February 13th-14th, 2017. It's been 458-459 days since the Nov 8, 2016, election of some rich asshole, no. 45, and 386-387 days the Jan 20th inauguration.
Under pressure, the rich asshole says he's 'totally opposed to domestic violence'
BY JORDAN FABIAN - 02/14/18 02:40 PM EST
President the rich asshole said Wednesday he is “totally opposed” to domestic violence, breaking an eight-day silence on the allegations that led to staff secretary Rob Porter’s resignation from the White House.
“I am totally opposed to domestic violence of any kind. Everyone knows that,” the rich asshole said, waving his finger as he spoke to reporters in the Oval Office. “It almost wouldn’t even have to be said. So, now you hear it, but you all know it.”
the rich asshole’s comments capped a week of growing pressure on the White House that culminated in the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee announcing an investigation into the matter on Wednesday.
The controversy has engulfed the White House, fueling speculation that chief of staff John Kelly, who worked closely with Porter, could lose his job over the issue.
the rich asshole on Tuesday twice declined to respond to questions about domestic violence, and on Friday offered sympathy for the former White House aide without acknowledging his two ex-wives, who are accusing Porter of abuse.
Those actions led to questions for Republicans about whether the rich asshole should speak out, adding to the mounting pressure on an administration that has struggled for a week to explain how Porter was able to work in the White House with an interim security clearance despite the allegations against him.
Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) launched the probe after FBI Director Christopher Wray contradicted the White House’s account of when it learned of the accusations against Porter, who was in charge of handling almost every document that reached the president’s desk.
Lawmakers and former administration officials said the allegations could have left him susceptible to blackmail.
“Clearly we should all be condemning domestic violence,” Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters Wednesday at a leadership press conference where the first questions were about Porter.
“And if a person who commits domestic violence gets in the government, then there is a breakdown in the vetting system and that breakdown needs to be addressed.”
At the same press conference, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was publicly asked about whether he might replace Kelly as chief of staff. He said Kelly was doing a fine job and that he had not discussed the position with the rich asshole.
The White House’s problems had deepened on Tuesday, when Wray undercut its claims that Porter’s background check was “ongoing” at the time of his ouster and that officials first learned the full extent of the allegations last week.
Wray testified before Congress that the FBI issued its first report on Porter to the White House in March 2017 and that the background investigation was closed last month.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday the timeline that she previously offered was still accurate because she had been referring to a White House office that handles security clearances that was still looking into Porter’s application.
She said she was “not aware” that anyone from the security office communicated any concerns to West Wing aides.
Sanders canceled her daily press briefing Wednesday, citing the school shooting in south Florida. That meant she was not asked questions on camera about Porter.
She also refused to answer Porter questions from reporters standing outside her office, saying the White House is focused on the shooting.
Sanders’s explanation Tuesday was not persuasive to Gowdy, who sent letters to both Wray and Kelly, demanding information on the security clearance process and whether it was followed with Porter.
Gowdy also requested information on when senior officials at the White House were made aware of the accusations against the former staff secretary.
Those concerns were echoed by Ryan, who said the White House “clearly [has] work to do to fix their vetting system.”
The incident has raised questions about the judgment and credibility of senior White House staff members and sparked accusations that the president and his team are out of touch with the issue of domestic abuse against women.
the rich asshole’s refusal to acknowledge Porter’s ex-wives irked some Republican women and raised fears about a backlash from female voters in the fall midterm elections.
At least 19 women have accused the rich asshole of sexual misconduct and harassment. the rich asshole has denied the allegations and the White House has said its official position is that the women are not telling the truth.
It has also overshadowed the White House’s efforts to advance its agenda on immigration and infrastructure in Congress and highlight positive economic news.
The ongoing controversy has shined a harsh spotlight not just on Kelly, but on White House counsel Don McGahn.
Kelly and McGahn reportedly learned in November there was a problem with Porter’s background check, yet Porter was allowed to remain in a key role on staff. Several news outlets reported that Porter was under consideration to be promoted to deputy chief of staff.
White House officials have repeatedly denied that top officials were fully aware of the Porter allegations until last Tuesday, when his two ex-wives’ accounts were published by the Daily Mail.
Kelly has said he would not have handled the Porter situation any differently.
“It was all done right,” he told The Wall Street Journal on Monday.
But there is frustration among many White House officials who feel they had not been given a full and accurate account of the events surrounding Porter.
Vice President Pence, who is often an unabashed defender of the rich asshole, said Wednesday the White House could have “handled this better.”
But the vice president on Wednesday offered a full-throated endorsement of Kelly.
“John Kelly has done a remarkable job as chief of staff for the president of the United States and I look forward to working with him for many, many months to come,” the vice president said at an event sponsored by Axios.
Dem senators want list of White House officials with interim security clearances
BY BRETT SAMUELS - 02/14/18 02:25 PM EST
Six Democratic senators on Wednesday wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking for a full list of White House staffers working without a full security clearance.
Sens. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), Martin Heinrich(N.M.), Mazie Hirono (Hawaii), Tom Udall (N.M.) and Cory Booker (N.J.) noted recent reports that indicated dozens of White House officials and appointees have been working in the rich asshole administration with interim security clearances.
The letter asks for a list of those with interim clearances, as well as the status of FBI background investigations into those individuals. It specifically seeks information on the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.
Democratic lawmakers have frequently raised concerns that Kushner is operating without a full security clearance.
The letter from Democratic senators echoes concerns voiced in a letter sent Tuesday to the FBI from House Democrats.
Both requests come as the White House is embroiled in controversy over its handling of domestic abuse allegations against former staff secretary Rob Porter, who was operating on a temporary security clearance.
Wray testified to a Senate panel on Tuesday that the FBI completed its background check investigation of Porter in July, and then offered additional information in November and January.
Yet Porter did not resign until a photo surfaced last week of his first ex-wife, Colbie Holderness, with a black eye she said she got from her husband during a vacation in Italy.
The White House has said it did not know of the seriousness of the allegations against Porter until published reports last week, though Wray's testimony suggests people at the White House should have been aware much earlier.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday announced it has launched an investigation into the White House’s handling of accusations against Porter, as well as his security clearance.
Another White House official reportedly resigned Wednesday after learning he did not qualify for a full security clearance because he admitted to smoking marijuana in 2013.
Pence says intel community concluded Russia did not affect election
BY MORGAN CHALFANT - 02/14/18 02:01 PM EST
Vice President Pence on Wednesday said the U.S. intelligence community universally concluded that Russia did not have an effect on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, despite the fact that officials have made no such judgment.
“Irrespective of efforts that were made in 2016 by foreign powers, it is the universal conclusion of our intelligence communities that none of those efforts had any impact on the outcome of the 2016 election,” Pence said at an event hosted by Axios, a claim he later repeated.
Pence went on to acknowledge that Russia did attempt to meddle in the election and said that the administration is taking steps to counter the threat.
“It doesn’t mean there weren’t efforts, and we do know there were,” Pence said. “There were efforts by Russia, and likely by other countries, to involve or influence American elections and we take that very seriously.”
The U.S. intelligence community has not reached a conclusion on whether Russian meddling actually had any bearing on the election's outcome.
“We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russia activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election,” an unclassified assessment released last January states. “The US Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze US political processes or US public opinion.”
U.S. officials have accused Russia of using cyberattacks and disinformation during the 2016 campaign to undermine American democracy, damage Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and help President the rich asshole.
Homeland Security officials have also disclosed that Russia targeted election systems in 21 states, though they have maintained that there is no evidence any vote counts were changed.
Top U.S. intelligence officials, including Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and CIA Director Mike Pompeo told lawmakers Tuesday that they expect Russia to attempt to meddle in the 2018 midterm elections.
On Wednesday, Pence did not directly answer whether he agreed with that judgment but insisted the administration was taking steps to ensure that state election systems and U.S. infrastructure are guarded against future foreign interference efforts.
“We have discussed plans going forward to ensure meddling in our elections by Russians or other powers around the world will be rebutted and that we’ll continue to develop the kind of technologies that ensure and maintain the integrity of our electoral system,” he said of his briefings with U.S. intelligence officials.
Pence went on to reiterate that Russia’s actions in 2016 had “no impact” on the election's result.
“Let me say again, the encouraging word is that it is the universal conclusion of our intelligence community that there was no impact on the outcome of the 2016 election from any foreign meddling in our elections,” Pence said, “I think that bears repeating.”
Pompeo made a similar remark last October, saying at a conference in Washington, “The intelligence community’s assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election.”
The CIA later issued a statement appearing to walk back his remarks.
“The intelligence assessment with regard to Russian election meddling has not changed,” an agency spokesman told The Washington Post at the time, adding, “the director did not intend to suggest that it had.”
the rich asshole himself has at times cast doubt on the intelligence community's assessment and has weathered criticism for not doing enough to penalize or call Russia out for its behavior. He has also described allegations of collusion between his campaign and Russia being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller as a “hoax.”
White House staffers without permanent security clearances read the top-secret President’s Daily Brief
Jared Kushner (Photo: Wikipedia Commons)
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NBC News reported Wednesday on new concerns over the White House handing of America’s most closely-guarded secrets.
A source with first-hand knowledge admitted being “really concerned with how liberally classified intelligence was being shared.”
The source revealed that the distribution list for the president’s daily briefing includes many staffers who lack permanent security clearances.
As The Washington Post reported Friday that President some rich asshole does not read the daily brief.
One senior staff member with access to the daily briefing is senior advisor and the rich asshole son-in-law Jared Kushner. Kushner lacks a permanent security clearance.
“And in the case of Jared Kushner, my sources tell me it is unprecedented for someone to be seeing the presidential daily brief who has not received a full security clearance,” NBC News intelligence and national security reporter Ken Dilanian told Katy Tur on Tuesday.
“This is a document that has the nation’s deepest secrets, including covert operation and top-level intelligence, NSA eavesdropping of foreign leaders, and to have someone looking at that document who hasn’t been fully cleared, who hasn’t been signed off on by the FBI, is unprecedented and it’s a decision directly made by some rich asshole,” Dilanian continued.
This may be the only chance for the rich asshole to get his wall
"I’ll take all the heat you want to give me, and I’ll take the heat off both the Democrats and the Republicans."
Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) on Wednesday are set to release a bare-bones immigration proposal that has the opportunity to appease both political parties and the president himself.
A bipartisan group of senators are set to propose an immigration bill Wednesday that includes permanent protections and an earned pathway to citizenship for roughly 1.8 undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children, known as “Dreamers,” and $25 billion for border security, PBS News Hour reporter Lisa Desjardins reported. The bill may be President the rich asshole’s only chance to get funding for a border wall, but White House officials cautioned on a background call Wednesday that the president may not sign a “skinny” proposal.
The rich asshole administration ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program last September, phasing out temporary work authorization and deportation protections for certain immigrants who came to the country as children. About 800,000 immigrants became beneficiaries of the program since its inception nearly six years ago. It’s estimated that 1.8 million immigrants would have been eligible for the program had the rich asshole White House not ended it. The discrepancy between the DACA population and the DACA-eligible population includes young immigrants who had not aged into the DACA program and other people who may not yet have met every requirement, like graduating from high school or obtaining a high school diploma equivalent.
Desjardins added in later tweets that the Graham-Durbin bill will likely preventDACA beneficiaries from sponsoring their undocumented parents. More details on the bill are still forthcoming.
Despite early assurances by the president in January that he would sign any immigration bills that Congress sends to him so long as it includes a border wall, he later requested any legislation from Congress include “four pillars”: a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, $25 billion for border security, limits to family-based migration, and an end to the diversity visa.
Hours before lawmakers emerged from Sen. Susan Collins’ (R-ME) office, where they met to discuss the immigration proposal, the White House released a statement endorsing a Republican-led plan that grants an earned pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million Dreamers, but also heavily focuses on the elimination of legal immigration avenues, like family-based migration and the diversity visa, as well as additional interior immigration enforcement. The plan mirrors the rich asshole’s “four pillars” on immigration. That plan likely will not gain Democratic supporters, some of whom insist that they would not support bills that fund additional immigration enforcement agents to pursue undocumented immigrants who have not committed crimes beyond their unauthorized stay in the United States.
White House officials in a background briefing later on Wednesday said that the president will not sign Graham’s proposal, and again called for Congress to move on Grassley’s proposed bill instead.
The chance to pass an immigration bill with bicameral majority approval is slim. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Tuesday that immigration would take up the rest of the week on the Senate floor because he wanted to move on to “other things.” As of Wednesday, Senators now have less than a two-day window to pass immigration reform. If approved, the bill will go to the Republican-led House and later to the president who once promised he would endorse a “bill of love” and that he would “take the heat off” both parties.
Yet the bill is likely as close as it will get to a compromise plan that the rich asshole publicly said he would support during a 55-minute televised meeting on immigration back in January.
“I will be signing it,” he assured lawmakers at the time. “I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, gee, I want this or I want that.’ I’ll be signing it.”
“I’ll take the heat, I don’t care. I don’t care,” the rich asshole told lawmakers in January. “I’ll take all the heat you want to give me, and I’ll take the heat off both the Democrats and the Republicans. My whole life has been heat. I like heat, in a certain way.”
Top Intel Dem concludes there’s ‘abundant’ evidence of collusion and obstruction of justice in the rich asshole-Russia probe
some rich asshole (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
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The top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence revealed to Capitol Hill reporters on Wednesday that there is more evidence against President some rich asshole than has been revealed publicly.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said the evidence is involves the crimes of collusion, obstruction of justice, and money laundering, The Guardian reported.
“There is certainly an abundance of non-public information that we’ve gathered in the investigation,” Rep. Schiff continued. “And I think some of that non-public evidence is evidence on the issue of collusion and some … on the issue of obstruction.”
“It is a tried and true maxim. As a former prosecutor, you follow the money,” the former assistant U.S. Attorney.
“We have not been able to adequately follow the money. And I think the allegations on money laundering are credible enough that we ought to, in the exercise of due diligence, see if this was one of the other vectors of the Russian active measures campaign,” Schiff explained.
Schiff also referenced the rumored the rich asshole sex tape.
“We know that in other places they use money laundering as a way of entangling people, as a way of compromising people,” he added. “To me that is far more potentially compromising than any salacious video would be.”
‘He struck a lot of us as clueless’: 11 ex-White House chiefs of staff struggled to counsel Reince Priebus
Reince Priebus (Twitter)
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The author of The New York Times best-selling book, The Gatekeepers: How the White House chiefs of staff define every presidency has an explosive new Vanity Fair expose documenting the time Reince Priebus served in the some rich asshole administration.
A month before the inauguration, Barack Obama’s outgoing Chief of Staff Denis McDonough hosted Priebus and 10 additional former chief of staffs to give advice.
“I caught the eye of several of the others and we exchanged worried expressions,” a Republican chief revealed. “He seemed much too relaxed about being able to navigate a difficult job. I think he struck a lot of us as clueless.”
“He was approaching the job like it was some combination of personal aide and cruise director,” another noted.
“We wanted to help Reince in any way we could,” said Jack Watson, who served President Jimmy Carter. “But I don’t think there was a chief in the room that thought he was going to be able to do the job, given the rich asshole as his president.”
The article explains that on election night, it looked like the chief of staff role almost went to Steve Bannon, except for the fact Bannon didn’t look the part.
“the rich asshole looked around and I remember I had a combat jacket on and I hadn’t shaved in a week,” said Bannon. “I had the greasy hair [hanging] down. . . . I’m the senior guy—but look, it was obvious Reince had to be chief of staff.”
Bannon also had thoughts on the firing of former FBI director Jim Comey and the resulting investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, was apparently disappointed that the White House communications shop was failing to defend Comey’s firing.
“There’s not a f*cking thing you can do to sell this!,” Bannon charged.
“Nobody can sell this! P. T. Barnum couldn’t sell this! People aren’t stupid!” Bannon continued.
“This is a terrible, stupid decision that’s going to have massive implications. It may have shortened the rich asshole’s presidency—and it’s because of you, Jared Kushner!” Bannon shouted.
“Mueller’s doing a roll-up just like he did with the Gambinos. [Former campaign manager Paul] Manafort’s the caporegime, right? And [Rick] Gates [Manafort’s deputy] is a made man! [George] Papadopoulos is equivalent to a wiseguy out in a social club in Brooklyn,” Bannon explained. “This is like a Wagner opera. In the overture you get all the strands of the music you’re going to hear for three hours. Well, Mueller opened with a bang. He totally caught these guys by surprise. So if you’re not going to fight, you’re going to get rolled over.”
Priebus admitted his time was troubled.
“Take everything you’ve heard and multiply it by 50,” he told Vanity Fair
Omarosa’s the rich asshole confessions are meant to help her bottom line — not her guilty conscience: Dem congressman
Former the rich asshole aide Omarosa Manigault (left) and Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA, right). Images via screengrab.
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Omarosa Manigault’s White House confessions on Big Brother have less to do with assuaging her guilty conscience and more to do with promoting her bottom line, one congressman argued Wednesday.
“Nobody wishes ill will to her,” Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA) told TMZ, noting that although Manigault’s comments about her time working in the White House “echo” the Democrats’ concerns about the rich asshole administration, her intentions may not be pure.
She wants “back into stardom and back into the reality show world where it’s a business,” he continued. “No one ever said that Omarosa didn’t have good business skills.”
When asked if Manigault’s White House anecdotes inspire him to watch Big Brother, Richmond responded with an unequivocal “Hell no!”
“I’m too busy watching the president,” he said. “That’s a full-time job.”
Watch below, via TMZ:
Conservative Hugh Hewitt gets pummeled after dismissing the rich asshole’s White House scandals as mere ‘West Wing drama’
Clinton WH aide Elizabeth Gore (left) and conservative radio host and Reagan WH aide Hugh Hewitt (right). Image via screengrab.
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According to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, the more than week-long scandal surrounding an alleged domestic abuser being granted interim security clearance in spite of the allegations being known to the White House is little more than typical Washingtonian drama.
When asked if the public can trust anything that comes from the White House press podium given how many times their story has changed regarding the timeline of disgraced ex-staffer Rob Porter’s allegations, Hewitt equivocated.
“Press secretaries are always the last to know some things,” he said.
Hewitt argued that during his time in the Reagan White House counsel’s office, “more knives thrown in that West Wing than in a carnival show when someone’s on a spinning wheel.”
“There’s a reason there’s a drama known as The West Wing,” he said, referencing the popular 1990’s television show. “There’s always drama in the West Wing.”
“Is it always like this?” host Peter Alexander mused.
Hewitt then referenced President Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal twice, saying it was “the all-time high for drama.”
“You always have periods of drama and periods of calm,” he said, noting that the Iran-Contra scandal took place in his time in the White House and “that was pretty damn bad too.”
“I just can’t agree with that,” Elizabeth Gore, a special assistant to President Clinton, argued.
“Hugh mentioned that there are periods of chaos and periods of calm,” she continued. “I haven’t seen any periods of calm with this White House.”
Watch below, via MSNBC:
POLITICS
the rich asshole Pick For EPA’s No. 2 Accused Of Abusing Power To ‘Bully’ And ‘Intimidate’ Opponents
As a Senate aide in 2005, Andrew Wheeler went after state air pollution regulators for opposing his boss’s bill.
Andrew Wheeler, the former coal lobbyist President some rich asshole nominated as the Environmental Protection Agency’s deputy administrator, spent a decade as a Senate aide and four years as an agency staffer under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, where he built a reputation as the skillful operator the White House needs to execute on its deregulatory agenda.
But during his time as a counsel to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, he was accused of abusing his power to target his opponents, which raises concerns for some about how he’d run an increasingly political agency. The same committee voted along party lines last week to advance his nomination to the full Senate for confirmation as the next-in-line to lead the EPA.
In January 2005, the Senate panel convened a hearing to discuss the Clear Skies Act, a bill Wheeler’s former boss Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) sponsored in 2003. The legislation rewrote federal air pollution rules under the Clean Air Act to reduce power plant emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury, while allowing planet-warming pollution like carbon dioxide to continue unabated.
At the hearing, John Paul, a regional air pollution officer from Dayton, Ohio, who spoke as a representative of the Association of Local Air Pollution Control Officials and its sister group, State and Territorial Air Pollution Program Administrators, testified that the bill was “simply not protective enough” and was “far too lenient” on polluters.
In response, Inhofe took the unusual step of asking the groups to turn over six years of IRS filings and all records of grants they received from the EPA. Wheeler took ownership of the demands in a March 1, 2005 interview with E&E News. But he denied that the requests were politically motivated.
“STAPPA receives apparently ... most if not all of their funding from the U.S. taxpayers,” Wheeler said. “That is part of our legitimate oversight activities on grant oversight. It has nothing at all to do with Clear Skies.”
But Bill Becker, who served as STAPPA’s executive director for 37 years before retiring in June, said the tax probe broke with ordinary protocol for requesting filings and “was meant for no other purpose than to intimidate and retaliate for positions ... against their bill.”
“It was merely a fact-finding witch hunt against our association, with the hope that they could find something and use that against us to temper what we said,” Becker told HuffPost by phone Monday. “They treated us at the time in a mean-spirited, political way for merely questioning a policy.”
The groups complied with the request, and Becker said nothing more came of it. But the existence of the Senate probe marked the associations in Washington, leaving some wondering whether the groups had done anything suspicious to warrant the investigation, Becker said.
“He got nothing, but he left the impression that somehow our association was being accused of doing something that we didn’t do, and others saw that,” he said. “So we went through a period where it was uncomfortable.”
Environmentalists and Democrats opposed the Orwellian-named “Clear Skies” bill, but the nonpartisan associations’ criticism carried particular weight because state regulators were the ones tasked with actually implementing the legislation.
“We could home in on the details and quickly discover if something would really weaken the Clean Air Act, so that testimony was really important,” said Becker. “Sen. Inhofe and his staff, including Andy [Wheeler], knew this and I think wanted to intimidate us or undermine what we were saying.”
The EPA declined HuffPost’s request to interview Wheeler, but defended his qualifications in an emailed statement.
“Andrew Wheeler has spent his entire career working to improve environmental outcomes, including many years on Capitol Hill and at EPA’s Office of Pollution and Prevention and Toxics during the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations,” Liz Bowman, EPA spokeswoman, wrote in the email. “We look forward to having him back at EPA.”
Faegre Baker Daniels, the law firm where Wheeler currently works, did not respond to an interview request.
Chris Miller, a former Democratic aide who worked on the Senate committee at the same time as Wheeler, said Inhofe frequently made decisions or requests that seemed like political plays, but the STAPPA probe stood out.
“Nothing rose to the level of what the STAPPA extra scrutiny was,” Miller, who now works at the lobbying firm AJW, told HuffPost. “The states were more allied with the public health side than the industry side, and Sen. Inhofe didn’t like that.”
Wheeler acted like a real bully in his dealings with the state and local agencies.Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch
Becker said STAPPA tried to avoid a partisan fight over the tax probe, noting that its president was a Republican who had twice voted for then-President George W. Bush.
“It wasn’t as if we were an association that leaned Democrat,” he said. “We were far right of the [Natural Resources Defense Council] and [Environmental Defense Fund] and environmental groups, but we were left of a conservative EPA and some of the elected officials.”
Still, Becker at the time told a reporter friend about the incident when he called looking for news tips, and in mid-February of 2005, Cox News Service published a wire story. Days later, The New York Times picked up the story. In March, the Baltimore Sun published an editorial lambasting Inhofe for “auditing the messenger” in what “looked for all the world like bullying.”
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government accountability and transparency watchdog, said the 13-year-old tax probe “raises serious concerns as to Wheeler’s judgement.”
“An investigation into policy opponents, if in an attempt to intimidate them, raises questions of abuse of power and government resources,” Jordan Libowitz, the group’s communications director, told HuffPost by email.
Yet the incident didn’t come up during Wheeler’s initial confirmation hearing in November. Instead, Republicans recalled chummy anecdotes of his time working for Inhofe and at the EPA. (Republicans steamrolled calls from the Sierra Club last week to postpone the confirmation vote after The Intercept published a report detailing fundraisers Wheeler held for Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and Inhofe in May.)
Democrats hammered Wheeler for lobbying ties he had to coal magnate Bob Murray until late last year. The bombastic chief of Murray Energy has wielded unprecedented influence over the rich asshole administration, providing the White House with an “action plan” that called for a federal bailout of coal-fired plants, repeal of the Clean Power Plan and a challenge to the 2009 EPA “endangerment finding” that determined carbon dioxide pollution poses a risk to public health.
Despite mincing words over whether he believes humans are causing climate change, Wheeler escaped the intense scrutiny put on Kathleen Hartnett-White, the Council on Environmental Quality nominee whose failure to answer basic science questions captured Democrats’ attention. While Hartnett-White stammered and struggled to defend her record of taking extreme stances against environmental regulation, Wheeler remained calm, spoke in polished legalese and projected a familiar Beltway aesthetic.
That seemed to put Democrats at ease. The party raised ire over Hartnett-White ― who credited coal with abolishing slavery and said carbon dioxide emissions were good for the planet ― and Michael Dourson, the EPA’s chemical safety division nominee whose research firm was described in 2014 by InsideClimate News as the “one-stop science shop” for chemical and tobacco industries seeking friendly conclusions. Both withdrew their nominations as support waned.
But no Democrats raised concerns over Wheeler when EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt testified last month before the Senate for the first time since taking office. Still, no Democrats voted to advance Wheeler’s nomination last week, though Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) ― who tend to vote with Republicans on fossil fuel issues ― could guarantee an already-likely confirmation in the full Senate. Jonathan Kott, a spokesman for Manchin, said the senator hadn’t decided on whether to vote for Wheeler yet. A spokeswoman for Heitkamp did not respond to a request for comment.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for Inhofe denied that the probe was politically motivated or connected to the Clear Skies bill.
“Sen. Inhofe’s investigation into STAPPA was a part of a broad investigation into EPA’s grant management process,” Leacy Burke, the spokeswoman, wrote in an email to HuffPost.
Mike Danylak, a spokesman for the Republican majority on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, declined to comment on the STAPPA probe.
A Senate vote on Wheeler’s confirmation is not yet scheduled. But if, and more likely when, he is confirmed, he could be mere months or years away from becoming the nation’s top environmental regulator. EPA administrators under Republican presidents have tended to leave office early over the past three decades. When Inhofe, 83, retires, Pruitt is said to be considering a bid for his seat, or a run for governor of Oklahoma. He is also eyeing the job of attorney general if Jeff Sessions steps down, according to Politico. In that case, Wheeler would become the EPA’s acting administrator.
“I am astonished there hasn’t been louder objection to his nomination from more progressive voices on Capitol Hill,” Frank O’Donnell, president of the environmental group Clean Air Watch, told HuffPost.
“Wheeler acted like a real bully in his dealings with the state and local agencies,” he added. “To me, that was an abuse of power, and it makes me concerned about what he might do with even more power at the EPA. If you cross him, would he take retribution?”
This story was updated to include a statement from Inhofe spokeswoman Leacy Burke
John Kelly is headed down a dangerous road
Despite the president's "confidence," the White House chief of staff's days may be numbered.
White House staffers have become increasingly frustrated with chief of staff John Kelly for his role in the ongoing Rob Porter scandal, the Washington Post reported Tuesday evening.
The report, which cites people with knowledge of the situation, indicates that a “growing number of aides” in the West Wing have started blaming Kelly for his “bungled handling of the allegations” against former staff secretary Porter, who has been accused by two ex-wives of domestic abuse. President some rich asshole has reportedly “begun musing about possible replacements” as well, according to the Post.
Some of the staffers reportedly believe that Kelly, a retired Marine general, purposely “misled” them about the Porter allegations.
“[He’s] a big fat liar,” one anonymous official said. “To put it in terms the general would understand, his handling of the Porter scandal amounts to dereliction of duty.”
The controversy first began back on February 6, after the Daily Mail published accounts by Porter’s first and second wives, Colbie Holderness and Jennifer Willoughby, who claimed that he had been verbally, emotionally, and physically abusive during their respective marriages years earlier, long before Porter was appointed staff secretary. Porter, who had been operating on an interim security clearance, resigned his post in the immediate aftermath of that report.
Initially, Kelly swatted down the allegations, praising Porter as “a man of true integrity and honor.” According to Axios, he also counseled Porter to “stay and fight” amid the controversy. However, after Holderness produced photo evidence of a black eye she says Porter gave her, which was published by The Intercept, Kelly reversed course, claiming he had not been aware of the allegations previously.
Later reports proved that was untrue: according to FBI Director Christopher Wray, whose agency was tasked with carrying out the top secret clearance investigation on Porter, the staff secretary’s background check was completed in July 2017, long before the domestic abuse allegations went public. The case was “administratively closed” in January. The White House security office — which is run by deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin — reportedly reviewed the full allegations in November, according to the New York Times, but had still not decided whether to grant Porter security clearance at the time of his resignation.
The Post reported this week that Kelly, knowing these things, had relayed a version of events to White House staff, including press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, that “many believed to be false.” White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah then presented that version of events to the press, recounting Kelly’s initial claim that he had not been aware of the full extent of the allegations until Holderness’ photo was published.
Kelly has continued to argue that the White House did nothing wrong in its response to the allegations.
The back and forth drama has led some to believe that Kelly’s days in the West Wing are numbered. According to the Post, the president has considered replacing Kelly with Economic Council director Gary Cohn or House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), in the wake of the scandal. (McCarthy himself has claimed he is not up for the White House position, telling reporters on Wednesday, “There is no opening.”)
But publicly, the White House is standing by him.
“The president has confidence in his chief of staff,” Sanders said on Tuesday, following a week of controversy.
That may not mean much in the rich asshole’s world: if Kelly does find himself on the chopping block in the coming days, he’d be closely following a pattern laid out by numerous former White House staffers, cabinet members, and the rich asshole administration officials before him — some of whom still had the president’s “confidence” up until their final few hours in the administration.
Michael Flynn, former national security adviser
Flynn, the rich asshole’s former national security adviser and campaign surrogate, was forced to resign last February after it was revealed that he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his communications with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Initially, the White House stood by Flynn, with counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway claiming in an interview with MSNBC that Flynn “enjoy[ed] the full confidence of the president.” When asked why the rich asshole had not personally issued such a statement, Conway added, “You should read nothing into that. I mean, he’s just not going to respond to every screaming headline.”
Seven hours later, Flynn resigned. He has since pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is reportedly cooperating with investigators working on Russia investigation.
Reince Priebus, former chief of staff
Kelly’s predecessor did not enjoy the same level of loyalty as other White House staffers, but even his departure in late July was shrouded in doublespeak.
“We all serve at the pleasure of the president, and if [Priebus] gets to a place where that isn’t the case, he’ll let you know,” Sanders said at the time. “Unlike previous administrations, this isn’t groupthink. We all have a chance to come and voice those ideas, voice those perspectives and have a lot of healthy competition, and with that competition, you usually get the best results. The president likes that kind of competition and encourages it.”
One day later, Priebus was fired.
Steve Bannon, former chief strategist
Bannon, who previously served as the rich asshole’s chief campaign executive, enjoyed strong support from the president early on, but the relationship later deteriorated, culminating in controversy, after the rich asshole — on Bannon’s advice — reacted to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which one woman was killed, by saying “both sides” were to blame for the incident.
On August 18, Bannon confirmed to Circa that he had given the White House his resignation two weeks earlier. Two days prior, the rich asshole himself had dodged questions about the chief strategist’s status within the White House, telling reporters, “He [Bannon] is a good person. He actually gets very unfair press in that regard. But we’ll see what happens with Mr. Bannon.”
James Comey, former FBI director
Comey, the controversial FBI director who’s found himself at odds with the rich asshole administration over the bureau’s special counsel investigation into possible Russian collusion, was initially given a vote of confidence before being fired and publicly excoriated six days later, on May 9, 2017.
“The president has confidence in the director,” then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer said, in a briefing on May 3.
Days later, Comey — who was out of the office, paying a visit to FBI agents in California at the time — was informed via news reports that he had been dismissed by the White House, which claimed he had lost the FBI’s support. (That claim later turned out to be false.)
WATCH: Former attorney general explains how the rich asshole’s lawyer blew apart his own Stormy Daniels cover up
Adult film actress Stormy Daniels (left, via Shutterstock) and the rich asshole's personal lawyer Michael Cohen (right, via screengrab).
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Former Attorney General of New Jersey Anne Milgram explained to MSNBC anchor Katy Tur that some rich asshole confidante Michael Cohen may not be able to invoke attorney-client privilege to shield his hush money payment to former porn star Stormy Daniels.
“Attorney-client privilege, does Michael Cohen still enjoy that in this scenario?” Tur asked.
“There are a number of facts we don’t know, but the one thing that’s clear is this is not how a lawyer normally would act, lawyers usually represent their client, as a part of that, they might reach a settlement agreement and pass funds from the individual client onto someone they were settling with,” Milgram explained.
“They would never personally pay. So that raises a question in my mind of whether he was acting as a lawyer,” Milgram continued. “It doesn’t appear to me here that he was.”
“If we’re talking about the privilege, I think you have to be wearing a lawyer’s hat to invoke that,” Milgram continued.
Milgram is currently a professor of practice and distinguished scholar in residence at New York University School of Law.
“What sort of questions does that leave him open to?” Tur asked.
“There’s a serious campaign contribution question. There are limits on how much individuals can contribute to a political campaign, there are limits as to how much businesses to a political campaign, there are criminal offenses associated with that if you pay too much,” Milgram reminded.
“And would it be considered a contribution if you tried to silence somebody?” Tur asked.
“Yes, it can be,” Milgram explained. “You’re paying $130,000 to essentially influence an election. Remember that the “Access Hollywood” tape came out on October 7th, this payment was made in October 2016 shortly there after.”
“So we could be hearing from Stormy Daniels?” Tur wondered.
“I expect that,” Milgram concluded.
the rich asshole finally denounces domestic violence after nine days: ‘It almost wouldn’t have to be said’
some rich asshole speaks from the Oval Office (screen grab)
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President some rich asshole on Wednesday finally denounced domestic violence, nine days after the scandal broke about domestic abuse allegations leveled against former staff secretary Rob Porter.
“I am totally opposed to domestic violence and everybody here knows that,” the rich asshole said, per Wall Street Journal reporter Rebecca Ballhaus. “I’m totally opposed to domestic violence of any kind. Everyone knows that. And it almost wouldn’t even have to be said. So, now you hear it, but you all know.”
Last Friday, the rich asshole drew widespread criticism after he said that many in the White House were “very sad” about Porter’s departure from the White House without once mentioning the women who allege that Porter beat them.
the rich asshole compounded the controversy one day later by tweeting about how unfair it was that men were having their careers ruined by “mere” accusations made by women — again without mentioning anything about the women who allege Porter beat them.
Watch the video of the rich asshole below.
And Jeff Sessions is going to let them get away with it.
The Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, declined to prosecute even after an official government investigation determined there were violations of the law by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
Under the rich asshole, Cabinet officials have gone wild, using taxpayer funds to finance extravagant luxury trips around the world.
An investigation has caught Veteran Affairs Secretary David Shulkin red-handed. The Washington Post notes that Shulkin “is a favorite of President the rich asshole.”
the rich asshole nominated Shulkin to lead the VA, remarking, “I’ll tell you about David: He’s fantastic, he’s fantastic.”
The inspector general for the VA, who is tasked with investigating abuses at the agency, has issued a report revealing that Shulkin’s chief of staff doctored emails and made false statements to hide his luxury travel.
The report notes that “the investigation revealed serious derelictions by VA personnel.”
Vivieca Wright Simpson, the VA chief of staff, altered language in an email to make it appear that Shulkin was receiving an award from the Danish government. She then used the altered email to justify spending over $4,300 of taxpayer funds for airline travel for Shulkin’s wife.
Inspector General Michael J. Missal believed the alterations were in violation of federal criminal laws and referred the issue to the Justice Department, who declined to prosecute.
The report also found that Shulkin and his staff lied to the investigating agency about key details of his trip.
Shulkin improperly received tickets to a Wimbledon tennis match worth thousands of dollars. The report also said Shulkin used an aide coordinating the trip as a “personal travel concierge” for him and his wife.
In one email to the aide, Shulkin’s wife, Merle Bari, wrote about their possible travel itinerary: “Is there earlier flight from Copenhagen? Wimbledon tickets? High tea? Roman baths in [B]ath. Would want to do baths not just tour.”
The damning findings are just the latest in a series of travel scandals described as “Billionaire Air.”
the rich asshole-era officials are emulating his behavior, using public funds to finance a luxury lifestyle. the rich asshole has turned Air Force One into a ferry service, delivering him to his resort properties for weekend games of golf.
His EPA chief recently justified traveling first class because he fears critics in coach might hurt him. Former aide Omarosa Manigault Newman had the military at her disposal as a taxi service.
And the rich asshole officials have spent over $1 million on other luxury travel. That we know of.
The Shulkin investigation exposes the fact that these officials know they are violating the public trust and going far beyond what is reasonable in their travel accommodations.
There is a leadership vacuum on these issues reaching directly into the Oval Office, and without someone in the presidency setting a tone of decorum and restraint, the swamp of corruption will overflow with sleaze on some rich asshole’s watch.
Pence: White House could have better handled Porter situation
BY JORDAN FABIAN - 02/14/18 01:14 PM EST
Vice President Pence on Wednesday said the White House could have done a better job handling the domestic abuse allegations against Rob Porter.
Pence said that the rich asshole administration has “no tolerance for domestic violence,” but added that “the White House could have handled this better.”
The vice president's remarks come as the saga surrounding Porter shows no signs of ending, and after House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) announced his panel would begin an investigation.
The White House itself has said it could have handled the situation better, though President the rich asshole has offered no public remarks suggesting he agrees with that sentiment.
Porter resigned as staff secretary last week after both of his ex-wives publicly accused him of domestic abuse. The FBI had completed a background check investigation in July, but Porter remained working at the White House until last week.
The White House has offered different explanations for how Porter remained at the White House, and chief of staff John Kelly has come under heavy criticism — including from prominent supporters of the rich asshole.
Pence offered a note of confidence for Kelly.
“John Kelly has done a remarkable job as chief of staff for the president of the United States and I look forward to working with him for many, many months to come,” Pence said at an event sponsored by Axios.
The vice president said he would offer more advice on the matter privately to the rich asshole.
Pence dodged, however, when asked if Kelly has been completely honest in explaining how the White House handled the allegations against Porter.
"There are very few Americans or American families that have served this country more honorably nor sacrificed more than the family of John Kelly," he said.
Kelly has said he would not have handled the Porter situation any differently.
“It was all done right,” he told The Wall Street Journal on Monday.
If whip effort fails, Ryan won’t outline next steps on immigration
BY MELANIE ZANONA - 02/14/18 12:07 PM EST
Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) would not outline leadership's plan for an immigration bill if the conservative measure that is currently being whipped in the House can’t get enough support to pass.
Asked Wednesday if he would bring separate legislation to the floor if a bill crafted by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) lacks support, Ryan said: “We’re not going to do ifs, ands or buts."
“At the end of the day, we want to have a solution," he said at a press briefing.
House GOP leaders said they would begin whipping the bill on Wednesday, fulfilling a promise to the House Freedom Caucus to build support for the legislation. But it’s unclear whether it would have enough votes to pass the lower chamber.
The legislation authorizes funding for President the rich asshole’s border wall, ends family-based migration and scraps the diversity visa lottery program.
It also includes tougher border-enforcement measures than the four pillars outlined by the White House: The bill would crack down on so-called sanctuary cities, boost penalties for deported criminals who try to re-enter the U.S. and requires that employers use an electronic verification system known as E-Verify to make sure they hire legal workers.
The Senate is scrambling this week to come up with a bipartisan solution for the Obama-era DACA program, which protects young immigrants who came to the country illegally as children. But it's far from clear that a resolution will be reached in the Senate.
the rich asshole rescinded DACA and gave Congress until March 5 to come up with a permanent legal fix, though court rulings have so far blocked the administration’s move.
“[The deadline is] not as important as it was before, given the court rulings, but I think this place works better with deadlines,” Ryan said. “We clearly need to address this issue in March.”
Complicating the DACA issue is that Ryan has long promised conservatives that he would only put an immigration measure on the House floor if it has a majority of the GOP’s support.
Whatever DACA bill comes out of the Senate, if any, is likely to take a far more narrow approach since it needs to have the support of nine Democrats to overcome a filibuster.
It’s unlikely such a bill would be able to follow Ryan’s criteria for an immigration bill, though the Speaker emphasized that the House would want to put its own stamp on the DACA debate anyway.
“What we always want to do in the House is have a House Republican position, which we can start from for negotiations,” he said.
Kelly feud spirals into ‘death match’ — and possible hires don’t want ‘stain’ of serving the rich asshole: report
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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Anew report from Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman claims that President some rich asshole would desperately like to be rid of chief of staff John Kelly — but he fears pulling the trigger because no one else who is qualified seems to want the job.
One source tells Sherman that the fight over Kelly’s tenure in the White House has descended into a “death match” between different factions vying for influence in the rich asshole White House.
“Factions inside and outside the White House are lobbying the rich asshole to go with other potential choices,” writes Sherman. “The battle to decide who could replace Kelly has reopened the deep fissures in the rich asshole’s divided West Wing.”
Sherman also says that the rich asshole has reached out to potential replacements for Kelly — but he’s so far found few willing takers.
One White House adviser tells Sherman that the rich asshole would prefer to see Mick Mulvaney take over the job, although the director of the Office of Management and Budget so far has shown no indication that he would agree to do so.
“Mulvaney doesn’t want it — his goal is run for governor or land a corporate gig,” the adviser says. “And his thinking is, if you’re the rich asshole’s chief of staff, you stain yourself for the future.”
‘A disgrace’: Dem rips Mulvaney over $30 million the rich asshole parade that would fund food stamps for 20,000
Mick Mulvaney and Barabara Lee (screen grab)
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Budget Director Mick Mulvaney revealed on Wednesday that a military parade requested by President some rich asshole could cost as much as $30 million — enough to fund food stamps for over 20,000 people each year.
At a House budget hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) noted that the rich asshole’s proposed budget cuts funds for some of the most vulnerable Americans.
“This budget is really shameful,” Lee explained. “It dismantles our basic living standards that Americans have turned to for decades and pushes millions of people into poverty. It will destroy people’s lives.”
Lee reminded Mulvaney that his budget cuts $213 billion from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps. In addition, the budget slashes billions from disability, rental assistance, adult employment and training programs, education, Medicaid, and the minority AIDS program.
“It’s hard to imagine how you could be proud of this budget,” she said to Mulvaney. “Since these cuts are to pay for the tax cuts for the wealthy billionaires, millionaires and corporations. It’s clear to me that you don’t care about paying down the debt or the deficit because this budget really shows what this tax scam was all about.”
Lee went on to ask Mulvaney about the rich asshole’s proposed military parade.
“I’ve seen various different cost estimates,” Mulvaney replied. “Between $10 million and $30 million depending on the size of the parade, the scope of it, the length, those types of things.”
“Obviously, an hour parade is different than a five hour parade in terms of cost,” he added.
As for the budget, Mulvaney argued that it would not push people into poverty because he expected those people those people to find jobs.
“We see the best welfare program as a job,” Mulvaney opined. “And we see the economy as a way to push people out of poverty, allowing them to lift themselves out of poverty.”
Lee noted that she had been a SNAP recipient at an earlier time in her life.
“Because I needed that bridge over troubled waters,” she explained. “It wasn’t permanent. It was just so I could get through what I was going through.”
“It’s a way that you are trying to make sure people that are low income, that we don’t believe that they have the dignity they deserve,” Lee added. “The way you are trying to put SNAP into a box now. And I think it’s a shame and disgrace that you’re treating low income families in this manner.”
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the cost of a $30 million parade would be enough to fund food stamps for nearly 24,000 people for a year.
Watch the video clip below.
The potential of a wide-ranging investigation poses enormous political risks for the White House.
It appears that Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) is turning the lights back on at the House Oversight Committee to press the rich asshole White House to explain why an alleged wife beater was hired for a sensitive staff position. And why that person was able to keep his job without the proper security clearance.
Given the burgeoning scandal, the move would appear to be a no-brainer. But ever since the rich asshole was inaugurated, Republicans on that crucial House committee, which is chaired by Gowdy, have made sure to give the White House virtual free reign, refusing to hold hearings and hold the executive branch accountable for obvious missteps.
But the current unfolding controversy appears to reached a point where Republicans themselves can no longer ignore the startling set of facts in play.
“How the hell did this happen?” Gowdy asked while appearing on CNN Wednesday morning, in reference to the idea that someone accused of beating his two ex-wives could land a job in the White House, and then keep that job after the FBI informed White House bosses about the abuse claims.
“How do you have any job if you have credible allegations of domestic abuse? Again, I am biased toward the victim,” Gowdy said.
Whether Gowdy is kicking off a full-on investigation with planned, public hearings remains to be seen. Indeed, on CNN he seemed to back off the idea that he was agreeing to an “official” probe.
Additionally, Rep. Elijah Cumming, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, stressed on Wednesday that “the credibility of this investigation will be judged by how thorough it is in obtaining documents and interviewing witnesses, and how bipartisan it is in its conclusions.”
A wide-ranging investigation could present enormous political risks for the White House, in part because it would allow Democrats on the committee to question witnesses and raise all kinds of additional concerns about how the White House operates.
Nonetheless, in a letter sent to the rich asshole’s beleaguered chief of staff John Kelly on Wednesday, Gowdy announced, “The Committee is investigating the policies and processes by which interim security clearances are investigated and adjudicated within the Executive Branch, and the extent to which any security clearances issued to Porter comported with those policies and processes.”
The letter was sparked by the Tuesday testimony from FBI Director Christopher Wray, who confirmed the bureau briefed the White House multiple times on its investigation into Porter last year. That revelation clearly contradicted the White House’s spin about when it first learned of the allegations against Porter, the former staff secretary.
With House Republicans now finally demanding answers from the White House, the pressure mounts on Porter’s former boss, John Kelly: What did he know, and when did he know it?
‘I mean, come on’: Paul Ryan says the rich asshole should ‘absolutely’ come out against wife beating
Paul Ryan speaks to reporters (CBS/screen grab)
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House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Wednesday called on President some rich asshole to publicly speak out against domestic abuse.
At a press conference on Wednesday, reporters reminded the Speaker that the rich asshole has refused to publicly condemn former White House staffer Rob Porter for allegedly abusing his ex-wives and that the president has also declined to make a more generalized statement against domestic violence.
“Do you think the White House should publicly condemn domestic violence,” MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt asked Ryan. “Should the president?”
“Absolutely,” Ryan replied. “Look, I can’t speak for what [Rob Porter] did because I don’t even know the answer to that. But clearly, clearly we should — I mean, come one — clearly we should all be condemning domestic violence. And if a person who commits domestic violence gets in the government, then there’s a breakdown in the system. There’s a breakdown in the vetting system. And that breakdown needs to be addressed.”
Watch the video below from CBS News.
WATCH LIVE: House GOP leadership holds weekly news conference cbsn.ws/2nWsoGb pic.twitter.com/TmrVtHekhr
"If a person who commits domestic violence gets into the government, then there is a breakdown in the system -- there's a breakdown in the vetting system -- and that breakdown needs to be addressed," House Speaker Paul Ryan says cbsn.ws/2GaqNmA pic.twitter.com/IUv7mjOgie
CNN host debunks GOP congressman’s FBI conspiracy in just 2 minutes
"This is crazy unless Dan Brown is writing it and putting it in a book!"
During a CNN interview on Wednesday morning, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) placed Carter Page at the center of the FBI’s alleged anti-the rich asshole plot during the 2016 election. But after host Chris Cuomo pointed out the obvious holes in his conspiracy theory, Jordan was left grasping at straws.
Jordan’s theory is that the FBI took out a warrant against Carter Page in October 2016 as part of then-director James Comey’s effort to throw the election for Hillary Clinton, with help from Obama mixed in. But as Cuomo pointed out, if the FBI was indeed scheming against the rich asshole by quietly surveilling a low-level associate who, by that time, had disassociated himself from the campaign, it would be a very odd strategy — not to mention the fact that Comey was going out of his way that same month to hurt Clinton by publicizing the investigation into her emails.
“What kind of caper is this, that this is what they came up with to hurt President the rich asshole is to put surveillance on Carter Page, a guy that had almost no real connection to the rich asshole… and then do it just for a few weeks before the election, and they think this is going to affect the outcome of the race? It’s preposterous,” Cuomo said.
Instead of dealing with Cuomo’s counterpoints on the merits, Jordan responded by advancing another already-debunked conspiracy about text messages exchanged between two FBI agents who were having an affair in 2016. Jordan claimed a September 2, 2016 text Lisa Page sent Peter Strzok telling him that “potus wants to know everything we’re doing” is evidence of anti-the rich asshole malfeasance.
However, as Cuomo pointed out, there are straightforward explanations that don’t involve deep state plots.
“What about [Obama] meeting with Putin two days later, and has a conversation with him about ‘stop what you’re doing, cut it out,'” Cuomo said, alluding to a September 4, 2016 meeting between Obama and Putin in which Obama reportedly confronted Putin about election interference. “How come you don’t factor that in to why they were saying Obama wanted to know everything? Maybe that’s exactly what it was about Jim, it was exactly about, ‘tell me what I need to know about what their interference is, I’m about to talk to the guy.'”
Jordan didn’t have any good answers. Later, Cuomo summarized the absurdity of his conspiracy.
“Peter Strzok wrote the letter about reopening the [email] case,” he said. “Jim Comey crushed Hillary Clinton. This is crazy unless Dan Brown is writing it and putting it in a book!”
Jordan has spent months pushing the FBI/Clinton conspiracy theory, often with help from friendly Fox News hosts. But he’s had trouble defending himself on CNN. During an interview with host John Berman in December, Jordan couldn’t explain why Comey would go out of his way to publicize the Clinton email investigation just days before the election, and admitted he had been in communication with the White House about the Mueller investigation he continues to work tirelessly to discredit.
Just last week, Jordan joined Cuomo and struggled to account for why he thinks it matters that some of the information the FBI used to take out a warrant on Page came from a political document. The FBI takes tips from anyone who provides them but then works to verify information on its own, and the warrant on Page was reauthorized three times.
Gowdy demands answers from White House on Porter
BY JORDAN FABIAN - 02/14/18 10:56 AM EST
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) on Wednesday sent a letter to the White House demanding to know how Rob Porter was allowed to work with an interim security clearance, despite being accused of domestic violence.
“The committee is investigating the policies and procedures by which interim security clearances are investigated and adjudicated within the executive branch, and the extent to which any security clearance issued to Porter comported with those policies and process,” Gowdy wrote to White House chief of staff John Kelly.
Gowdy asked that Kelly provide information on the security-clearance process and whether it was followed with Porter. He also requested information on when senior officials at the White House were made aware of the accusations against the former staff secretary.
The chairman gave Kelly two weeks to respond.
Gowdy’s letter is the first step in the committee’s investigation into Porter, which he announced earlier Wednesday, and signals it is serious in nature.
The probe was announced one day after FBI Director Christopher Wray contradicted the White House over its handling of Porter, who has been accused of physically abusing his two-ex wives.
Wray said it gave the White House information about Porter’s past as early as March 2017, months before officials said they learned of the allegations. He also said the investigation was closed in January, despite the White House’s insistence it was still ongoing at the time of Porter’s resignation.
Gowdy sent a similar letter to Wray requesting information about the investigation for Porter's security clearance.
The FBI chief’s testimony sparked a new controversy for the White House, which has struggled to move past the Porter incident.
It has raised questions about the credibility of Kelly and other top aides who were responsible for handling his hiring and background-check process.
some rich asshole is not going to become a better president — he is incapable of learning
some rich asshole pictured on day three of the Republican National Convention at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio on July 20, 2016 (AFP Photo/Jim Watson)
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“We need a truly great leader,” some rich asshole said during the campaign that ended with his election in November 2016. “We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal.” the rich asshole’s confidence about the deal-making prowess he developed in the business world was overweening. “I deal with Steve Wynn. I deal with Carl Icahn,” he told the voters. “I deal with killers that blow these [politicians] away.”
the rich asshole was surely right to think that striking deals—also known as finding common ground—is an important part of being president. The Constitution assigns the presidency few powers that are not shared with Congress or the states and reviewable by the courts in what the political scientist Richard Neustadt classically described as a system of “separated institutions sharing powers.” Or as former president Bill Clinton has long been fond of saying: “The Constitution boils down to one thing. Let’s have an argument and then let’s make a deal.”
the rich asshole’s voters valued his experience as a business man rather than a politician. Historically, nearly everyone elected or even nominated by a major political party for president has been a current or former senator, governor, vice president, general, or cabinet member. In the quarter century after World War II, senators and vice presidents (most of whom had been senators) dominated presidential elections because Cold War–era voters trusted the federal government and valued their experience dealing with national security issues. Then, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, the electorate turned to state governors, who were untainted by the incompetence and corruption now associated with a Washington-based political career: Jimmy Carter of Georgia in 1976, Ronald Reagan of California in 1980, Bill Clinton of Arkansas in 1992, and George W. Bush of Texas in 2000.
The ascendant Tea Party movement that helped the Republican Party win control of the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, however, was not just anti-Washington but anti-government in all its forms. Seven current or former Republican governors battled the rich asshole for the Republican nomination, including large or swing-state chief executives Bush, Kasich, Walker, Christie, George Pataki of New York, and Jim Gilmore of Virginia. None of them came close. On the eve of the primary campaign, 58 percent of Republicans said they would prefer “someone from outside the existing political establishment” to “someone with experience in how the political system works.”
As a candidate who had never held public office, the rich asshole appealed to many voters as a complete outsider who would “drain the swamp” in Washington. “The problem with politicians,” he told a rally: “[they’re] all talk and no action. It’s true. All talk, and it’s all bullshit.” He knew politicians could be bought, the rich asshole claimed, because he had bought some of them himself as a cost of doing business. “When I need something from them—two years later, three years later,” he said. “They are there for me.”
“Deals are my art form,” the rich asshole once bragged. Yet overconfidence blinded him to the reality that government is nothing like the profit-maximizing private economy. He failed to understand that the motivations of the other constitutional actors whose cooperation he needed are varied, complex, and subtle.
In the cutthroat world of real estate development, deal-making is extremely fluid and walking away from a bargain with a contractor, developer, or lender is tolerable. But a president cannot walk away when negotiations break down with Congress and find another legislature to deal with. And in politics a reputation for standing by one’s word is the coin of the realm.
the rich asshole’s experience prior to becoming president was limited not just to business, but to privately owned business. Never having dealt with an independent board of directors, he never learned the arts of shared governance.
Not realizing that the Constitution created a system of separated institutions sharing powers was just a start for the rich asshole. He also seems not to realize much about the Constitution at all. At a July meeting with House Republicans, he professed his devotion to the document he had taken the oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” by declaring, “I want to protect Article I, Article II, Article XII—go down the list.” There are seven articles in the Constitution, not twelve, much less a longer “list.”
It’s one thing not to understand the challenges of a new position because of lack of experience. It’s another not to learn. Every one of the rich asshole’s elected predecessors became more surefooted in the job by doing it. They got better because they crammed during the post-election transition period, surrounded themselves (sometimes sooner, but always later) with advisors experienced in government, and learned from their mistakes.
In contrast, the rich asshole took office avowing that he had nothing to learn. Claiming that he makes great decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability,” the rich asshole added: “I could actually run my business and run the government at the same time.”
During the months that followed the rich asshole’s election, he first blew any chance for even a short honeymoon with a dark, campaign-style inaugural address focused on “American carnage.” Then, failing to take advantage of a unified Republican government, he saw just one important piece of legislation that he supported enacted: a tax cut bill, the near-inevitable consequence of electing a Republican Congress.
This lack of achievement is remarkable considering that the rich asshole took office under unusually favorable circumstances. Although the world had its share of problems, they were ongoing, not new or urgent. The domestic economy had been growing, slowly but steadily, for ninety consecutive months. The inflation rate was about 2 percent and unemployment had dipped below 5 percent. The percentage of Americans who regard themselves as middle- or upper-class had reached 62 percent, a greater share than before the 2008-2009 economic meltdown. The stock market was booming, having tripled from its modern low in March 2009.
the rich asshole was elected by attacking the federal government, not by advancing a positive agenda. He has been insensitive toward anyone, in government or out, who disagrees with him. And he has been unwilling to reach out, as most presidents do at least symbolically, to the unconverted.
From the resistance that has emerged in Congress, the courts, the bureaucracy, the states and cities, the media, and the opposition party, the rich asshole has been taught the hard way what most of the country has rejoiced in for more than two centuries: that the American constitutional system is well designed “to counteract ambition” when ambition aspires to roam directionless and unrestrained. Equally important, the Constitution countenances deal-making among officials chosen to represent the American people in all their variety. But has he been listening?
This article was originally published at History News Network
The EPA says Scott Pruitt has no choice but to travel in first class, because otherwise someone in the economy seats might try to beat him up.
Even as Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt has eviscerated his department, he has been living the high life on the taxpayers’ dime.
Last year, Pruitt was among the many the rich asshole officials busted jetting around on unnecessary charter flights, booking four trips on “Billionaire Air” that cost the government $58,000. But even after that stopped, Pruitt kept on traveling in style, racking up at least $90,000 on first-class airline tickets and sticking taxpayers with the bill.
But as Pruitt told The New Hampshire Union Leader on Tuesday, this time he has a very good reason for booking luxury flights: to prevent his unidentified critics who ride coach from trying to attack him.
“We live in a very toxic environment politically, particularly around issues of the environment,” said Pruitt. “We’ve reached the point where there’s not much civility in the marketplace and it’s created, you know, it’s created some issues and the [security] detail, the level of protection is determined by the level of threat.”
Pruitt claims that there have been “incidents” that prompted this policy, but he didn’t explain what the incidents were, how first class is more “secure,” or why that same security detail cannot protect him in economy. Nor did a Washington Post Freedom of Information Act request into his travel records.
And somehow the vast majority of members of Congress manage to fly economy with no security issues.
This is not the first time someone has tried this excuse to explain away the administration’s misuse of travel funds. During the Price scandal, conservative commentator Erick Erickson told “Fox & Friends” Price couldn’t fly commercial because “the Left wants him dead” over Obamacare repeal. But this is the first time the argument is being raised by the administration itself.
Pruitt and EPA officials owe taxpayers a better explanation for how they are using government funds. The administration’s accountability and credibility are severely lacking.
the rich asshole urges Senate to pass Senator Grassley’s immigration bill: statement
President some rich asshole refused to certify the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. (AFP / Brendan SMIALOWSKI)
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U.S. President some rich asshole on Wednesday said he supported Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley’s immigration bill and urged the full Senate to back it, according to a statement issued by the White House.
“I am asking all senators, in both parties, to support the Grassley bill and to oppose any legislation that fails to fulfill these four pillars – that includes opposing any short-term ‘Band-Aid’ approach,” the rich asshole said, referring to four principles outlined in a White House framework for any immigration bill.
POLITICS
the rich asshole Attorney Michael Cohen: I Paid Porn Star Stormy Daniels
He did not explain what the payment was for.
Michael Cohen, personal attorney for President some rich asshole, told The New York Times on Tuesday that he paid Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. porn star Stormy Daniels)$130,000 in 2016. However, he insisted that the money was his own.
“Neither the rich asshole Organization nor the rich asshole campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly,” Cohen told the newspaper. “The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.”
He did not explain what the payment was for.
Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Daniels had an affair with the rich asshole in 2006, the year after he married Melania and a few months after the birth of their son, Barron. Daniels was reportedly paid $130,000 just before the 2016 election to sign a nondisclosure agreement and keep silent about the matter.
The White House has denied the affair, and Daniels has released statements also rebuffing the reports.
“Just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean that it can’t cause you harm or damage,” Cohen told BuzzFeed. “I will always protect some rich asshole.”
Last month, InTouch magazine printed a previously unpublished 2011 interview with Daniels in which she spoke at length about the alleged affair. The conversation was conducted before the nondisclosure agreement.
The $130,000 payment came under scrutiny after watchdog group Common Cause filed a complaint to determine if it ran afoul of campaign laws as an in-kind contribution.
“The complaint alleges that I somehow violated campaign finance laws by facilitating an excess, in-kind contribution,” Cohen told the Times. “The allegations in the complaint are factually unsupported and without legal merit, and my counsel has submitted a response to the F.E.C.”
Refugee resettlement agencies set to lay off staff following the rich asshole’s immigration policies
Resettlement agencies have long helped refugees get settled into the United States.
The rich asshole administration’s decision to significantly reduce refugee admissions to the United States is causing layoffs at refugee resettlement agencies across the United States, according to Reuters, with nearly two dozen offices expected to close.
The U.S. State Department’s plan — which, as Reuters reported, still needs final approval — has ordered at least 20 refugee resettlement agencies to shut down across the country and called for 40 others to scale back operations. The decision draws fresh attention to President some rich asshole’s decision to cut back the annual refugee admissions from the 110,000 cap set by his predecessor to 45,000 for the 2018 fiscal year. For the State Department, the cut means the country no longer needs all 324 resettlement offices in operation by the 2017 fiscal year, the publication noted, detailing plans drawn up from a December 1, 2017 meeting between State Department officials and refugee agency representatives.
“The changes will consolidate smaller affiliates, reduce costs and simplify management structures to help the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program run in a way that is fiscally responsible and sustainable in the long term,” State Department spokeswoman Cheryl Harris told Reuters.
The proposed closures and cutbacks will affect some places with multiple offices in one city, but the plan also includes closures of Louisiana’s only two resettlement offices and a sharp scaling back of the only office in Hawaii, the publication noted. Plans to open 11 new offices in Washington, New Mexico, and Indiana will not happen in 2018.
Last year, after the rich asshole issued an executive order to temporarily halt refugees from entering the country, refugee resettlement agencies began gearing up to shut down various offices. World Relief announced at the time that it would close offices in Idaho, Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, and Maryland — five locations that together resettled 25,000 refugees, Christianity Today previously reported. The rich asshole administration prevented refugee resettlement on the claim of potential terrorist threats.
Refugees can access resettlement centers for up to five years after they arrive, so the State Department’s decision will have a large impact. For years, refugee resettlement agencies ministered to newly-arrived people adjusting to American culture — which in a small, ironic way is a rallying point of conservatives who paint immigrants as too foreign.
Refugee resettlement agencies do a lot. Officers help refugees navigate the health care system, the banking system, and other points of American life that may prove burdensome when one first arrives in the country. As one example, the International Rescue Committee — one of the nine resettlement agencies with contracts with the government — has four offices with anywhere between 12 and 15 financial coaches to help refugees learn “financial capability” so they will be less likely to default on their loans.
“The population doesn’t go away when you turn off the spigot,” Robert Carey, who directed the Office of Refugee Resettlement under President Barack Obama, toldReuters. “If the intent is really to have people integrate into society then doing this is counter to that intent.”
The United States has taken in only 1,385 refugees in January, compared to 6,777 for the same month last year, according to Reuters.
Meanwhile, the global refugee crisis persists. Officials have documented at least 401 deaths in the Mediterranean Sea since the start of 2018 as more people undertake deadly and irregular means to get to Europe. About 5.5 million Syrians have sought refuge in host countries after a civil war broke out in 2011. Jordan, one of the major host countries, registered 655,624 Syrian refugees by the end of December 2017. People are similarly still fleeing the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mynamar, Afghanistan, and countless other countries in hopes of seeking safety.
Ryan: White House should 'absolutely' condemn domestic violence
BY SCOTT WONG - 02/14/18 10:53 AM EST
Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Tuesday the White House should “absolutely” condemn domestic violence as the rich asshole administration continues to deal with the fallout related to domestic abuse allegations against former White House staff secretary Rob Porter.
“Clearly we should all be condemning domestic violence,” Ryan told reporters on Wednesday.
“And if a person who commits domestic violence gets in the government, then there is a breakdown in the vetting system and that breakdown needs to be addressed.”
The White House “clearly [has] work to do to fix their vetting system. I don’t know exactly how they will do that. I’ll leave that to them, but Chairman Gowdy is doing his proper job and oversight,” Ryan said.
Asked for any recommendations on how the White House could better handle the Porter situation, Ryan replied, “I’ll leave that to them. We’re the House. I can’t answer that question.”
Criticism of the White House's handling of the Porter allegations has now stretched an entire week. Chief of staff John Kelly condemned domestic violence in an email to staff, and White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that President the rich asshole supports victims of domestic violence.
But the president has made no public comments about domestic violence victims, including Porter’s ex-wives, since the story broke. That may be because multiple women have accused the rich asshole of sexual assault and harassment, allegations that he emphatically denies.
“Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new,” the rich asshole tweeted over the weekend. “There is no recovery for someone falsely accused - life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?”
Stephanie Ruhle to John Kelly: ‘We can introduce you to some competent people who didn’t beat their wives’
MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle (screen grab)
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MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle on Wednesday lashed out at White House Chief of Staff John Kelly for keeping an alleged wife beater on staff instead of search for “competent people who didn’t beat their wives.”
“How much is this a disservice to the president?” Ruhle asked of Kelly’s initial decision to defend alleged domestic abuser Rob Porter instead of firing him. “This hot mess the president knew nothing about and shouldn’t have to deal with something like this.”
“I don’t mean to be sassy here this morning,” she continued. “More than anything I’m sad. I’m sad, in part, [because of a Washington Post article that said] when a White House aide was asked if John Kelly was transparent or truthful, they said — quote — ‘In this White House, it is simply not in our DNA.'”
Ruhle pointed out that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders seemed to suggest at Tuesday’s press conference that Kelly was not giving her the whole story on the Porter domestic abuse scandal.
“There you’ve got John Kelly setting her up, ‘Go out there and lie to the American people,'” the MSNBC host said. “You know what, there’s one thing with Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying, ‘You know what, I’m going to lie to the American people.’ It’s another thing for her to be lied to by her boss and then she’s forced to lie to the American people.”
Ruhle concluded the segment with a message for the President’s chief of staff.
“John Kelly, I’d like to [make an] offer [to] you,” she stated. “I get it, you think Rob Porter is a really smart, competent guy. He went to the Harvard. My own husband went to Princeton. We can introduce you to some competent people out there who didn’t beat their wives.”
Watch the video clip below from MSNBC.
ENVIRONMENT
the rich asshole Wants To Fire 248 National Weather Service Forecasters
The White House budget proposal follows a record-smashing year of weather disasters.
The proposed White House budget would cut hundreds of jobs from the National Weather Service, including forecasters, after one of the worst hurricane seasons on record.
The rich asshole administration budget proposal would slash the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by more than $1 billion next year, forcing the agency to cut about 8 percent of jobs. The weather service, part of NOAA, would lose 355 jobs, including 248 forecasting positions.
Weather forecasters are alarmed. Dan Sobien, president of the weather service labor union, warned that the plan had sapped morale.
“We can’t take any more cuts and still do the job that the American public needs us to do,” Sobien told The Washington Post on Monday. “There simply will not be the staff available on duty to issue the forecasts and warnings upon which the country depends.”
Government forecasters were faced with a particularly active hurricane season in 2017 that, alongside other natural disasters, caused a record of more than $300 billion in damage. NOAA said in January the country was hit with 16 separate billion-dollar disasters last year, including hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, and a string of wildfires in California.
E&E News notes that the rich asshole budget document said the reduction in staffing would help eliminate “inefficiencies associated with the rigid field office structure.”
Any major cuts to NOAA would need to be approved by Congress, and the White House budget only serves as a guideline. But it establishes the priorities of the rich asshole administration and provides a framework for lawmakers.
Other proposed cuts at the NWS include $11 million slashed from the tsunami warning program, and a $15.5 million reduction to ocean surface and marine observation programs.
Even his fellow Marines are turning on him.
As much as the rich asshole’s botched response to the White House domestic abuse scandal has hurt him, it has been even more damaging to the reputation of chief of staff John Kelly.
Since his hiring last year, Kelly has enjoyed an undeserved image as a moderating influence on the rich asshole, and has traded on his military service to avoid criticism. But Kelly’s despicable and duplicitous behavior in the Rob Porter scandal has one-time allies deserting him, including his fellow Marines.
On Tuesday night, retired 21-year Marine veteran Shawn Turner told CNN’s Don Lemon that Kelly should resign, and that Marines he speaks to agree with him.
Turner said that during Kelly’s 40-year-plus career as a Marine, “he had a reputation at a strong leader,” but that “for a long time, Marines have been watching him in this position, and as we watch him, we have had to tie ourselves in knots trying to understand some of the decisions that he’s made, and some of the behavior that he’s exhibited.”
“There is an expectation, among his fellow Marines, that he is going to uphold those values,” Turner said. “From the attack on the Florida congresswoman that turned out to be completely erroneous, to the unsavory comments that he made about DACA recipients, to this most recent incident where there is a truth that Gen. Kelly knows that he has not shared with us, it’s just gotten to a point where I think it’s in the best interests of not only the country, but of John Kelly and the Marine Corps, for him to go ahead and step aside.”
Even in calling for Kelly’s resignation, Turner is being kind. Kelly wasn’t just “erroneous” in his attacks on Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL). He told a breathtaking 20 lies in four minutes — including the invention of children who did not exist — in order to cover for the rich asshole’s horrendous treatment of a fallen soldier and his widow. Then he refused to apologize.
Kelly’s comments about Dreamers weren’t just “unsavory,” they were flat-out racist, and the rich asshole’s White House stood by them. Kelly also has the distinction of prompting White House reporter April Ryan to ask whether the rich asshole administration believes that slavery was wrong.
And Kelly’s conduct with regard to the disgraced former White House aide whose ex-wives have accused him of abuse has been despicable from beginning to end. Kelly covered for Porter for months, openly supported him even after the domestic abuse allegations were made public, and even lobbied Porter to stay on the job.
Turner’s plea comes amid a swirl of reports that Kelly may soon be out of a job, but if history is any indication, it is unlikely that Kelly will use the occasion to do the right thing and admit he was wrong.
WATCH: Rep. Trey Gowdy reveals Congress is investigating the Rob Porter scandal
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Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) revealed that Congress has launched an investigation into White House staff secretary Rob Porter’s employment despite credible allegations of domestic abuse.
Gowdy, who announced his retirement from Congress earlier this month, told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota the House Oversight Committee he chairs opened an investigation Tuesday into the Porter scandal.
“We did last night,” Gowdy said.
Camerota asked whether he had officially confirmed the investigation, but Gowdy said her use of “official” was a bit of an overstatement.
“That word probably means more to you than it does to me,” Gowdy said. “What matters to me is we are directing inquiries to people that we think have access to information we don’t have. You can call it official, you can call it unofficial — those words don’t mean anything to me.”
FBI director Chris Wray contradicted the White House timeline by confirming the investigation of Porter’s abuse allegations wrapped up months before he was pushed out.
“What means something to me is I’m going to direct questions to the FBI that I expect them to answer,” Gowdy said. “If they don’t answer them, then they’re going to need to give me a really good reason. You’ll learn that reason, and you can judge whether or not it’s a sufficient reason or not. Unless you’re Jack Bauer (from Fox’s ’24’), you can’t make people answer questions. I’ve been trying for seven years to get people to answer questions without a whole lot of success. We’re going to try, and we could use your help if they say no.”
Gowdy: House Oversight has launched investigation into Porter
BY BRETT SAMUELS - 02/14/18 09:09 AM EST
The House Oversight Committee is now investigating how former White House staff secretary Rob Porter kept his role in the administration even as accusations of domestic abuse were made against him, according to Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the panel's chairman.
Gowdy sent a letter on Wednesday to the White House demanding to know how Porter was allowed to work without an interim security clearance, despite being accused of domestic violence.
Gowdy separately sent a letter on Wednesday to FBI Director Christopher Wray seeking clarity on how the bureau investigates and issues interim security clearances. Gowdy also asked when the FBI notified the White House of any underlying issues with Porter's background check, which has become a source of controversy.
Wray testified to a Senate panel on Tuesday that the FBI completed its background check investigation of Porter in July, and then offered additional information in November and January.
Yet Porter did not lose his job until photos surfaced last week of his first ex-wife, Colbie Holderness, with a black eye she said she got from her husband during a vacation in Italy.
Another ex-wife, Jennie Willoughby, has also gone public with allegations of physical and emotional abuse.
The White House has said it did not know of the seriousness of the allegations against Porter until published reports last week, though Wray's testimony suggests people at the White House should have been aware much earlier.
Asked directly on CNN's "New Day" if this committee would launch a probe, Gowdy said, “We did last night.”
Gowdy was unclear as to the nature of the investigation, saying at one point it could be called official or unofficial.
“What matters to me is that we are directing inquiries to people that we think have access to information we don’t have," said the chairman, who is retiring at the end of this Congress.
"You can call it official, you can call it unofficial, those words don’t mean anything to me. What means something to me is I’m going to direct questions to the FBI that I expect them to answer,” Gowdy said.
White House chief of staff John Kelly has been at the center of the storm. He initially defended Porter, and the White House reportedly worked with some reporters to have Porter get his side of the story out publicly before deciding he should exit the administration.
Gowdy also sent a letter Wednesday to Kelly, asking him when the White House knew of any "potential derogatory or disqualifying information" about Porter.
On Tuesday, President the rich asshole did not respond when asked if he had a message for victims of domestic violence. He has offered public sympathy for Porter.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at a daily briefing on Tuesday suggested a White House office manned with career staff had yet to sign off on the FBI's background check, and that this was how Porter was allowed to work in the building.
Gowdy said Wednesday he’s “troubled by almost every aspect” of the situation surrounding Porter.
“I spent two decades believing women and children who alleged abuse, even sometimes when no one else did,” Gowdy told CNN, referring to his time as a prosecutor.
“So whether or not there’s a security at issue or not, I have real issues about how someone like this could be considered for employment whether there’s a security clearance or not,” Gowdy said.
‘How the hell was still he employed?’ GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy scalds White House over Rob Porter scandal
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) (Screen cap).
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Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) unloaded on the rich asshole White House’s handling of the Rob Porter scandal during a CNN interview on Wednesday — and he said he was disturbed by “almost every aspect” of it.
During an interview with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota, Gowdy said he simply did not understand how Porter was allowed to keep his job at the White House for so long despite the fact that key members of the administration must have known about credible allegations of domestic abuse had been leveled against him.
“I spent two decades believing women and children who alleged abuse, even sometimes when no one else did,” Gowdy said. “I have real questions about whether someone like this can be considered for employment, whether there’s a security clearance issue or not. So yeah, I’m troubled by almost every aspect of this.”
Camerota then pointed out to Gowdy that FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday testified under oath that his agency had given the White House a complete report on Porter’s background months ago, and yet no one at the White House took action to remove him from his position. How, Camerota asked, could Porter have remained employed at the White House despite that?
“That’s a good question and I don’t know the answer,” said Gowdy. “If you knew it in 2017 and the bureau briefed them three times, then how in the hell was still he employed? The security clearance is a separate issue — it’s an important issue, but separate. How do you have any job if you have credible allegations of domestic abuse? Again, I am biased towards the victims. I spent two decades believing them. But you don’t have to be biased towards the victim to ask how in the hell did this happen?”
Watch the video below.
"To put it in terms the general would understand, his handling of the Porter scandal amounts to dereliction of duty."
The Rob Porter scandal has officially become the John Kelly scandal, and it’s threatening the entire White House. the rich asshole’s chief of staff now appears to be a man with very few friends inside the West Wing.
In what would signal a stunning collapse for a White House that already operates on the chaos theory and seems to be in a perpetual state of disarray, more and more press reports on Wednesday are suggesting that the rich asshole’s chief of staff has lost the confidence of those inside the West Wing.
It’s now an open question whether Kelly will survive the parallel-track scandals.
“Kelly is ‘a big fat liar,'” one White House official told the Washington Post. “To put it in terms the general would understand, his handling of the Porter scandal amounts to dereliction of duty.”
Increasingly, it sounds like the rich asshole himself might be fanning those flames:
Several White House aides have described a diffuse situation as opposed to a more precise one last year when the focus of attacks was either Priebus or Bannon. Most think the people directly involved in retaining Porter are lying to some degree.
The morale was already quite low in the Kelly era for several staff. But this is worse than it’s been since Charlottesville. And after dismissing Kelly dismissal talks as spread by Mooch/others, ppl close to Kelly now realize it’s coming from Trump.
The first track of the scandal broke a week ago when Porter, Kelly’s right-hand man, resigned after the Daily Mail published photographs of his battered ex-wife. In the days since, the administration has been completely unable and unwilling to explain why Porter kept working for Kelly after Porter failed this FBI security clearance after two ex-wives detailed his history of abuse.
That’s when the story morphed into the Kelly scandal because the rich asshole’s chief of staff reportedly encouraged aides to lie about the mess and support the idea that Kelly had acted swiftly to get rid of Porter the moment he heard about the abuse allegations. (Kelly did not.)
That fallout is still raging and Kelly won’t answer questions publicly.
“The Porter drama has become all-consuming, creating an atmosphere of chaos and infighting reminiscent of the ‘Game of Thrones’ stage early in the rich asshole’s presidency — and distracting from the administration’s budget and infrastructure agenda,” the Post reports.
The White House is “coming apart at the seams,” one the rich asshole official told CBS News Wednesday morning.
Another White House official told Axios, “The Kelly coverup is unraveling right before our eyes.”
What’s so damaging for the White House and the entire Republican Party is that the scandal is completely self-inflicted. Most Democrats have stayed away from the unfolding mess. That means the scandal, from the White House’s perspective, cannot be wrapped in partisan terms.
Republicans can’t blame Hillary Clinton, they can’t blame Barack Obama, and they can’t blame the FBI.
But they can blame John Kelly.
John Kelly’s allies now realize the rich asshole is the one leaking dirt on him to the press: NYT reporter
Gen. John Kelly (Wikimedia Commons) and some rich asshole (AFP)
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There have been several leaks out of the White House recently that paint an unflattering portrait of White House chief of staff John Kelly, and the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman says that Kelly’s allies now believe the leaks are coming from President some rich asshole himself.
Writing on Twitter, Haberman described low morale at the rich asshole White House and she said that many White House staffers believe that their own colleagues are lying about their roles in the handling of former staff secretary Rob Porter, who was fired after it was revealed that both of his former wives accused him of domestic abuse.
“Several White House aides have described a diffuse situation as opposed to a more precise one last year when the focus of attacks was either Priebus or Bannon,” Haberman writes. “Most think the people directly involved in retaining Porter are lying to some degree.”
Haberman then said morale had sunk to a low point not seen since the president’s insistence after Charlottesville that there were “very fine people” attending a white nationalist rally — and she said that Kelly’s allies think the rich asshole is trying to oust him through leaking dirt to the press.
“The morale was already quite low in the Kelly era for several staff,” she writes. “But this is worse than it’s been since Charlottesville. And after dismissing Kelly dismissal talks as spread by Mooch/others, people close to Kelly now realize it’s coming from the rich asshole.”
Several White House aides have described a diffuse situation as opposed to a more precise one last year when the focus of attacks was either Priebus or Bannon. Most think the people directly involved in retaining Porter are lying to some degree.
‘Joy Behar, not Jewish’: Fox News host forced to backtrack after bonkers Tomi Lahren rant against ‘The View’
Joy Behar and Tomi Lahren (Photo: Screen capture)
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During Tuesday’s episode of “The View,” co-host Joy Behar couldn’t help but mock Vice President Mike Pence for the recent claim by Omarosa Manigault that he hears the voice of Jesus Christ speaking to him.
Behar was paraphrasing the old joke, “if you talk to God it’s prayer. But if God talks to you it’s schizophrenia.” But the joke fell flat with Fox News and right-wing commentator Tomi Lahren.
During an interview with “Fox & Friends,” Lahren tried to spin the joke into Behar attacking the Christian faith of the vice president.
“Who is she to judge how often our vice president should speak to his lord and savior?” Lahren said, ignoring the fact that Jesus is “talking back.” She went on to argue that it’s part of the left’s war against Christianity. She went on to call the women “catty.”
“If you want Joy Behar to be quiet just say that maybe someone is speaking to Allah and Allah talks back. She would not be mocking that,” said co-host Brian Kilmeade.
“Again, they live in a world where women can be men and men can be women. But if you’re a conservative Christian, you have a mental illness,” Lahren said, attacking transgender Americans and again ignoring the allegation Pence hears voices.
“Obviously she doesn’t know Christ,” Ainsley Earhardt said of the Catholic comedian. The comment was ironic given the panel just denounced Behar for attacking someone else’s faith.
“Well, she’s Jewish, isn’t she?” Kilmeade asked.
“Meghan McCain said that Jesus speaks to her every morning,” co-host Steve Doocy said.
“Joy Behar, not Jewish,” Kilmeade cut in to clarify after the producers explained to him that the daughter of Italian immigrants is not Jewish.
Lahren went on to tout “Blue Lives Matter” and honoring law enforcement. The comments come weeks after Lahren attacked the FBI.
Watch the full interview below:
Media buries the rich asshole attorney’s admission that he paid off adult film star who spanked him with a magazine weeks before election
the rich asshole is rewriting the rules.
the rich asshole’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, admitted Tuesday night that he made a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels weeks before the election. In a statement, Cohen claimed he used his “personal funds” to “facilitate” the payment and was not reimbursed by the rich asshole campaign or the rich asshole Organization. Cohen refused to say if he was reimbursed by the rich asshole personally or answer any other questions about the payment.
Prior to the payment, Daniels was reportedly negotiating with several media outlets to go public with her story about an affair with the rich asshole. She gave a detailed account of the affair to In Touch in 2011, which published a transcript of the interview in January of this year.
Cohen’s statement came after the advocacy group Common Cause filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, asking for an investigation into whether the payment to Daniels violated election law. The payment would be illegal if its purpose was to benefit the campaign. Cohen’s statement that he would “always protect some rich asshole” seemed to bolster that theory.
Our full statement on the need for the @FEC & @TheJusticeDept to investigate after @realDonaldTrump's attorney Michael Cohen admitted he paid $130,000 in hush money to #StormyDaniels before the 2016 election following our legal complaint:commoncause.org/press/press-re…
The New York Times, which broke the news of Cohen’s admission, apparently doesn’t consider this big news. The story did not make the front page of the paper on Wednesday, crowded out by a story about the eating habits of figure skaters and the rediscovery of a lost strain of rice.
The Wall Street Journal, which first broke the news of the $130,000 payment to Daniels, included a short blurb on the front page but published the story on Cohen’s admission on A4. The Wall Street Journal did find space on its front page for a story on people who give poultry as a Valentine’s Day gift.
USA Today’s front page includes news about the Falcon Heavy rocket and John Oliver’s return to TV, but nothing on Cohen or Stormy Daniels.
The Washington Post published a story on Cohen’s admission but it was apparently too late to make the printed paper.
Even if the money originated from the rich asshole himself, Cohen’s admission could be describing a serious legal violation. Although candidates are allowed to make unlimited contributions to their own campaign, they are not permitted to funnel money off the books to benefit their campaign and then not report it.
Former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards was prosecuted in federal court for allegedly misusing campaign funds to cover up an affair. The case included allegations that a third party wrote a $200,000 check that was used to cover up his affair with Rielle Hunter. His case ended in a mistrial when the jury was unable to agree on a verdict on five of the six charges.
House Republicans attempt to grow a spine and launch investigation into White House’s handling of domestic abuse scandal
"I would want to know from Don McGahn and General Kelly and anyone else - what did you know?"
The Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee revealed on CNN on Wednesday morning that he’s launched an investigation of White House’s handling of the Rob Porter domestic abuse scandal.
It took a while for oversight committee chair Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) to acknowledge it. Early during the interview, Gowdy — who recently announced he will not seek another term in Congress — said he’s skeptical of reports indicating Chief of Staff John Kelly knew about domestic abuse allegations against former top aide Rob Porter for months.
“We do have jurisdiction over the security clearance process — I do not have jurisdiction over the president hires,” Gowdy said. “Congress has lots of questions of the executive branch that go unanswered.”
But after host Alisyn Camerota put the question to him directly, Gowdy confirmed that an investigation actually began on Tuesday night — hours after FBI Director Christopher Wray indicated during congressional testimony that the White House has been lying about how much information the FBI shared with the administration about Porter’s alleged history of abuse and when it was shared.
“What matters to me is that we are directing inquires to people that we think have access to information we don’t have,” Gowdy said. “You can call it official, you can call it unofficial, those words don’t mean anything to me. What means something to me is that I am going to direct questions to the FBI that I expect them to answer, and if they don’t answer them, then they are going to need to give me a really good reason and you’ll learn that reason and you can judge if it’s a sufficient reason or not.”
Gowdy indicated he’s specifically interested in learning more about what information the FBI shared with the White House and when top administration officials were looped in.
“I would want to know from Don McGahn and General Kelly and anyone else – what did you know, from whom did you hear it, to what extent did you hear it, and what actions, if any, did you take?” Gowdy said. “The chronology is not favorable for the White House. When you have the head of the FBI saying we told you three times in 2017 and once more in 2018 for good measure, then I think the really fair questions are what were you told, by whom were you told it, did you have some reason to question what the bureau told you, and if none of that is true, why did you keep him on?”
On the heels of Wray’s testimony, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tried to explain away the contradiction between Wray’s testimony and what she said the day before by pinning blame on the White House personnel security office.
“The White House personnel security office, staffed by career officials, received information last year in what they considered to be the final background investigation report in November,” Sanders said. “But they had not made a final recommendation for adjudication to the White House because the process was still ongoing when Rob Porter resigned.”
UPDATE (10:30 a.m.): On Wednesday, Gowdy sent a letter to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly asking for information about the White House’s security clearance process and what information about Porter officials had when the decision was made to grant Porter a temporary one.
WATCH: Christian author flops after CNN’s Chris Cuomo asks him to prove the rich asshole goes to church
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the rich asshole-backing evangelical David Brody went on CNN Wednesday to defend his new book that describes President some rich asshole’s “spiritual journey” — but he had trouble saying whether he thinks the president regularly attends church.
While talking about the rich asshole’s newfound faith in God, Brody was asked by CNN’s Chris Cuomo whether the president attends church on a regular basis. The question seemed to catch Brody off guard, as he stammered before answering.
“Well he does… he goes to church,” Brody said. “But let me tell you this…”
“We certainly don’t have the Sunday church cams that we used to have,” Cuomo interjected.
“Please understand that he can come on himself and defend his church attendance,” Brody said.
Earlier in the segment, Cuomo expressed bafflement that evangelicals could possibly give their full endorsement to the rich asshole.
“The question is, how much of it is really a measure of this man, or are you just giving him a really low bar?” Cuomo asked. “It seems the evangelical community prizes beliefs and behaviors that this president does not and has never exhibited. How do you overcome what he says about people, what he expresses in terms of a lack of compassion for people? A man who says he’s never had to ask God for forgiveness?”
Brody insisted that the rich asshole did say that he asks for forgiveness from God — despite having said in the past that he never did because he has nothing to feel sorry about — in one interview conducted with Brody.
“You can Google it,” Brody helpfully suggested, referring to a private conversation with the president he reported from a golf course.
Brody also suggested that having the rich asshole becoming a “cultural warrior” on behalf of evangelicals was evidence of God having a “sense of humor.”
Watch the video below.
CNN’s Alisyn Camerota mocks Michael Cohen’s latest explanation for Stormy Daniels payoff
Alisyn Camerota and Chris Cuomo (Photo: Screen capture)
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CNN host Alisyn Camerota couldn’t help but laugh at the latest strategy of having President some rich asshole’s attorney Michael Cohen take the fall for the Stormy Daniels pay-off.
“In a private transaction in 2016, I used my own personal funds to facilitate a payment of $130,000 to Ms. Stephanie Clifford. Neither the rich asshole administration nor the rich asshole campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment either directly or indirectly,” Cohen said in a statement Tuesday, more than two weeks after the news broke about the payoff.
It’s unclear if Camerota chuckled because it took the White House more than two weeks to come up with the explanation or if the explanation wasn’t sufficient, but she cracked up.
“Talk about devotion!” she said. “Either Michael Cohen was having the affair or on he is really taking one for the team here.”
Political commentator David Gregory joined Camerota in questioning the legitimacy of the claim.
“Just to state the obvious, I’m left a little skeptical to believe that he was really on the hook for this,” he said. “This is embarrassing in and of itself. It would be worse if this were money diverted out of a campaign to do it. But really there was no kind of compensation or reimbursement that he received in some fashion to do this. It seems to me there is more to this.”
Fellow host Chris Cuomo noted it’s a tough lift. “He can’t prove the nonexistence of a fact, that he wasn’t reimbursed.”
Watch the exchange below:
A white paper suggesting a number of gun regulations be rolled back was secretly informed by a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association.
The Associate Deputy Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) — who was previously rumored to be on the rich asshole’s list to head the agency — sought input and feedback from a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association on a white paper suggesting major rollbacks to current gun safety regulations.
Ronald Turk, then serving as the ATF’s Acting Deputy Director, produced the paper dated Jan. 20, 2017 — the rich asshole’s inauguration day — which was leaked to The Washington Post weeks later.
The paper “calls for removing restrictions on the sale of gun silencers; allowing gun dealers to have more guns used in crimes traced to their stores before the federal government requires additional information from the dealer, and initiating a study on lifting the ban on imported assault weapons,” the Post noted at the time.
But what wasn’t known then was that Turk had personally reached out to Mark Barnes, a lawyer who has lobbied for the NRA as well as gun manufacturers and gun show trade groups, to ask for help crafting the language and to essentially request approval of the proposals therein.
As CNN reported Tuesday, it was only thanks to the efforts of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence that this disturbing information ever came to light.
After the Post’s story on the white paper ran in February 2017, the Brady Center filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) public records request to obtain earlier drafts of the white paper. The ATF stonewalled for months, and the Brady Center sued the agency in October 2017. In December, a federal judge ordered the ATF to comply with the request, which it finally did in January 2018.
And the previously unseen drafts revealed the troubling influence the NRA lobbyist had over Turk’s paper.
“I was surprised to see that the draft document had been emailed out to a gun industry lawyer and the final product took his suggestions as edits — without any disclosure of that until we went to court to get these documents,” Avery W. Gardiner, co-president of the Brady Center, told CNN.
“If I am missing the mark on a major issue or disregarding a major discussion point any feedback you have would be appreciated,” Turk wrote to Barnes days before publishing the paper.
Meaning, as Gardiner put it, “There was a secret white paper that was partially written by the gun lobby.”
And the initial draft of the paper, dated Nov. 16, 2016, was even more chilling. It was titled “Guns in America — Options for a New Administration: Secure 2nd Amendments (sic) Rights, support for the firearms industry and the Violent Gun Crime Fight,” and specifically cited the incoming the rich asshole White House as its audience.
“This paper serves to provide the new President and his administration multiple options regarding the regulation of firearms,” the early draft read.
And the documents that the Brady Center obtained show just how heavy a hand Barnes had in crafting these dangerous ideas and proposed policy changes.
Though Barnes insisted to CNN that there was nothing “unusual” about his involvement.
“We didn’t craft anything. We just gave the bureau comments,” he said.
Except a lobbyist for organizations and corporations that contribute to the increasingly deadly gun culture in the United States giving “comments” on gun-related policies is not as anodyne as he might wish to insist.
Especially when those comments are given to an administration that has made it painfully clear whose side it is on in this epidemic.
In the second special election win of the week, Margaret Good claimed victory in Florida's 72nd State House District.
In Minnesota on Monday night, voters handed Democrats an important win by retaining a key state senate district and throwing the GOP majority into jeopardy.
And on Tuesday night, voters kept the wins coming, this time in Florida where Democratic attorney Margaret Good bested GOP realtor James Buchanan to take Florida’s 72nd State House District.
The district, which includes most of the city of Sarasota, backed the rich asshole in 2016, but swung 6 points toward Democrats in the special election.
Despite the district leaning red, Good campaigned on a number of liberal causes, including environmental protection, preventing school privatization, and maintaining Obamacare protections. And the voters rewarded her for it.
Republicans had a lot riding on this seat, and it is a danger sign for the party’s prospects in other races next fall, including holding onto the governorship and challenging Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson.
“This is going to set the tone for 2018 … You can’t become complacent. It’s important that we get a win here.” Buchanan said at a rally on Sunday.
This is the second special election in Florida to flip a Republican seat for Democrats since the rich asshole took office. In September 2017, progressive activist Annette Taddeo won the race for State Senate District 40, becoming the first ever Democratic Latina to be elected to the chamber.
And the Florida GOP’s troubles may only be getting started.
In the wake of Hurricane Maria, over 130,000 Puerto Ricans have moved to the state, many of whom are furious at the rich asshole for leaving their island to its fate. And a new ballot initiative this fall could amend Florida’s constitution to repeal major voter disenfranchisement laws that the state’s Republican governor has exploited for years.
The political stars are slowly realigning for the Sunshine State. Tuesday’s win may only be a taste of what is to come.
Prosecutors are trying to unseat Republicans who play defense for the rich asshole.
Tired of the wild, reckless and partisan attacks that the rich asshole and Republicans have been hurling against the FBI, a string of former prosecutors have come forward to run for Congress in hopes of unseating members of the GOP this year.
One such candidate is Chris Hunter, a former FBI agent and federal prosecutor, running in Florida’s 12th District.
“After watching President some rich asshole fire former FBI Director James Comey, belittle Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio, among other events, Mr. Hunter said he decided to leave his job as a prosecutor in Tampa in December and run for Congress,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
The paper identified five prosecutors who are running for Congress as Democrats this year, but zero prosecutors who are running as Republicans.
“The Washington landscape has been dominated this year by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and accompanying attacks on the Justice Department’s credibility,” according to the Journal. “One result has been the spectacle of several federal prosecutors quitting to run for Congress.”
What’s unusual is that candidates such as Hunter formerly served as day-to-day professional prosecutors before they opted to run. That’s in contrast to someone like Doug Jones, a Democrat who recently won a Senate race in Alabama and who once served as a high-profile political appointee as U.S. attorney in Alabama.
“It is rarer for line-level prosecutors, who are career staffers” to run for public office, the Journal notes.
But more and more are becoming motivated to try to unseat Republicans.
The election season pushback comes as vocal factions within the Republican Party have been waging a months long campaign to destroy the FBI in hopes of protecting their president who remains the center of a special counsel investigation.
The strategy seems to be utterly transparent: The GOP is trying to dismantle trust in the FBI so that if and when the rich asshole White House faces indictments the public defense will be that federal law enforcement cannot be trusted.
The GOP’s anti-FBI push hit a recent nadir when the party and the rich asshole moved to make public a cherry-picked report designed to depict the FBI as overstepping its bounds in terms of investigating possible collusion between the rich asshole campaign and Russian operatives in 2016.
After weeks of hype, the memo failed to contribute anything substantive, and it certainly did not undercut the workings of the FBI.
Some of the former prosecutors now running for Congress, such as Jay Hulings in Texas, are hitting their GOP opponents hard for supporting the memo charade:
This oped is just about the most dishonest thing I’ve seen from Will Hurd. The idea that releasing the memo has anything to do with civil liberties is laughable. No, he sacrificed his credibility for a partisan stunt. It’s shameful and he knows it. twitter.com/hurdonthehill/…
Like Hulings, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the FBI Special Agents Association all made clear their disdain for the political production behind the GOP’s memo campaign.
That’s a rather remarkable development since for decades the Republican Party has branded itself as the home of law and order.
But that’s changing as the GOP runs interference for the rich asshole in the form of denigrating law-and-order officials.
The embattled House Intelligence chairman did not find a friendly audience back home in the Central Valley.
House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes is facing growing hostility back in his home district in California, where he fled the room at a farm show rather than answer his constituents’ angry questions.
Nunes has been roundly discredited and ridiculed following the release of his FBI smear memo, especially after he admitted he did not even read the intelligence on which the memo was based.
Despite the rich asshole’s attempts to help him by blocking the release of the Democratic memo debunking the smears, and despite Nunes going so far as to create his own fake news website defending his actions, his constituents are pointedly unhappy with their congressman.
That hostility became apparent on Tuesday, when Nunes visited the World Ag Expo in his Central Valley hometown of Tulare.
He was immediately greeted with protestors from the local Democratic Party, and after only a short appearance, fled the event pursued by people demanding answers about the attacks he and the rich asshole have unleashed on the FBI.
“Congressman, any update on the Democratic memo?” one man asked as Nunes wordlessly pushed past people on his way to the exit. “Congressman, do you have a moment for a question?”
Followed all the way down the hall, Nunes never acknowledged anyone and disappeared through the exit.
Shortly after the recording of Nunes went online, his Democratic opponent, Fresno prosecutor Andrew Janz, was quick to comment.
Running away from constituents and reporters in his "safe" seat here in #CA22. This is at the World Ag Expo here in #Tulare. twitter.com/TaubGVWire/sta…
Nunes is likely unaccustomed to facing genuine pressure. He represents a district which is normally deep red, and he has not held a town hall meeting with his constituents since 2010.
But the most recent polls show a generic Democrat within single digits of beating him.
Members of Congress should make themselves accessible and accountable to the people they ostensibly represent. Nunes, now being tested with palpable anger from the voters, is refusing to be either.
"I can no longer remain silent about our President."
A rising star in the Michigan Republican Party has not only resigned from his chairmanship, but has walked away from the GOP entirely, as the rich asshole’s toxic reputation continues to spread around the country.
Members of the Bay County Republican Club in Michigan scheduled an emergency meeting for Tuesday night to select a new chair after Brandon DeFrain recently resigned in protest largely over the rich asshole’s reckless behavior and cruel ideologies.
“I can no longer remain silent about our President. I have not seen a leader, I’ve only seen more of the same,” DeFrain wrote on Facebook. “More racism in our streets, on social media and schools, more hatred between family members, more people feeling as if their human and civil rights are being violated, more drug overdoses and more people feeling tormented and discriminated against because of who they worship and who they love.”
“I’m tired of attempting to defend a machine that does not defend the people I love,” he added.
Indeed, it is the GOP as a whole DeFrain is leaving behind.
“I will no longer seek political office as a partisan represented candidate,” he announced.
DeFrain, 34, has served as the chairman of the Bay County Republican Club since 2014, as the party has made inroads into long-time Democratic strongholds in Northern Michigan. Bay County voted twice for President Barack Obama.
Last year, DeFrain was featured on NBC’s “Today” show as part of a round-table discussion with voters in Bay City who had voted for the rich asshole. DeFrain noted that the rich asshole had won the county by 7,000 votes and 13 percentage points, and marveled at the local energy surrounding the rich asshole’s campaign.
But his views have changed dramatically after over a year with the rich asshole in office.
“Since Inauguration Day I’ve shared my opinion in close circles and mainly with family members, friends and my wife. I haven’t spoke much about the current state of political affairs because in the past, I believed in giving our leaders a chance.”
But the rich asshole has done nothing with that chance.
“I do not support the actions coming from the White House,” DeFrain declared.
And his decision to leave the rich asshole-era GOP behind will allow him to “be better aligned with my own values … that represent all people, faith, gender, class, thought, race and every other denomination on our planet. I care about every human on this earth and I desire to live in a way that pursues freedom for all.”
the rich asshole won Michigan by just 11,000 votes in 2016. Today, his approval there stands at just 40 percent — a number that likely won’t be helped by the rich asshole bizarrely taking credit for a new auto plant in Detroit that does not actually exist.
And it seems it is not just Republican voters in Michigan, but also key figures in the party’s ranks, that have begun to sour on the rich asshole and his erratic and repugnant actions.
Sanders passed on another chance to express any support or sympathy for victims of domestic violence. Instead, she complained about how she had been portrayed.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders responded to an op-ed column written by former White House aide Rob Porter’s ex-wife Colbie Holderness not by expressing concern over domestic violence, but by getting defensive.
Discussing Sanders, Holderness wrote, “I expected a woman to do better,” responding to her refusal to say whether the rich asshole believes the abuse allegations made by her and Jennie Willoughby, who is also Porter’s ex-wife.
Both women have made allegations of abuse against him. Photos of Holderness with a black eye she attributed to Porter were published along with her op-ed.
Reporter Jeff Zeleny asked Sanders whether she has “any regret” for how she has explained the story to the American people in light of the op-ed by Holderness criticizing Sanders and the White House’s subsequent cover-up.
“I would never presume to understand anything going on with that individual, nor would I think that she could presume what’s going on with me or the way that I am responding.”
Sanders then repeated her talking points from Monday. “Look, we’ve condemned domestic violence in every way possible. In fact, the president’s budget that he released yesterday fully funds the Violence Against Women Act. We’re looking for ways that we can take action to help prevent this from ever happening to anyone. And to presume that I feel differently is simply a very strong mischaracterization of who I am and who the White House is and what our actions are focused on and what we’re trying to do here.”
The remark was yet another instance of the rich asshole White House making the issue about themselves rather than addressing the alleged victims of abuse directly.
the rich asshole has continued to refuse to use his elevated platform to address the women, instead preferring to make remarks favoring Porter and praising his service.
The defensive posturing from Sanders came just hours after FBI director Christopher Wray, in sworn congressional testimony, made it clear the White House has been lying about how they handled Porter.
He testified that the investigation into Porter had been completed, while Sanders and the White House have insisted that they did not act on the accused aide because an investigation was not complete.
Porter was allowed to operate in the White House and was given access to classified material, even as these determinations had already been made by intelligence agencies and presented to the rich asshole.
Instead of admitting to a mistake, owning up to how they have mishandled a sensitive situation and insulted the women here and women across the country, Sanders chose a different path. She went on defense, made the story about herself, and continued the rich asshole’s ongoing attacks against women.
the rich asshole is resorting to complete and total fantasy in order to brag about his "accomplishments."
the rich asshole has long made a habit of taking credit for other people’s accomplishments, but on Tuesday, he took credit for one that doesn’t even exist.
During a bipartisan meeting with lawmakers on trade, the rich asshole stopped the proceedings for an important announcement.
“We just got this notice,” the rich asshole said, reading from a piece of paper. “General Motors in Korea announces the first step in necessary restructuring. They’re going to — GM Korea company announced today that it will cease production and close its Gunsan plant in May of 2018, and they’re going to move back to Detroit.”
“You don’t hear these things except for the fact the rich asshole became president,” the rich asshole bragged. “You wouldn’t be hearing that. So they’re moving back from Korea to Detroit.”
the rich asshole read the headline from GM’s announcement word-for-word, as well as part of its opening paragraph.
But the announcement itself makes no absolutely mention of moving the plant to Detroit.
In fact, the rest of the paragraph he quoted notes that “The Gunsan facility has been increasingly underutilized, running at about 20 percent of capacity over the past three years, making continued operations unsustainable.”
The Gunsan plant makes the Chevy Cruze, which is already produced at a factory in Detroit that laid off 1,500 workers in October, 200 of them permanently, due to low demand for the model.
the rich asshole and his team have created imaginary terrorist attacks, an imaginary trucker friend, an imaginary partnership with Toyota, and tens of thousands of imaginary coal jobs.
But this appears to be the first non-corporeal manufacturing facility in their list of accomplishments.
the rich asshole’s instinct to lie never ends, and it never ceases to amaze.
The cover-up keeps looking worse and worse.
the rich asshole’s response to the Rob Porter domestic abuse scandal has been a rolling disaster, and it got a whole lot worse when FBI Director Christopher Wray knocked down a key lie that the administration has been telling.
As recently as Tuesday morning, the White House said that Porter’s “background check investigation had not been completed yet” when he resigned over allegations that he had abused two ex-wives, and used that supposed fact as an excuse for failure to fire Porter or to make any changes going forward.
But Wray directly contradicted that talking point during testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying his agency actually completed Porter’s investigation twice.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked Wray for a timeline of the FBI’s revelations to the White House about the domestic abuse allegations. While Wray said he was unable to reveal the content of those investigations, he confirmed that the FBI submitted a partial report to the White House in March and then a completed report in July.
“Soon thereafter, we received requests for followup inquiry, and we did the followup, and provided that information in November,” Wray said. “And then we administratively closed the file in January, and then earlier this month, we received some additional information, and we passed that on, as well.”
Based on Wray’s testimony, the White House is lying when it says Porter’s background check had not been completed, or was ongoing. Wray’s timeline is also consistent with other reporting that suggests the White House was covering up for Porter all along.
White House counsel Don McGahn has reportedly known of the allegations for over a year, and chief of staff John Kelly was informed about them in November, which is when Wray says the FBI completed the requested “followup.”
Wray also confirmed that the FBI had “completed” Porter’s background investigation in July, which did not result in a permanent security clearance. The White House continued to employ Porter, despite his inability to obtain permanent security clearance.
This scandal has deeper implications than the political damage it is wreaking on the rich asshole administration for apparently protecting an alleged wife-beater. The White House continues to employ dozens of staffers who also have failed to obtain permanent security clearance, including the rich asshole’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Wray’s revelation should force Republicans to join Democrats in holding the rich asshole accountable for risking national security by continuing these reckless clearances.
the rich asshole Says General Motors, Which Never Left Detroit, Is Coming Back To Detroit (VIDEO)
some rich asshole loves to take credit for his predecessor’s actions, but this time, he’s grabbing even more credit, probably because today ends in a Y. General Motors announced today that it will “cease production and close its Gunsan plant by the end of May 2018″ and because the plant in South Korea is having problems, the rich asshole assumed that it would move to Detroit even though General Motors is already in Detroit? Confused? Yeah, me too.
On the announcement, the rich asshole said,”General Motors is coming back into Detroit. That is a really significant statement.”
Watch:
.@POTUS on General Motors closing plant in South Korea: "General Motors is coming back into Detroit. That is a really significant statement."
the rich asshole said, “You don’t hear these things except for the fact the rich asshole is President” while speaking of himself in the third person again.
The facility in Gunsan “has been increasingly underutilized, running at about 20 percent of capacity over the past three years, making continued operations unsustainable,” according to GM’s statement. It’s not closing because the rich asshole has done something awesome to entice them to ‘come back to Detroit’ even though it is already in Detroit.
Late last year, GM made plans to scale back production at an assembly plant in Detroit and, according to a source, would “lay off about 1,500 workers as the company contends with a continued decline in sedan sales.” So, it’s highly unlikely that the company will bring more workers to Detriot. But, because the rich asshole hasn’t accomplished anything after being in office for just over a year, he’s going to grab credit wherever he can find it. Citation: see the video again.
Topping that off, the rich asshole is now presenting us with a budget which will not balance. In 2016, the rich asshole said that he will eliminate our country’s debt in 8 years. Well, he’s off to a really bad start. the rich asshole is merely trying to distract the public from his mountain of scandals by claiming that GM will be coming back to Detriot even though it never left.
I know, it’s hard to believe that President Liar Pants lied again.
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