lowest rate ever recorded in the United States and so has unemployment among Hispanic-Americans.
The world is witnessing the resurgence of a strong and prosperous America. I'm here to deliver a simple message. There has never been a better time to hire, to build, to invest and to grow in the united States. America is open for business and we are competitive once again. The American economy is by far the largest in the world and we've just enacted the most significant tax cuts and reform in American history. We've massively cut taxes for the middle class, and small businesses to let working families keep more of their hard earned money.
We lowered our corporate tax rate from 35 percent all the way down to 21 percent. As a result, millions of workers have received tax cut bonuses from their employers in amounts as large as $3,000. The tax cut bill is expected to raise the average American's household income by more than $4,000. The world's largest company, apple, announced it plans to bring $245 billion in overseas profits home to America. Their total investment into the United States economy will be more than $350 billion over the next five years. Now is the perfect time to bring your business, your jobs, and your investments to the United States.
This is especially true because we have undertaken the most extensively regulatory reduction ever conceived. Regulation is stealth taxation. The U.S. Like many other countries unelected bureaucrats, we have, believe me, we have them all over the place, and they have imposed crushing and anti-business and anti-worker regulations on our citizens with no vote, no legislative debate, and no real accountability. In America those days are over. I pledged to eliminate two unnecessary regulations for everyone new regulation. We have succeeded beyond our highest expectations. Instead of two for one, we have cut 22 burdensome regulations for everyone new rule. We are freeing our businesses and workers so they can thrive and flourish as never before. We are creating an environment that attracts capital, invites investment, and rewards production. America is the place to do business, so come to America where you can innovate, create and build.
I believe in America. As president of the United States I will always put America first just like the leaders of other countries should put their country first also. But America first does not mean America alone. When the United States grows, so does the world. American prosperity has created countless jobs all around the globe and the drive for excellence, creativity, and innovation in the U.S. Has led to important discoveries that help people everywhere live more prosperous and far healthier lives.
As the United States pursues domestic reforms to unleash jobs and growth, we are also working to reform the international trading system so that it promotes broadly-shared prosperity and rewards to those who pray -- play by the rules. We cannot have free and open trade if some countries exploit the system at the expense of others. We support free trade but it needs to be fair and it needs to be reciprocal because in the end unfair trade undermines us all. The United States will no longer turn a blind eye to unfair economic practices including massive intellectual property theft, industrial subsidies, and pervasive state-led economic planning.
These and other predatory behaviors are distorting the global markets and harming businesses and workers not just in the U.S. But around the globe. Just like we expect the leaders of other countries to protect their interests, as president of the United States, I will always protect the interests of our country, our companies, and our workers. We will enforce our trade laws and restore integrity to our trading system. Only by insisting on fair and reciprocal trade can we create a system that works not just for the U.S., but for all nations.
As I have said, the United States is prepared to negotiate mutually beneficial, bilateral trade agreements with all countries. This will include the countries within TPP, which are very important. We have agreements with several of them already. We would consider negotiating with the rest either individually or perhaps as a group if it is in the interests of all. My administration is also taking swift action in other ways to restore American confidence and independent. We are lifting self-imposed restrictions on energy production to provide affordable power to our citizens and businesses and to promote energy security for our friend all around the world. No country should be held hostage to a single provider of energy. America is roaring back and now is the time to invest in the future of America.
We have dramatically cut taxes it make America competitive. We are eliminating burdensome regulations at a record pace. We are reforming the bureaucracy to make it lean, responsive and accountable and we are insuring our laws are enforced fairly. We have the best colleges and universities in the world and we have the best workers in the world. Energy is an abundant and affordable. There is never been a better time to do business in America. We are also making historic investments in the American military because we cannot have prosperity without security. To make the world safer from rogue regimes, terrorism and revisionist powers, we're asking our friend and allies to invest in their own defenses and to meet their financial obligations. Our common security requires everyone to contribute their fair share.
My administration is proud to have led historic efforts at the united nations security council and all around the world to unite all civilized nations in our campaign of maximum pressure to de-nuke the Korean peninsula. We continue to call on partners to confront Iran's support for terrorists and block Iran's path to a nuclear weapon. We're also working with allies and partners to destroy jihad it terrorist organizations such as ISIS and very successfully so. The nights is leading a very, very broad coalition to deny terrorists control of their territory and populations, to cut off their funding and to discredit their wicked ideology. I am pleased to the support that the coalition to defeat ISIS has retaken almost 100% of the territory once held by these killers in Iraq and Syria. There is still more fighting and worked to be done. And to consolidate our gains. We are committed to insuring that Afghanistan never again become as safe haven for terrorists who want to commit mass murder to our civilian populations.
I want to thank those nations represented here today that have joined in these crucial efforts. You are not just securing your own citizens but saving lives and restoring hope for millions and millions of people. When it comes to terrorism we will do whatever is necessary to protect our nation. We will defend our citizens and our borders. We are also securing our immigration system as a matter of both national and economic security. America is a cutting-edge economy but our immigration system is stuck in the past.
We must replace our current system of extended family chain migration with a merit-based system of admissions that selects new arrivals based on their ability to contribute to our economy, to support themselves financially, and to strengthen our country.
In rebuilding America we are also fully committed to developing our workforce. We are lifting people from dependence to Independence because we know the single-best anti-poverty program is a very simple and very beautiful paycheck. To be successful it is not enough to invest in our economy.
We must invest in our people. When people are forgotten the world becomes fractured. Only by hearing and responding to the voices of the forgotten can we create a bright future that is truly shared by all. The nation's greatness is more than the sum of its production and a nation's greatness is the sum of its citizens, the values, pride, love, devotion and character of the people who call that nation home.
From my first international G-7 summit to the g20, to the U.N. General assembly, to APEC, to the world trade organization and today at the world economic forum my administration has not only been present but has driven our message that we are all stronger when free, sovereign nations cooperate towards shared goals and they cooperate toward shared dreams. Represented in this room are shared dreams.
Represented in this room are some of the remarkable citizens from all over the worlds. You are national leaders, business titans, industry giants and many of the brightest mind in many fields. Each of you has the power to change hearts transform lives and shape your country's destinies. With this power comes an obligation however, a duty of loyalty to the people, workers, customers, who made you who you are.
Together let us resolve it use our power, our resources and our voices, not just for ourselves but for our people, to lift their burdens, to raise their hopes and to empower their dreams. To protect their families, their communities, their histories and their futures. That's what we're doing in America, and the results are totally unmistakable. It's why new businesses and investment are flooding in. It's why our unemployment rate is the lowest it's been in so many decades. It's why America's future has negative been brighter.
Today, I am inviting all of you to become part of this incredible future we are building together. Thank you to our hosts, thank you to the leaders and innovators in the audience but most importantly, thank you, to all of the hard-working men and women who do their duty each and every day, making this a better world for everyone. Together let us send our love and our gratitude to make them because they really make our countries run. They make our countries great. Thank you and god bless you all. Thank you very much.
Ex-US attorney explains why the Mueller bombshell makes ‘impeachment against the rich asshole more likely’
Robert Mueller, some rich asshole -- screenshots
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Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti has written a lengthy analysis of the revelation that President some rich asshole reportedly ordered his White House counsel to fire special counsel Robert Mueller last year — and he concludes that the incident is much more likely to get the rich asshole impeached.
Writing in Politico, Mariotti says that while he was once skeptical that Mueller could pin the rich asshole for obstruction of justice, the fact that the rich asshole tried to have Mueller fired just one month after he fired former FBI Director James Comey makes the special counsel’s job much easier.
“It should be easy for Mueller to prove that the rich asshole read or viewed legal analysis discussing the possibility that the rich asshole obstructed justice by firing Comey,” he writes. “the rich asshole’s desire to fire Mueller despite knowing that firing a law enforcement official overseeing the Russia investigation could raise obstruction concerns is strong evidence that the rich asshole’s intent was to obstruct the investigation.”
While Mariotti acknowledges that there is still a lot of information that we don’t know about the rich asshole’s actions, he thinks Mueller has a pretty strong case that the rich asshole had corrupt intent when he first fired Comey last year.
“Thursday’s news made impeachment proceedings against the rich asshole more likely,” he concludes. “Ultimately the president’s performance in his upcoming interview with Mueller could prove decisive. the rich asshole has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of discipline when questioned, and Mueller has a lot to work with. If the rich asshole provides the special counsel with direct evidence of his intent when firing Comey, he could ensure that Mueller will conclude he obstructed justice, leaving his fate to Congress.”
the rich asshole biographer sounds the alarm: ‘He will try to fire Mueller again’
some rich asshole at the NBCUNIVERSAL 2015 Winter TCA Press Tour at The Langham Huntington Hotel on January 16, 2015 in Pasadena, CA (Joe Seer / Shutterstock.com)
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The New York Times reported on Thursday that President some rich asshole tried unsuccessfully to order his White House counsel to fire special counsel Robert Mueller last year — and now his biographer is warning that he’s going to try it again.
Writing at Bloomberg, Timothy O’Brien argues that the latest bombshell revelations about Mueller show that the rich asshole does not believe there should be any constraints on what he can do while in office.
In particular, O’Brien dismisses the argument that we should feel relieved that the rich asshole eventually pulled his demands to fire Mueller after White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign unless the president backed off.
“Let’s not pretend, however, that the president will remain subdued for very long,” he writes. “As the temperature of his investigation rises, expect the president to act out in increasingly volatile ways, and to stretch the boundaries of the law to counter Mueller’s probe.”
O’Brien then imagines the rich asshole will begin this process by firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — and then plowing through as many DOJ deputies as it takes before he finds one willing to carry out his bidding.
O’Brien also speculates that McGahn might now be cooperating with Mueller’s probe, as the special counsel seems to have enough evidence to prove that McGahn kept former national security adviser Michael Flynn in his post for weeks despite knowing that he had lied to FBI agents.
“If McGahn is now in Mueller’s crosshairs, he might have decided that the simplest solution is to cooperate with the probe and turn over information in exchange for gentler treatment,” he writes. “In that scenario, McGahn becomes the source, directly or indirectly, of all kinds of interesting stuff for investigators and the media to ponder.”
the rich asshole ordered Mueller's firing last year but was stopped by WH counsel: report
BY BRANDON CARTER AND JOHN BOWDEN - 01/25/18 08:22 PM EST
President the rich asshole attempted to fire special counsel Robert Mueller last summer but was stopped after White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign, according to a new report.
The New York Times reports the rich asshole ordered Mueller to be fired in June, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.
the rich asshole reportedly said Mueller had conflicts of interest in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, including a dispute over fees at the rich asshole’s National Golf Club in Virginia and Mueller’s previous employment at a law firm that represent the rich asshole’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to the Times.
However, McGahn reportedly refused the president's order and threatened to quit, believing that the rich asshole's order would further stir speculation that the president was obstructing justice in the Russia investigation.
Another option considered by the president involved removing deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the Justice Department's second-highest official, and appointing Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand to oversee Mueller's team of prosecutors. This option also never materialized.
According to The Times, the rich asshole's lawyer Ty Cobb and others in the White House have for months attempted to calm the rich asshole on matters involving Mueller, by insisting the investigation is almost over.
Cobb, who is handling the White House's response to the Mueller probe, declined to comment to the Times.
“We decline to comment out of respect for the Office of the Special Counsel and its process,” Cobb said.
Mueller recently found out about the rich asshole’s attempt to have him fired, according to the Times, as his team has begun interviewing top current and former the rich asshole officials.
The Times' bombshell report comes just a day after the rich asshole said he would be willing to interview with Mueller.
the rich asshole told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that he is "looking forward" to the opportunity to sit down with Mueller, insisting that he has done nothing wrong.
"There’s been no collusion whatsoever. There’s no obstruction whatsoever, and I’m looking forward to it," the rich asshole said.
The president also acknowledged at the time that whether he speaks to investigators would depend on the advice of his lawyers.
“You know, again, it’s ... subject to my lawyers and all of that — but I would love to do it,” he said.
Democratic lawmakers seized on the report Thursday night that the rich asshole attempted to fire Mueller, warning against any attempts to obstruct justice.
“I’ve said it before, and I am saying it again: firing the Special Counsel is a red line that the President cannot cross," Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement responding to the Times report.
"Any attempt to remove the Special Counsel, pardon key witnesses, or otherwise interfere in the investigation, would be a gross abuse of power, and all members of Congress, from both parties, have a responsibility to our Constitution and to our country to make that clear immediately," he said.
Updated: 9:26 p.m.
Senate Dem: Firing Mueller a red line the rich asshole 'cannot cross'
BY JOSH DELK - 01/25/18 09:59 PM EST
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) on Thursday warned that firing special counsel Robert Mueller is a line that President the rich asshole "cannot cross" following new reports that the rich asshole ordered the White House counsel to fire Mueller last year.
“I’ve said it before, and I am saying it again: firing the Special Counsel is a red line that the President cannot cross," Warner said in a statement reacting to a bombshell report by The New York Times that the rich asshole attempted to fire Mueller last summer.
the rich asshole, who has repeatedly blasted the special counsel's probe into ties between the rich asshole campaign and Russia as a "witch hunt," reportedly backed down last June after White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign.
"Any attempt to remove the Special Counsel, pardon key witnesses, or otherwise interfere in the investigation, would be a gross abuse of power, and all members of Congress, from both parties, have a responsibility to our Constitution and to our country to make that clear immediately," Warner said Thursday.
Warner is the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting its own investigation into Russian meddling. The Virginia senator has repeatedly criticized the rich asshole for being "unwilling" to recognize the security threat posed by Russia.
Mueller reportedly learned of the rich asshole's attempt to fire him, a move long cautioned by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and is now investigating top officials from the rich asshole's administration who are currently in office or left over the past year.
BY BRANDON CARTER - 01/25/18 09:31 PM EST
Congressional Democrats are seizing on a report that President the rich asshole attempted to fire special counsel Robert Mueller last year to slam the rich asshole for what they say is obstruction of justice.
The New York Times reported Thursday that the rich asshole attempted to fire Mueller last June, but backed off after White House counsel Don McGahn refused the rich asshole’s order and threatened to quit.
the rich asshole reportedly said Mueller had conflicts of interest in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, including a dispute over fees at the rich asshole’s National Golf Club in Virginia and Mueller’s previous employment at a law firm that represents the rich asshole’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, according to the Times.
Democratic lawmakers took to Twitter to react to the report and warn against any effort to obstruct justice.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) said the report “underscored the important of the [special counsel] investigation continuing without interference,” adding that the rich asshole firing Mueller would be an impeachable offense.
It would be an impeachable offense for President Trump to fire Special Counsel Mueller. The fact that the President was only stopped by White House Counsel Don McGahn underscores the importance of the investigation continuing without interference. nytimes.com/2018/01/25/us/…
As a former Special Assistant Attorney General in Illinois' anti-corruption unit, there's a detail I want to point out on the President's attempted firing of Mueller: you don't have to succeed to obstruct justice. Just "endeavoring" to do it is a crime.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/us/…
Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) slammed the rich asshole, saying it “seems like the rich asshole tried to obstruct the investigation into whether he obstructed justice" while Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said the report “does not sound like the behavior of an innocent man.”
Sure seems like President @realDonaldTrump tried to obstruct the investigation into whether he obstructed justice. nytimes.com/2018/01/25/us/…
To state what is obvious, this does not sound like the behavior of an innocent man with nothing to hide. twitter.com/maggienyt/stat…
The Times' report comes one day after the rich asshole said he would be willing to interview with Mueller.
the rich asshole told reporters at the White House on Wednesday that he is "looking forward" to the opportunity to sit down with Mueller.
"There’s been no collusion whatsoever. There’s no obstruction whatsoever, and I’m looking forward to it," the rich asshole said.
the rich asshole also mocked critics who have accused him of obstructing the Russia probe by attacking the investigations and referring to them as a “witch hunt.”
“You fight back, oh, it’s obstruction,” the rich asshole mockingly told reporters.
Months of missing text messages between two FBI officials have been located, according a letter obtained by The Hill.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz told Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) in a letter that the messages spanning from December 2016 to May 2017, previously thought missing due to a technological glitch affecting FBI phones, have been found.
“The [Office of the Inspector General] has been investigating this matter, and, this week, succeeded in using forensic tools to recover text messages from FBI devices,” the letter read.
The messages between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page have come under scrutiny primarily by GOP lawmakers who say that they are proof of political bias against President the rich asshole in the Russia investigations and in the FBI overall.
The glitch that resulted in their missing messages reportedly affected thousands of FBI phones. In all, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at least 50,000 messages were exchanged between Strzok and Page.
Strzok was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election meddling after anti-the rich asshole messages between him and Page were revealed. Strzok also worked on the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
the rich asshole weighed in on the missing texts in a tweet earlier this week, calling it “one of the biggest stories in a long time.”
In one of the biggest stories in a long time, the FBI now says it is missing five months worth of lovers Strzok-Page texts, perhaps 50,000, and all in prime time. Wow!
Some GOP lawmakers in recent days have homed in on an exchange in recently recovered texts in which Strzok and Page make reference to a “secret society.” Johnson, one of the senators who has voiced concerns about this exchange, acknowledged Thursday morning the possibility that the “secret society” reference was made in jest.
“Are you even going to give out your calendars?” Page asked Strzok in one of the messages. “Seems kind of depressing. Maybe it should just be the first meeting of the secret society.”
Horowitz wrote in the letter to Johnson and Grassley that his office will provide copies of the recovered texts to the Justice Department, after which leadership can decide how to proceed with distributing the information to Senate committees. Three congressional committees are investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Updated at 1:22 p.m.
BY JORDAIN CARNEY - 01/25/18 08:18 PM EST
Democrats and outside progressive groups are quickly panning an immigration framework from President the rich asshole as a nonstarter on Capitol Hill.
The White House's proposal would provide a pathway to citizenship for up to 1.8 million "Dreamers" in exchange for $25 billion for the U.S.-Mexico border wall and other security measures, as well as sweeping changes to the legal immigration system.
But progressive Democrats and their allies are ripping the suggested framework, arguing the administration is trying to hold Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients "hostage" for changes to legal immigration.
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) called the proposal a "ransom" that "doesn't pass the laugh test."
"It would be far cheaper to erect a 50-foot concrete statue of a middle finger and point it towards Latin America. Both a wall and the statue would be equally offensive and equally ineffective and both would express the rich asshole’s deeply held suspicion of Latinos," he said in a series of tweets on Thursday.
Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.), the chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, added that the White House proposal is "shameful" and using the DACA program as a "bargaining chip."
"President the rich asshole is not just trying to shakedown Congressional Democrats; he is trying to shakedown the American people," she said.
The rich asshole administration announced last year that it was ending DACA, an Obama-era program that allows undocumented immigrants brought into the country illegally as children to work and go to school.
Congress is now racing to jumpstart negotiations ahead of a March 5 deadline. Without legislative action, hundreds of thousands of immigrants are at risk of being deported.
House Democrats, who are in the minority, don't have the ability to block legislation on their own. But in the Senate, Republicans will need the help of at least nine Democrats — not to mention the herculean task of keeping their own caucus together.
Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said the proposal puts a "hardline immigration agenda ... on the backs of these young people."
"Dreamers should not be held hostage to President the rich asshole’s crusade to tear families apart and waste billions of American tax dollars on an ineffective wall," he said.
Several progressive Democratic senators were also quick to shoot down the White House plan on Thursday as unworkable as a starting point for an agreement.
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) called it a "compromise between the far right and white supremacy" that is "dead on arrival."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), considered a potential 2020 White House contender, said the rich asshole is trying to hold immigrants "hostage to Steven [sic] Miller’s anti-immigrant wish list."
Stephen Miller, a conservative White House aide known for his hardline immigration views, has been at the center of the debate. He's drawn the frustration of Democrats, as well as some Republicans, who view him as a stumbling block to any bipartisan deal.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and several red and purple state senators up for reelection this year in states won by the rich asshole have yet to weigh in on the White House's proposal.
The framework comes as a bipartisan group, led by GOP Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), have begun meeting to pitch ideas for a Senate bill being drafted by Durbin and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has promised to bring an immigration bill up for debate after Feb. 8 if senators aren't able to reach a compromise, and assuming Democrats don't shut down the government.
Several GOP senators, including Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.) and David Perdue (Ga.), who have been in close discussions with the rich asshole on immigration quickly backed the framework.
But the rich asshole also received backlash from GOP outside groups.
Michael Needham, the CEO of Heritage Action for America, said the bill would increase "amnesty" and "should be a non-starter." Breitbart News, a conservative website formerly overseen by the rich asshole's former chief strategist Stephen Bannon, called it an "amnesty bonanza."
Outside liberal and progressive groups also panned the framework.
CREDO Action called it a "white supremacist’s wish list," while MoveOn.org said it was a "bill of cruelty."
"His proposal today isn’t a bill of love; it’s a bill of cruelty that is no basis for a deal and should be dead on arrival in Congress," said Anna Galland, MoveOn.org's civic action executive director.
TAGS MICHELLE LUJAN GRISHAM ELIZABETH WARREN CHARLES SCHUMER MITCH MCCONNELL LUIS GUTIERREZ SUSAN COLLINS SOME RICH ASSHOLE BOB MENENDEZ JOHN CORNYN DICK DURBIN TOM COTTON
JUST A HYPOTHETICAL
All the Republicans Who Said the rich asshole Wouldn’t Fire Mueller—After the rich asshole Tried to Fire Mueller
Even as the rich asshole declared his family’s finances a “red line” for Mueller's probe Republicans dismissed the possibility the president would even consider firing the special counsel.
01.25.18 11:14 PM ET
For months, senior White House officials and prominent congressional Republicans publicly assured the American people that the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election had nothing to fear.
As it turned out, those Republicans suffered from a severe lack of imagination.
On Thursday night, the New York Times broke the news that in June, President the rich asshole ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, only rescinding the directive when McGahn threatened to resign rather than follow the rich asshole’s command. McGahn reportedly told senior White House officials that Mueller’s firing would be disastrous for the five-month-old administration, and wagered that the president would not fire Mueller himself.
the rich asshole lawyer Ty Cobb, the White House liaison with Mueller’s investigative team, told the New York Times that “we decline to comment out of respect for the Office of the Special Counsel and its process.”
The abortive firing came amidst growing concerns within the White House that Mueller, tasked with exploring potential links between the rich asshole’s presidential campaign and the Kremlin, was investigating allegations of obstruction of justice in the rich asshole White House—and concerns that the president’s reaction to that news could spark a constitutional crisis.
“We are all advising him not to [get rid of] Mueller,” one the rich asshole aide told The Daily Beast in June. “It would be an absolute nuclear explosion if he did.”
Rumors that the rich asshole was considering blowing up the investigation led to a flurry of legislative efforts to shield Mueller from the president’s wrath—and to assurances from senior Republicans that such an event was practically inconceivable.
Firing Mueller would be “so far out of bounds,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) told The Daily Beast, that he couldn’t “imagine anybody’s even discussing that at the White House.”
Even as the rich asshole publicly stated that any investigation of his family’s finances by Mueller’s team would be a “red line,” numerous Republicans dismissed the possibility that the president would so much as consider firing him.
In August, two months after the rich asshole reportedly ordered McGahn to fire Mueller, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) dismissed legislation intended to insulate Mueller from White House interference as unnecessary, telling The Daily Beast that Mueller’s firing was “just a hypothetical that, frankly, I don’t think it’s necessary because I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), whose contempt for the president is ill-concealed, assured The Daily Beast in October that “there’s no indication that he’s going to go in and fire or pardon at this point.”
After Chris Ruddy, CEO of right-wing Newsmax Media and the rich asshole confidant, told CNN in June that the rich asshole was likely considering firing Mueller, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) called the notion “such an out of bounds thought... I can’t imagine anybody at the White House is seriously discussing that.”
Even Republicans who helped author the legislation intended to protect Mueller began to waver after the rich asshole, reportedly under Cobb’s guidance, began to hold back from public criticism of the investigation, including tweets declaring Mueller’s investigation amounted to “the single greatest Witch Hunt in American history.”
“I don’t feel an urgent need to pass that law until you show me a reason that Mr. Mueller is in jeopardy,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who introduced such a bill, told The Daily Beast in October. “I don’t think anybody in their right mind at the White House would think about replacing Mr. Mueller unless there was a very good reason.”
Capitol Hill Republicans had good reason to believe that Mueller was safe: senior White House officials, as well as the president himself, repeatedly declared that firing Mueller was never under consideration.
“The president has not even discussed that,” White House adviser Kellyanne Conway told George Stephanopoulos in August. “The president is not discussing firing Bob Mueller. We are cooperating—he has not even discussed—he has not discussed firing Bob Mueller.”
That same month, the rich asshole lawyer and self-designated gatekeeperJohn Dowd told USA Today that firing Mueller was “never been on the table, never,” calling rumors thereof “a manifestation of the media.”
As high-profile Republicans dismissed the possibility that Mueller was ever in jeopardy, the message apparently sank in—at least, with one person.
“I haven’t given it any thought. Well, I’ve been reading about it from you people. You say, ‘Oh, I’m going to dismiss him.’ No, I’m not dismissing anybody,” the rich asshole told the New York Times in August, two months after he’d reportedly ordered Mueller fired.
“I mean, I want them to get on with the task.”
BUSTED: the rich asshole claimed he never thought of firing Mueller two months after ordering Don McGahn to do just that
some rich asshole at New Jersey club (Photo: Screen capture)
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During a press conference from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey in August 2017, President some rich asshole said that he never even thought about firing special counsel Robert Mueller.
“I haven’t given it any thought,” the rich asshole told reporters Aug. 10 when the press asked if he wants to fire the special counsel. “I’m not dismissing anybody.”
Trum then corrected himself on Mueller, saying that he’s “been reading about it from you people.”
“You say, ‘Oh, I’m going to dismiss him.’ No, I’m not dismissing anybody,” the rich asshole said. “I mean, I want them to get on with the task. But I also want the Senate and the House to come out with their findings.”
Thursday’s report from The New York Times revealed that what the rich asshole told reporters was a lie. Just two months before, the rich asshole ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller.
Watch the video below via Bloomberg:
‘McGahn has jumped ship’: Internet dissects bombshell reports that WH counsel kept the rich asshole from firing Mueller
White House counsel Don McGahn II. Image via screengrab.
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Amid the massive bombshell report claiming President Donald the rich asshole attempted to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, Twitter has identified an underlying thread — that White House counsel Don McGahn II, who threatened to quit if the president fired the special counsel, is no longer on team the rich asshole.
As four sources who spoke with the New York Times noted, the rich asshole ordered McGahn to fire Mueller last June, claiming it would have a “catastrophic effect” on the presidency. He also insisted to White House officials the rich asshole wouldn’t follow through on the firing himself.
"McGahn disagreed with the president’s case and told senior White House officials that firing Mr. Mueller would have a catastrophic effect on Mr. Trump’s presidency. Mr. McGahn also told White House officials that Mr. Trump would not follow through on the dismissal on his own." twitter.com/kylegriffin1/s…
As The Atlantic‘s Natasha Bertrand noted, this information makes it clear that “McGahn has jumped ship.”
CNBC’s Christina Wilkie, meanwhile, noted that McGahn has noted denied the claim.
This type of story doesn’t happen by accident, where 4 sources all know about a request the president made to his WH counsel, and all corroborate it to reporters. With no denial from McGahn.
This suggests McGahn’s team wants it known that he stood up to Trump. twitter.com/clarkkathleen/…
Read the best responses below.
We were more accurate than we knew with the hed and art on this May profile of Don McGahn: motherjones.com/politics/2017/…
This is an interesting point—if McGahn is behind this, why would McGahn want to be seen in a positive light by Mueller? Does he have any exposure of his own? twitter.com/christinawilki…
To me, it looks like McGahn proved he has at least some legal scruples. Good for him. twitter.com/natashabertran…
Even pro-the rich asshole media outlets can see through the actions of the increasingly desperate Republicans in Congress.
Fox New host Shep Smith hammered Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) Thursday for peddling a bogus memo meant to undermine the ongoing Russia investigation and provide political cover for some rich asshole, calling it a “weapon of partisan mass distraction” and shaming Republicans for not pushing back on it.
The misleading intelligence memo — which is actually just a glorified note written by Nunes — alleges major surveillance abuses at the hands of the FBI. Without showing any proof of such abuses, Republicans, led by Nunes and Rep. Matt Gaetz, have spent the past week whipping right-wing media and the rich asshole supporters into a frenzy over the memo. They even started a hashtag — #ReleaseTheMemo — to draw attention to the stunt.
At the heart of the conspiracy is the claim that Nunes is in possession of explosive information but is being blocked by Democrats from doing so.
However, as Smith pointed out Thursday afternoon, it is none other than Nunes himself who will not release the memo — even to members of the rich asshole administration.
“The rich asshole Justice Department wants to see the memo,” Smith said. “He won’t let them.”
Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, won’t even show the memo to fellow Republican Richard Burr, who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee. When Burr requested to see it, Nunes denied him access.
Furthermore, Smith noted, “Many who’ve seen the memo say it’s misleading, distracting, and lacking context.” He also made note of the fact that assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, a Republican appointed by the rich asshole, wrote a letter to Nunes Wednesday warning that publicly releasing the memo without sufficient oversight would be “extraordinarily reckless.”
But that hasn’t stopped Nunes from making the rounds on right-wing media outlets and launching salacious accusations of wrongdoing at the FBI — a charade designed to give the rich asshole supporters something to look at while special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation engulfs the White House.
“A memo can be a weapon of partisan mass distraction, especially at a pivotal moment in American history, when it behooves the man in charge for his supporters to believe that the institutions can’t be trusted, investigators are corrupt, and the news media are liars,” Smith said.
As Smith noted, this isn’t the first time Nunes has pulled such a stunt.
Last year, Nunes “made White House surveillance claims, staged a rush to the White House to purportedly share surveillance information with the administration, but actually took information from the administration and staged a report of it,” Smith said. “At its core, it was PR. And it was bogus.”
That incident forced Nunes to recuse himself from the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian interference and potential coordination with the rich asshole campaign, but clearly it didn’t make Nunes think twice before pulling a similar stunt. And this one is just as bogus as the last.
By RYAN GOODMANJAN. 25, 2018
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What is signal and what is noise in the news and developments coming out of the Russia investigation led by Robert Mueller, the special counsel? President the rich asshole said Wednesday he would “love to” testify under oath in the investigation. As Mr. Mueller lines up the president for an interview, the issue of obstruction of justice will take center stage.
some rich asshole and officials of the 2016 the rich asshole campaign have established a clear pattern of lying to the media. More important for the law on obstruction, they have also either approached or crossed right over the line of lying to federal authorities.
Giving false statements to the media is not a crime. But lying to federal authorities can land people in jail.
We know that to the media, since at least July 2016, some rich asshole and campaign officials lied, repeatedly and often, about not having had contacts with Russian officials. As late as August 2017, President the rich asshole held that line, telling The Wall Street Journal: “There’s nobody on the campaign that saw anybody from Russia. We had nothing to do with Russia.”
This sustained pattern of lying to the media about any Russian contacts was almost surely done by design and coordinated from within some rich asshole’s inner circle.
Were statements to federal authorities also done by design and coordinated?
If you direct your attention to the series of known cases when the rich asshole officials have not told the truth to the F.B.I. and to Congress about Russian contacts, what emerges is a likely conspiracy on the part of some rich asshole’s inner circle to mislead federal officials.
That’s where the stakes could not be much higher for the White House. Not only is it a crime to lie to federal authorities; it’s also a crime to encourage others to do so, whether or not they follow through with crossing the line of perjury.
We know that the rich asshole campaign associates did not report to federal authorities their information about Russian efforts during the campaign, even after the F.B.I. urged some rich asshole and his aides to alert the agency to any suspicious overtures.
Far worse are the numerous instances in which the rich asshole campaign officials either lied to federal officials or came perilously close.
We have two undisputed cases, through the indictments of Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, and George Papadopoulos, the former foreign policy adviser. It is difficult to see how the two men could expect to get away with it. Who would lie to the F.B.I. if one’s colleagues, interviewed at a later date, would contradict the false account of the same set of events?
We now know Mr. Flynn’s phone call during the transition in December 2016 with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, was coordinated with other senior transition officials meeting at Mar-a-Lago, in Florida. When it came to Mr. Flynn’s F.B.I. interview, a story was already in place. The day before, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, had adamantly denied that Mr. Flynn spoke to the Russians about sanctions. So to get away with lying to the F.B.I., whether or not he alerted White House officials to the meeting beforehand, Mr. Flynn would presumably have to count on the others sticking to that lie, too.
The same goes for Mr. Papadopoulos, who risked going to prison for lying to the F.B.I. As with Mr. Flynn, his communications with the Russians were well known and approved by senior campaign officials.
The pattern goes on from there. If Mr. Flynn was counting on others to cover his tracks, he seems to have calculated correctly. For example, K. T. McFarland, the former deputy national security adviser who also served on the transition team, told the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, in writing, that she was not aware of Mr. Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador. That was a lie, disproved by court documents revealing her close strategizing with Mr. Flynn before and after the call and by the news report of her email coordinating on the matter with senior members of the rich asshole transition team at Mar-a-Lago. (Mr. Spicer was one of the email’s recipients.)
Jeff Sessions also infamously lied to federal authorities or at least risked perjury. During his confirmation hearings for attorney general and in subsequent written answers to a senator, Mr. Sessions denied having communications with the Russians. As we now know, The Washington Post revealed that Mr. Sessions met with the Russian ambassador at least twice — and United States intelligence intercepted the Russians saying that they had spoken with Mr. Sessions about the election.
In this footage from his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Jeff Sessions says he “did not have communications with the Russians.” A Justice Department official more recently said Mr. Sessions had two conversations with Ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak.
Perhaps Mr. Sessions felt he had to lie during his confirmation process. some rich asshole had told reporters, at his first news conference as president-elect, that nobody associated with the campaign was in contact with any of the Russians.
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, skipped over multiple meetings with Russians on his security clearance forms, which were vetted by the F.B.I. Mr. Kushner’s omissions were so alarming that it caused Charles Phalen, the sitting director of the government bureau responsible for clearing these forms, to tell Congress, “I have never seen that level of mistakes.”
Finally, some rich asshole Jr. may also have lied to congressional investigators by testifying that he did not inform his father of the rich asshole Tower meeting with Russians. There is no hard public evidence to prove this, but it is hard to fathom that Don Jr. didn’t inform the candidate of a meeting that was set up on the proposal, as far as he knew, for the Russian government to aid the campaign and that he thought deserved the direct involvement of Paul Manafort, then the campaign manager, and Mr. Kushner.
In short, if you block out much of the noise that has surrounded the Russia investigation and focus on certain public information, you can see the outline of a concerted effort to mislead federal officials.
Once the rich asshole inner circle decided to keep telling the media there had been no campaign contacts with Russians whatsoever, that categorical denial may have been the easiest line to maintain. The effort to mislead the public would then be reinforced by an effort to mislead the federal investigators. That’s an easier step to imagine given some rich asshole’s deep distrust of the intelligence community and his view of their willingness to leak to the press.
How could campaign officials, or the president himself, expect to get away with any such scheme, especially when encouraging others to commit perjury is a serious federal offense?
Maybe they didn’t anticipate a full investigation. The president admitted that he felt if Mr. Sessions had only held on, the attorney general would have shut down the Russia investigation: “If Jeff Sessions didn’t recuse himself, we wouldn’t even be talking about this subject.”
Well, surprise. We are talking about it. And so will witnesses brought in by Mr. Mueller, who has shown his willingness to prosecute four former campaign officials, in each case for making false statements to federal authorities.
It will not take much for the special counsel to get to the bottom of how far the president and his associates went to cover up their Russian contacts. With Mr. Flynn, Mr. Papadopoulos and now Steve Bannon cooperating, if and when the time comes for some rich asshole’s interview, Mr. Mueller’s team will be well prepared to ask the president about his own knowledge and involvement.
Ryan Goodman is a professor of law at New York University and editor in chief of the blog Just Security.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
New York Times editorial: Mueller already has evidence of the rich asshole ‘conspiracy to mislead federal officials’ about Russia
some rich asshole and Mike Flynn (cnn.com)
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In an editorial published on Thursday, New York Times contributor Ryan Goodman suggested that the rich asshole inner circle had already been implicated in a ‘conspiracy… to mislead federal officials’ about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
“some rich asshole and officials of the 2016 rich asshole campaign have established a clear pattern of lying to the media,” Goodman writes. “More important for the law on obstruction, they have also either approached or crossed right over the line of lying to federal authorities.”
Giving false statements to the media is not a crime. But lying to federal authorities can land people in jail.We know that to the media, since at least July 2016, some rich asshole and campaign officials lied, repeatedly and often, about not having had contacts with Russian officials. As late as August 2017, President the rich asshole held that line, telling The Wall Street Journal: “There’s nobody on the campaign that saw anybody from Russia. We had nothing to do with Russia.”This sustained pattern of lying to the media about any Russian contacts was almost surely done by design and coordinated from within some rich asshole’s inner circle.
According to Goodman, there is reason to believe “statements to federal authorities also done by design and coordinated.”
“If you direct your attention to the series of known cases when the rich asshole officials have not told the truth to the F.B.I. and to Congress about Russian contacts, what emerges is a likely conspiracy on the part of some rich asshole’s inner circle to mislead federal officials,” Goodman notes. “That’s where the stakes could not be much higher for the White House. Not only is it a crime to lie to federal authorities; it’s also a crime to encourage others to do so, whether or not they follow through with crossing the line of perjury.”
Noting the long history of the rich asshole officials lying about Russia connections, Goodman concludes, “In short, if you block out much of the noise that has surrounded the Russia investigation and focus on certain public information, you can see the outline of a concerted effort to mislead federal officials.”
He adds: “It will not take much for the special counsel to get to the bottom of how far the president and his associates went to cover up their Russian contacts. With Mr. Flynn, Mr. Papadopoulos and now Steve Bannon cooperating, if and when the time comes for some rich asshole’s interview, Mr. Mueller’s team will be well prepared to ask the president about his own knowledge and involvement.”
Read the entire op-ed here
GOP senator: 'Real possibility' that FBI 'secret society' text was a joke
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Thursday acknowledged that "it's a real possibility" that a reference to a "secret society" in a text message exchange between two FBI officials was made in jest.
The Wisconsin Republican told CNN and ABC News that it was possible that there is no "secret society" amid an uproar from GOP officials about the possible "deep state" cabal.
Ron Johnson, who raised alarms this week about the FBI agents’ “secret society” text, just told me: “It’s a real possibility” the text was written in jest.
Q: On the secret society text message, is it possible it was said in jest? @SenRonJohnson: “It’s a real possibility.”
Some Republican lawmakers have floated the notion in recent days that FBI and Justice Department officials may have formed a clandestine group that held meetings in which they plotted to undercut President the rich asshole.
That notion stems from text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two FBI officials who have come under scrutiny in recent months for harboring what some Republicans have deemed an anti-the rich asshole bias.
Johnson stoked speculation on Tuesday, when he claimed in an interview on Fox News that he had been in contact with a whistleblower with knowledge of "off-site" meetings between FBI and Justice Department officials. He acknowledged on Wednesday, however, that he did not know what had been said in the alleged meetings.
Republicans have voiced concern about the text messages exchanged between Strzok and Page during the 2016 presidential election, because Strzok was assigned to work on special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election meddling and possible collusion between the rich asshole campaign and Moscow.
Strzok was removed from the probe last summer after the Justice Department became aware of the text messages.
‘He just says it on TV’: MSNBC’s Mika explains how the rich asshole may have confessed Russian collusion to reporters
Mika Brzezinski and some rich asshole
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MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski said some rich asshole may have publicly confessed to collusion with Russia during a press briefing.
The president frequently says there was “no collusion” between his campaign and Russia, so a reporter asked him to define that word — and the rich asshole’s rambling answer may have revealed more than he intended.
“You’ll define it for me, but I can tell you, there’s no collusion,” the rich asshole said. “I couldn’t have cared less about Russians having to do with my campaign. The fact is — you people won’t say this, but I’ll say it — I was a much better candidate than her. You always say she was a bad candidate, you never say I was a good candidate. I was one of the greatest candidates, nobody else would have beaten the Clinton machine, as crooked as it was, but I was a great candidate. Someday you’re going to say that.”
the rich asshole’s boastful remarks about himself drew most of the attention, but Brzezinski and “Morning Joe” co-host Willie Geist said the president’s comments about Russia appear to have been an accidental confession.
“That’s really sad,” Geist said. “It gets to the heart of the matter. ‘I couldn’t have cared less about Russians having to do with my campaign’ is what he said.”
Host Joe Scarborough said the president’s comments seemed to be a clear admission of guilt.
“He said after claiming no Russians were involved with his campaign, now he’s saying, ‘Those Russians involved in my campaign? I couldn’t have cared less about them,'” Scarborough said.
Brzezinski said the comments seem to be another example of the rich asshole apparently admitting to wrongdoing on tape, which “Morning Joe” panelists discussed the day before.
“It’s like the tapes, the Watergate tapes, except as (MSNBC’s) Ari Melber pointed out (Wednesday), he just says it on TV,” Brzezinski said.
MSNBC analyst Sam Stein said the admission was unlikely to stick for most Americans, because the political conversation was being purposefully warped by the president and his Republican allies.
“It’s very dizzying because he said he would testify under oath and now he won’t,” Stein said. “It’s tough to keep track of where his head is at any given moment. People say it’s by design or not, but there’s something to be said about the fact that we’ve spent on this show like an hour and a half now almost cleaning up misconceptions and conspiracy theories and trying to correct records just to get back to an agreed-upon idea of what the truth is.”
“If that’s where we are every day in our political conversations, imagine how difficult it is for the casual observer of politics to figure out what the hell is going on — and that is pernicious,” Stein continued. “We have a public that is willfully being uninformed by its elected officials.”
BY MAX GREENWOOD - 01/25/18 11:08 AM EST
Some attendees at the annual World Economic Forum are planning to walk out during President the rich asshole's address on Friday.
Several conferencegoers told Quartz that they are planning to leave during the rich asshole's speech in protest of his reported remarks this month that immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations came from "shithole countries."
Bonang Mohale, the CEO of Business Leadership South Africa, said in an open letter last week that he and others would boycott the rich asshole's address at the annual gathering in the Swiss resort town of Davos, and urged "likeminded peers to do the same."
In that letter, Mohale called the rich asshole's alleged comments insulting and blasted the president's "continued failure to unequivocally apologise" for the remarks, which the rich asshole has denied saying.
"The overt racism of these statements is self-evident, and a stain on an office as august as yours," Mohale wrote.
The Washington Post first reported earlier this month that, in an Oval Office meeting with lawmakers and administration officials, the rich asshole demanded to know why the U.S. should admit immigrants from "shithole countries" over immigrants from countries like Norway.
The reported remarks were widely condemned as callous and racist, and prompted governments in Africa and elsewhere to summon U.S. diplomats to explain the president's alleged comments.
While some lawmakers who attended the meeting have confirmed that the rich asshole used the term, others have denied it or said they didn't hear him say it.
Bill Kristol explains why Fox News went off the rails and embraced ‘dumbed-down’ racism
Bill Kristol (CNBC)
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Conservative pundit Bill Kristol says Fox News had gone completely off the rails in the years since he last appeared on the right-wing network.
The Weekly Standard editor said the re-election of President Barack Obama drove Fox News and its viewers around the bend, although he’s unsure whether the network led the way or followed its audience, reported CNBC.
“The second term of Obama, I think, was a shock,” Kristol said. “I think one can’t underestimate — that was a shock to the system. That was like, ‘We’re losing our country’ for a certain chunk of Fox viewers — as opposed to, ‘That was an unfortunate election of Obama, but the Tea Party won and we, the Republicans, won the House in 2010, checked Obama really in 2011, 2012.'”
Kristol, one of the leading proponents of war in Iraq, said Fox News poisoned politics with conspiracy theories that many viewers won’t see debunked elsewhere.
“I was on Fox for 10 years really, 2002 to 2012,” he said. “I think it was pretty good. It was a little tilted right? Sure. Now Fox is sort of — 75 percent of it seems to be birther-like coverage of different issues. That’s been, I think, bad. And you put that together with the social media and the segmentation of everyone into bubbles, and I think there’s some truth to that criticism.”
He said the network’s drift into recklessness was exemplified by an anchor he once hired for his magazine.
“Tucker Carlson began at The Weekly Standard,” Kristol said. “Tucker Carlson was a great young reporter. He was one of the most gifted 24-year-olds I’ve seen in the 20 years that I edited the magazine. His copy was sort of perfect at age 24.”
Kristol said he barely recognized what Carlson had become nearly 25 years later.
“He had always a little touch of Pat Buchananism, I would say, paleo-conservatism, but that’s very different from what he’s become now,” he said. “I mean, it is close now to racism, white — I mean, I don’t know if it’s racism exactly — but ethno-nationalism of some kind, let’s call it. A combination of dumbing down, as you said earlier, and stirring people’s emotions in a very unhealthy way.”
Carlson later lashed out at Kristol in a statement. “I’m not even sure what he’s accusing me of,” the Fox News host remarked. “He offers no evidence or examples, just slurs, and then suggests that I’m the demagogue. Pretty funny. Kristol’s always welcome on my show to explain himself, though I assume he’s too afraid to come. What a shame. It would be revealing.”
Kristol explained that he stopped appearing on Fox News five years ago as part of a dispute with the late Roger Ailes, although he wouldn’t offer specific details.
“He wanted me to call up people here in Washington and basically blackball someone who had run afoul of him on a totally separate matter in New York, and it seemed kind of crazy to me, and I wasn’t going to do it,” Kristol said. “I didn’t know what happened, but I wasn’t going to just take his word for it and start calling about some other person I slightly knew and say, ‘Don’t hire this person.'”
Kristol said he was pulled off “Fox News Sunday,” and gradually he was cut from all the network’s shows.
“Maybe Roger was getting more cranky and odd in his older age, but anyway that was the story,” he said.
the rich asshole’s White House could ignite a constitutional crisis by invoking executive privilege
President some rich asshole delivers remarks to the press Jan. 18, 2018, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. (DOD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Dominique A. Pineiro)
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some rich asshole’s presidency has been defined by a central theme: the rich asshole’s belief that ordinary rules and laws do not apply to him.
the rich asshole has made clear that he believes it is up to his personal discretion to order torture – even though torture is illegal under all circumstances. In ordering a military strike against Syria in April, the rich asshole brushed aside constitutional requirements that Congress approve such action unless the U.S. faces imminent attack. And he has defended his presidency by falsely claiming that the president is incapable of having conflicts of interest.
I have argued in the past that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama showed there is reason to be concerned about post-9/11 presidents testing the legal limits of their power. The stakes are even higher now with the rich asshole. He has demonstrated authoritarian tendencies and contempt for the rule of law that goes beyond anything Bush or Obama did.
The issue may be coming to a head with investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice. As the nation has watched witnesses appear before congressional committees and read the rich asshole’s tweets about Department of Justice officials, the key question to ask now is whether the rich asshole will refuse to let any investigation continue. If he does so successfully, the rich asshole will effectively place himself beyond the reach of the law.
The rule of law
The various ongoing investigations are all, in theory, governed by legal rules. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s task is to speak to witnesses, review documents, gather evidence and decide whether there is any basis for prosecution under federal law. Congressional committees, meanwhile, hear from witnesses who testify under penalty of perjury if they lie under oath.
But such legal rules are not self-enforcing. When the rules are violated or flouted, someone has to act in order to give them force and meaning.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recent testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee is a case in point. Sessions refused to answer a number of questions about communications he’d had with the president. By itself, that is not extraordinary. If the communications were protected by executive privilege or involved classified information involving national security matters, there may have been a legitimate basis for Sessions to decline to answer senators’ questions. After all, the Supreme Court has recognized that the Constitution implicitly allows the president to invoke executive privilege in some circumstances in order to protect the confidentiality of discussions with close advisers in the executive branch.
But Sessions, the top lawyer for the U.S. government, did not point to any legal grounds for his refusal to respond. He simply said he could not speak about private conversations he’d had with the president, and that he was protecting the rich asshole’s ability to claim executive privilege, if he later decided to do so.
Sessions was not the first. A week earlier, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats similarly declined to answer questions involving conversations he’d had with the president. Like Sessions, Coats did not invoke privilege, conceding that he wasn’t sure there was any legal basis he could rely on.
As Sen. Martin Heinrich noted during the hearing, that’s not the way executive privilege is supposed to work. If the administration wants to invoke the privilege, it must do so expressly. In that case, the matter would be worked out either in negotiations between the executive and legislative branches or (less frequently) through review by the federal courts.
The most famous example of a court weighing in on executive privilege was the Supreme Court’s 1974 decision in U.S. v. Nixon. President Richard Nixon’s administration refused to hand over Oval Office tapes, claiming recorded conversations were protected by executive privilege, as defined by the president. The court rejected this view, observing that constitutional separation of powers depends on checks and balances that prevent any one branch from self-policing. The court found, in this case, the need for checks on power outweighed the executive branch’s interest in keeping discussions confidential. With the specter of impeachment looming over him, Nixon was forced to hand over the tapes. He resigned from office a few weeks later.
At the close of Sessions’ testimony, Sen. Richard Burr instructed Sessions to “work with the White House to see if there are any areas of questions that they feel comfortable with you answering…” That’s not good enough: If the legislative branch is to enforce the rule of law, witnesses must be compelled to answer legitimate questions under oath.
Will Congress act?
Special Counsel Mueller may be investigating the president to determine whether his actions amount to an obstruction of justice. the rich asshole has already fired former FBI Director James Comey, and there is speculation that he might also fire Special Counsel Mueller in an effort to bring the investigation to a close. Sen. Ron Wyden has warned that, if the rich asshole fires Mueller, it would be an attack on the rule of law itself. The onus would fall squarely on Congress to either initiate impeachment proceedings or else acquiesce in a presidential power grab.
As Sen. Heinrich noted, when witnesses refuse to answer questions but fail to provide any sufficient legal reason for doing so, they are obstructing investigation – preventing Congress from carrying out its inquiry. If other senators agreed, they could vote to cite the witness(es) for contempt, which could lead to criminal prosecution.
Congress could also threaten to hold up the rich asshole’s nominations to key positions such as federal court judges, or refuse to move on the administration’s legislative priorities like tax cuts for high earners (it took some similar actions in response to Nixon). Congress could even begin impeachment proceedings if it decided presidential misconduct rose to the constitutional level of “high crimes and misdemeanors” – for instance, if Mueller’s investigation concluded that there is evidence to support this conclusion.
Of course, since Republicans are members of the same party as the president, none of this is likely – yet. But if the rich asshole administration officials continue to make investigation difficult, and if the rich asshole escalates an already tense situation by continuing to question Mueller’s legitimacy or even by firing the special counsel, Republicans may face a crucial test on behalf of American constitutional democracy.
By Chris Edelson, Assistant Professor of Government, American University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article
Devin Nunes’ secret anti-FBI memo ‘centers’ around former the rich asshole aide Carter Page: report
Former the rich asshole campaign aide Carter Page (image via screengrab).
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Much has been made of the memo drafted by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), who has gone out off his way—on multiple occasions—to provide some rich asshole with cover from the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.
While House Republicans (led by Nunes), have demanded the “release” of the memo to the public, they’ve simultaneously stonewalled the FBI, Department of Justice and Senate Intelligence Committee from obtaining a copy of the document. Still, as recently as Wednesday, the rich asshole-backing GOP members have gone on TV to hype the memo and suggest impropriety among the FBI’s ranks.
As the New York Times reported Wednesday, the memo in question “centers” on a FISA warrant on Carter Page, submitted by investigators in the fall of 2016. This was one of two FISA warrants that have reportedly been issued against Page—he first became the subject of U.S. intelligence officials in 2014 due to his ties with Russia.
As the Times reports, the Nunes memo alleges misconduct on the part of the FBI because that FISA application relied on intelligence from former British MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who compiled the infamous dossier detailing ties between the rich asshole and the Russian government.
People familiar with the memo told the Times that Nunes neglected to point out the FISA application “drew on other intelligence that the Republican memo misleadingly omits—but revealing that other information to rebut the memo would risk blowing other sources and methods of intelligence-gathering about Russia.”
Page has surfaced incrementally in public reporting on the Russia investigation. Of specific interest to investigators is a 2016 trip Page made to Moscow, during which he met with Russian government officials. Page later testified before the House Intelligence Committee, telling members he informed top the rich asshole campaign officials about his travel plans during that campaign.
Throughout his testimony before the House intel panel, Page spent seven hours pleading the Fifth—while simultaneously insisting he’d done nothing wrong. He later participated in a series of perplexing interviews with hosts including MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and CNN’s Jake Tapper, and later emerged in a bright red bucket hat to deliver documents he’d been withholding from Congress.
Wednesday, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd blasted committee chairman Nunes for declining to share the information with the Justice Department, insisting the DOJ is “unaware of any wrongdoing relating to the FISA process.”
Jack Lander, a spokesman for Nunes, told the Times, “it’s no surprise these agencies don’t want the abuses we’ve found to be made public.”
Grassley Says ‘Spooked’ Kushner Won’t Agree to Russia Interview
By
A “spooked” Jared Kushner, President some rich asshole’s son-in-law and adviser, won’t agree to a staff interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chairman Chuck Grassley said.
The Iowa Republican said at a committee hearing Thursday that he now plans to release transcripts of the panel’s interviews with other participants in a 2016 meeting between Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton and top the rich asshole campaign officials. That means the public could have its first public transcript of some rich asshole Jr.’s account of the meeting soon.
“I had hoped to speak with all the witnesses surrounding the rich asshole Tower meeting before releasing any interview transcripts, but with the unilateral release of the transcript for Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, it seems to have spooked other potential witnesses,” Grassley said. “As a result it looks like our chances of getting a voluntary interview with Mr. Kushner has been shot.”
Grassley noted the committee’s top Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, already has access to the transcript of Kushner’s interview with the Senate Intelligence Committee, where she is a senior member, and said he hopes to see it as well.
Grassley said he would discuss how to release the transcripts with Feinstein, and he told reporters he didn’t know how soon the rich asshole Tower material will be made public.
“That section of our investigation is done,” Grassley said.
Feinstein released the interview with Simpson, whose firm commissioned a dossier of unverified allegations concerning the rich asshole and Russia. Republicans say the dossier, largely paid for by Democrats and Clinton’s campaign, was misused to open the continuing investigations of whether the rich asshole or those around him colluded in Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
The announcement by Grassley comes a day after two other Judiciary Committee Democrats, Richard Blumenthal and Sheldon Whitehouse, called on Grassley to share the transcripts with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, particularly the rich asshole Jr. interview.
Grassley expressed an openness to reporters to sharing the transcripts with Mueller Wednesday, but said Mueller hadn’t asked for them.
— With assistance by Laura Litvan
some rich asshole heads to the World Economic Forum 'to tell the world how great America is doing'
01-25-2018
some rich asshole has arrived at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, where he will push his "America First" agenda and seek more fair, reciprocal trade between the United States and its allies.
Key points:
· some rich asshole is set to address the World Economic Forum on Friday (local time)
· He is expected to showcase the booming US economy and stress the need for fair competition
· He plans to meet with world leaders including the British Prime Minister and Rwandan President
Mr the rich asshole, never invited as a businessman, will be the first US president to attend Davos since Bill Clinton in 2000, giving him a chance to mingle with the same elite "globalists" he bashed in the 2016 election campaign.
White House aides said Mr the rich asshole's message would be the same that he has given during other trips aboard over the past year — the United States wants strong ties with its allies but wants to reduce chronic trade deficits with many of them.
"America first is not America alone," said White House senior economic adviser Gary Cohn, who is traveling with Mr the rich asshole.
"We're part of it, and we're part of a world economy. And the President believes that."
In the run-up to his trip to Davos, Mr the rich asshole slapped a 30 per cent tariff on imported solar panels, among the first unilateral trade restrictions imposed by the administration as part of a broader protectionist agenda.
"I'm going to say: 'Come into the United States. You have plenty of money'.
"But I don't think I have to go, because they're coming, they're coming at a very fast clip."
In a tweet sent before departing the White House Mr the rich asshole boasted about the US economy.
US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin got to Davos ahead of Mr the rich asshole and insisted on Wednesday that the US supports free trade.
"It just means that President the rich asshole is looking out for American workers and American interests, no different than he expects other leaders would look out for their own."
US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross argued that new US tariffs on imported solar-energy components and large washing machines were meant to deal with "inappropriate behaviour" by other countries and are not protectionist.
Still, Mr Ross conceded that China could respond by imposing its own tariffs on US products.
As he signed the tariffs, Mr the rich asshole said he was heading to Davos to talk "about investing in the United States again".
the rich asshole to showcase booming US economy
Mr the rich asshole is set to address the forum on Friday. He is expected to showcase the booming US economy and measures like his recent tax overhaul, claiming that a thriving America benefits the world.
A vocal critic of trade deals he sees as unfair to the United States, Mr the rich asshole will also stress the need for what he sees as fair competition.
Mr Mnuchin dismissed any concerns Mr the rich asshole might get a cool reception.
During his two-day stop, the President will attend a reception in his honour, host European executives for dinner and meet with world leaders.
He plans to sit down with British Prime Minister Theresa May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Swiss President Alain Berset and Rwandan President Paul Kagame.
The meeting with Mr Kagame comes not long after participants in a White House meeting said Mr the rich asshole had referred to African nations as "shitholes".
Mr the rich asshole also was criticised in Britain for retweeting videos from a far-right British group.
He has previously criticised London Mayor Sadiq Khan following a terror attack last year.
Mr the rich asshole cancelled plans for a recent trip to London to open the new $1 billion US embassy there — a move that avoided protests promised by political opponents.
Mr the rich asshole said he skipped the trip because he was unhappy with the new embassy's cost and location.
National Security Adviser HR McMaster said the US continued to have a "special relationship" with Britain.
AP/Reuters
Gaetz Gets Combative Over Release Of Intel Memo: ‘I Don’t Trust CNN Anchors’
By Nicole Lafond | January 25, 2018 8:34 am
During an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Wednesday evening, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) grew combative about the media and blamed Democrats for attempting to block the release of a Republican-authored memo that claims to reveal the basis of an anti-the rich asshole bias at the FBI.
Cuomo told Gaetz that he wants the memo released because he doesn’t trust politicians.
“I want to know more because politicians have politics in mind,” Cuomo said.
“So do reporters,” Gaetz said, cutting Cuomo off.
“And I do no trust any of you as ultimate arbiters of fact,” Cuomo continued.
“I don’t trust CNN anchors, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a debate about the context. … CNN calling someone partisan?” Gaetz scoffed.
The memo in question was authored by Rep. Devin Nunes’ (R-CA) staffers, and it reportedly contains classified information about the conduct of senior Department of Justice and FBI officials, that allegedly proves Republicans’ claims of the Justice Department’s bias against President some rich asshole. The memo was reportedly shared with many Republican members of Congress, but has not been turned over to the FBI or the Department of Justice.
Democrats are questioning the validity of the memo, with Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) calling it a “conspiracy theory.” Two California Democrats Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff have asked Facebook and Twitter to probe whether the hashtag promoting the release of the memo on social media was propagated by Russian bots.
Watch some of the exchange between Cuomo and Gaetz, who spouts several other theories about the FBI and the Russia investigation, below:
DOJ Warns That Releasing Nunes Memo Without Review Is ‘Extraordinarily Reckless’
By Tierney Sneed | January 25, 2018 10:45 am
A Wednesday letter signed by a rich asshole appointee in the Department of Justice blasted House Intel Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) for not allowing the DOJ to review an anti-FBI memo as House Republicans push for the document’s public release.
The letter, from Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, revealed that the House Intel Committee had turned down FBI Director Christopher Wray’s “personal appeal” to review the memo. It also suggested that Nunes himself has not read the underlying intelligence that it is said to form the basis of the four-page memo.
“We believe it would be extraordinarily reckless for the Committee to disclose such information publicly without giving the Department and the FBI the opportunity to review the memorandum and to advise [the House Intelligence Committee] of the risk of harm to national security and to ongoing investigations that would come from public release,” Boyd said.
According to reports, the memo alleges the FBI misled a FISA court judge in seeking a surveillance warrant for the rich asshole campaign adviser Carter Page by not informing the judge that one of its sources — ex-British spy Christopher Steele, author of the so-called dossier — was being paid by Democrats.
Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee were taken by surprise last week at a committee meeting where the panel voted on party lines to allow House members to view the memo. House Republicans have since advocated that the memo be disclosed to the public — in a campaign called #ReleaseTheMemo — and it is believed that they will seek to use an obscure House rule to publish it.
House Intel Democrats in a joint statement called the memo “a misleading set of talking points attacking the FBI,” while noting that only a handful of lawmakers are permitted to view the underlying intelligence, making it “impossible” to explain to the public the memo’s flaws.
The request by staff of Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) to view the memo was also denied by House Republicans, CNN reported.
The letter from Boyd was the sharpest rebuke yet from the rich asshole DOJ to Republicans’ smear campaign against the FBI as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe heats up.
The Justice Department was for months resistant to House Intel Republicans’ requests to access materials related to the Russia investigation. Earlier this month, Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein even sought out House Speaker Paul Ryan to mediate their conflict with Nunes. Ryan instead sided with Nunes, CNN reported, and helped work out an agreement for the DOJ to turn over hundreds pages of documents related to the Russia probes.
Wednesday’s letter references those negotiations — and name-checks Ryan specifically — in alleging that releasing the memo represents “a significant deviation from the terms of access” negotiated between Ryan, House Intel and the DOJ.
Representatives for Ryan, who’s leading a congressional delegation to the Middle East currently, did not respond to TPM’s inquiry. A spokesman for Nunes also didn’t respond to TPM’s request for comment.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) — who, according to the letter, was Nunes’ designee to view the intelligence materials — said on CNN Wednesday evening that he didn’t care if the DOJ saw the memo, but asked that his “friend” Boyd “lower the rhetoric.”
“The memo was derived, distilled from information that the Department gave us. So it’s not like there’s new information,” Gowdy said. “Everything in the memo they already have. What they don’t know specifically is what are the complaints. And I’m fine to share them with them, but you can’t possibly say a memo was reckless if you haven’t read it.”
The DOJ has continued to call for House Republicans to let the Department see the memo.
“If you have evidence of wrongdoing, we really need to see that, because if there is something going wrong at the Department of Justice or in the FBI, we want to get to the bottom of it. We want to hold people responsible for it,” DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores, another political appointee at the agency, said on CNN Thursday morning.
She said the department has not seen evidence of wrongdoing, while acknowledging that lawmakers appear disturbed by what they’ve seen of the memo.
“They’ve seen over a thousand pages of material, ” she said, referencing the classified information the DOJ turned over.”Maybe they’ve seen something that we haven’t. Maybe they noticed something based on interview with a witness compared to that material. That’s why we want to see the memo.”RE
the rich asshole:Palestinians must return to peace talks with Israel to receive U.S. aid
DAVOS, Switzerland — President the rich asshole says the Palestinians must return to peace talks with Israel to receive U.S. aid money.
the rich asshole’s decision last year to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital roiled Arab nations and led Palestinians to refuse to negotiate with the U.S. on grounds that America can no longer be an honest broker in the quest for peace. Palestinians claim east Jerusalem for their future capital.
the rich asshole says U.S. aid to the Palestinians is “on the table” but they won’t get it “unless they sit down and negotiate peace.”
By
· Attorneys general pursuing suit after New York case tossed
· Administration says no harm done by the rich asshole’s business ownership
Fresh off a victory in New York, the rich asshole administration attorneys will reprise their argument that the president can’t be sued for benefiting from his business interests by people who can’t prove they’ve been harmed.
Last time around, President some rich asshole’s lawyers persuaded a New York federal judge to reject claims pressed by an ethics-in-government group. Now, the fight is closer to home as Justice Department attorneys seek to convince a Maryland judge that the rich asshole’s ownership of a posh Washington hotel blocks from the White House isn’t drawing customers away from tax-paying businesses there and in the District of Columbia.
DC Attorney General Karl Racine and his Maryland counterpart Brian Frosh, both Democrats, sued the president in June seeking an order compelling him to divest his business interests. They accused him of breaching U.S. constitutional provisions barring the nation’s chief executive from profiting from his office.
"Previous presidents have taken great care to comply with these core anti-corruption provisions,” the AGs said in court papers opposing the administration’s request to dismiss the case. “President the rich asshole, however, has done the opposite. He has not only continued to accept financial benefits from governments, but has actively targeted their business, thereby fostering a market for influence over the nation’s chief executive."
Accepting the attorneys general’s arguments would disqualify the president from serving while maintaining commercial business interests, the rich asshole’s lawyers said.
No Harm
"Those claims falter on threshold grounds: neither plaintiff has alleged an injury" that would allow them to sue, government lawyers said. "In fact, within the two jurisdictions, the president has an ownership interest in only one active business, the rich asshole International Hotel."
U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte has scheduled a 5 1/2-hour hearing for Thursday in Greenbelt for the two sides to make their arguments.
Seth Barrett Tillman -- an American law professor who teaches at Ireland’s Maynooth University -- sided with the rich asshole, arguing in a court filing that business transactions for value don’t count as constitutionally prohibited "emoluments."
Twenty-two former government officials, including former U.S. secretaries of state John Kerry and Madeleine Albright -- both Democrats -- and Republican Chuck Hagel, the defense secretary under President Barack Obama, backed the attorneys general.
The government’s argument “would give the president license to engage in a wide range of financial entanglements that could leave vulnerable even the most important national security and foreign policy interests of the United States," they said in a Nov. 28 submission to the judge.
In November, Messitte ordered 23 the rich asshole businesses, including the Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, to retain records in response to subpoenas received from the attorneys general. That would preserve evidence if the lawsuit is allowed to go ahead.
Last month, U.S. District Judge George Daniels in New York threw out a lawsuit by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, concluding they hadn’t sufficiently alleged they’d been harmed by the president.
The administration is also seeking dismissal of a Washington federal court case lodged by scores of Democratic lawmakers.
The case is District of Columbia v. the rich asshole, 17-cv-1596, U.S. District Court, District of Maryland (Greenbelt).
UNFRIENDED
For the first time in four years, GLAAD found that fewer non-LGBT adults are comfortable with their LGBT peers. The organization says the rich asshole’s anti-LGBT agenda is partly to blame.
01.25.18 9:00 AM ET
The theory that LGBT acceptance in America will only ever increase over time is a reassuring one. The only problem is that it may not be true.
A new survey commissioned by the LGBT media advocacy group GLAAD and conducted by The Harris Poll found that fewer non-LGBT adults reported being comfortable with their LGBT peers than in previous years.
This marks the first time in the four-year history of the Accelerating Acceptance report that GLAAD has witnessed a decline in LGBT acceptance.
“This year, the acceptance pendulum abruptly stopped and swung in the opposite direction,” GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis wrote in the 2018 report, noting the sharp contrast between this year’s results and the last three years of watching Americans report being “more comfortable with LGBTQ people and more supportive of LGBTQ issues.”
The annual GLAAD survey asks non-LGBT Americans to describe how comfortable they are in several scenarios involving LGBT people, like learning that a doctor is LGBT, witnessing a same-sex couple holding hands, or worshipping alongside and LGBT person at church.
This year’s version, conducted in November 2017, found “a decline with people’s comfort year-over-year,” not just in a few of the scenarios, but “in every LGBTQ situation.”
For example, in 2016, twenty-seven percent of non-LGBT Americans said that they would be “very” or “somewhat” uncomfortable with learning that a family member is LGBT; in 2017, that figure jumped all the way up to 32 percent.
Missing texts, a mysterious memo, and a 'secret society' — Republicans are going on an all-out assault against the FBI
01-25-2018
· Questions about the integrity of the FBI, Department of Justice, and special counsel Robert Mueller intensified this week as Sen. Ron Johnson claimed there was an anti-the rich asshole "secret society" within the FBI.
· News that the FBI was not able to save thousands of text messages exchanged between FBI officials accused of expressing opposition to President some rich asshole has further fueled speculation among Republicans that the Russia investigation is biased against the president.
· Republicans are also clamoring for the rich asshole to authorize the release of a secret memo they say proves former President Barack Obama abused surveillance laws.
Republicans’ criticism of the FBI reached a fever pitch this week, as Sen. Ron Johnson claimed an anti-the rich asshole "secret society" within the FBI and reports emerged that thousands of texts between two FBI employees critical of the rich asshole went missing because of a software glitch on Samsung phones.
"Where are the 50,000 important text messages between FBI lovers Lisa Page and Peter Strzok? Blaming Samsung!" the rich asshole said in a tweet Wednesday.
In a letter sent last week to Johnson, Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Department of Justice, said the FBI’s system was not able to preserve messages between Strzok and Page that were sent between December 16, 2016, and May 17, 2017. The content of the texts from those five months would have likely provided lawmakers with a clearer picture of the nature of the two FBI employees’ involvement in the Russia investigation.
Special counsel Robert Mueller removed Strzok from his investigative team after texts with Page, a senior FBI lawyer, surfaced last year showing Strzok making disparaging remarks about the rich asshole. Strzok, who also played a critical role in exonerating Hillary Clinton in the FBI's investigation of her use of a private email server, was demoted to another department at the bureau last summer.
Now that his texts with Page aren’t available for lawmakers to see, some Republicans are ramping up attacks against the FBI. Others, including the rich asshole's lawyers, have taken it a step further. They want a second special counsel to formally investigate anti-the rich asshole bias and potential corruption within the FBI, DOJ, and Mueller's investigative team.
“First the IRS destroyed emails pivotal to our investigation of their political targeting. Now the FBI ‘failed to preserve’ texts between Peter Strzok & Lisa Page following the ’16 election,” tweeted Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who sits on the House and Judiciary and Oversight committees. “The time for a second special counsel is now.”
the rich asshole administration officials have tried to clarify the president's feelings towards the FBI, even as he continues to slam the Russia investigation, which he has called a "hoax" and a "witch hunt."
During the White House press briefing Wednesday, press secretary Sarah Sanders said that the rich asshole has "100% confidence" in FBI Director Wray, as well as in the rank-and-file of the FBI. the rich asshole's criticism, she insisted, is only aimed at "a few bad actors," although she declined to specify.
The FBI's 'secret society'
On Tuesday, Johnson said, without evidence, that he knew about a "secret society" within the FBI that plots to undermine the rich asshole. Johnson's claim compounded concerns many of his Republican colleagues have expressed in recent weeks about the FBI's integrity.
"We have an informant that's talking about a group that was holding secret meetings off-site. There's so much smoke here. There's so much suspicion," Johnson told Fox News' Bret Baier. "This is bias, potentially corruption, at the highest levels of the FBI."
He continued to slam the FBI, adding that Mueller "is in no position to do an investigation over this kind of misconduct" and calling for a special counsel to investigate.
Johnson's claim appears to stem from the Strzok-Page texts reviewed by some congressional lawmakers. One of the texts, ABC News reported, references a "secret society," but the context is unclear.
"Are you even going to give out your calendars? Seems kind of depressing. Maybe it should just be the first meeting of the secret society," Page said to Strzok, expressing disappointment in the rich asshole's election victory.
Johnson urged Congress "to continue to dig." During a CNN appearance Thursday morning, Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores joked that she was "not a member of any secret society" and said she would wait for the inspector general's report before drawing any conclusions.
Secret memo shocks Republicans, underwhelms Democrats
Republicans have also been pushing for the House Intelligence Committee, chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes, to release a memo that outlines purported illegal surveillance during the transition period against then-President-elect the rich asshole by President Barack Obama's administration.
The Twitter hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo has been trending on social media, pressuring the rich asshole to give disclosure of the memo a green light.
the rich asshole, who famously tweeted in the early months of his presidency that he "just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in the rich asshole Tower just before the victory," has led the charge in questioning the credibility of US intelligence agencies.
Last month, he claimed the FBI's reputation was "in Tatters - worst in History!"
The tweet then prompted FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom the rich asshole appointed to replace James Comey, to respond, albeit indirectly, to the president's comments.
“There is no shortage of opinions out there,” Wray said during a hearing on Capitol Hill. “The FBI that I see is people, decent people, committed to the highest principles of dignity and professionalism and respect.”
POLITICS
the rich asshole says he has a proposal for peace between Israel and Palestinians, threatens Palestinian aid
· the rich asshole threatens to pull international aid for the Palestinians if they do not show a willingness to reach a peace deal with Israel.
· the rich asshole says he has an unspecified peace proposal, which he calls "great" for the Palestinians and "very good" for Israel.
CNBC.com
‘Trying to make fetch happen’: Internet rags on Lindsey Graham for blatantly sucking up to the rich asshole’s DACA pitch
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Regina George (Mean Girls / Wikimedia)
DON'T MISS STORIES. FOLLOW RAW STORY!
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Thursday unveiled his latest play for some rich asshole’s ego, releasing a series of graphics designed to convince the president his work on a path to citizenship for DACA recipients and other DREAMers would somehow set him apart from his predecessors.
The Internet on Thursday reacted swiftly to Graham’s (and I’m paraphrasing here) sudden case of kiss-ass, noting the GOP Senator seems to be playing to the rich asshole well-documented ego and deep-seated need for praise and adoration.
Read some of the best replies below, via Twitter:
Lindsey Graham is really trying to make fetch happen. twitter.com/lindseygrahams…
Lindsey Graham is truly a pathetic little man. twitter.com/lindseygrahams…
Lindsey Graham: "Today’s DACA recipients can be tomorrow’s #TRUMPDreamers”
Lindsey Graham just single handedly destroyed loyalty to Trump from his base #TrumpDreamers #AmnestyDon twitter.com/LindseyGrahamS…
In a 2007 deposition in my libel case (which he lost), he was underprepared and overconfident.
By
Timothy L. O'Brien January 25, 2018, 9:24 AM EST
“There’s been no collusion whatsoever. There’s been no obstruction whatsoever.” —some rich asshole, Jan. 24, 2018
President some rich asshole held an impromptu press briefing in the White House early Wednesday evening, popping into a meeting of reporters and his chief of staff and telling the group that he's "looking forward" to speaking “under oath” with Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
That's the Robert Mueller who is overseeing a Justice Department investigation into whether the rich asshole's presidential campaign colluded with the Kremlin to tilt the 2016 election in his favor. That's the Robert Mueller who is examining whether the rich asshole and others in his orbit obstructed law-enforcement efforts to examine that matter. And that's the Robert Mueller scouring the president's businesses and finances. He’s already indicted four former the rich asshole insiders for a variety of crimes, including lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Yet the president mustered the bravado to tell reporters last night that he "would love to" sit down with Mueller in two or three weeks.
Sometimes love is blind.
Whether he realizes it or not, the rich asshole is in a perilous position. He presides over a chaotic White House stocked with competing interests and egos, he's mired in a complex investigation and he's advised and protected by a relatively scanty phalanx of private attorneys. If the president goes mano-a-mano with Mueller, the outcome of that encounter is likely to hinge on how careful, credible and capable he is under oath.
Speaking from experience, I think the president's attorneys should grab their worry beads. the rich asshole sued me for libel in 2006 for a biography I wrote, "TrumpNation," alleging that the book misrepresented his business record and understated his wealth. the rich asshole lost the suit in 2011, but during the litigation my lawyers deposed him under oath for two days in 2007. We had the opportunity to ask the rich asshole about his business and banking practices, his taxes, his personal finances and his professional relationships.
the rich asshole's attorney then was Marc Kasowitz, who also briefly represented the president when the Justice Department investigation first got rolling in Washington. My attorney was Mary Jo White, a former federal prosecutor steeped in many of the same legal traditions and courtroom experiences as Mueller. It didn't go well for the future president.
Hammered by White and her deputies, the rich asshole ultimately had to admit 30 times that he had lied over the years about all sorts of stuff: how much of a big Manhattan real estate project he owned; the price of one of his golf club memberships; the size of the rich asshole Organization; his wealth; his speaking fees; how many condos he had sold; his debts, and whether he borrowed money from his family to avoid going personally bankrupt. He also lied during the deposition about his business dealings with career criminals.
the rich asshole's poor performance stemmed in part from the fact that he was being interrogated by shrewd attorneys wielding his own business and financial records against him. But there were lots of other things that went wrong as well.
the rich asshole is impatient and has never been an avid or dedicated reader. That’s OK if you’d rather play golf, but it’s not OK when you need to absorb abundant or complex details. Lawyers typically prepare binders full of documents for their clients to pore over prior to a deposition, hoping to steel them for an intense grilling. My lawyers did that prior to my own deposition in the rich asshole lawsuit. But the rich asshole didn’t appear to be well prepared when we deposed him, a weakness that my lawyers exploited (and that Mueller surely would as well).
the rich asshole, for example, had submitted a document to the court from his accountant outlining his assets and liabilities. He was proud of the document’s glowing conclusions but hadn’t seemed to have read most of it prior to sitting down with my lawyers – including a section that said that the report wasn’t a reliable gauge of his wealth. the rich asshole seemed surprised when my lawyers pointed that out.
the rich asshole also has a well-known inability to stick to the facts and a tendency to dissemble and improvise. While under oath, he’ll try to avoid saying that he’s lied in the past until he’s presented with documentation proving otherwise.
“How do you differentiate between exaggeration and a lie?” one of my lawyers, Andrew Ceresney, asked when discussing inflated sales figures the rich asshole had used to promote a property.
“You want to put the best spin on a property,” the rich asshole replied. “No different than any other real estate developer, no different than any other businessman, no different than any politician.”
Ceresney pointed out that there was a difference, though: the actual sales figures for the property being discussed, which Ceresney possessed. This is relevant today, because the rich asshole probably doesn’t know which documents Mueller has collected. If the president sits down under oath and lies, it’s likely that Mueller will have a raft of paperwork on hand to document that fact.
the rich asshole has also courted the spotlight for so long that there’s an ample public record going back decades of statements he’s made on a wide array of subjects. That’s not true of most people sitting for a deposition, but it’s true for the rich asshole and it’s a problem for him. My lawyers unearthed wildly conflicting statements the rich asshole had made about his wealth over the years, for example, but they only had media and books to rely on. Mueller can dig into the president’s ill-considered and possibly damaging Twitter rants about what he calls the Russia “witch hunt,” the FBI and his life in the Oval Office.
the rich asshole’s campaign and White House aides may have done any number of problematic things without the rich asshole knowing about them, and that could protect him from being charged with setting illegal things in motion (like obstructing a federal investigation, for example). But another the rich asshole weakness is that he basks in the perception that he’s the man in charge and everyone else follows his orders.
At moments during his deposition in my libel case, the rich asshole would have been well served to acknowledge that others in his organization – like his chief financial officer – had independently decided to gather and report certain problematic financial information. But the rich asshole couldn’t resist saying that his minions at the rich asshole Organization and elsewhere were just following his orders, a boast that also raised the legal stakes for himself (even if he didn’t realize that’s what he was doing).
the rich asshole’s enthusiasm for a get-together with Mueller clearly freaked out his lawyers, who scrambled to roll back the president’s statements shortly after he made them. His lead lawyer, Ty Cobb, said that the president was speaking off the cuff and that a more considered approach to Mueller and his team might be taken.
“He’s ready to meet with them, but he’ll be guided by the advice of his personal counsel,” Mr. Cobb said of the president.
I’m not so sure. Cobb’s client hasn't often been guided by advice from anyone. He's probably not going to start now.
Barely human meatbag Hannity calls report the rich asshole ordered Mueller’s firing a distraction, then switches topic when report is confirmed by own network
BY JOSH DELK - 01/25/18 10:16 PM EST
Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday pushed back against reports that President the rich asshole attempted to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel leading the Russia probe, calling it a distraction.
"At this hour The New York Times is trying to distract you," Hannity said on his program, in reference to the newspaper's report Thursday night that the rich asshole ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller last summer.
the rich asshole reportedly backed down from his demands when McGahn threatened to resign instead of carry out the order.
McGahn reportedly refused to take the rich asshole's request to the Justice Department, saying that firing Mueller could be disastrous and could raise questions of obstruction of justice.
"Our sources, and I've checked in with many of them, they're not confirming that tonight. And the president's attorney dismissed the story and says 'nope, no comment, we're not going there tonight,'" Hannity said on his program.
Ty Cobb, a lawyer who serves as the liaison between the administration and Mueller's team, had declined to comment for the Times report Thursday.
Hannity, who has echoed the rich asshole's concerns about political bias at the FBI and in Mueller's investigation, went on to question the legitimacy of the newspaper's report.
"How many times has The New York Times and others gotten it wrong?" he said.
But minutes later, Hannity reversed his claim, saying Fox News sources confirmed The New York Times' reporting.
"All right, so we have sources tonight just confirming to Ed Henry that, maybe, yeah, some rich asshole wanted to fire the special counsel for conflict. Does he not have the right to raise those questions?" Hannity asked.
"You know, we'll deal with this tomorrow," Hannity said, before pivoting to a different topic.
Updated: 11:15 p.m.
It's time to talk about impeachment.
some rich asshole has been trying to kill the investigation into him, his campaign, and his family almost from the moment he took office.
His sloppy attempts to obstruct the investigation have only made the case against him that much worse. He fired FBI Director James Comey and foolishly admitted he did so because of Comey’s investigation. He’s been smearing, slandering, and tweet-raging about special counsel Robert Mueller for months.
But an explosive new report confirms the rich asshole’s attempts to end this investigation go far beyond his public outbursts. Last June, only a month after Mueller was appointed, the rich asshole tried to have him fired for investigating the rich asshole for obstruction of justice.
And the rich asshole’s White House is not denying it.
“We decline to comment out of respect for the Office of the Special Counsel and its process,” said Ty Cobb, one of the rich asshole’s lawyers, in a statement to the Times.
For a White House that smears any allegation, regardless of the amount of evidence supporting it, as “fake news,” that statement speaks volumes about the story, which is based on conversations with multiple sources.
The only reason Mueller still holds his position is because White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to quit.
Mueller was appointed in May 2017, and by June, the rich asshole was concocting what certainly seems to be a very thin case for his firing:
First, he claimed that a dispute years ago over fees at the rich asshole National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., had prompted Mr. Mueller, the F.B.I. director at the time, to resign his membership. The president also said Mr. Mueller could not be impartial because he had most recently worked for the law firm that previously represented the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Finally, the president said, Mr. Mueller had been interviewed to return as the F.B.I. director the day before he was appointed special counsel in May.
It’s not surprising, then, that McGahn refused to be a party to such an obvious attempt at further obstruction.
The bombshell report confirms what many Democrats were warning when the rich asshole first started smearing Mueller.
“The message the president is sending through his tweets is that he believes the rule of law doesn’t apply to him and that anyone who thinks otherwise will be fired. That’s undemocratic on its face and a blatant violation of the president’s oath of office,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) at the time.
The GOP-led smear campaign against Mueller also kicked into gear at the same time the rich asshole was looking for a way to fire him.
When Mueller was first appointed in May, Republicans had nothing but good things to say about the Purple Heart veteran and former FBI director.
But a month later, their tone had shifted considerably. Suddenly, the investigation was a “witch hunt” and Mueller went from having integrity to having “conflicts of interest.”
In their attempt to undermine Mueller, the rich asshole and his Republican allies launched myriad allegations against the special counsel and his role in the investigation, with some calling on him to step down and others refusing to push back on the baseless attacks against him.
At one point, longtime the rich asshole confidante Roger Stone accused Mueller of committing obstruction of justice and demanded that he be removed from his position as special counsel, while former chief strategist Steve Bannon urged the rich asshole to use more aggressive tactics against Mueller.
In November, Republicans even introduced legislation that would have compelled Mueller to step down. These attacks began in June and peaked again in December, but they never ceased. Now we know why.
Last June, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) predicted that if the rich asshole did indeed fire Mueller, “Congress would begin impeachment proceedings.”
That’s exactly what the rich asshole was trying to do, and the only thing that stopped him was his own attorney threatening to quit, which would almost certainly have exploded the story of the rich asshole’s intentions at the time.
Seven months later, we know those fears were warranted.
Sen. Blumenthal on the rich asshole obstruction bombshell: “We have a constitutional crisis looming”
the rich asshole has created a crisis for this nation, and Congress must act immediately before it gets any worse
While some rich asshole is insisting to other world leaders what a fantastic success he’s had as president thus far, a crisis is looming at home.
That’s according to Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who has been arguing for months that Congress must affirmatively act to protect special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, in case the rich asshole tries to fire him.
That concern is no longer hypothetical, as the New York Times reported Thursday night that the rich asshole did indeed try to fire Mueller within a month of his appointment last year, and the only thing that stopped him was his own attorney’s threat to quit.
“We have, now, a constitutional crisis looming,” Blumenthal told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, “and that’s the reason why we need to protect the special counsel with legislation that I’ve offered, along with a number of Republican colleagues, and Democrats, to make sure that the special counsel is protected in this investigation.”
Why, Maddow asked, is this more than “just a fight” but an actual constitutional crisis?
Blumenthal laid it out very clearly.
“It would be a constitutional crisis because it would involve the president exceeding his authority under the Constitution, violating statutes, and potentially confronting Congress, which would hold him accountable to obey the law.”
Further, Blumenthal said, such a confrontation could look very much like the one that led to Richard Nixon’s disgraceful resignation.
“That kind of confrontation may be in our future as well,” he warned.
Blumenthal sits on the Judiciary Committee, one of several congressional committees investigating the rich asshole, his campaign, his possible collusion with Russia, and his obstruction of those investigations.
Earlier this week, in fact, Blumenthal was warning about “even more powerful evidence of obstruction of justice” when it was reported that the same week the rich asshole fired FBI Director James Comey, he asked then-acting Director Andrew McCabe how he had voted in an apparent attempt to determine whether McCabe might be more sympathetic to the rich asshole’s efforts to shut down investigations.
It is because of these concerns that Blumenthal and others have been calling for legislation to stop the rich asshole from firing Mueller or anyone else involved in investigating the rich asshole. These concerns, we now know, are absolutely warranted.
So why isn’t such protection in place?
Because the top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, is protecting the rich asshole.
“I don’t hear much pressure to pass anything,” McConnell said in November. “There’s been no indication that the president or the White House are not cooperating with the special counsel.”
Not only was their an indication — there was a plan to do exactly that.
The time for Congress to act to protect Mueller and all of the ongoing investigations was months ago, when the rich asshole and Republicans first launched a smear campaign against Mueller, but now it is of the utmost urgency. We are, as Blumenthal said, in a crisis, and it is up to the party in power to finally put country before party and protect our democracy.
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