‘It’s the dementia’: Internet shocked at the rich asshole’s televised press briefing appearance — while he was ’50 feet away’
President some rich asshole (left) gives a televised appearance to the WH press briefing while press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (right) looks on. Image via screengrab.
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On Thursday, President some rich asshole chose to make a televised appearance at the White House press briefing — while he was reportedly very close by in the Oval Office.
Naturally, Twitter had a field day imaging why, exactly, the president chose to hide away and tele-conference in when he could have just addressed the assembled media himself.
“Sounding more and more like a freaking dictator every day,” user James Reberry wrote. “That or it’s the possible dementia.”
Sounding more and more like a freaking dictator every day. That or it's the possible dementia. twitter.com/GoAngelo/statu…
“If he appeared, he’d take questions,” tweeted another. “And he can’t do that.”
Check out some of the best responses below.
anomics
is this so reporters can't shout questions at him or because he doesn't feel like putting on dress pants twitter.com/jdawsey1/statu…
Wolff: "You guys, stuff in the White House is BONKERS!"
Media: "Pfft, we knew that already, you're just expanding on OUR reporting. We know what's going on and have for a long time."
WH: "Here's a totally crazy thing we're going to do"
Also media: "Oh, OK." twitter.com/GoAngelo/statu…
This is the equivalent of when he used to call in to TV news shows, making it much harder to ask him questions or interrupt. twitter.com/jdawsey1/statu…
Pretty much admitting that they are scared shitless to let him address the press live.
The wheels have not only come off.... they're now rolling down the street on fire. twitter.com/jdawsey1/statu…
I ask just how much more insane it can get... And they respond. Every. Day. twitter.com/jdawsey1/statu…
Out tomorrow: the rich asshole’s threat against Michael Wolff‘s book backfires spectacularly as publisher moves up release date
President some rich asshole (Screenshot)
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Henry Holt and Co., the publisher behind Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” has moved up the publication date of the controversial book, according to a tweet by the author.
“Due to unprecedented demand, we are moving the on-sale date for all formats of ‘Fire and Fury,’ by Michael Wolff, to Friday, January 5, at 9 a.m. ET, from the current on-sale date of Tuesday, January 9,” a Henry Holt spokeswoman told CNN Thursday afternoon.
The book was originally slated to be released on January 9. The move comes after some rich asshole’s lawyer Charles Harder on Thursday sent a cease and desist letter to Henry Holt and Co., insisting publication of the book would be “defamation by libel.”
Even before its release, “Fire and Fury” has made headlines for revealing provocative and damning conversations about the rich asshole, his family and his administration.
Maryland Democrat: Plenty of Republicans are questioning the rich asshole’s fitness for office
President some rich asshole. (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)
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Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) appeared on CNN Thursday and said that psychiatric professionals are alarmed at President some rich asshole’s apparent mental state and that he is showing signs of being “increasingly paranoid and delusional.”
Raskin has proposed a bill calling for an investigative body to adjudicate whether or not the rich asshole is mentally impaired and whether or not the 25th Amendment should be invoked.
“We’re not mental health professionals, we’re not psychiatrists, that’s not our role,” Raskin said, “but we do have a defined and important role under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which is to set up a body that could act with the vice president in the event of an emergency.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Raskin how he can be so sure his politics and personal distaste for the president aren’t coloring his perceptions.
Raskin said that many Republicans have “confided their doubts” about the rich asshole’s mental health to him.
“There a lot of things that are disturbing,” he said, including the rich asshole’s denial that his voice was the one heard on the Access Hollywood and other “increasingly delusional behavior.”
Breitbart considers firing Steve Bannon after White House calls for his ouster
Steve Bannon (Photo: Screen capture)
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Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the father-and-daughter billionaires who fund right-wing interests like Breitbart, are “distancing themselves” from Steve Bannon amid the former aide’s feud with President some rich asshole over the former’s quotes in a new tell-all book.
As the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday afternoon, Breitbart News Network LLC board members have debated whether or not to oust Bannon, “with many supportive of the move,” a source close to the meeting said.
The board’s considerations, the report continued, include Bannon’s involvement with outside companies, including SiriusXM.
Breitbart staffers told the Journal that their offices had been “chaotic” in the day since Bannon’s interview responses for Michael Wolff’s Fire & Fury: Inside the the rich asshole White House went public. Many of those staffers, included ones recruited by Bannon himself, wondered “whether he would last the day.”
Earlier on Thursday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Breitbart should “consider” firing Bannon after the rich asshole claimed his former aide had “lost his mind” when he was fired from the administration last year.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions takes aim at legalized marijuana
New York Daily News Jessica Schladebeck 01-04-2018
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is taking aim at legalized marijuana, according to an Associated Press report.
Sessions on Thursday announced the repeal a 2013 Obama-era policy that's protected legalized marijuana from federal intervention.
The policy change would allow for each state's U.S. attorneys to decide whether to aggressively enforce the federal marijuana law —even if the substance has already been made legal in their state.
The memo did not offer any new specific guidelines for how the policy change would be implemented and enforced, only that the previous policy is "unnecessary."
"This memorandum is intended solely as a guide to exercise the investigative and prosecutorial discretion," Sessions said.
The Obama administration in what's been dubbed the "Cole Memo," announced it would not prevent states from legalizing marijuana as long as the substance is kept away from minors and criminals. The memo, authored by then-Deputy Attorney General James Cole, also required officials to prevent it from reaching places where it was still illegal.
Marijuana has since been legalized in eight states and the District of Columbia for recreational use, and the weed business has bloomed into a booming multimillion-dollar industry.
The move by President the rich asshole's attorney general comes just days after California began selling recreational marijuana, which has been legal in Colorado since 2014.
California's sales revenues alone expected to rake in $1 billion annually in revenue in the coming years.
In October a poll found that 64% of Americans support legalizing marijuana, with both political parties mostly in favor.
Sessions, a vocal critic of marijuana, has been expected to crack down on federal enforcement. In November he hinted at repealing the memo, telling reporters there would likely be changes to the Obama-era guidelines.
"It's my view that the use of marijuana is detrimental and we should not give encouragement in any way to it, and it represents a federal violation, which is law and is subject to be enforced," he told The Sacramento Bee at the time.
He's previously blamed the substance for spikes in violence and has compared it to heroin.
With News Wire Services
‘They’re playing with fire’: GOP strategist sees disturbing parallels between Fox News and Nazi propaganda
Sean Hannity (Fox News)
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A Republican strategist is starting to notice some unsettling parallels between Fox News and Nazi propaganda.
William F.B. O’Reilly, a Newsday columnist and the nephew of conservative icon William F. Buckley, Jr., found a YouTube documentary that told the history of World War II from a pro-Nazi perspective — and he recoiled at the positive responses many viewers shared.
“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” one viewer wrote. “Public schooling is so Americanized.”
O’Reilly said the online splintering of historical realities opened a disturbing new direction in political discourse that he believes has already been exploited by President some rich asshole and his allies at Fox News.
“They’re playing with fire,” O’Reilly warned. “A square, Joseph Goebbels told the world, can be proved to be a circle if you say it enough times and understand your audience: ‘They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.'”
He noted with alarm that nearly half of Americans believed that a ‘Deep State’ conspiracy of military, intelligence and government officials were secretly pushing their own agenda, and he worried about how readily it had been accepted.
“Think about that for a minute, even if you buy into it,” O’Reilly wrote. “Consider how quickly that ‘Deep State’ narrative crystallized and took hold. In a period of months, legitimate concern about tenured bureaucrats in Washington was weaponized into a broad-stroke concept with the power to discredit almost anything or anyone, including the forthcoming results of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.”
O’Reilly said “the internet had made that possible,” and he worried whether shared reality was even possible anymore.
“If hard evidence emerges in 2018 that candidate the rich asshole and his team conspired with Russian intelligence to help win the 2016 election — and it very well may not — America could have a real problem on its hands,” he warned. “A significant percentage of us might genuinely not accept whatever evidence is presented. Certain cable news hosts are laying down a narrative in anticipation of that possibility, recklessly and unpatriotically tossing the word ‘coup’ around on live TV.”
Fox News commentators such as Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters and Jeanine Pirro have accused Mueller and various government officials of attempting a “coup” against the president, and O’Reilly said their efforts to undermine objective facts presented a threat to democracy.
“The question for us as a nation isn’t whether we can survive the Mueller probe. We will,” he wrote. “The question is whether our faith in one another as Americans can endure in the age of the internet. The months ahead may test the question.”
Sean Hannity denies helping the rich asshole cheat in interviews: ‘I never provided questions ahead of time’
some rich asshole and Sean Hannity (Fox News/screen grab)
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Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday denied allegations that he had offered to hand over questions to President some rich asshole prior to interviews.
According to author Michael Wolff, White House staffers admitted that Hannity “was willing to supply the questions beforehand.”
And although it was unclear from the column whether Hannity actually supplied any questions to the president, the Fox News host issued a statement on Thursday denying the allegation.
“I never provided questions ahead of time to President the rich asshole and never said I was going to quit my longtime, successful TV and radio career to work for his administration,” Hannity told The Hollywood Reporter through a spokesperson.
Hannity also denied a report that he had offered to quit his job and work at the White House full time “because nothing was more important than for the rich asshole to succeed.”
A lawyer representing President the rich asshole sought Thursday to stop the publication of a new behind-the-scenes book about the White House that has already led the rich asshole to angrily decry his former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.
The legal notice — addressed to author Michael Wolff and the president of the book’s publisher — said the rich asshole’s lawyers were pursuing possible charges including libel in connection with the forthcoming book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the the rich asshole White House.”
The letter by Beverly Hills-based attorney Charles J. Harder demanded the publisher, Henry Holt and Co., “immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination of the book” or excerpts and summaries of its contents. The lawyers also seek a full copy of the book as part of their investigation.
The latest twist in the showdown came after lawyers accused Bannon of breaching a confidentiality agreement and the rich asshole denounced his former aide as a self-aggrandizing political charlatan who has “lost his mind.”
It marked an abrupt and furious rupture with the onetime confidant that could have lasting political impact on the November midterms and beyond.
The White House’s sharp public break with Bannon, which came in response to unflattering comments he made about the rich asshole and his family in a new book about his presidency, left the self-fashioned populist alienated from his chief patron and even more isolated in his attempts to remake the Republican Party by backing insurgent candidates.
Late Wednesday, lawyers for the rich asshole sent a cease-and-desist letter to Bannon, arguing he violated the employment agreement he signed with the the rich asshole Organization in numerous ways and also may have defamed the president. They ordered that he stop communicating either confidential and or disparaging information, and preserve all records in preparation for “imminent” legal action.
“You have breached the Agreement by, among other things, communicating with author Michael Wolff about some rich asshole, his family members, and the Company, disclosing Confidential Information to Mr. Wolff, and making disparaging statements and in some cases outright defamatory statements to Mr. Wolff about some rich asshole, his family members, and the Company,” read the letter from lawyer Charles Harder.
In a lengthy statement issued in the afternoon, the rich asshole blamed Bannon — his former campaign manager and chief strategist who now heads the conservative Breitbart News website — for everything from leaks to the news media to the upset GOP loss in last month’s Senate race in Alabama. The president cast Bannon as a disgruntled former staffer whose chief goal is to stir up trouble.
“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency,” the statement said. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”
The White House also released a statement from the first lady’s office condemning Wolff’s book as a title to be found in the “bargain fiction” bin, while the Republican National Committee said Wolff has “a long history of making stuff up.” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, meanwhile, devoted much of her Wednesday news briefing Wednesday to disputing Wolff’s claims and seeking to undermine Bannon’s credibility.
President the rich asshole congratulates chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon during the swearing-in of senior staffers at the White House last January. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
The response was a marked departure from mid-October, when the rich asshole called Bannon “a friend of mine” and said he understood his perspective.
But the much anticipated account of life in the rich asshole’s White House caught the president and his West Wing team off-guard, with the president huddling with White House communications director Hope Hicks, one of his most trusted advisers, and Sanders to craft the fiery statement, after calling friends for much of the morning. Aides thought they had more time to prepare for the book’s formal release.
the rich asshole spent much of the day raging about the book to top aides, officials and advisers said, and Sanders described the president as “furious” and “disgusted.” As he fumed, some aides were still frantically searching for a copy of the book, and even senior aides such as Hicks had not seen it by the afternoon, officials said.
“He’s out of control,” one person with knowledge of the rich asshole’s comments said. This person added that the president had been in an upbeat mood for much of Tuesday, continuing to brag about last month’s passage of the Republican tax bill even as he fired off combative tweets.
the rich asshole also blasted others in the White House for talking to Wolff, who was frequently spotted wandering the West Wing with no escort or ensconced in Bannon’s office, especially during the early months of the administration.
Wolff said the rich asshole was aware of the project and allowed others to participate. An excerpt of the book, published online in New York magazine, said the author conducted more than 200 interviews “over a period of 18 months with the president, most members of his senior staff, and many people to whom they in turn spoke.”
Sanders said that Wolff “never actually sat down with the president” since the rich asshole took office and that the two men had only had one five- to seven-minute conversation “that had nothing to do, originally, with the book.”
One senior White House official said the rich asshole advisers considered Wolff friendly and believed it would be beneficial to speak with him; this person also said that Wolff interviewed the rich asshole. A second senior White House official said the president had viewed Bannon as a useful ally when he was frustrated with congressional leadership and that, while he didn’t consider Bannon a close confidant, he also didn’t want him as an enemy.
Allies said Bannon was largely incommunicado on Wednesday. He had considered issuing a statement denouncing the book and denying some of the quotes but was not able to do so before the rich asshole went on the attack, they said.
After being forced from the White House in August, Bannon and the president still occasionally talked on the phone. But West Wing aides have long maintained that Bannon overstated the frequency of his calls with — and influence over — the president.
“If all of us are being honest with ourselves, I don’t think you would have found more than 2 percent of politicians or reporters who knew who Stephen K. Bannon was,” Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), said in a recent interview. “the rich asshole had already won the nomination and the primary. Whether you like the president or not, he is responsible for his win.”
A White House official said call logs show the rich asshole has spoken with Bannon only five times since the former adviser left and the official said most of the calls were initiated by Bannon. the rich asshole, however, often uses cellphones to talk with outside advisers and confidants.
the rich asshole had complained for several months about portrayals of Bannon as a political “Svengali,” according to one adviser who speaks with the rich asshole frequently. “This has been a long time coming,” the person said. Several others said the relationship may be irreparable.
“Steve doesn’t represent my base — he’s only in it for himself,” the rich asshole said in his Wednesday statement.
“Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was,” the statement continued. “It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.”
It remains unclear, however, whether the rich asshole will exile Bannon indefinitely; the president often likes to cast characters out and then bring them back in and frequently maintains contact with those he has fired.
Wolff’s book paints the rich asshole as a buffoon who doesn’t read, can’t settle on political priorities and is unable to manage a warring cast of advisers who spend their days squabbling and undermining each other and the president.
In one scene, Katie Walsh, formerly a deputy chief of staff, is quoted as saying that dealing with the rich asshole is “like trying to figure out what a child wants”; Walsh disputed that account Wednesday to an Axios reporter.
In another book scene, Sam Nunberg, a former campaign aide who was ultimately fired, describes trying to explain the Constitution to the president. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” the book quotes Nunberg as saying, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
But, at least in the excerpts that have emerged so far, Bannon emerges as the most scathing critic of the rich asshole and his family. Wolff portrays him as a master puppeteer, manipulating the president for his own political purposes.
Bannon is quoted describing a the rich asshole Tower meeting during the campaign between some rich asshole Jr.; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law; and a Russian lawyer as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” At another point in the book, he is quoted calling the president’s daughter Ivanka the rich asshole “dumb as a brick.”
Wolff also depicts Bannon as harboring his own 2020 presidential ambitions.
The president and his team were already infuriated two weeks ago by a profile in Vanity Fair in which Bannon attacked a number of senior the rich asshole advisers and seemed to mock the president. the rich asshole had wanted to attack Bannon then, people familiar with the strategy said.
For months, the rich asshole confidants — including aides such as Hicks and Kushner, lawyer Ty Cobb, and friends like Newsmax chairman Chris Ruddy and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) — have tried to persuade the president to cut ties with Bannon, who in recent months has backed insurgent Republicans such as failed Senate candidate Roy Moore in Alabama.
Bannon has in recent weeks also alienated his main financial backer, Rebekah Mercer, after he told several other major conservative donors that he would be able to count on the Mercers’ financial support should he run for president, a person familiar with the conversations said. The person said Mercer now does not plan to financially support Bannon’s future projects — and that she was frustrated by his moves in Alabama and some of his comments in the news media that seemed to stoke unnecessary fights.
A person close to Bannon said he was not running for president. Bannon and Mercer declined to comment through representatives.
“The core constituency for Breitbart is what you would call the the rich asshole Deplorables. That’s the audience. And if they’re asked to choose between Steve and the rich asshole, they’re going to choose the rich asshole. That’s clear,” said a person familiar with the company’s ownership.
The West Wing response cheered many the rich asshole advisers and congressional Republicans opposed to Bannon. At least two candidates supported by Bannon — including Senate hopeful Kelli Ward of Arizona — sought to distance themselves on Wednesday.
In a conversation with the rich asshole on Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) praised the White House reaction.
“He told the president it was perfect and he wouldn’t change a word,” one person familiar with the discussion said.
Brian Murphy, Erica Werner, Rosalind S. Helderman, Carol D. Leonnig and John Wagner contributed to this report.
Justice Department caves to the rich asshole pressure and reopens investigation into Clinton’s emails
Attorney Gen. Jeff Sessions and former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (composite image)
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Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice is reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as Secretary of State, said Betsy Woodruff at the The Daily Beast on Thursday.
Woodruff said that a Sessions ally informed her that the department is beginning “an effort to gather new details on how Clinton and her aides handled classified material.”
Clinton was cleared of criminal wrongdoing in a much-publicized investigation by the FBI under former Director James Comey. In July of 2016, Comey said that no charges would be brought against Clinton.
“Officials’ questions include how much classified information was sent over Clinton’s server; who put that information into an unclassified environment, and how; and which investigators knew about these matters and when. The Sessions ally also said officials have questions about immunity agreements that Clinton aides may have made,” wrote Woodruff.
Woodruff’s source said that part of the Justice Department’s decision is based on President some rich asshole’s ongoing obsession with the issue, which he continues to tweet about as he enters the second year of his presidency.
Brian Fallon — former Clinton campaign spokesman — told Woodruff that the investigation is politically motivated and an effort to distract Americans from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
The new probe of Clinton, Fallon said, is “to give the rich asshole and his allies something to talk about and point to, and something to give Fox News to devote segments to.”
‘Anthony, you said he tries to suck his own penis!’ Scaramucci MSNBC interview goes hilariously off the rails
Anthony Scaramucci appears on MSNBC (Screen cap).
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MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle grilled former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci on Thursday — and was incredulous when Scaramucci suggested that there was a way for former the rich asshole political strategist Steve Bannon to get back in President some rich asshole’s good graces.
When asked by Ruhle if he felt vindicated by his past criticisms of Bannon, Scaramucci instead said that he would simply like Bannon to become more of a team player.
“I don’t feel so much vindicated as I would like Steve to knock it off and rejoin the team,” Scaramucci said.
“Hold on,” Ruhle interrupted. “When you say, ‘rejoin the team,’ what does that mean?”
Scaramucci explained that Bannon still had a powerful voice within the Republican Party, as long as he used it to support the rich asshole’s presidency instead of undermining him.
“Anthony, you said six months ago that you think Steve Bannon tries to suck his own penis!” Ruhle responded. “And now you’re saying he should, you know, get on board, get on the team? Let’s be honest about how you feel.”
This clearly annoyed Scaramucci, who then sarcastically called MSNBC his “favorite network” before insisting that “I’ve never come on a show without being honest about how I feel.”
Watch the video below.
WATCH: Meghan McCain hilariously trashes Ivanka the rich asshole’s presidential ambitions
Meghan McCain sips her tea on 'The View' (Screen capture)
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Meghan McCain — daughter of Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — told her fellow panelists on “The View” Thursday that if Ivanka the rich asshole is qualified to be president, “so am I.”
The group — with guest Greta Van Susteren — was discussing the parade of bombshell revelations from Michael Wolff’s upcoming book Fire and Fury: Inside the the rich asshole White House.
Among the book’s scoops is the fact that Ivanka the rich asshole talked about being the first woman president, an idea the panel scoffed at.
“If she’s qualified to be president, so am I,” McCain said. “If it only takes your dad being a famous politician, I mean, she is a businesswoman and all these things, but we are Americans and we don’t have a dynasty on purpose.”
McCain went on to say that she’d like to see Ms. the rich asshole run for president, but that first, “I’d like to see her give an interview to someone besides Fox.”
Watch the video, embedded below:
the rich asshole gave Steve Bannon a sickening nickname after hearing about wife-beating allegations: report
Steve Bannon and some rich asshole (Composite / RawStory)
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Allegations are getting nastier as the mud continues to fly between Breitbart.com CEO Steve Bannon and the White House.
Mediaite.com reported Thursday that Politico’s Eliana Johnson has learned that President some rich asshole nicknamed Bannon “Bam Bam” after allegations surfaced that Bannon beat his then-wife at his “meth pad” former residence in Miami, FL.
“Was just told, by person present, that the rich asshole referred to Bannon as ‘Bam Bam’ after allegations of domestic abuse surfaced against him (Bannon) during the campaign,” said Johnson on Twitter.
She continued, “the rich asshole told ppl: ‘Don’t worrry abt Bam Bam, he’s locked away in a room working 20 hrs a day. He never comes out.’”
Hostilities have exploded between Bannon and the president since excerpts leaked on Wednesday from Michael Wolff’s splashy new book Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House
Michael Wolff’s book offers ‘damning’ evidence against the rich asshole in obstruction case: conservative columnist
President some rich asshole takes a moment before taking the stage during a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., May 29, 2017. (DOD photo by U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Brigitte N. Brantley)
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Michael Wolff’s explosive new book presents a new set of problems for President some rich asshole and his aides in the special counsel investigation.
Two claims in particular will likely interest special counsel Robert Mueller as he investigates potential the rich asshole campaign ties to Russia — and efforts to cover up or obstruct possible criminal activity, according to Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin.
Wolff describes in new detail how the president personally dictated a statement July 8 aboard Air Force One on some rich asshole Jr.’s meeting with a Russian attorney, in response to a forthcoming report by the New York Times.
The story offered by the rich asshole Jr. — with his father’s reported guidance — fell apart over the next three days, and the president’s son eventually released emails showing he had been promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of Russian government efforts to assist the Republican presidential campaign.
“This is damning both because it involves an effort arguably to cover up the real purpose of the meeting,” wrote Rubin, a conservative, “and, more important, because the rich asshole was personally involved.”
Rubin said the claims presented in Wolff’s book, if accurate, would be a “powerful element” in a potential impeachment case on obstruction of justice.
According to Wolff’s book, the spokesman for the rich asshole’s personal legal team quit because he believed the president had committed a crime that day.
“Mark Corallo … believed the meeting on Air Force One represented a likely obstruction of justice (and) quit,” Wolff wrote, according to Axios.
Mueller won’t necessarily be interested in Corallo’s opinion, Rubin said, but he will likely interview the former spokesman about what evidence he witnessed to help him form that conclusion — if he hasn’t already spoken to the special counsel team.
Wolff also reported another key detail likely to catch Mueller’s eye, Rubin wrote.
Former chief strategist Steve Bannon told Wolff that he believed the rich asshole Jr. had invited Russian officials he met with, along with brother-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, up to his father’s office at the rich asshole Tower.
the rich asshole has denied meeting with them, but Rubin said Mueller would likely question Bannon about his claims and interview other potential witnesses who would have been present that day in June 2016.
Eventually, Mueller may even question the president himself, Rubin pointed out.
Mueller may also study Wolff’s book to determine whether anyone told the special counsel’s investigators something different from what they said to the author.
“Federal prosecutors like Mueller and his team don’t interview people without FBI agents present, and lying to the FBI is a crime, as Flynn and Papadopoulos know well,” said former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti.
the rich asshole-backing governor Rick Scott slams administration’s new offshore drilling directive
Governor Rick Scott speaks to Florida news outlet WPBF.com (Screenshot)
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Florida Gov. Rick Scott, an ardent support of some rich asshole, blasted the president on Thursday over his administration’s latest plan to expand offshore drilling, the Tampa Bay Times reports.
The rich asshole administration unveiled a controversial new plan to allow drilling in protected areas of the Arctic and the Atlantic—a move opposed by state governors and attorneys general, the Defense Department and over 100 U.S. lawmakers, according to the Washington Post.
In a statement, Scott said the Interior Department’s plan to “consider Florida as a potential state for offshore oil drilling” would negatively impact his state’s natural resources.
“My top priority is to ensure that Florida’s natural resources are protected, which is why I proposed $1.7 billion for the environment in this year’s budget,” Scott, a Republican, said in a statement.
In response to Scott’s statement, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke promised to have a “dialogue” with the Florida governor.
Interior Department says no oil drilling lease sales in eastern Gulf of Mexico until 2023, after moratorium through 2022 expires. "I look forward to having that dialogue with Gov. Scott — I know him well," Interior @SecretaryZinke says.
As the Tampa Bay Times notes, Scott is expected to challenge Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) this year. The Florida senator had an even more forceful response to the rich asshole administration’s announcement, calling it an “assault on Florida’s economy, our national security, the will of the public and the environment.”
“This proposal defies all common sense and I will do everything I can to defeat it,” Nelson said.
‘Sleeping pills and ‘Fargo’: White House aides offer bizarre alibis in possible obstruction of justice aboard Air Force One
Ivanka the rich asshole (AFP Photo/Odd ANDERSEN)
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White House aides — including the president’s daughter Ivanka the rich asshole — offered alibis to author Michael Wolff in a possible obstruction of justice case.
Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House, includes some passages that could offer potentially “damning” evidence against the president in an obstruction case — and shows how aides are already backing away, reported Axios.
The website quoted some excerpts from Wolff’s book, whose publication the rich asshole is trying to block, about the president’s July 8 flight home from the G20 summit.
According to Wolff, the president personally dictated a statement aboard Air Force One on some rich asshole Jr.’s meeting with a Russian attorney in response to a forthcoming report by the New York Times.
That story fell apart under scrutiny, and the rich asshole Jr. eventually released emails showing he went into the meeting expecting damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of Russian government efforts to elect his father.
Special counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly investigating whether those efforts to craft a misleading statement could be considered obstruction of justice — and sources tried to paint themselves out of the picture as Wolff reported the incident.
“Ivanka, according to the later recollection of her team, would shortly leave the meeting, take a pill, and go to sleep,” Wolff reported. “Jared (Kushner), in the telling of his team, might have been there, but he was ‘not taking a pencil to anything.'”
“Nearby, in a small conference room watching the movie ‘Fargo,'” Wolff reported, “were Dina Powell, Gary Cohn, Stephen Miller, and H. R. McMaster, all of whom would later insist that they were, however physically close to the unfolding crisis, removed from it.”
Mark Corallo, the former spokesman for the rich asshole’s legal team, resigned July 20, and he reportedly told Wolff “that he believed the meeting on Air Force One represented a likely obstruction of justice.”
Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist and a major source for Wolff’s book, said the rich asshole Jr’s meeting with Russian officials — as well as brother-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort — showed horrendous judgment and potential criminal activity.
“The three senior guys in the campaign … thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside the rich asshole Tower in the conference room on the twenty-fifth floor — with no lawyers,” Bannon told Wolff. “They didn’t have any lawyers. Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad sh*t, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”
Ex-Def Sec shreds GOP lawmakers trying to shut down Muller’s probe: ‘Complicit’ in the rich asshole’s obstruction of justice
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC)
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Former Defense Secretary William Cohen, a Republican who served under former President Bill Clinton, sharply criticized GOP lawmakers who are systematically undermining special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, asking, “why aren’t they just as complicit” in some rich asshole’s possible obstruction of justice.
The comments came shortly after two House Freedom Caucus Republicans, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) penned an essay for the Washington Examiner calling for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign. As Business Insider’s Natasha Bertrand points out, that move would clear the way for the rich asshole to appoint an attorney general who has not recused himself for the Russia investigation and could therefor shut down Mueller’s probe.
The demand from Jordan and Meadows follows relentless efforts by the rich asshole loyalists—including Reps Devin Nunes (R-CA), Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Ron DeSantis (R-FL), among others—who’ve been working to publicly undermine Mueller, the Department of Justice and the FBI. the rich asshole himself has derided the Russia investigation since its onset.
“Whenever you have someone trying to jeopardize the integrity of our judicial system, that’s something that needs to be condemned,” Cohen told CNN.
“When I see what is taking place in terms of the attacks on Bob Mueller, when I see we’re trying to shut down and destroy the attempt to bring this to the surface, I’m concerned about it,” he continued.
Cohen wondered whether the GOP’s effort to cast doubt on federal law enforcement agencies makes them a party to Mueller’s reported obstruction of justice investigation. “This is participating in what may be an obstruction of justice case,” Cohen argued.
“If member of Congress are trying to use their office in order to shut down an investigation, why aren’t they just as complicit in the activities?” he asked.
Cohen said he’s “concerned” about the GOP’s actions on behalf of the president, imploring his fellow Republicans “to stand up.”
“I know that they took an oath to defend this country,” he said. “I want them to defend it against all enemies domestic and international and foreign, and I want them to stand up and say, ‘Find out what’s the truth here.’”
“I know that they took an oath to defend this country,” he said. “I want them to defend it against all enemies domestic and international and foreign, and I want them to stand up and say, ‘Find out what’s the truth here.’”
Watch below, via CNN:
"You Can’t Make This Shit Up": My Year Inside the rich asshole's Insane White House
Luke McGarry
Author and columnist Michael Wolff was given extraordinary access to the rich asshole administration and now details the feuds, the fights and the alarming chaos he witnessed while reporting what turned into a new book.
Editor’s Note: Author and Hollywood Reporter columnist Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the the rich asshole White House (Henry Holt & Co.), is a detailed account of the 45th president’s election and first year in office based on extensive access to the White House and more than 200 interviews with the rich asshole and senior staff over a period of 18 months. In advance of the Jan. 9 publication of the book, which the rich asshole is already attacking, Wolff has written this extracted column about his time in the White House based on the reporting included in Fire and Fury.
I interviewed some rich asshole for The Hollywood Reporter in June 2016, and he seemed to have liked — or not disliked — the piece I wrote. "Great cover!" his press assistant, Hope Hicks, emailed me after it came out (it was a picture of a belligerent the rich asshole in mirrored sunglasses). After the election, I proposed to him that I come to the White House and report an inside story for later publication — journalistically, as a fly on the wall — which he seemed to misconstrue as a request for a job. No, I said. I'd like to just watch and write a book. "A book?" he responded, losing interest. "I hear a lot of people want to write books," he added, clearly not understanding why anybody would. "Do you know Ed Klein?"— author of several virulently anti-Hillary books. "Great guy. I think he should write a book about me." But sure, the rich asshole seemed to say, knock yourself out.
Since the new White House was often uncertain about what the president meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around — checking in each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, making appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the "system," and then wandering across the street to the White House and plunking myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch.
The West Wing is configured in such a way that the anteroom is quite a thoroughfare — everybody passes by. Assistants — young women in the rich asshole uniform of short skirts, high boots, long and loose hair — as well as, in situation-comedy proximity, all the new stars of the show: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Jared Kushner, Mike Pence, Gary Cohn, Michael Flynn (and after Flynn's abrupt departure less than a month into the job for his involvement in the Russia affair, his replacement, H.R. McMaster), all neatly accessible.
The nature of the comedy, it was soon clear, was that here was a group of ambitious men and women who had reached the pinnacle of power, a high-ranking White House appointment — with the punchline that some rich asshole was president. Their estimable accomplishment of getting to the West Wing risked at any moment becoming farce.
A new president typically surrounds himself with a small group of committed insiders and loyalists. But few on the rich asshole team knew him very well — most of his advisors had been with him only since the fall. Even his family, now closely gathered around him, seemed nonplussed. "You know, we never saw that much of him until he got the nomination," Eric the rich asshole's wife, Lara, told one senior staffer. If much of the country was incredulous, his staff, trying to cement their poker faces, were at least as confused.
Their initial response was to hawkishly defend him — he demanded it — and by defending him they seemed to be defending themselves. Politics is a game, of course, of determined role-playing, but the difficulties of staying in character in the rich asshole White House became evident almost from the first day.
"You can't make this shit up," Sean Spicer, soon to be portrayed as the most hapless man in America, muttered to himself after his tortured press briefing on the first day of the new administration, when he was called to justify the president's inaugural crowd numbers — and soon enough, he adopted this as a personal mantra. Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, had, shortly after the announcement of his appointment in November, started to think he would not last until the inauguration. Then, making it to the White House, he hoped he could last a respectable year, but he quickly scaled back his goal to six months. Kellyanne Conway, who would put a finger-gun to her head in private about the rich asshole's public comments, continued to mount an implacable defense on cable television, until she was pulled off the air by others in the White House who, however much the president enjoyed her, found her militancy idiotic. (Even Ivanka and Jared regarded Conway's fulsome defenses as cringeworthy.)
Steve Bannon tried to gamely suggest that the rich asshole was mere front man and that he, with plan and purpose and intellect, was, more reasonably, running the show — commanding a whiteboard of policies and initiatives that he claimed to have assembled from the rich asshole's off-the-cuff ramblings and utterances. His adoption of the Saturday Night Live sobriquet "President Bannon" was less than entirely humorous. Within the first few weeks, even rote conversations with senior staff trying to explain the new White House's policies and positions would turn into a body-language ballet of eye-rolling and shrugs and pantomime of jaws dropping. Leaking became the political manifestation of the don't-blame-me eye roll.
The surreal sense of the rich asshole presidency was being lived as intensely inside the White House as out. the rich asshole was, for the people closest to him, the ultimate enigma. He had been elected president, that through-the-eye-of-the-needle feat, but obviously, he was yet … the rich asshole. Indeed, he seemed as confused as anyone to find himself in the White House, even attempting to barricade himself into his bedroom with his own lock over the protests of the Secret Service.
There was some effort to ascribe to the rich asshole magical powers. In an early conversation — half comic, half desperate — Bannon tried to explain him as having a particular kind of Jungian brilliance. the rich asshole, obviously without having read Jung, somehow had access to the collective unconscious of the other half of the country, and, too, a gift for inventing archetypes: Little Marco … Low-Energy Jeb … the Failing New York Times. Everybody in the West Wing tried, with some panic, to explain him, and, sheepishly, their own reason for being here. He's intuitive, he gets it, he has a mind-meld with his base. But there was palpable relief, of an Emperor's New Clothes sort, when longtime the rich asshole staffer Sam Nunberg — fired by the rich asshole during the campaign but credited with knowing him better than anyone else — came back into the fold and said, widely, "He's just a fucking fool."
Part of that foolishness was his inability to deal with his own family. In a way, this gave him a human dimension. Even some rich asshole couldn't say no to his kids. "It's a littleee, littleee complicated …" he explained to Priebus about why he needed to give his daughter and son-in-law official jobs. But the effect of their leadership roles was to compound his own boundless inexperience in Washington, creating from the outset frustration and then disbelief and then rage on the part of the professionals in his employ.
The men and women of the West Wing, for all that the media was ridiculing them, actually felt they had a responsibility to the country. "the rich asshole," said one senior Republican, "turned selfish careerists into patriots." Their job was to maintain the pretense of relative sanity, even as each individually came to the conclusion that, in generous terms, it was insane to think you could run a White House without experience, organizational structure or a real purpose.
On March 30, after the collapse of the health care bill, 32-year-old Katie Walsh, the deputy chief of staff, the effective administration chief of the West Wing, a stalwart political pro and stellar example of governing craft, walked out. Little more than two months in, she quit. Couldn't take it anymore. Nutso. To lose your deputy chief of staff at the get-go would be a sign of crisis in any other administration, but inside an obviously exploding one it was hardly noticed.
While there might be a scary national movement of Trumpers, the reality in the White House was stranger still: There was Jared and Ivanka, Democrats; there was Priebus, a mainstream Republican; and there was Bannon, whose reasonable claim to be the one person actually representing Trumpism so infuriated the rich asshole that Bannon was hopelessly sidelined by April. "How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me? Zero! Zero!" the rich asshole muttered and stormed. To say that no one was in charge, that there were no guiding principles, not even a working org chart, would again be an understatement. "What do these people do?" asked everyone pretty much of everyone else.
The competition to take charge, which, because each side represented an inimical position to the other, became not so much a struggle for leadership, but a near-violent factional war. Jared and Ivanka were against Priebus and Bannon, trying to push both men out. Bannon was against Jared and Ivanka and Priebus, practicing what everybody thought were dark arts against them. Priebus, everybody's punching bag, just tried to survive another day. By late spring, the larger political landscape seemed to become almost irrelevant, with everyone focused on the more lethal battles within the White House itself. This included screaming fights in the halls and in front of a bemused the rich asshole in the Oval Office (when he was not the one screaming himself), together with leaks about what Russians your opponents might have been talking to.
Reigning over all of this was the rich asshole, enigma, cipher and disruptor. How to get along with the rich asshole — who veered between a kind of blissed-out pleasure of being in the Oval Office and a deep, childish frustration that he couldn't have what he wanted? Here was a man singularly focused on his own needs for instant gratification, be that a hamburger, a segment on Fox & Friends or an Oval Office photo opp. "I want a win. I want a win. Where's my win?" he would regularly declaim. He was, in words used by almost every member of the senior staff on repeated occasions, "like a child." A chronic naysayer, the rich asshole himself stoked constant discord with his daily after-dinner phone calls to his billionaire friends about the disloyalty and incompetence around him. His billionaire friends then shared this with their billionaire friends, creating the endless leaks which the president so furiously railed against.
One of these frequent callers was Rupert Murdoch, who before the election had only ever expressed contempt for the rich asshole. Now Murdoch constantly sought him out, but to his own colleagues, friends and family, continued to derisively ridicule the rich asshole: "What a fucking moron," said Murdoch after one call.
With the Comey firing, the Mueller appointment and murderous White House infighting, by early summer Bannon was engaged in an uninterrupted monologue directed to almost anyone who would listen. It was so caustic, so scabrous and so hilarious that it might form one of the great underground political treatises.
By July, Jared and Ivanka, who had, in less than six months, traversed from socialite couple to royal family to the most powerful people in the world, were now engaged in a desperate dance to save themselves, which mostly involved blaming the rich asshole himself. It was all his idea to fire Comey! "The daughter," Bannon declared, "will bring down the father."
Priebus and Spicer were merely counting down to the day — and every day seemed to promise it would be the next day — when they would be out.
And, indeed, suddenly there were the 11 days of Anthony Scaramucci.
Scaramucci, a minor figure in the New York financial world, and quite a ridiculous one, had overnight become Jared and Ivanka's solution to all of the White House's management and messaging problems. After all, explained the couple, he was good on television and he was from New York — he knew their world. In effect, the couple had hired Scaramucci — as preposterous a hire in West Wing annals as any — to replace Priebus and Bannon and take over running the White House.
There was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward the rich asshole's family and the rich asshole himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify the rich asshole. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.
Most succinctly, no one expected him to survive Mueller. Whatever the substance of the Russia "collusion," the rich asshole, in the estimation of his senior staff, did not have the discipline to navigate a tough investigation, nor the credibility to attract the caliber of lawyers he would need to help him. (At least nine major law firms had turned down an invitation to represent the president.)
There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he'd repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn't stop saying something.
By summer's end, in something of a historic sweep — more usual for the end of a president's first term than the end of his first six months — almost the entire senior staff, save the rich asshole's family, had been washed out: Michael Flynn, Katie Walsh, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon. Even the rich asshole's loyal, longtime body guard Keith Schiller — for reasons darkly whispered about in the West Wing — was out. Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Rick Dearborn, all on their way out. The president, on the spur of the moment, appointed John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general and head of homeland security, chief of staff — without Kelly having been informed of his own appointment beforehand. Grim and stoic, accepting that he could not control the president, Kelly seemed compelled by a sense of duty to be, in case of disaster, the adult in the room who might, if needed, stand up to the president … if that is comfort.
As telling, with his daughter and son-in-law sidelined by their legal problems, Hope Hicks, the rich asshole's 29-year-old personal aide and confidant, became, practically speaking, his most powerful White House advisor. (With Melania a nonpresence, the staff referred to Ivanka as the "real wife" and Hicks as the "real daughter.") Hicks' primary function was to tend to the rich asshole ego, to reassure him, to protect him, to buffer him, to soothe him. It was Hicks who, attentive to his lapses and repetitions, urged him to forgo an interview that was set to open the 60 Minutes fall season. Instead, the interview went to Fox News' Sean Hannity who, White House insiders happily explained, was willing to supply the questions beforehand. Indeed, the plan was to have all interviewers going forward provide the questions.
As the first year wound down, the rich asshole finally got a bill to sign. The tax bill, his singular accomplishment, was, arguably, quite a reversal of his populist promises, and confirmation of what Mitch McConnell had seen early on as the silver the rich asshole lining: "He'll sign anything we put in front of him." With new bravado, he was encouraging partisans like Fox News to pursue an anti-Mueller campaign on his behalf. Insiders believed that the only thing saving Mueller from being fired, and the government of the United States from unfathomable implosion, is the rich asshole's inability to grasp how much Mueller had on him and his family.
Steve Bannon was openly handicapping a 33.3 percent chance of impeachment, a 33.3 percent chance of resignation in the shadow of the 25th amendment and a 33.3 percent chance that he might limp to the finish line on the strength of liberal arrogance and weakness.
some rich asshole's small staff of factotums, advisors and family began, on Jan. 20, 2017, an experience that none of them, by any right or logic, thought they would — or, in many cases, should — have, being part of the rich asshole presidency. Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country's future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.
At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up the rich asshole failed to recognize a succession of old friends.
Happy first anniversary of the rich asshole administration.
Amid Trumpland meltdown, Fox launches racial ‘Pocahontas’ attack on Warren: ‘She speaks with forked tongue’
Steve Doocy speaks to Howie Carr (screen grab/Fox News)
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While the White House was in crisis mode on Thursday, the hosts of Fox & Friends attacked Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who is a favorite to challenge the president in 2020.
In a segment that ignored revelations in Michael Wolff’s new bombshell book about the White House, Fox News host Steve Doocy spoke to right-wing radio host Howie Carr about Warren’s chances against the rich asshole in 2020.
“She’s not terribly fast on her feet,” Carr opined. “I understand why President the rich asshole would like to run against her. The whole thing with her Native American ancestry, which is more than questionable. He calls her Pocahontas, they call him a racist. She’s an ethnic fraud.”
Carr then held up Pow Wow Chow, a 1984 cookbook with contributions from Warren.
“She contributed five recipes, two of them she plagiarized from a French cuisine book,” he insisted. “Do you think they really served cold crab omelet back on the Trail of Tears in the 19th century? She speaks with a forked tongue.”
President some rich asshole has repeatedly referred to Warren as “Pocahontas,” and insists that the name is not a racial slur. For her part, Warren has denied ever using her ancestry to gain advantage in school admissions or employment.
the rich asshole has said that he would like to face Warren in the 2020 presidential election.
Watch the video below from Fox News.
‘There’s just no blood there’: West Wing creator says the rich asshole-based show would look like ‘dead air’
some rich asshole (Gage Skidmore / Flickr) and Aaron Sorkin (Wikimedia Commons)
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Aaron Sorkin, creator of the critically acclaimed White House-based series “West Wing” on Wednesday said he “wouldn’t do” a version of his hit TV show with some rich asshole-like character at the helm, telling ABC’s Nightline, “It would look like dead air.”
“I don’t find him to be a terribly interesting character,” Sorkin explained. “He is exactly what he looks like.”
Sorkin told ABC “there’s no nuance” in a character like the rich asshole because “he only ever talks about two things: Himself and his enemies, and that’s it.”
“It’s a character that you wouldn’t believe the character in a drama,” Sorkin, who also created the drama series “The Newsroom,” told ABC News. “He doesn’t have any of the qualities that you that you need to tell a story. There’s just no blood there.”
This isn’t the first time Sorkin has taken on the rich asshole. Last month, he told the Hollywood Reporter the rich asshole is “a really dumb guy with an observable psychiatric disorder,” having previously declared him a “thoroughly incompetent pig with dangerous ideas, a serious psychiatric disorder, no knowledge of the world and no curiosity to learn.”
Watch the interview below, via ABC:
‘Take it to the bank — he said this’: Here’s proof that Bannon’s anti-the rich asshole quotes are real
Steve Bannon (New York Times)
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President some rich asshole has dismissed an explosive new book about his administration as “phony,” but the author visited the White House at least 20 times and recorded conversations with staffers.
Jonathan Swan, a national political correspondent for Axios, appeared Thursday on “Morning Joe,” where he explained the website’s reporting on author Michael Wolff’s research for Fire and Fury: Inside the rich asshole White House.
Wolff spent hours at a time in private areas of the West Wing, according to Axios, where he recorded dozens of hours of tapes with a variety of sources, and hosted a dinner for six that included White House strategist Steve Bannon and former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, whose conversations are quoted at length in the book.
Bannon also served as a major source for Wolff, and many of the Breitbart News chief’s fans and allies are questioning why he would turn on the rich asshole.
“It is a question that people close to him can’t understand, and I think it’s incredibly stupid,” Swan told MSNBC. “It’s something he has been saying privately by the way — none of this is stuff he wasn’t saying privately for months. The new thing is he said it on the record.”
Swan offered an anecdote that he said explained Bannon’s mindset.
“One little wrinkle I would add, which sort of helps you understand Bannon’s psychology and how he thinks about himself, Bannon has told more than one person close to him that if the rich asshole is impeached, he will run in a Republican primary in 2020 against Mike Pence,” Swan said. “He thinks he could get more support among evangelicals than Pence. This sounds crazy, (but) it is true. Bannon denies it, (but) I am telling from you my own reporting, multiple sources, take it to the bank — he has said this.”
Swan was dismissive that Bannon’s participation in the book was part of some broader political strategy that would one day make sense.
“I think it’s reasonable, the idea that there is, like, some four-dimensional chess going on here and Bannon has an end game that none of us aware of — he’s thinking five moves ahead,” Swan said. “I mean, give me a break. Give me a break.”
Ex-DOJ official says Sally Yates tried to protect president from Flynn — but the rich asshole called her a ‘c*nt’ anyway
Fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates (Photo: Screen capture)
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President some rich asshole reportedly used an unspeakably sexist slur to insult then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates — but one former government official said he missed the point of her warning about Russian blackmail.
Yates was fired Jan. 30, four days after warning the White House counsel that national security adviser Mike Flynn may be “compromised” after lying about conversations with the Russian ambassador about easing sanctions levied by the outgoing Obama administration.
“What I think some rich asshole has always missed about the warning about Mike Flynn — she was looking out for him, she was looking out for the White House,” said Matthew Miller, former spokesman for the Justice Department. “She was trying to warn them they had someone in their midst who would embarrass the White House and potentially compromise the White House. Not only did they ignore it, they turned on her.”
the rich asshole fired Yates, who was filling in as U.S. attorney general until Jeff Sessions could be confirmed, and referred to her as “such a c*nt,” according to a new book by reporter Michael Wolff.
“He used a word to describe Sally Yates that we can’t use on morning television or late-night television or, really, any time,” Miller said. “I will tell you as someone who worked with Sally Yates, I was shaking with anger when I read it (Wednesday). Sally Yates is one of the most talented, most courageous, classiest, smartest prosecutors of her generation.”
Miller said the rich asshole’s rudely dismissive attitude toward Yates — and her warning about Flynn, who has accepted a plea deal and agreed to cooperate in the special counsel probe — shows how unprepared he is for the position he holds.
“I think it’s a sign, like everything else in the book, this president — not just the president but all the people around him — weren’t really ready to run the government when they took office,” Miller said. “I think in the last year we’ve seen they haven’t gotten any better at it.”
Kellyanne Conway was yanked off cable news after Ivanka the rich asshole grew tired of her ‘idiotic militancy’
Kellyanne Conway (Photo: Screen capture)
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In the early days of the the rich asshole administration, Kellyanne Conway was a ubiquitous presence on cable news shows.
However, in the wake of several high-profile gaffes, Conway’s TV appearances were dramatically cut back — so much so that “Saturday Night Live” even devoted an entire sketch to asking of Conway’s whereabouts.
According to journalist Michael Wolff, it seems that White House staff members wanted Conway yanked off the air because they thought her strident and angry defenses of every single the rich asshole action made the entire White House look ridiculous.
“Others in the White House… however much the president enjoyed her, found her militancy idiotic,” writes Wolff in The Hollywood Reporter. “Even Ivanka and Jared regarded Conway’s fulsome defenses as cringeworthy.”
Among other things, Conway infamously used the term “alternative facts” to describe the White House’s approach to disseminating information, while also concocting a completely fictional terrorist attack in Bowling Green, Kentucky to justify the president’s ban on travel from multiple Muslim-majority countries.
Not enough popcorn in the world.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders says Breitbart should ‘consider’ firing Steve Bannon
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Screenshot)
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White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Thursday that Breitbart News should consider firing boss Steve Bannon over his disparaging remarks about President some rich asshole and his family.
When asked by a reporter whether it would be a good idea for Breitbart to drop Bannon, Sanders replied that “I certainly thing it’s something they should look at and consider.”
Although there were signs on Thursday that the rich asshole may have softened his stance on Bannon — the rich asshole seemed happy that Bannon had called him a “great man” on Wednesday evening, for example — Sanders’ comment suggests that all is not forgiven in the rich asshole White House.
Bannon enraged the rich asshole when he was quoted in an upcoming book on the rich asshole White House as saying he believed some rich asshole Jr.’s infamous 2016 meeting in the rich asshole Tower with Russian officials was “unpatriotic” and “treasonous.”
‘The president is surrounded by people who hate him and hate each other — that’s very good news for Bob Mueller’: NYT reporter
the rich asshole's Cabinet Meeting (Screen Capture)
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MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough wasn’t really surprised by anything he read in Michael Wolff’s explosive new book on the rich asshole presidency — and he gloated over Steve Bannon turning on the president.
The host of “Morning Joe” warned President some rich asshole not to bring his former campaign manager into the White House, and he said Bannon’s betrayal signaled a worrisome trend for the president as he faces multiple investigations of his campaign ties to Russia.
“If are you a prosecutor and you’re looking at this situation, you are looking at a cast of characters that one by one by one are turning on the president of the United States, and all the president’s men and all the president’s women, right now it’s looking like, of the loyalists around some rich asshole, it’s now boiled down to basically the rich asshole and his children who are still loyal to him,” Scarborough said.
“What is the impact of having the national security adviser who spent more time with him on planes campaigning in 2016 and was seen as the guy that the rich asshole trusted to have around him the most, now cooperating with the feds? What does it mean to have the campaign manager now, of course, in trouble with the feds, possibly facing a lifetime in jail? What does it mean when you have one of his top foreign policy guys now cooperating with the FBI, and now you have his final campaign manager, his top political strategist, accusing the president and all the president’s men and women of treason? What does that do to the prosecutor?”
New York Times national political correspondent Nick Confessore, who has questioned the accuracy of some passages in Wolff’s book, said he was not surprised by many of the revelations — although he was astonished by the viciousness of the quotes.
“I have never seen anything in presidential politics that is remotely like that anywhere, it’s astonishing,” Confessore said. “This is a president, in Wolff’s telling, who is surrounded by people who hate him and hate each other and don’t respect him. It is hard to imagine the first six months or a year in the White House, with that much open disdain for a guy in the Oval Office. It is impossible for a presidency to function in those conditions, and we are seeing this presidency does not function in an orderly way.”
“It’s very good news for Bob Mueller, by the way, and if he wants to kind of kind of peel these people apart, he has a lot to work a lot to work with,” Confessore added.
Ex-White House staffer Anthony Scaramucci: the rich asshole ‘not all that angry’ after Bannon called his son a traitor
Anthony Scaramucci speaks to CNN (screen grab)
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Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci on Thursday insisted that President some rich asshole was not “angry” after reports emerged that former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon called his son, Donald Jr., “treasonous.”
During an interview on CNN, host Chris Cuomo asked the former communications director about Michael Wolff’s new book that claims that Bannon had blasted some rich asshole Jr. for meeting with Russians during the 2016 campaign. Bannon reportedly called the incident “treasonous” and ripped the president’s son for not reporting it to the FBI.
“How angry do you think this stuff is going to make him?” Cuomo wondered.
Scaramucci admitted that he had not talked to the president since the news about Bannon broke on Wednesday.
“My gut tells me that he’s probably not all that angry as much as he is distracted,” he opined. “He thinks it’s another unnecessary distraction.”
“He says his son is treasonous,” Cuomo pointed out. “You don’t think that makes him angry?”
“This is another misnomer about the president,” Scaramucci replied. “People think he’s angry and volatile and temperamental and all this sort of stuff, I don’t see that in the guy’s personality at all. Okay? I see the guy as honest and straightforward. Sometimes he wears a lot on his sleeve. Sometimes he wears a lot on his sleeve on Twitter.”
“But at the end of the day,” he added, “I wouldn’t describe him as angry as much as I would describe him as frustrated because when he let Bannon go, he sent out a nice tweet about him.”
In a statement on Wednesday, the rich asshole referred to Bannon as a mere “staffer” and said that his chief strategist had “lost his mind” after leaving the White House
Watch the video below from CNN.
the rich asshole lawyers try to stop publication of Michael Wolff book — and demand apology to president
some rich asshole removes his hat to show that his hair is real during a political rally at Ladd-Peebles Stadium on August 21, 2015 in Mobile, Alabama (AFP Photo/Mark Wallheiser)
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President some rich asshole is trying to stop the publication of an explosive new book that reveals staffers in his chaotic administration don’t believe he’s fit to carry out his White House duties.
The president’s attorneys have sent a cease-and-desist letter Thursday morning to author Michael Wolff and publisher Henry Holt, reported the Washington Post‘s Carol Leonnig.
NEW this am: Trump attorneys send cease-and-desist letter this morning to Wolff and book publisher @HenryHolt demanding they stop publication and issue an apology to @realDonaldTrump for defamatory statements made thus far.
The letter demands they stop publication of Fire and Fury: Inside the the rich asshole White House and issue an apology to the president for “defamatory statements made thus far.”
the rich asshole’s attorneys also issued a cease-and-desist letter to Breitbart News chief Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist who served as a major source for Wolff’s book.
The president’s attorneys warned legal action against Bannon was “imminent” for alleged “defamation by libel and slander,” and for allegedly violating his nondisclosure agreement.
WATCH: Anthony Scaramucci says the rich asshole has ‘probably the best emotional intelligence’ of any living person
the rich asshole surrogate Anthony Scaramucci talks on CNN (Screen cap).
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Former the rich asshole Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Thursday to defend President some rich asshole’s intelligence.
Reacting to multiple quotes from Michael Wolff’s new book on the rich asshole White House, in which aides regularly disparage the rich asshole’s intelligence, Scaramucci insisted that the rich asshole’s intellect is razor sharp.
“You cannot be dumb and win the American presidency,” said Scaramucci, who was fired from his position at the White House after being employed for only 11 days. “You know he’s not dumb, I know he’s not dumb.”
Scaramucci then took it a step farther by suggesting that the rich asshole actually has greater intelligence in some respects than any other person in the world.
“In fact, I think he’s got probably the best emotional intelligence, in terms of sizing and reading people,” he explained.
Scaramucci then said that the rich asshole’s highly personal attack on Steve Bannon Wednesday showed the rich asshole knew how to read people — despite the fact that the rich asshole had first hired Bannon to be his campaign manager, and then hired him to be his top political strategist.
“When you have a lone wolf like that, operating against the president’s interests, he had no choice but to do what he did yesterday,” Scaramucci said of the rich asshole.
Watch the video below.
‘System is rigged, must go to Voter ID’: the rich asshole blames Democrats for collapse of bogus voter fraud panel
some rich asshole and Kris Kobach (Screengrab)
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President some rich asshole is blaming Democrats for the collapse of his bogus voter fraud panel.
“Many mostly Democrat States refused to hand over data from the 2016 Election to the Commission On Voter Fraud,” the rich asshole tweeted Thursday morning. “They fought hard that the Commission not see their records or methods because they know that many people are voting illegally. System is rigged, must go to Voter I.D.”
The president shut down the White House commission Wednesday, complaining that many states had refused to turn over information requested by the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
No states have uncovered significant evidence to support the president’s claim that widespread voter fraud cost him the popular vote, if not the Electoral College vote.
Election officials — including many Republicans — in individual states have strongly rejected the rich asshole’s claims, and Democrats accused the president of using the panel to rig the system against them through voter suppression.
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