This is a daily or weekly record of the Trump presidency so hopefully future generations will learn what happens when you elect an narcissistic, thin skinned, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic unqualified buffoon in a position of power where he has access to nuclear codes.
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Thursday, February 8, 2018
February 7th, 2017. It's been 452 days since the Nov 8, 2016, election of some rich asshole, no.45, and 380 days since the Jan 20th inauguration.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Wednesday commandeered the House floor to deliver a marathon monologue designed to secure protections for young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children.
In a record-breaking eight-hour, seven-minute speech featuring prayers, Bible passages and testimonials from “Dreamers,” Pelosi vowed to oppose a sweeping, two-year budget package — a deal she herself helped to negotiate — unless Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) pledges to consider legislation shoring up the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which President the rich asshole is sunsetting in less than a month.
The extraordinary speech was at once a remarkable display of endurance for the 77-year-old Pelosi and a media sensation generating endless buzz across Capitol Hill. It was also something else: a clear signal to Pelosi’s troops — some of them questioning her dedication to securing Dreamer protections — that she’s leading the fight on immigration head-first.
“This is not an issue that’s going to go away,” Pelosi said. “This is an American value that is deeply felt across the board.”
Pelosi was joined on the House floor by an ever-changing cast of Democratic lawmakers — many of them representing the minority caucuses that have led the fight over the fate of DACA — who gathered behind her to lend their support. It marked a show of confidence in the longtime Democratic leader that, at times, has been absent during the recent immigration debate.
Indeed, Pelosi, along with Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), infuriated liberal Democrats last September — particularly the members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — when they cut a short-term spending deal with the rich asshole that excluded any DACA protections.
Since then, Congress has passed three additional continuing resolutions, none of which has led to a DACA fix. While Schumer used the filibuster last month to force a three-day shutdown, Democrats agreed to reopen the government without an immediate vote on immigration. Instead, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vowed to consider an unspecified DACA bill this month — a commitment Ryan has not yet extended.
The lack of assurance that DACA will win a vote in the lower chamber has not been overlooked by liberal Democrats, who are quick to recall the 2013 immigration debate, when the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform package with bipartisan support, only to see it go ignored by GOP leaders in the lower chamber.
“It never saw the light of day in the House of Representatives,” Rep. Joseph Crowley (N.Y.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said Wednesday, suggesting he’s ready to oppose the new budget package.
Many liberals have pressed Pelosi and other party leaders to oppose any new spending bill that excludes the Dreamer protections. And they’re not mincing words.
Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.), among Capitol Hill’s most vocal immigration reformers, said Tuesday that for Pelosi to support the newly crafted budget deal would be “a complete betrayal.”
Pelosi on Wednesday heeded the calls, taking to the floor just after 10 a.m. for a “one-minute” speech that extended for hours. Her stated goal was to get Ryan to guarantee a vote on DACA legislation. Without that pledge, she’s opposing the budget agreement.
“Without that commitment from Speaker Ryan, comparable to the commitment from Leader McConnell, this package does not have my support, nor does it have the support of a large number of members of our caucus,” Pelosi said near the start of her speech.
Ryan has said for months he wants to act on a DACA fix, but won’t consider any legislation that’s not supported by the president — a difficult standard to gauge since the rich asshole has repeatedly sent mixed signals regarding his DACA demands. On Wednesday, amid Pelosi’s sermon, Ryan gave no signals he’s ready to budge.
“Speaker Ryan has already repeatedly stated we intend to do a DACA and immigration reform bill — one that the president supports,” Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong said in an email.
Announced Wednesday by McConnell and Schumer, the Senate’s sweeping budget agreement seeks to end the need for short-term funding bills by raising spending caps on both defense and nondefense programs over the next two years. The package includes a number of items demanded by Pelosi and the Democrats, including funding for the opioid crisis, natural disaster relief, veterans health-care facilities and medical research.
But it was the missing immigration piece that prompted Pelosi’s resistance. She huddled in the Capitol Wednesday morning with House Democrats, where lawmakers argued both sides of the question of whether they should hinge their votes for the budget deal on the DACA issue. But Pelosi had sealed her decision Tuesday night, sending her staff to gather Bible quotes Wednesday morning.
Hours later, other party leaders seemed to back her position.
“I think many, if not all of us — I don’t want to speak for every person — look at … the issue of DACA and immigration and how we treat immigrants in this country as the civil rights issue of the day,” Crowley said.
“That’s how strong this is for all of us in our caucus.”
It’s unclear if Pelosi’s opposition threatens passage of the budget package in the House, thereby heightening the chances of a government shutdown. A number of conservatives have vowed to oppose the legislation, citing the increased spending on domestic programs, among other concerns. Those defections will force Ryan to reach across the aisle for Democratic votes, but the numbers on both sides remain uncertain.
The Democrats have not yet decided whether they’ll whip the vote, according to the office of House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.).
If Congress fails to get a spending bill to the rich asshole’s desk by the end of Thursday, large parts of the government would close their doors Friday.
White House chief of staff John Kelly said in a new statement he was “shocked” by allegations of domestic abuse leveled against staff secretary Rob Porter after Porter announced his resignation earlier Wednesday.
"I was shocked by the new allegations released today against Rob Porter. There is no place for domestic violence in our society,” Kelly said in the statement.
“I stand by my previous comments of the Rob Porter that I have come to know since becoming Chief of Staff, and believe every individual deserves the right to defend their reputation,” he continued. “I accepted his resignation earlier today, and will ensure a swift and orderly transition."
Porter announced Wednesday that he would resign from his White House role after being accused of abusing two of his ex-wives. Colbie Holderness and Jennifer Willoughby have alleged that the aide was physically and emotionally abusive. Holderness provided photos of injuries including a black eye.
Kelly and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders both issued statements of support for Porter after the initial reports of the abuse allegations surfaced Tuesday night. Kelly called him “a man of true integrity and honor.”
The White House announced Porter's resignation on Wednesday, but Porter denied the allegations.
“These outrageous allegations are simply false. I took the photos given to the media nearly 15 years ago and the reality behind them is nowhere close to what is being described. I have been transparent and truthful about these vile claims, but I will not further engage publicly with a coordinated smear campaign,” he said in a statement.
Sanders told reporters that Porter's exit would not be "immediate" so he could assist with his replacement’s transition.
“Rob has been effective in his role as staff secretary, and the president and chief of staff have had full confidence and trust in his abilities and his performance,” Sanders said.
Porter was a top aide to Kelly in the White House and was responsible for the paper flow to President the rich asshole’s desk in the West Wing.
CBS News reported Wednesday that the allegations against Porter prevented him from obtaining a full security clearance. Multiple people in the White House were aware of the allegations before they were reported by media, according to reports.
"As has always been our policy, we do not comment on security clearances," Sanders said in a statement.
Racism is a feature, not a bug, for this administration.
some rich asshole’s chief of staff John Kelly showed the administration’s true colors when he insulted Dreamers by calling them “lazy.” And rather than walk back that racist remark, the White House is fully embracing it.
On Tuesday, Kelly told reporters that people who were eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) but failed to register were “too lazy to get off their asses,” then augmented that comment later in the day by saying that those Dreamers “just should have probably gotten off the couch and signed up.”
The following morning, White House Director of Legislative Affairs Marc Short got in on the act, reinforcing Kelly’s comments in an interview with MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson.
When Jackson confronted Short about Kelly’s remarks, he responded by changing the subject to the supposed generosity of the rich asshole’s proposal. But under the rich asshole’s framework, Dreamers would not have the same rights to sponsor family members that current citizens do, and he has demanded $30 billion for his border wall and other security measures.
Jackson quickly forced Short back on topic. “I talked to Dreamers after John Kelly made those comments, they were deeply offended,” she noted, adding that “one person told me he was disgusted that John Kelly would use that kind of language.”
“Hallie, 690,000 actually applied to the program,” Short sidestepped again. “If there were some that were afraid, we’re giving that additional leniency.”
“Sure, sure, fear, but not laziness,” Jackson interjected. “Is that a fair assessment? What does the White House think? Do they think that these immigrants …”
“I think that there’s both, I think that there’s both,” Short replied, and insisted again that Kelly “is their biggest advocate.
“Do you think undocumented immigrants are lazier than U.S. Citizens?” Jackson asked Short.
Short answered that Kelly wasn’t talking about the 690,000 Dreamers who applied for status, but that “he’s talking about some, a small category, who were too lazy to actually apply to the program.”
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Many Dreamers feared registering for DACA, knowing that the program could be rescinded, and their cooperation with the program could then be used to round them up for deportation.
That’s exactly the prospect that DACA-eligible Americans now face if a deal is not reached.
The rich asshole White House’s message is simplistic and callous: “Good” immigrants like the well-regarded Dreamers are lazy and ungrateful, and that the rest are probably criminals. That’s hardly a stance meant to achieve a bipartisan compromise, but simply to stoke the rich asshole’s resentful base — and it’s coming across loud and clear.
Right-wing media have once again been forced to reap what they sow by promoting stories based on out-of-context text messages sent between the GOP’s new favorite boogeymen.
As CNN’s Oliver Darcy, a former editor at Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, wrote on Wednesday, “members of the pro-the rich asshole media acted like they hit the goldmine on Wednesday morning” when Fox News published an article and released an “alert” about a single text message.
The message was sent from FBI lawyer Lisa Page to agent Peter Strzok, the erstwhile lovers at the heart of the GOP’s allegations of anti-the rich asshole bias and corruption at the highest ranks of the FBI and Justice Department. Sent September 2, 2016, Page told Strzok that former President Barack Obama wanted “to know everything we’re doing.” The text made its way to the center of a 25-page report released by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who said it proved Obama was involved in the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server scandal.
“The misleading messaging was delivered to millions of people through Fox News’ airwaves and through other pro-the rich asshole media, which went into overdrive,” Darcy wrote, noting that the story was featured prominently on the Drudge Report, Breitbart and fringe right-wing sites like InfoWars and the Gateway Pundit.
Soon, President some rich asshole himself was on the bandwagon, tweeting in all caps that the “new FBI texts” are “bombshells.”
When cross-referencing the timeline of the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s private email server during her time as secretary of state, CNN found that September 2, the day the text was sent, landed squarely between when the bureau closed the probe in July and re-opened it in late September.
Three days after the text was sent, in fact, Obama confronted Putin at the G20 summit in China about Russia’s meddling in the American election.
“A person familiar with Strzok’s thinking reiterated this account,” Darcy wrote, “telling CNN that the text referred to Obama’s broader interests in issues of potential Russian interference in the election more generally.”
Early Wednesday, Fox News published an explosive new story alleging President Obama sought detailed briefings about the Clinton email investigation. The report is based on texts between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page released by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security on Tuesday.
In a text sent on September 2, 2016, Page tells Strozok that “potus wants to know everything we’re doing.” Fox News claims this text “raises questions about Obama’s personal involvement in the Clinton email investigation.”
Fox News is hyping the story on air repeatedly as a bombshell, calling it “shocking.”
President the rich asshole, an avid viewer of Fox News, got the message.
The theory is being pushed by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who recently advanced and then retracted a claim that there was a “secret society” in the FBI seeking to undermine the rich asshole. Johnson released a report to accompany the emails called “THE CLINTON EMAIL SCANDAL AND THE FBI’S INVESTIGATION OF IT.”
On September 2, 2016, Page wrote about preparing talking points for Director Comey because “potus wants to know everything we’re doing.” This text raises additional questions about the type and extent of President Obama’s personal involvement in the Clinton email scandal and the FBI investigation of it.
There is just one problem: The entire Fox News story is a fraud.
It’s simply not a plausible interpretation of the September 2, 2016 text exchange that Obama was seeking a briefing on the Clinton email investigation.
FBI Director James Comey closed the Clinton email investigation on July 5, 2016. It was not reopened until October. The same trove of text messages released Tuesday reveals that the FBI did not even become aware of additional emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop until September 28, 2016.
Fox News suggests the texts were referring to talking points regarding the Clinton email case. But those talking points, according to documents released by the Senate, were completed in June. That makes sense because they were prepared in advance of Comey’s announcement in July.
So what was Obama interested in? Most likely, he wanted information about the counterintelligence investigation into the the rich asshole campaign’s contacts with Russia, which was active on September 2, 2016. Obama has publicly said that he confronted Putin about election interference a few days later at the Group of 20 meeting in China, telling the Russian leader to “cut it out.”
“[I]t has to be about the Russia probe,” former Department of Justice official Matthew Miller told ThinkProgress in reference to the September 2, 2016 texts.
There was nothing inappropriate about Obama seeking a briefing on the Russia investigation. “[S]ince the Russia investigation was a counterintelligence, not a criminal, investigation at that time, it was totally appropriate for Obama to be briefed,” Miller said. “The Department of Justice is allowed to brief and coordinate with the White House on national security matters, including terrorism and espionage.”
Don’t hold your breath for Fox News to correct this false report. It will likely be presented to millions of viewers tonight on primetime television. But that does not make it true.
UPDATE (2/7, 4:32PM): The Wall Street Journal, speaking to associates of Strzok and Page, confirms that the texts refer to the Russia investigation not the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Text messages from 2016 show preparation to brief Barack Obama about Russia’s interference in that year’s election, according to associates of the FBI employees involved in the exchange, not, as a Republican senator suggested, meddling by the then-president in the federal Hillary Clinton email investigation.
MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi, guest hosting “All In with Chris Hayes” on Wednesday, hilariously mocked President some rich asshole’s longing for public praise.
“President the rich asshole wants to see a military parade, today Defense Secretary James Mattis confirmed the Pentagon is now drawing up options for him,” Velshi noted. “But not everyone thinks a parade of tanks and gun trucks is such a great idea.”
“You don’t need a big parade to prove your strength, or as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once said, ‘being powerful is like being a lady, if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t,'” Velshi recounted.
“Well, President the rich asshole is no lady,” Velshi concluded.
The second half of the show’s Thing 1 Thing Two segment featured more questions about the rich asshole’s apparent need for accolades from Americans.
“President the rich asshole’s demand for a military parade has some, including members of his own party, saying it’s more of a sign of insecurity than strength. Perhaps it was as a sense of insecurity that led the president to complain that Democrats didn’t sufficiently clap for him during the State of the Union,” Velshi suggested.
“Now, the White House says the rich asshole was joking about the whole treason thing, but there’s no doubt if you watched the State of the Union closely, the president cared very much about the clapping,” Velshi observed, before playing a highlight reel illustrating his point.
An FBI informant connected to the Uranium One controversy told three congressional committees in written testimony that Moscow routed millions of dollars to America with the expectation it would be used to benefit Bill Clinton's charitable efforts while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quarterbacked a “reset” in US-Russian relations.
The informant, Douglas Campbell, said in the testimony obtained by The Hill that he was told by Russian nuclear executives that Moscow had hired the American lobbying firm APCO Worldwide specifically because it was in position to influence the Obama administration, and more specifically Hillary Clinton.
Democrats have cast doubt on Campbell’s credibility, setting the stage for a battle with Republicans over his testimony.
Campbell said Russian nuclear officials “told me at various times that they expected APCO to apply a portion of the $3 million annual lobbying fee it was receiving from the Russians to provide in-kind support for the Clinton’s Global Initiative,” he added in the testimony.
“The contract called for four payments of $750,000 over twelve months. APCO was expected to give assistance free of charge to the Clinton Global Initiative as part of their effort to create a favorable environment to ensure the Obama administration made affirmative decisions on everything from Uranium One to the U.S.-Russia Civilian Nuclear Cooperation agreement. “
APCO officials told The Hill that its support for CGI and its work with Russia were not connected in any way, and in fact involved different divisions of the firm. They added their lobbying for Russia did not involve Uranium One but rather focused on regulatory issues aimed at helping Russia better compete for nuclear fuel contracts inside the United States.
“APCO Worldwide’s activities involving client work on behalf of Tenex and The Clinton Global Initiative were totally separate and unconnected in any way,” APCO told The Hill in a statement. “All actions on these two unconnected activities were appropriate, publicly documented from the outset and consistent with regulations and the law. Any assertion otherwise is false and unfounded.”
Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton, said Campbell’s testimony is simply being used to distract from the investigations into President the rich asshole and Russia.
“Just yesterday the committee made clear that this secret informant charade was just that, a charade. Along with the widely debunked text-message-gate and Nunes' embarrassing memo episode, we have a trifecta of GOP-manufactured scandals designed to distract from their own President's problems and the threat to democracy he poses,” Merrill said.
In addition to his written testimony, Campbell on Wednesday was interviewed for several hours behind closed doors by staff from both parties on the Senate Judiciary, House Intelligence and House Oversight and Government Reform committees.
Democrats have asked that a transcript of the testimony be released to the public, though it’s unclear whether Republicans will take that step.
Republicans are seeking to use Campbell’s account to expand their investigations beyond the 2016 election and the rich asshole to possible questions about Russian graft during the Obama administration.
They note that the FBI found Campbell’s undercover work valuable enough to reward him with a $50,000 check in 2016.
Democrats, in turn, have accused Republicans of making “wild claims” about Campbell and Uranium One.
In a letter sent this week, Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, asserted that Justice Department officials told both parties during a briefing in December that they ultimately found they “could not trust” Campbell when he was working as an FBI informant.
Justice officials also said that Campbell had at no point made “any allegations of corruption, illegality, or impropriety on Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, President Clinton, the Uranium One deal, or CFIUS,” according to the Democrats.
“They also confirmed that there were “no allegations of impropriety or illegality” regarding Secretary Clinton in any of the documents they reviewed,” the Democrats said.
Campbell painted a different picture in his written testimony.
He accused Obama administration officials of making decisions that ended up benefitting the Russian nuclear industry, which he said was seeking to build a monopoly in the global uranium market to help President Vladimir Putin seek a geopolitical advantage over the United States.
The United States already imports more than 90 percent of the uranium it uses in nuclear reactors, according to U.S. government figures from 2016.
Campbell wrote that Russian nuclear executives “boasted” during vodka-fueled meetings monitored by the FBI about “how weak the U.S. government was in giving away uranium business and were confident that Russia would secure the strategic advantage it was seeking in the U.S. uranium market.”
He also said he asked his FBI handlers why the U.S. was not more aggressive.
“I expressed these concerns repeatedly to my FBI handlers. The response I got was that politics was somehow involved,” he testified.
Much of the GOP’s interest in Campbell’s testimony centers on the Obama administration’s approval of the Uranium One deal. That deal at the time gave the Russian mining giant Rosatom control of roughly 20 percent of America’s capacity to mine uranium.
The deal was approved unanimously in 2010 by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a multi-agency board that includes the State Department, the Defense Department and the Justice Department, among other agencies. The board has the power to block deals that threaten national security.
Campbell, whose work as an informant was first disclosed in a series of stories published last fall by The Hill, helped the FBI gathered evidence as early as 2009 that the Russian nuclear industry was engaged in a kickback, bribery and racketeering scheme on U.S. soil. The criminal scheme, among other things, compromised the U.S. trucking firm that had the sensitive job of transporting uranium around America, Campbell testified.
Campbell says he provided the FBI the evidence of wrongdoing months before the Obama administration approved a series of favorable decisions that enriched Rosatom, including the CFIUS decision.
The Hill’s stories last fall prompted the Justice Department to take the rare step of freeing Campbell from his nondisclosure agreement as an intelligence asset so he could testify to Congress about what he witnessed inside Russia’s nuclear industry.
Campbell gave the congressional committees documents he said he provided to his FBI handlers in 2010 showing that the Russian and American executives implicated in the Tenex bribery scheme specifically asked him to try to help get the Uranium One deal approved by the Obama administration.
“In 2010, officials inside Tenex became interested in helping another Rosatom subsidiary, ARMZ, win Obama administration approval to purchase Uranium One, a Canadian company with massive Kazakh and large U.S. uranium assets,” Campbell testified. “Although Tenex and ARMZ are separate subsidiaries, Tenex had its own interest in Uranium One. Tenex would become responsible for finding commercial markets and revenue for those uranium assets once they were mined.
“The emails and documents I intercepted during 2010 made clear that Rosatom’s purchase of Uranium One – for both its Kazakh and American assets – was part of Russia’s geopolitical strategy to gain leverage in global energy markets,” he testified. “I obtained documentary proof that Tenex was helping Rosatom win CFIUS approval, including an October 6, 2010 email … asking me specifically to help overcome opposition to the Uranium One deal.”
Campbell told lawmakers the purchase of the Uranium One assets and the securing of billions of new uranium sales contracts inside the United States during the Obama years were part of the “Russian uranium dominance strategy.”
“The importance of the Uranium One decision to Tenex was made clear by the fact that the Russian government directed Mikerin to open a new U.S. office for Tenex and to create a new American entity called Tenam in early October 2010, just weeks before Rosatom and ARMZ won the Obama administration approval to buy Uranium One,” he said.
“Rosatom/Tenex threw a party to celebrate, which was widely attended by American nuclear industry officials. At the request of the FBI, I attended and recorded video footage of Tenam’s new offices,” he added.
Campbell’s written testimony covered a wide array of activities he conducted under the FBI’s direction, ranging from a failed sting effort to lure Putin to the United States to gathering evidence that Russia was “helping Iran build its nuclear capability.”
Campbell provided Congress an April 16, 2010, memo he said he wrote and gave to the FBI that spelled out in detail the Russian efforts to aid Iran.
“Tenex continues to supply Iran fuel through their Russian company,” Campbell wrote in that 2010 document obtained by The Hill, naming the specific company that was being used to help. “They continue to assist with construction consult [sic] and fabricated assemblies to supply the reactor. Fabricated assemblies require sophisticated engineering and are arranged inside the reactor with the help and consult” of Russians.
“The final fabricators to Iran are being flown by Russian air transport due to the sensitive nature of the equipment,” his 2010 memo to the FBI added.
Campbell told lawmakers he also gave the FBI “documentary proof that officials in Moscow were obtaining restricted copies of IAEA compliance reports on Iranian nuclear inspections, a discovery that appeared to deeply concern my handlers.”
While most of his testimony involved intelligence matters, Campbell also briefly described the toll years of undercover work took on him personally. He continued informing through a bout with brain cancer, a case of leukemia and battles with excessive drinking, he told lawmakers.
He also was never reimbursed for the hundreds of thousands of dollars he used of his own money to make bribe payments under the FBI’s direction to the Russians to facilitate his cover.
But Campbell testified he was gratified when the FBI in 2016 gave him a $50,000 reward check celebrating his undercover work, directly answering Democrats criticisms that federal prosecutors didn’t trust him as a witness.
“My FBI handlers praised my work. They told me on various occasions that details from the undercover probe had been briefed directly to FBI top officials. On two occasions my handlers were particularly excited, claiming that my undercover work had been briefed to President Obama as part of his daily presidential briefing,” he testified
In the end, though, he told lawmakers he remains disturbed that the Obama administration made so many favorable decisions benefitting the Russian nuclear industry when the evidence of wrongdoing and ill intent was so extensive.
“I was frustrated watching the U.S. government make numerous decisions benefiting Rosatom and Tenex while those entities were engaged in serious criminal conduct on U.S. soil,” he testified. “Tenex and Rosatom were raking in billions of U.S. dollars by signing contracts with American nuclear utility clients at the same time they were indulging in extortion by using threats to get bribes and kickbacks, with a portion going to Russia for high ranking officials.”
He said he never got a satisfactory answer from the FBI.
“I remember one response I got from an agent when I asked how it was possible CFIUS would approve the Uranium One sale when the FBI could prove Rosatom was engaged in criminal conduct. His answer: ‘Ask your politics,’ ” Campbell said.
White House chief of staff John Kelly on Wednesday released a second statement claiming he’s “shocked” to learn that recently-resigned presidential secretary Rob Porter was accused by two of his ex-wives of assaulting them.
“I was shocked by the new allegations released today against Rob Porter,” Kelly said in a statement. “There is no place for domestic violence in our society.”
The allegations against Porter, however, are not new. The Intercept, who broke the story earlier on Wednesday, said the FBI was aware of the allegations and interviewed both of his ex-wives who accused him of domestic abuse when he applied for White House security clearance.
Kelly also said he will “stand by” his previous defense of Porter, who he called a “man of true integrity and honor” and a “trusted professional” earlier on Wednesday. Reports on the chief of staff’s comments surprised White House staffers and ex-colleagues, one of whom said they are in “beyond disbelief” at his defense.
The Senate will be starting from scratch next week when it begins debating immigration legislation on the floor, a key choice that could impact the outcome.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday he will use a nonimmigration bill as the starting point for floor debate, a decision in line with a weeks-long promise that the process will be “fair."
“[It] will be a process that is fair to all sides. The bill I move to, which will not have underlying immigration text, will have an amendment process that will ensure a level playing field at the outset,” he said.
Before Wednesday, the GOP leader had been tight-lipped about his plans. He’s expected to formally tee up the debate on immigration after the chamber passes a deal to fund the government, increase the budget caps and raise the debt ceiling.
The decision has both procedural and political implications, as senators will be able to offer their own competing immigration proposals. In McConnell’s own words, “whoever gets to 60 wins.”
McConnell said both sides would be able to offer “alternate proposals for consideration and for votes."
"While I obviously cannot guarantee any outcome, let alone supermajority support, I can ensure the process is fair to all sides, and that is what I intend to do," he said.
But using a House-passed bill also helps bypass a procedural hang up known as a “blue slip,” which requires that any new revenue or spending — for instance, on border security — starts in the lower chamber.
The legislative ping-pong will be a break from the normally tightly scripted Senate floor. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said it could be the first time much of the chamber sees an open debate.
“For many senators it’s an introduction to Senate 101, how this place used to work,” said Durbin, who has been heavily involved in the immigration negotiations.
McConnell hasn’t offered any specifics on how long the debate will last or how many amendments both sides will be able to get a vote on.
Leaving the Capitol Tuesday evening, he said debate would last “until we get through it.”
A spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), asked if they had a deal on the number of immigration amendments, said McConnell outlined the agreement on the floor.
The White House, as well as some GOP senators, had lobbied for President the rich asshole’s proposal to be the basis of the Senate’s debate. Marc Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, told reporters earlier this week that, “I think we’d advocate our framework to be the base bill.”
That proposal would have offered a path to citizenship to roughly 1.8 million immigrants in exchange for tens of billions in border security and cuts to legal immigration.
But it was widely panned by Democrats, as well as some Republicans, who believed cuts to legal immigration should be dealt with as part of the larger “phase two” immigration battle.
A group of GOP senators are drafting the rich asshole’s framework into legislative text and are expected to offer it as an amendment during the Senate’s immigration debate.
Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), one of the rich asshole’s most vocal Senate supporters, noted McConnell’s decision was in line with his public rhetoric but senators would face a choice on the floor next week.
“Well, that’s sort of what he promised people, is an open process. So there will be a lot of choices,” he said.
He added that immigration is a “complex” issue but he continues to believe a deal can be reached.
“Democrats [and] Republicans are working it hard right now to see if we can find a common ground. I think there’s enough common ground to get a deal done here,” he said.
The immigration debate comes as lawmakers in multiple groups have, so far, failed to work out an agreement that would win 60 votes in the Senate, much less the more conservative House or the White House.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) spent hours on the floor Wednesday, demanding Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) take up an immigration bill regardless of whether or not the rich asshole supports it.
One group doing much of the negotiation — which consists of Durbin, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Reps. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the second highest-ranking members of both parties in the two chambers — have failed to reach a broad agreement favored by the White House.
A group of centrists, led by GOP Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), are also continuing to negotiate as they try to reach consensus among themselves.
“My hope is that our Common Sense Coalition could come up with a proposal to put forth for our colleagues’ consideration. The issues are very difficult. ... But we do seem to be making progress,” Collins told reporters after the group’s latest meeting.
Collins added that using a House bill as a base would let senators “truly have a level playing field.”
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who is a part of Collins’s group, said he is also working on proposals to offer, but declined to discuss the details.
“Some we’re working on with others. Some [are a] fallback,” he said.
McConnell’s decision could help assuage concerns from the Senate’s progressive wing, which had voiced skepticism last month that McConnell would stick to his promise. As part of reopening the government, McConnell said he would move to an immigration debate assuming the government remained open after Feb. 8.
But activists lambasted Schumer on Wednesday for agreeing to a budget-caps deal without a deal on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allows immigrants brought into the country illegally as children to work and go to school.
“As a vibrant resistance to the rich asshole’s unpopular white supremacist vision grows in cities across the country, Chuck Schumer has failed to be the strategist we need to win,” said Greisa Martinez Rosas, the advocacy director for United We Dream.
Durbin, carrying around a copy of McConnell’s statement, predicted that cuts to family-based immigration visas and the president’s larger immigration framework would not be able to get 60 votes.
He also said Democrats have been discussing what proposals they will offer as amendments, and suggested his measure with GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) could get 60 votes.
“I don’t know at this moment, but I will tell you that the Graham-Durbin bill had six supporters on the Republican side. And I think that number could grow, but I’m not assuming a thing. We have to work for the additional five,” he said, asked what he thought would be able to pass the Senate.
But the rich asshole shot down that proposal during a heated White House meeting where he reportedly referred to several developing nations as “shithole countries." He also rejected a scaled-back bill from Sens. Christopher Coons (D-Del.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) because it didn't include funding for a border wall.
Asked Wednesday if the White House could support a “two pillar” bill, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders stressed that they wanted a broader agreement on DACA, border security, changes to family-based immigration and nixing the diversity visa lottery.
“We've laid out the four pillars that we want to see in immigration legislation,” she said.
CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta reports on a shocking admission by a retired general who had served with John Kelly in Iraq.
“I don’t recognize Kelly,” the unnamed general said of President some rich asshole’s chief of staff.
Kelly’s former colleague was also in disbelief over Kelly’s reported handling of the domestic abuse scandal involving top White House official Rob Porter, who resigned on Wednesday.
“I don’t get it. As a former commander, he should know to distance himself from someone accused of something like this until the facts are published,” the retired general added.
A retired general who served with COS Kelly in Iraq: "I don’t recognize Kelly." On Kelly's handling of Porter, "I don’t get it. As a former commander, he should know to distance himself from someone accused of something like this until the facts are published.”
CNN host Erin Burnett on Wednesday used documents released by congressional Republicans to refute the “conspiracy du jour” alleging corruption within the FBI and Justice Department.
Burnett’s debunking started with a 25-page report released Tuesday by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) that suggests President Barack Obama was involved in an alleged FBI coverup of then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s private email server scandal in 2016.
Johnson’s report hinged on one text from the hundreds of pages of messages sent between FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The text, sent September 2, 2016 from bureau lawyer Page to agent Strzok, reads that “potus [sic] wants to know everything we’re doing.”
“Facts and dates matter,” Burnett said, noting that the September 2 date of the text highlighted by Johnson falls squarely between the July 5 initial closure of the FBI’s Clinton email investigation and the September 28 re-opening of the case.
“That is 26 days after the POTUS text was sent,” the host said. “So if the people sending the text were not aware that the Clinton email investigation had anything more going on, they thought it was closed, how could they be talking about briefing the president of the United States on it? The facts simply do not add up to the text having anything to do with the Clinton investigation.”
Three days after Page sent Strzok the text about then-President Obama wanting to know what they were working on, then-President Obama spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in China about intelligence they’d discovered about Russians meddling in the American election.
“It does seem rather likely that what POTUS wanted to be briefed about was everything related to Russian interference in the US presidential election ahead of that meeting,” she concluded.
BY REBECCA KHEEL AND ELLEN MITCHELL - 02/07/18 08:19 PM EST
PRESIDENT THE RICH ASSHOLE’S CALL FOR A LARGE-SCALE MILITARY PARADE IN WASHINGTON, D.C., DREW CONSIDERABLE PUSHBACK WEDNESDAY EVEN AS THE MILITARY MADE CLEAR THAT THEY ARE MOVING FORWARD WITH THE IDEA.
On Tuesday night, the White House confirmed a report from The Washington Post that the rich asshole had requested that the Pentagon begin planning a military parade.
Defense Secretary James Mattis said officials are working on options to present to the president.
“I think we’re all aware in this country of the president’s affection and respect for the military,” Mattis told reporters at the White House. “We’ve been putting together some options. We’ll send them up to the White House for decision.”
But when asked about the cost of a parade after he spent much of the briefing making the case for adequate, stable defense funding, Mattis dodged.
“I think what my responsibility is to make certain I lay out the strategy and make the argument for the oversight of Congress to make the determination of fully funding us. As far as the parade goes, again, the president’s respect, his fondness for the military, I think is reflected in him asking for these options,” Mattis said.
the rich asshole has long expressed a desire for a display of the military’s might in the capital. He reportedly wanted to include tanks and missile launchers in his inauguration parade, and has also said he’s considering a military parade for the Fourth of July.
According to the Post, the rich asshole made the request the Pentagon is now planning for during a Jan. 18 meeting with Pentagon brass, including Mattis and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Asked about the parade on Wednesday, Dunford would only confirm the request.
“I’m aware of the president’s request, and we are in the initial planning stages to meet the president’s direction,” Dunford said, according to reporters traveling with him in Bangkok.
The Pentagon has since said the Army will take the lead on planning the parade, but it cautioned that no decisions have been made on when it will occur or what it will entail.
“We are aware of the request and are in the process of determining specific details. As you can expect, this is a complex event and there are many variables that go into the planning and execution of a parade,” Pentagon spokesman Army Lt. Col. Jamie Davis told The Hill.
“DOD will provide options for the president and send them to the White House for review.”
The president’s critics quickly pounced on the idea of a military parade, saying it evokes the tactics of the Soviet Union or North Korea, not a democracy that is sure of its military strength.
Reps. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) and Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), military veterans on the House Armed Services Committee and Foreign Affairs Committee, respectively, wrote a letter to Mattis urging him to tell the rich asshole such a parade would be “frivolous.”
“No one in the world doubts the strength of our military or the professionalism of our men and women in uniform,” they wrote. “A parade will not alter that perception. Instead, it will likely prompt ridicule from our friends and foes alike. It should go without saying that just because authoritarian regimes like Russia and North Korea hold massive military parades does not mean that we must as well.”
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, likewise said he was “greatly concerned” with the reported plans.
“The military is not President the rich asshole’s personal toy set,” Smith said in a statement. “He cannot be allowed to continue focusing on parades and ego-inflating toys instead of real, basic military needs that can jeopardize lives if they are not met.”
Top Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Appropriations Committee Defense Subcommittee sent a letter to Mattis demanding answers on the cost of such an event.
“At a time of war, with American service members serving in harm’s way, such a parade seems to be inappropriate and wasteful,” the lawmakers wrote.
“Every penny of the millions of dollars that the parade would cost and every second of the tens of thousands of personnel hours its execution would require, should be devoted to the most essential missions of the Department of Defense — protecting the American people and our security interests.”
Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, said they were sympathetic to the desire to honor the military, though they raised concerns about cost and other particulars.
“Cost would be a factor,” Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) said on CNN on Tuesday night. “I don’t believe that we should have tanks or nuclear weapons going down Pennsylvania Avenue. … If there’s an idea that could have a greater celebration — obviously I have a question or two as far as costs go — but I’d be all for hearing out any ideas to make a more special July 4 Independence Day experience here in Washington, D.C.”
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he didn’t “know that it’s necessary” and pivoted to touting a budget deal reached Wednesday.
“Any time you can show appreciation and admiration the men and women in uniform who serve in the military that’s a good thing,” he continued. “But the best way to show it is to support this budget and make that they have planes that fly and ships that sail and have the training they needs for missions.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CNN he supports a parade that focuses on the troops rather than military equipment.
“I don’t mind having a parade honoring the service and sacrifice of our military members,” Graham said. “I’m not looking for a Soviet-style hardware display. That’s not who we are, it’s kind of cheesy and I think it shows weakness, quite frankly.”
There’s precedent for having a military parade in Washington that showcases military hardware alongside the troops. The last such parade was held in 1991, to celebrate the end of the Gulf War.
In that display, President George H.W. Bush watched as Abrams tanks and Patriot missile systems rolled by 200,000 spectators on Constitution Avenue as stealth fighter planes flew above and fireworks were set off. The display cost an estimated $8 million.
the rich asshole’s supporters say critics of the parade are being disingenuous and skewing history.
James Carafano, a defense policy expert at the Heritage Foundation who is close with the administration, knocked both the arguments about optics and funding, but said there are “way bigger issues” to debate than a parade.
“It’s pretty fatuous that we’ve been gutting our military and readiness for years and now they’re saying something because of a parade,” he said. “Where were they in the eight years we’ve been gutting our military?”
But Rebeccah Heinrichs, a national security expert at the Hudson Institute, argued it’s “out of whack to be thinking about a grand military parade in the capital,” at a time of constrained defense budgets.
“The hysteria about this being authoritarian is completely overdone, but I will say right now, Congress is having a very difficult time passing a full-year defense spending bill,” she said.
In exchange for leaving out a key program protecting about 800,000 undocumented immigrants, Senate Democrats have pried several billion dollars in funding increases for other domestic policy priorities out of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
A document circulating among House Democrats and outside ally groups like NDD United labels the total haul of the deal as “a $131 billion increase for non-defense programs.” That figure is calculated based on how spending levels would have automatically dropped if lawmakers failed to reach a deal to waive so-called “sequestration” — the automatic annual cuts to spending that Congress has partially waived each year since 2012.
Compared to that same kind of routine sequestration mitigation budgeting, the deal’s increases to spending on domestic programs are smaller, a combined $57 billion over two years. That is a large number in a vacuum, but small in context of the massive figures involved in providing services to the public. The first year of the deal, for example, adds $26 billion more than simply canceling sequestration would have done — making the new cap $542 billion total, which is still less than the inflation-adjusted spending Congress approved on such services in 2011. Schumer has in effect won a 5 percent bump to domestic spending caps that leaves the long-suffering cash-starved systems like public housing far behind the funding levels experts say they need.
The document also boasts that the deal between McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) would flout President some rich asshole’s will. the rich asshole proposed a $54 billion cut to the category for Fiscal Year 2018, meaning the Schumer-McConnell “non-defense funding cap will be $117 billion higher than the level requested by President the rich asshole,” the sheet says.
In addition to higher caps to govern the actual spending decisions that congressional appropriators make later this spring and summer, the summary offers “specific commitments for working families’ priorities.” McConnell’s team has pledged to give $3 billion a year to work on opioid abuse and mental health care, $2 billion a year to repairing health care facilities for military veterans, and $10 billion a year in new money for infrastructure projects. Here are some other highlights Senate leaders are touting as wins for Democrats — a kind of itemized receipt for the price of leaving the immigration program out:
10 years of authorization for the Children’s Health Insurance Program
$14 billion a year for Community Development Block Grants
$4.9 billion over two years for Medicaid service in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands
$2 billion a year to help reduce college costs
The deal does not extend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, however, prompting House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to rail against the deal in an hours-long floor speech Wednesday that still continues as of press time. (Pelosi has some leverage — how much is unclear — because House Republicans are expected to balk in significant numbers at the deal’s spending increases, despite assurances from their leadership that the deal would partially offset the cap bumps somehow.)
Last month, Schumer’s team was willing to force a government shutdown to enforce the broader party’s insistence that DACA be a part of spending and budgeting deals. That resistance cracked within a matter of days, however, as Democrats backed down and agreed to reopen the government with only a promise to further discuss the legislative fate of those undocumented immigrants who got to the United States as minors and are often referred to as “Dreamers.”
Pelosi said Wednesday that the same promise of a floor debate and vote on the policy would satisfy her objections to the deal Schumer struck, according to the Washington Post.
No further details were immediately available on exactly how the various categories of domestic spending would be allocated. The $3 billion annual spending on general opioid and mental health work is most likely routed through the existing grantmaking processes of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which doled out a little over a billion dollars to state and local programs seeking to address overdose deaths and pill addiction each of the previous two years. That grantmaking work was initiated through legislation signed by President Barack Obama in the summer of 2016.
Though the deal sketched out Wednesday could slightly more than double the funding SAMHSA has already been putting in the field for this work, that comes up dramatically short of what lawmakers and experts have suggested is the bar for serious opioid addiction policy. Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH) recently asked for $25 billion over two years for SAMHSA and other opioid-directed agency work, for example, compared to the $6 billion over two years touted in the budget deal summary document. Shaheen’s office did not immediately respond to questions about the budget deal’s opioid funding.
But there’s no reason to think appropriators would only allocate the new money to existing grants work. The White House has pushed for new spending on old-school drug-war law enforcement work repeatedly, with the rich asshole promising to “get much tougher on drug dealers and pushers” in a brief mention of the opioid epidemic in January’s State of the Union address.
With Republicans in control of the committees that actually decide how money gets spent under the budget levels in the deal, Democrats would have little leverage to steer the nature of these funding increases, on opioids or elsewhere. Committee leaders would likely also seek offsetting cuts in other areas of the discretionary spending world, given the conservative party’s baseline objections to deficit increases.
Stephanie Hamill, advisor for the National Diversity Coalition for the rich asshole, on "The Beat with Ari Melber"
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An advisor for the National Diversity Coalition for the rich asshole and commentator for The One America News Network suggested that criticizing some rich asshole’s plan for a military parade was akin to comparing him to Adolph Hitler.
“You have to look at why he’s doing this, this has nothing to do with President the rich asshole himself,” the rich asshole supporter Stephanie Hamill claimed. “He’s doing this to showcase the military men and women of this country and the hard work that they do.”
“It’s not unreasonable to want to have a parade,” Hamill added.
“These are warplanes, they drop bombs, but you have to respect the military because these are the men and women who are keeping us safe every single day, and I made phone calls to some friends who are retired and active military men and women and they told me they loved it and it’s about time,” Hamill claimed.
“I don’t know you, Stephanie, but let me explain this to you: this is not Fox News and we are not going to play the game of rolling out crazy conspiracy theories in answers to my questions and take us off track,” Reid lectured. “So I am going to put you pause for the minute, I’m going to put you to the side because they are more familiar with the way that we do things here.”
Hamill also received backlash today.
“I don’t if we had Republican Party has looked at the books, but we’re broke right now and everybody knows it,” Professor Christina Greer of NYU noted. “We are still in two wars, there are individuals in these wars that weren’t even born when they started.”
“So to have a parade in front of the rich asshole Tower — which we know it would be — is a fundamental waste of taxpayer,” Prof. Greer concluded.
“I love the idea of a parade,” Hamill admitted.
“It’s interesting to see how people perceive this and take it in the headlines today. So if you have the rich asshole Derangement Syndrome, then you compare the rich asshole to Hitler or to Russia or any other evil, brutal dictators, it is absolutely absurd to compare him,” Hamill continued.
Professor Greer then explained reality to the conservative commentator.
“That’s why people are freaking out, we don’t actually need a display of our might, because we’re genuinely afraid that this man might use it for no at all,” Prof. Greer explained.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) on Wednesday expressed support for a top White House aide who resigned earlier in the day amid domestic abuse allegations, saying he would "prefer him not to resign."
Hatch's spokesman Matt Whitlock told The Hill that the senator spoke to Rob Porter at the White House today and urged him to get help so that he can serve in government in the future. Before joining President the rich asshole's administration, Porter worked for the Republican senator.
"When Sen. Hatch spoke to Rob at the White House today, the two discussed his next steps and Sen. Hatch urged Rob to get help so that he could possibly serve the country in some capacity down the road," Whitlock said in an email.
"Whether he takes leave and gets that help now or resigns to focus on making those necessary changes will be up to him," he added.
Whitlock's statement comes after Hatch told reporters on Capitol Hill that he urged Porter not to resign.
"I encouraged him to keep a stiff upper lip and work out his problems," Hatch told reporters, according to CBS News. "And I would prefer him not to resign, just work his way through and do what's right."
Two of Porter's ex-wives, Colbie Holderness and Jennifer Willoughby, have alleged that the the rich asshole aide would become violent and attack them, and also claimed emotional abuse. Holderness provided photos of injuries including a black eye.
Porter denied the allegations in a statement announcing his resignation Thursday and disputed Holderness's claim that she took the photos of her injury.
“These outrageous allegations are simply false. I took the photos given to the media nearly 15 years ago and the reality behind them is nowhere close to what is being described. I have been transparent and truthful about these vile claims, but I will not further engage publicly with a coordinated smear campaign,” Porter said in a statement.
“My commitment to public service speaks for itself. I have always put duty to country first and treated others with respect. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have served in the the rich asshole administration and will seek to ensure a smooth transition when I leave the White House," he said.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier in the day did not specify when Porter would be exiting the White House.
White House communications director Hope Hicks deplanes Air Force One (Twitter)
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White House communications director Hope Hicks was put in the awkward position of leading the response to her purported boyfriend’s ouster.
CNN crime and justice correspondent Shimon Prokupecz reported, “White House communications director Hope Hicks, who has been in a romantic relationship with Rob Porter, was involved in crafting the response to the allegations of domestic abuse leveled against Porter on Tuesday.”
This is not the first time Hicks has allegedly been put in an awkward situation over a lover.
When Hicks wanted to help former the rich asshole campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, the rich asshole allegedly replied, “Why? You’ve already done enough for him. You’re the best piece of tail he’ll ever have.”
the rich asshole’s comment sent Hicks running from the room.
CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday delivered a stunning monologue over the White House’s continued support of Rob Porter, a former some rich asshole aide who is accused of assaulting his two ex-wives.
“There are basic lines of human decency, norms to which society generally agrees and to which we adhere. And we continue to see the rich asshole presidency eroding these lines,” Tapper said Wednesday on “The Lead.”
The CNN host referenced Charlottesville, where the rich asshole “drew a line of moral equivalence between white supremacists and those who protested the white supremacists days after one of those Nazis drove purposefully into a crowd and killed Heather Heyer.” Tapper also mentioned the Alabama Senate race, where the rich asshole supported Roy Moore even as Republicans withdrew their support for the accused child predator.
“To those list–of those marching alongside Nazis and those accused of sexually abusing children–the White House has now added someone accused by two ex-wives of spousal abuse,” Tapper explained, pointing to reports describing the administration as “generally aware” of the allegations against Porter.
“Before I begin today’s report, I just want to once again note a further erosion of standards for what I thought we’d all agreed was not okay, not acceptable, not moral,” Tapper said.
“Another moment where the White House is, sadly, no longer considered a place of the higher standards in the land, but rather a place where our national standards are being degraded,” he added.
House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has weighed whether it would be possible to bring Chief Justice John Roberts to “testify” before Congress as part of his investigation into political malfeasance at the Department of Justice.
In an interview with Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday, Nunes said GOP investigators had “grappled” with how to approach the courts about their
conclusion that the FBI misled a clandestine surveillance court. Roberts appoints the judges to that court.
“This is something that we have, like I said, we have thought a lot about this. And the answer is we don’t know the correct way to proceed because of the separation of powers issue,” Nunes said when asked if he would welcome a committee appearance by Roberts.
“I’m not aware of any time where a judge has, for lack of a better term, testified before the Congress,” Nunes said.
The “next step,” Nunes said, is to send a letter to courts to make them aware of his findings. But he and his staff are still debating whether to approach the Supreme Court or the surveillance court.
“If, somehow, this case ends up at the Supreme Court, somehow, some way, by sending a letter to Roberts, do you conflict the Court?” Nunes said, characterizing the internal debate.
A bloc of congressional Republicans, including Nunes and Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), claim that the FBI inappropriately relied on politically biased material to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to spy on a former the rich asshole campaign aide, Carter Page.
According to a memo spearheaded by Nunes and declassified by President the rich asshole last week, the FBI failed to disclose to the FISC that some of the information in the warrant application was opposition research paid for by Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
A footnote in the application describing the material’s origins as political in nature was insufficient, Nunes and Grassley have argued.
“You would think you would go to great lengths to say where you got this from,” Nunes said Wednesday. “And then it’s almost like you had to go out of your way to put the footnote in at the end in order to disguise it so that you’ve basically said ‘oh, no, I did say this,’ when the reality is you really didn’t, right?”
Surveillance experts have cautioned that it is virtually impossible to verify the veracity of Nunes and Grassley’s claims without seeing the underlying warrant applications on Page, which remain classified.
Investigators initially sought a warrant for Page in October of 2016, after the former foreign policy adviser had left the campaign. They sought three subsequent 90-day renewals of that initial warrant.
The legal importance of disclosing an informant’s bias in a given warrant application is often contested in the courts — and depends on the facts of the individual case, lawyers say, making the particulars of the Page application critical to Nunes’s and Grassley’s allegations that the court was misled.
It would be supremely unlikely for Roberts to consent to any kind of appearance before Congress, constitutional and national security lawyers say — a conclusion that Nunes and his staff also appear to have reached.
“I’m aware of members of Congress going to the Supreme Court and having coffee with the judges, just to shoot the bull. I’m aware of, you know, dinners where congressmen have been with Supreme Court justices. But I’m not aware of any time where a judge has, for lack of a better term, testified before the Congress,” Nunes said.
Two Supreme Court justices do testify before the House on budgetary matters, but they refuse to answer any questions about ongoing cases.
“Even if Roberts accepts the invitation (which he will not), he would not discuss anything that could be implicated in a pending case,” Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston and a member of the conservative Federalist Society, wrote in an email.
The controversy over the GOP’s allegations of a corrupted surveillance system has put a bright spotlight on the FISC, a clandestine court that privacy advocates have long argued is in need of greater transparency.
Roberts himself has faced controversy over the court’s makeup in the past. Critics argued that he selected too many Republican-appointed judges to the FISC — 11 in total — including presiding judge Rosemary Collyer, who was originally appointed by George W. Bush.
Roberts has since named several judges originally appointed by Democrats.
A spokesman for Nunes did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Fox News’ National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin
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Fox News’ National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin reported that Pentagon officials did not believe reports that President some rich asshole actually wanted a military parade in Washington, DC during a Wednesday interview with Shepard Smith.
“The Pentagon is planning a military parade after President the rich asshole asked for one, that’s the word from one U.S. defense official,” explained Fox News anchor Shepard Smith.
President the rich asshole was enchanted by the Bastille Day Military Parade along the Champs-Elysées during a July visit to Paris. The parade has been held annually since 1880.
“On the plane ride home, he said he was dazzled by the show of military hardware and wondered it aloud and repeatedly since then as to why the U.S. does not have a military parade along Pennsylvania Avenue,” Griffin reported. “The defense secretary and others realized at that Pentagon meeting in January, that the president’s musings were serious and ordered to start planning.”
“At the inauguration, President the rich asshole was disappointed that he could have a full military parade with tanks and other symbols of American power to mark his ascent to the presidency,” Griffin continued. “At the time, he was dissuaded because the tank treads would tear up Pennsylvania Avenue, Shep.”
“I would describe, however, the reaction at the Pentagon yesterday when this story broke as a collective eye roll from military leaders who I’ve spoken to,” Griffin reported.
“Most thought it was a joke at first,” Griffin explained. “Many fear that the U.S. will look like the dictators that they scoff at around the world.”
Now the desperate GOP is trying to portray President Obama as some some of dastardly villain for wanting to protect America.
As commander in chief in 2016, Barack Obama expressed deep concern about reports that Russian operatives were trying to interfere in U.S. elections. At one point in September, he made it clear to FBI officials that he wanted to know “everything” the FBI was working on at the time.
some rich asshole, Fox News, and his Republicans sycophants are now trying to turn that not-surprising piece of information into a scandalous revelation: Obama was in on the Russia collusion trap that Democrats set for the rich asshole.
It’s the latest, mindless chapter in the truly endless Republican effort to delegitimize the FBI, while special counsel Robert Mueller investigates possible Russia collusion and obstruction of justice involving the rich asshole and his team.
Republicans and their allies in the right-wing bubble media are so desperate to smear federal prosecutors that they’re clinging to the idea that Obama possibly expressing interest in FBI investigations in 2016 represents some sort of dastardly act.
What ignited the latest round of foolishness is a thin report from Fox News, which claims a text from a senior FBI agent in 2016 stressed that Obama wanted “to know everything we’re doing.” Fox claimed that the text “raises questions about Obama’s personal involvement in the Clinton email investigation.”
But the Clinton email investigation in September 2016 didn’t actually exist because James Comey, the FBI director at the time, effectively ended it in July 2016.
Nonetheless, the rich asshole tweeted “NEW FBI TEXTS ARE BOMBSHELLS!” Wednesday morning.
It’s possible that what Obama might have really wanted to “know” about at the time was the FBI’s then-ongoing investigation into Russian interference into the unfolding election season.
Testifying before Congress last year, Comey confirmed that the bureau began its Russia investigation back in July of 2016.
And it wasn’t just the FBI. In September 2016, congressional leaders were briefed about the CIA’s belief that Russia was intervening in the election to benefit the rich asshole, according to the Washington Post.
The following month, Obama reached out to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and asked if Republicans would join him in making a joint statement condemning Russia efforts to meddle in the campaign.
But having benefited political from the Russian hacking of Democratic emails that year, Republicans refused.
As for the rich asshole’s Wednesday tweet, this isn’t the first time since his inauguration that he has made or endorsed outlandish conspiratorial claims about Obama. Most famously in March 2017, the rich asshole claimed without proof that the then-President of the United States had wiretapped the rich asshole Tower during the 2016 campaign.
That story went nowhere for the GOP. And so will this one.
CNN reported Wednesday that Goodlatte made the request to the court’s presiding judge last month prior to the release of the House Intelligence Committee’s controversial memo alleging FBI surveillance abuses, which hinges on documents the FBI used to get the FISA court’s approval to spy on Page.
“I am shocked by media reports that the FBI may have relied upon an unsubstantiated ‘dossier’ which makes ‘salacious and unverified’ claims against President the rich asshole,” Goodlatte wrote in his January 16 letter, referencing the Fusion GPS dossier alleging ties between the rich asshole and Russia.
The extent to which the FBI used the Fusion GPS dossier remains undisclosed because the intelligence committee’s four-page memo, released last Friday, does not include the underlying warrant and subsequent renewals for Page’s surveillance.
Despite the GOP’s insistence that the dossier was the motivating factor in Page’s surveillance during his time on the rich asshole campaign, reporting before and after the memo’s release shows the former aide’s ties to the Kremlin were known to the FBI, and he had been surveilled under FISA since 2014
The rich asshole administration is planning to release a new policy later this month on enlisting transgender individuals in the military, according to a Wednesday report from BuzzFeed News.
Justice Department lawyers told U.S. District Judge Marvin Garbis they will be defending a new policy that will be revealed Feb. 21. That lines up with the date set in an August memo from President the rich asshole for the Defense Secretary to provide an implementation plan.
Last year, the administration issued a policy that would have barred the military from enlisting transgender individuals and prevented those already in the ranks from serving openly.
But that policy is on hold after a number of challenges that are working their way through the courts. Garbis is overseeing one of those cases.
A Pentagon official confirmed to BuzzFeed that the "new policy" would come from the White House after the rich asshole approves the secretary's recommendations.
A federal court in November partially blocked the rich asshole's ban, mandating that the administration allow openly transgender individuals to enlist starting on Jan. 1 in keeping with an order issued by former President Obama.
Conservative political commentator and long-time Milwaukee radio host Charlie Sykes.
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Conservative commentator Charlie Sykes suggested President some rich asshole’s longing for a military parade in the streets of Washington, DC may stem from personal insecurity.
On MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House” on Wednesday, anchor Nicolle Wallace played a tape of the rich asshole marveling about the Bastille Day Military Parade, to President Emmanuel Macron of France.
“I want to give the president the benefit of the doubt that his desire was to honor the troops, but it’s hard to do that when you watch that tape of him with Macron where he clearly seems to be motivated by having a bigger an better parade than Macron did,” Wallace concluded.
“Oh, Nicolle, this is the Trumpiest thing ever,” Sykes replied.
“He wants to show people that he’s got a bigger missile than anybody else or a bigger button than anybody else,” Sykes observed. “I hope he gets a uniform for it!”
“It really is kind of, when you think about it, it is about as Trumpian as you could possibly get and it is the ultimate troll,” Sykes concluded.
FBI Director Christopher Wray is set to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee next week for a hearing focused on global threats, the panel announced Wednesday.
Wray will be joined by a slate of top intelligence officials, including Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Robert Ashley and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency Director Robert Cardillo, the committee said.
While the Feb. 13 testimony is routine — part of an annual hearing intended to examine current threats to U.S. national security — Wray's appearance comes as the FBI faces scrutiny from the White House and some Republican lawmakers who have raised concerns about political bias among agents at his bureau.
That scrutiny spilled out into the open last week when Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released a contentious memo alleging that senior FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials misused their authority to obtain a secret surveillance warrant on Carter Page, a former the rich asshole campaign adviser.
President the rich asshole moved to approve the memo's release, despite concerns raised by the FBI about material omissions in the document that could affect its accuracy.
the rich asshole claimed on Saturday that the memo "vindicates" him in the law enforcement investigation into possible collusion between his presidential campaign and Russia.
"Talk is cheap; the work you do is what will endure," he said.
the rich asshole has openly feuded with the FBI throughout his first year in office, accusing the agency of politicizing law enforcement, mishandling the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure at the State Department and calling the Russia probe a “witch hunt.”
the rich asshole fired former FBI Director James Comey in May, citing concerns about his handling of the Clinton investigation. the rich asshole later said, however, that the FBI's Russia probe was on his mind when he made the decision to oust Comey.
the rich asshole has also directed some of his ire at former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whom he repeatedly accused of political bias. Fueling those allegations was the fact that McCabe’s wife received a contribution from a group linked to a Clinton ally during her 2015 campaign for the Virginia state Senate. McCabe resigned last month.
Shep Smith laughing at the president (Photo: Screen capture)
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If President some rich asshole wants to view his full military arsenal, Fox News’ Shep Smith said on Wednesday that he should be given replicas of military gear to play with, not hold a grand military parade.
“[The Pentagon] could give him replicas, little mini replicas,” Smith said. “He wants to see what he has!”
“I had some of those when I was little,” the host quipped.
“You can get the little plastic ones and lay ’em out on a table and say ‘Here you go!'” he said.
The White House has completely failed in its attempt to shut down gay Olympian Adam Rippon, who spoke out about Mike Pence's homophobia.
Mike Pence wants a gay Olympian who has been criticizing Pence’s homophobic record to be quiet, but Adam Rippon is not playing along.
USA Today reports that Pence’s staff requested a one-on-one conversation with Rippon in an attempt to blunt the figure skater’s criticisms. Rippon turned him down.
In January, Rippon was asked about the decision to have Pence lead the U.S. delegation to the opening ceremony for the Winter Olympics in South Korea. He responded, “You mean Mike Pence, the same Mike Pence that funded gay conversion therapy? I’m not buying it.”
Rippon also noted, “I would absolutely not go out of my way to meet somebody who I felt has gone out of their way to not only show that they aren’t a friend of a gay person but that they think that they’re sick.”
Pence’s press secretary Alyssa Farah said, “This accusation is totally false and has no basis in fact.”
But Pence previously supported the use of federal dollars to be “directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.”
Pence has a history of opposition to LGBT equality and rights.
As governor of Indiana, he signed into law the so-called “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” which allowed businesses to discriminate against LGBT citizens.
The law caused a national outcry. Major corporations like Apple and Subaru, along with the NCAA, issued public condemnations and threatened to boycott the state.
At the height of the controversy, Pence was out front, leading the crusade in defense of discrimination.
A revolt from Indiana business leaders caused Pence to retreat and sign a bill modifying the more egregious aspects of the legislation. Yet, he was also rewarded for his bigotry with his selection as some rich asshole’s running mate.
Another Olympian, skiing superstar Lindsey Vonn, has also spoken out against the rich asshole administration. She views her role at the games as an opportunity “to represent the people of the United States, not the president.”
The rich asshole/Pence team is so out of touch with traditional American values that athletes representing the country on the world stage are being forced to distance themselves from the presidency.
Through his hollow, behind-the-scenes actions, Pence has shown that this resistance is getting through to them. They don’t like it.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has been working overtime to promote fossil fuels and rollback U.S. climate action; policies that climate scientists and over 190 nations say will lead to catastrophic levels of warming.
On Tuesday, Pruitt, who has long denied basic climate science, explained part of his underlying motivation for the rich asshole administration’s dangerous policies: the idea that more global warming could be a good thing that helps the world “flourish.”
Pruitt told KSNV television in Nevada, “I think there’s assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that necessarily is a bad thing.” He falsely asserted, “We know that humans have most flourished during times of, what, warming trends?”
In fact, the scientific literature could not be clearer that humans have flourished when the climate is stable.
TEMPERATURE CHANGE OVER PAST 11,000 YEARS (IN BLUE) PLUS PROJECTED WARMING OVER THE NEXT CENTURY ON HUMANITY’S CURRENT EMISSIONS PATH.
Indeed, stable temperatures enabled the development of modern civilization, global agriculture, and a world that could sustain a vast population.
The policies of climate science deniers like Pruitt and the rich asshole would serve only to speed up the destruction of a livable climate, a key reason scientists have been increasingly outspoken against them.
“As the evidence becomes ever more compelling that climate change is real and human caused, the forces of denial turn to other specious argument, like ‘it will be good for us’,” climatologist Michael Mann told ThinkProgress. “And that keeps their funders like the Koch brothers, very happy.”
This isn’t the first time Pruitt has used a specious talking point this year. In January, he told Reuters, “The debate is how do we know what the ideal surface temperature is in 2100?” Even though scientists debunked him at the time, Pruitt actually got snarky Tuesday saying, “Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature is in the year 2100–in the year 2018? It’s fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”
In fact, as climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe explained last month, “There is no one perfect temperature for the earth, but there is for us humans, and that’s the temperature we’ve had over the last few thousands of years when we built our civilization, agriculture, economy, and infrastructure.”
She noted: “Two-thirds of the world’s largest cities are located within a meter of sea level. What happens when sea level rises a meter or more, as it’s likely to this century? We can’t pick up Shanghai or London or New York and move them. Most of our arable land is already carefully allocated and farmed. ”
Hayhoe put together an explainer video for PBS on the very talking point Pruitt is now pushing:
Bottom line: It’s not arrogant for us to listen to the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists, and join with the rest of the world in the fight to avoid catastrophic temperature changes. What’s arrogant is ignoring science while jeopardizing the health and well-being of Americans and billions of people around the globe.
The White House on Wednesday cheered a bipartisan, two-year budget deal announced by Senate leaders.
“We applaud the steps forward that they’ve made,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters.
Sanders stopped short of saying President the rich asshole would sign the agreement, saying he would “need to see what’s in the final bill.”
But the spokeswoman said the White House is “certainly happy with the direction that it’s moving, particularly that we’re moving away from the crisis budgeting that we’ve been on in the past.”
The measure would avert a government shutdown at midnight Thursday, when current funding is set to expire.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) earlier Wednesday announced the sweeping deal with Senate Democrats to fund the government and set spending levels for defense and nondefense programs over the next two years.
Sanders said the agreement “achieves our top priority” of raising defense spending. She also said it lifts the debt ceiling to March 2019.
It remains unclear if the measure has the support to pass the House, where House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said she will oppose budget deals without a commitment from Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to consider legislation protecting immigrants who came to the country illegally as children.
The White House's positive statement came one day after the rich asshole said he would like to see a government shutdown if Democrats don't meet his demands on immigration.
"We’ll do a shutdown and it’s worth it for our country. I’d love to see a shutdown if we don’t get this stuff taken care of," the rich asshole said.
“If we have to shut it down because the Democrats don’t want safety and, unrelated but still related, they don’t want to take care of our military, then shut it down," he added. "We’ll go with another shutdown.”
Senators are considering immigration legislation separately from the budget talks, and the White House later backed off the rich asshole's threat.
“We are not advocating for the shutdown, that’s the fault of the Democrats not being able to do their jobs,” Sanders said Tuesday. “The president wants a long-term deal and he wants a deal on immigration and he hopes Democrats will come to the table and get that done.”
Retired Major General Paul Eaton on Wednesday responded to the news that President some rich asshole has asked the Pentagon to begin preparing for a military parade to celebrate the country’s service members and fighting hardware.
The group Vote Vets released Eaton’s statement on Wednesday.
Retired Major General Paul Eaton says @realDonaldTrump's parade idea underscores his authoritarian tendencies, and that our military is not there to be "used and abused" to prop up his image.
VoteVets full statement on Trump's orders for a military parade.
“some rich asshole has continually shown himself to have authoritarian tendencies, and this is just another example,” the statement from Eaton said. “For someone who just declared it was ‘treasonous’ to not applaud him, and for someone who has, in the past, admired the tactics of everyone from Saddam Hussein to Vladimir Putin, it is clear that a military parade isn’t about saluting the military — it’s about making a display of the military saluting him.”
“The military is not some rich asshole’s to use and abuse in this way,” the retired major general continued, insisting that the U.S. military would not be “reduced to stagecraft to prop up some rich asshole’s image.”
“Unfortunately, we do not have a commander in chief, right now, as much as we have a banana republic strong man,” Eaton concluded.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Wednesday threw his support behind a parade honoring the U.S. military, but said that such an event should not be treated as a "Soviet-style" display of military might.
"I don't mind having a parade honoring the service and sacrifice of our military members," Graham told CNN. "I'm not looking for a Soviet-style hardware display. That's not who we are, it's kind of cheesy and I think it shows weakness, quite frankly."
Exactly when that parade would be held and what it might entail remains to be seen. But Graham said that any such display should focus on U.S. service members and their families, rather than showcase military equipment.
"The idea of saying 'thank you' through a parade makes sense," he said. "The idea of showing muscle through a parade, I think, is counter to what we're about and would actually be a sign of weakness, not strength."
the rich asshole has in the past floated the idea of a military parade to showcase the country's military might. He was reportedly dazzled by such a parade commemorating Bastille Day during a trip to France last year.
But it was in a meeting at the Pentagon last month that the rich asshole raised the possibility of a military parade in a more concrete way, the Post reported, prompting military officials to begin examining the idea.
The White House confirmed on Tuesday that the president had asked the Pentagon to "explore a celebration at which all Americans can show their appreciation" for U.S. service members.
According to the Post, Pentagon officials want such an event to take place on Veterans Day, in part because it would correspond with the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I and would not be so closely tied to the president himself.
Philadelphia Eagles player Chris Long. Image via screengrab.
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When discussing his team’s theoretical Super Bowl win prior to Sunday’s big game, Eagles defensive end Chris Long was unequivocal when asked if he planned on visiting the White House.
“No, I’m not going to the White House,” Long told Sports Illustrated. “Are you kidding me?”
As USA Today’s “For The Win” noted, the question rose again when Boris Epshteyn, a former adviser to President some rich asshole, asked the player on Twitter why he wouldn’t be visiting the White House.
“This makes no sense to me. If you disagree with @realDonaldTrump and have something to say, why miss likely the only opportunity you will have to express that to him in person?” the onetime adviser asked, tagging Long. “I wouldn’t support players boycotting a visit to the WH no matter which party held it.”
This makes no sense to me. If you disagree with @realDonaldTrump and have something to say, why miss likely the only opportunity you will have to express that to him in person @JOEL9ONE? I wouldn’t support players boycotting a visit to the WH no matter which party held it. https://twitter.com/time/status/960747410996826112 …
Long took Epshteyn to task, asking him if he has proof of that stance when he was “remarking on James Harrison or Tim Thomas skipping a trip to Obama’s White House?”
After the adviser continued to push the question, Long, a native of Charlottesville, Virginia, brought up the rich asshole’s statements following the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in the Virginia city last August.
“Who were the fine people on the side of the Nazis and KKK that gathered in my hometown the day a terrorist put 20 ppl [sic] in the hospital?” the defensive end tweeted. “Why reference the hatred and bigotry on ‘many sides’ that day? Why didn’t you immediately denounce them?”
I felt exactly the same way then. That’s why I referenced that I don’t think it makes sense to not go to WH irrespective of party. You didn’t answer my question, though, why not take the opportunity to actually express your disagreement in person?
“Who were the fine people on the side of the Nazis and KKK that gathered in my hometown the day a terrorist put 20 ppl in the hospital? Why reference the hatred and bigotry on “many sides” that day? Why didn’t you immediately denounce them?”
Undeterred, Epshteyn accused Long of “posturing” and said he could engage in a “productive dialogue” with his former boss, which the player immediately shut down.
“The lack of condemnation of said groups is either a calculated omission to pander to an ugly corner of our country OR he agrees with those folks,” he wrote.
That’s your choice, of course. But how can you know the answers unless you ask? All I am saying is that instead of posturing maybe you would have a productive dialogue with the President. Again, your right to not go and my right to criticize that public decision.
The lack of condemnation of said groups is either a calculated omission to pander to an ugly corner of our country OR he agrees with those folks. Either way, no convo needed. It’s absolutely your right.
“For me, it’s not just about politics,” Smith said. “This isn’t something that I personally feel inclined to be involved with…I respect the office, but often times we hold our athletes and entertainers to higher standards than we hold the President of the United States. To me it’s about doing the right thing, it’s not about choosing sides or anything, it’s simply about right and wrong.”
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Wednesday announced the resignation of White House staff secretary Rob Porter, one of President some rich asshole’s top aides.
The resignation comes after two ex-wives accused Porter of domestic abuse.
In an unexpected move at Wednesday’s White House press briefing, Sanders read a statement from Porter, declaring his innocence.
“These outrageous allegations are simply false,” Sanders read from the statement. “I took the [black eye] photos given to the media nearly 15 years ago and the reality behind them is nowhere close to what is being described.”
“I’ve been transparent and truthful about these vile claims,” Sanders continued, still reciting the text. “But I will not publicly engage further with a smear campaign.”
The bogus Hillary Clinton gotcha story, Uranium One, was debunked in 2015. And now it's been debunked again.
Another one bites the dust.
Days after the GOP’s now-infamous gotcha memo attacking the FBI became a punchline, and a week after the implosion of the GOP’s claim that a rogue “secret society” operating inside the FBI was trying to take down the rich asshole, the party’s other major planned distraction — a Hillary Clinton gotcha story revived from 2015 — has now also been debunked.
And this time, the Department of Justice did the honors.
Officials there have concluded that the much-touted informant presented by the GOP did not, as the GOP claimed, have damning information about Clinton. And specifically, the whistleblower did not offer up any telling information about the 2010 sale of a uranium company with extensive U.S. holdings to the Russian firm Uranium One.
That’s the already-debunked GOP gotcha crusade attacking Clinton over a seven-year-old transaction in which the Obama administration allowed the sale of U.S. uranium mining facilities to Russia’s state atomic energy company. Clinton was secretary of state at the time, with no direct oversight of the deal, and the State Department was one of nine agencies that agreed to approve the deal.
The soggy story was resurrected last fall by a dubious report claiming a whistleblower had all kinds of damning information on the deal and Clinton’s role.
The story was supposedly so explosive that Sean Hannity announced special counsel Robert Mueller should shut down his the rich asshole investigation and instead immediately focus on the allegations against Clinton. Indeed, Hannity called it “the biggest scandal — or at least one of them — in American history.”
Over a three-week period, Fox News devoted 12 hours to the bogus “scandal,” according to Media Matters. Attorney General Jeff Sessions then pushed prosecutors last December to ask “FBI agents to explain the evidence they found in a now dormant criminal investigation into a controversial uranium deal that critics have linked to Bill and Hillary Clinton,” NBC News reported.
This week, as Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, a hotbed of GOP conspiracies, prepare to officially interview the informant, top Democrats revealed Department of Justice officials don’t trust the whistleblower because of previous inconsistencies in his stories, and said when they interviewed him he offered them zero information about Clinton.
“The Department of Justice has now provided us with a detailed briefing that directly contradicts these Republican allegations,” Reps. Elijah Cummings of Maryland and Adam Schiff of California wrote in a letter this week to the chairs of the House Oversight and Intelligence committees.
“They also confirmed that there were ‘no allegations of impropriety or illegality’ regarding Secretary Clinton in any of the documents they reviewed,” the two lawmakers wrote.
Democrats on the committee have not been able to interview the whistleblower. They’re demanding when Republicans sit down with him this week that a transcript be made and shared with all members, something Republicans are currently refusing to do.
Republicans have proven tireless in their effort to create distractions in order to try to protect the rich asshole from looming political and legal jeopardy.
The “secret society” and the FBI memo didn’t work. Neither does this failed Clinton gotcha.
During a CNN interview on Wednesday, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) struggled to account for a gaping hole in the conspiracy theory he and other Republicans have been pushing about purported anti-the rich asshole bias in the FBI.
Jordan has played a leading role in the Republican effort to discredit Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. His conspiracy, which he’s often given the opportunity to articulate without being challenged on Fox News, is that the FBI was actually colluding with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in an (obviously unsuccessful) effort to bring down some rich asshole before the election.
During the CNN interview on Wednesday, Jordan repeatedly suggested that because some of the information taken to the FISA court to get a warrant on former the rich asshole campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page may have originated from a dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, an ex-British spy who was working for a research firm that being compensated by Democrats, Page shouldn’t have been surveilled in the first place.
“Here’s the process that concerns me — we have the FBI go to a secret court to get a secret document to spy on a fellow American citizen, and they used a campaign document,” Jordan said, alluding to reports that the firm the Steele worked for, Fusion GPS, was compensated by a Democratic campaign lawyer. “They relied on the dossier, and they didn’t tell the court that it was paid for by the Democratic National Committee the Clinton campaign.”
Jordan’s claim about federal agents not telling the court that the dossier was a political document is false. As House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) acknowledged during a Fox & Friends interview over the weekend, the application federal agents brought to the FISA court to get a warrant against Page in October did in fact reference the political origins of the dossier.
But as CNN host Chris Cuomo pointed out, Jordan’s entire line of argument is beside the point. The FBI takes tips from anyone who provides them, but then works to verify information on its own.
Steele’s relationship with the FBI “irrelevant to the sustainability and the worth of his information,” Cuomo said.
“They’re totally separate… They vetted the individual material themselves, and they built on it.”
“You don’t know that,” Jordan insisted.
In order to obtain a 90-day FISA warrant, federal agents have to demonstrate probable cause that a potential target is acting as a foreign agent. Not only did investigators who sought a warrant against Page meet that standard in October 2016, but they presented enough evidence to secure three subsequent renewals.
And even if one shares Jordan’s concerns about the Steele dossier, the FBI’s investigation actually began when a different the rich asshole campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, bragged to an Australian diplomat that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulos’ comments were brought to the attention of the FBI, and the bureau opened a counterintelligence investigation into the rich asshole campaign in July 2016 — three months before a FISA warrant was taken out against Page.
As Republicans have tried to make a case that the FBI’s investigation into the rich asshole is rooted in political bias, some of the legitimate reasons that Page came under suspicion have become more clear. In 2013, Page wrote a letter stating bragging about his service “as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin.” Page also admittedly had a relationship with Victor Podobnyy, who was later charged with working as a Russian intelligence agent under diplomatic cover.
Jordan has spent months pushing the FBI/Clinton conspiracy theory on Fox News. On Tuesday, he joined Fox & Friends and teamed up with host Ainsley Earhardt in an attempt to discredit the entire FISA court — the logic being that since two of the 11 judges were appointed to the federal bench by former President Bill Clinton, those judges were incapable of following the law when it comes to cases involving Republicans.
While Fox News generally doesn’t push back on Jordan’s claims, other networks do. In December, for instance, Jordan did an interview with CNN anchor John Berman and admitted that he’s discussed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation with the White House.
Berman also pointed out a major and obvious hole in Jordan’s FBI/Clinton conspiracy theory — if the FBI was colluding with Clinton during the election, then why did FBI Director James Comey go out of his way to publicize the Clinton email investigation just days before the election, while remaining silent about the bureau’s investigation of the rich asshole?
All Jordan could say in response was “we’ll find out.”
Valerie Jarret and Meghan McCain (Photo: Screen capture)
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The women of “The View” were fiery about the ongoing battle between the Senate and the White House about immigration reform. Former senior advisor to President Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett called out Meghan McCain for trying to blame Democrats for the lack of an agreement.
While there is bipartisan agreement on protecting DREAMers and DACA recipients, the rich asshole continues to demand funding for his wall if Congress wants to pass a bill for immigrant youth.
Behar cut in to say that the rich asshole proclaimed there is no deal without the wall. McCain said that was what she meant that Democrats must agree to the wall and to stop so-called “chain migration.” Republicans, however, could pass their own bill with all of those things.
“The problem with chain migration, Meghan, is that if you give the DACA recipients citizenship, what this administration is doing is making sure that their parents get sent back,” Sunny Hostin explained. “And, so, you’re breaking up families and they don’t deserve that kind of treatment.”
McCain went on to claim that there are huge groups of voters who supported the rich asshole’s inflammatory rhetoric during the 2016 campaign when it came to immigrants and Democrats have to realize that they need to agree to the GOP’s demands if they want to save DREAMers.
“Why is a deal necessary? Why can’t you just pass a bill that is for them?” Jarrett asked.
McCain admitted it was a political problem because the rich asshole’s own base doesn’t want anything other than a wall. Thus, the rich asshole is kowtowing to the 24 percent of Americans who don’t want protection for DREAMers and only want the wall.
“That’s right, the minority is running this country,” Hostin cut in.
“Well, then, the other side needs to come out and vote,” McCain shot back.
“They did! Three million more people voted for Hillary Clinton. I keep repeating this,” Behar said.
McCain dismissed the comment saying they have this argument daily.
Whoopi Goldberg cut in to say that Americans want it to pass and that the rich asshole can’t hold DREAMers hostage while demanding funding for the wall because he told Americans that Mexico would be paying for it.
“Nobody wants to be responsible for paying for a wall that that you said we weren’t going to pay for,” she said. “If his base wants him to do what he’s supposed to do, then he’s supposed to find a way to make this work. You can’t force us to pay for a wall that you said Mexico would pay for!”
Goldberg also said that if the rich asshole wants his wall so much he should kick in some of his own billions to pay for it. Similarly, she told the president to pay for his own military parade if he wants one so much.
Now sources tell Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman that Kelly’s attempt to go to bat for Porter left a bad taste in many White House officials’ mouths, as they thought it made the White House seem insensitive to issues such as spousal abuse.
“It’s beyond disbelief,” a former White House official tells Sherman. “Everyone is trying to figure out why Kelly is leading the charge to save him.”
Staffers were particularly frustrated that Kelly put out an official statement defending Porter shortly before he decided to step down in which he called the staff secretary “a man of true integrity and honor” and a “trusted professional.”
“How many times has Kelly put out a statement defending the rich asshole?” one Republican asked.
Sherman said that Porter has served as Kelly’s right-hand man and has worked to limit the kinds of information that President some rich asshole sees to prevent staffers slipping him conspiracy-laden InfoWars articles.
Despite the fact that two of Porter’s ex-wives told the FBI that he physically abused them, Porter himself has denied all accusations by calling them “slanderous and simply false.”
some rich asshole Jr. has something to say to anyone who thinks his father, President the rich asshole, is a racist.
“You know it’s amazing — all the rappers, all his African American friends, from Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, have pictures with him,” some rich asshole Jr. told the Daily Caller in an interview released this week, when asked by interviewer Ginni Thomas — wife of Justice Clarence Thomas — about “the left’s efforts to frame [his] dad and anyone who supports [the president] as a hater, as a racist, as a fascist.”
Such talk does a “real disservice … to those people who are actually oppressed and hurt by real racism, real sexism,” the rich asshole Jr. added, saying that it had “lost its effect because it’s been numbing to people.”
“I know him [the president], I’ve seen him my whole life, I’ve seen the things he’s done,” he said. “…It was only till he got into politics that all of a sudden they say, ‘oh [the rich asshole is] the most terrible human being.’ Oh, I don’t know he wasn’t so terrible a couple years ago when you’re at his events. It wasn’t so terrible then when you’re hitting him up for charity dollars and he’s sponsoring things–sponsoring scholarships and doing XYZ for you guys.”
Putting aside the fact that taking photos with rappers and civil rights leaders for publicity reasons a couple decades ago is hardly proof someone isn’t racist, the rich asshole has said and done some patentlyracistthings in his lifetime — both before and after taking office.
In 1973, the rich asshole was sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination against African-Americans. He began his presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.” In May 2016, he said a judge presiding over a case involving the rich asshole University could not be fair because the judge was Mexican-American. At a June 2016 campaign rally in Redding, California, the rich asshole pointed to one attendee, in the middle of his speech, and said, “Look at my African-American over there!”
After being criticized for that remark, the rich asshole responded by retweeting a fake photo of Black supporters. BuzzFeed later revealed that the image the rich asshole had posted was among the first results returned in a Google search of “Black families,” and that the original image was from a 2015 WCPO-TV article about a “Midwest Black Family Reunion.”
the rich asshole won the 2016 election in part because of racial resentment. Since taking office, he has proposed, among other things, a particularly racist immigration policy, saying in June last year that Haitians “all have AIDS” and that Nigerians would never “go back to their huts” after visiting the United States. In front of a group of Native American veterans, he called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.”
When speaking about Haitian, El Salvadoran, and African immigrants this past January, he asked a bipartisan group of lawmakers, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” The statement was so glaringly bald-faced that much of the mainstream media actually labeled the president an outright racist. Neo-Nazi factions, by contrast, praised him.
In the wake of that controversy, rather than apologizing for the remark or chastising those defending racism, the rich asshole dug in his heels, telling reporters “I’m the least racist person you will ever interview.”
None of this has stopped the president’s ultra-conservative supporters from digging through the archives to try and disprove claims that the rich asshole is racist. Right-wing websites like the Daily Wire and NewsMax last month seized on a 1998 video of reverend and activist Jesse Jackson praising the rich asshole for his service to African Americans. Jackson said in January that the rich asshole’s “shithole” comments were a “source of shame for our nation.”
Now, the rich asshole Jr., supposedly on the other side of a strong firewall between his father’s administration and his father’s business, has waded into the fray as well, arguing against claims that his father is racist by posting photos of the rich asshole with Black public figures, including Baptist minister and activist Al Sharpton.
Sharpton, for his part, responded the rich asshole Jr.’s claims in an interview with MSNBC Tuesday night. “We haven’t changed,” Sharpton said. “[the rich asshole] changed. And what he’s changed to become is one who has proposed some of the most racist, bigoted policies… He is promoting racism.”
Additionally, Kanye West, one of the rappers the rich asshole Jr. referred to during his Daily Caller interview, has since said he was “super unhappy” with the rich asshole shortly after his controversial meeting with the then-president-elect at the rich asshole Tower during the White House transition. West said that the rich asshole lost his support during the president’s first two weeks in office, after he signed a racist immigration order that banned immigrants and travelers from several Muslim-majority nations.
Former FBI Director Robert Mueller said cyber security will be the number one future threat in the country, but for the time being, "counterterrorism and stopping terrorist attacks" is more important. (Photo: Kit Fox/Medill Flickr)
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The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committe on Wednesday declassified and released 473 pages of text message transcripts between controversial FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
“Rob Porter has been effective in his role as Staff Secretary,” the statement read. “The President and Chief of Staff [John Kelly]have full confidence in his abilities and his performance.”
WH press sec Sarah Sanders out with a statement *supporting* top WH aide Rob Porter, who just resigned amid reports he punched, kicked and choked two of his ex-wives. Via pool.
“It’s beyond disbelief,” a former White House official told Vanity Fair. “Everyone is trying to figure out why Kelly is leading the charge to save him.”
The chief of staff also issued a statement of his own in defense of the disgraced aide, calling him a “a man of true integrity and honor” and a “trusted professional.”
“How many times has Kelly put out a statement defending the rich asshole?” a Republican interviewed by Vanity Fair mused.
As recently as last week, President the rich asshole was bragging about how stock market gains he purportedly engineered were propelling an economic surge benefiting all Americans.
“[It’s] smashed one record after another, gaining $8 trillion in value,” the rich asshole said during the State of the Union. “That is great news for Americans’ 401(k), retirement, pension and college saving accounts.”
The speech capped off a year in which the rich asshole repeatedly linked the stock market’s steady rise — a rise that began under President Obama in 2009 — with the fortunes of all Americans, roughly half of whom don’t have any investments.
The Stock Market has been creating tremendous benefits for our country in the form of not only Record Setting Stock Prices, but present and future Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. Seven TRILLION dollars of value created since our big election win!
But now, days after the largest single-day point drop in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the rich asshole is claiming the exact opposite — that the stock market is rigged against him because it tanked in response to good economic news he helped engineer.
“In the ‘old days,’ when good news was reported, the Stock Market would go up,” the rich asshole tweeted on Wednesday. “Today, when good news is reported, the Stock Market goes down. Big mistake, and we have so much good (great) news about the economy!”
In the “old days,” when good news was reported, the Stock Market would go up. Today, when good news is reported, the Stock Market goes down. Big mistake, and we have so much good (great) news about the economy!
The historic Dow Jones drop that occurred on Monday was in part a reaction to Friday’s jobs report, which showed stronger wage growth than at any point since 2009. As companies sink more money into wages, there’s less left for shareholders.
Wage growth also contributes to concerns about inflation — another drag on corporate profits and the expectation thereof, which is what motivates the stock market. That dynamic, coupled with the fact that many Americans don’t have investments, is a big reason why economists differentiate between economic news that is actually good for working-class people and stock market gains.
The relationship between wage growth and inflationary pressures on one hand and downward pressure on stock prices isn’t new, so it’s unclear what the rich asshole — who has a degree from the Wharton business school — means when he refers to the “old days.”
Monday’s sell-off created an awkward visual for the rich asshole, who was giving a speech in Ohio bragging about how good the economy is right as the Dow Jones tanked. Fox News even cut away from the rich asshole’s speech to cover the roughly 1,100-point drop. Roughly half of those losses were recovered during trading on Tuesday and Wednesday.
"This is about the president showing off. This is all about his ego."
some rich asshole’s demand for a military parade in Washington, D.C., is drawing sharp criticism from former military leaders, who see it for the ego-feeding exercise that it is.
the rich asshole has suffered from parade envy for a long time, but on Tuesday, both the Pentagon and the White House confirmed that the planned show of force is in motion. The plan drew immediate backlash from service members, and former military commanders are also speaking out.
On Wednesday morning, retired Rear Adm. John Kirby slammed the parade during an appearance on CNN’s “New Day.”
“I don’t like it, not at all,” Kirby said. “This is not about showcasing our military. This is about the president showing off. This is all about his ego.”
Kirby went on to say that such a display “is beneath us as a nation.”
“We are the most powerful military on Earth. We don’t need to be parading our military hardware down Pennsylvania Avenue to show that to anybody,” Kirby said.
The retired admiral concluded by saying that the planned parade would be a waste of resources that could be put to much better use.
“I think this is just a tremendously bad idea,” he said.
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Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling agreed with Kirby. “It’s not who we are as a military,” he said. “We don’t have to portray military might because the world knows how strong we are.”
During his first year in office, the rich asshole repeatedly ignored the deaths of U.S. service members whose sacrifices did not suit his politics, even starting a public feud with slain Sgt. La David Johnson’s widow. the rich asshole has repeatedly pushed policies that would hurt veterans and their families, and most recently, failed to protect military pay during the rich asshole shutdown.
the rich asshole has also placed our military servicemen at greater risk with his spasmodic foreign policy declarations, like his nuclear threats against North Korea and labeling of African nations — where thousands of U.S. troops are deployed — as “shithole countries.”
Many veterans have also taken issue with the rich asshole striking his military-friendly pose after avoiding service in Vietnam over a dubious claim of “bone spurs,” and later describing the fact that he avoided contracting an STD as his “personal Vietnam.”
Double amputee and Democratic senator from Illinois Tammy Duckworth has frequently criticized the rich asshole for claiming expertise on military issues.
“I will not be lectured about what our military needs by a five deferment draft dodger,” she said in January.
A military parade in honor of the rich asshole would be a worldwide embarrassment during a presidency rife with worldwide embarrassments. Our military and our country deserve better.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) announced this week he is working with Ivanka the rich asshole to craft a paid leave plan intended to appeal to both Republicans and Democrats.
The plan wouldn’t be funded by the federal government, raise taxes, or impose a mandate on employers — but would require individuals to withdraw from their Social Security benefits whenever they need to take time off to care for a new baby or other family related-matters, which could delay some Americans’ ability to retire.
Rubio adopted this “budget-neutral” approach to Social Security based on ideas from the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), a right-wing nonprofit organization purportedly focused on the economic policy concerns of women. The group published a report in early January entitled “Policy Focus: A Budget-Neutral Approach to Parental Leave.”
The National Partnership for Women and Families released a statementWednesday calling the proposal harmful for women.
“Such a plan would harm women in particular because they are still primary caregivers for their families and the wages they receive over their lifetimes trail men’s, leading to monthly Social Security benefits that are an average of 20 percent lower for women than men,” NPWF President Debra Ness said. “But no one should have to borrow against already low Social Security benefits in order to access the paid family and medical leave they need. Our country deserves to have the promise of Social Security protected.”
The plan also fails to address whether Social Security recipients like non-retired disabled workers and their families, or the surviving family of a deceased worker, would be required to dip into their Social Security to cover their paid leave.
In a call with reporters on Wednesday morning, IWF president Carrie Lukas defended the plan, calling it “entirely voluntary.”
“Anyone who thinks this is a bad trade-off doesn’t have to make this trade,” Lukas said.
It is true that any advance towards paid family leave is better than none. But paid leave, as it has been interpreted and legislated for years, refers to someone else paying you to take some needed time off. Paid leave does not mean leveraging your own retirement to borrow time from yourself.
In spite of this, the IWF has convinced Rubio, along with Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Joni Ernst (R-IA), that this is the right path forward for the only First World nationthat still doesn’t require new mothers to receive paid leave.
The IWF’s anti-women beginnings
The IWF grew out of “Women For Judge Thomas,” a group a formed in 1992 during Anita Hill’s testimony against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, who faced allegations of sexual harassment.
Even after Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court, the IWF continued to fight Hill. While Hill recounted her experience with Thomas at a conference, the group’s co-founder Ricky Silberman held a counter protest at the Federalist Society, where she said Hill’s “unsubstantiated charge of sexual harassment launched the mother of all gender wars.”
The pseudofeminist conservative darling lobbied against then-Sen. Joe Biden’s “Violence Against Women Act,” saying “wives instigate violence, including severe violence, against husbands more often than husbands do against wives.” The IWF also criticized Equal Pay Day as a “fictitious ‘holiday’ liberal women’s groups have manufactured to try to expose the so-called ‘wage gap,’” and opposes any legislation that will “convince women that society, and especially the workplace, is unfair to women.” And the IWF asserted that sexual assault on campus is an overblown issue, given that it is “inherently incredible” that female college students “are unable to report assaults to authorities.”
The IWF has defended Rush Limbaugh
While the group bills itself as “independent” and “non-partisan,” the IWF has been an aggressive political player.
The IWF has repeatedly defended right-wing talk radio show host Rush Limbaugh for his misogynistic comments. In 2012, after Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke — a Georgetown Law School student who testified in favor of a contraception mandate before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee — a “slut” and prostitute, the IWF responded by accusing anti-Limbaugh feminists like Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda of wanting to silence and censor him.
In 2007, Limbaugh donated $237,000 to IWF, making him the group’s biggest donor that year, according to a report by The Nation and the American Independent Institute. The report noted that in later years, “donors to the IWF began cloaking its contributions by running them through the right-wing’s biggest donor-advised fund, DonorsTrust,” making it difficult to know how much Limbaugh and other donors may have contributed since then.
The IWF opposes the teaching of global warming
IWF has also opposed the teaching of global warming in schools, forming a short-lived group called Balanced Education for Everyone. The group labeled global warming as “junk science” and promoted a documentary called Not Evil Just Wrong, an anti-global warming film created to counter Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
The IWF believes assault weapons help mothers
In 2013, an IWF fellow testified before a Senate Judiciary hearing on a proposed assault rifle ban. She told the committee that a ban on assault rifles would harm women because an assault weapon “in the hands of a young woman defending her babies in her home becomes a defense weapon.”
The IWF has an extensive history with the Koch brothers
A report on IWF by the Center for Media and Democracy reveals the group’s close links to the Koch Brothers. While the relationship between the IWF and the Kochs is tenuous now, in the group’s early stages it shared space and leadership with David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity.
The organization received $16,234,294 in foundation grants between 1994 and 2013, according to data complied by the American Bridge 21st Century Foundation’s Conservative Transparency database — with a lot of that money coming through pass-through “banks” utilized by the Koch family, like the Donoros Capital Fund and Donors Trust, which gave $1,640,000 in 2012.
One of the newest supporters of the IWF paid leave plan is Sen. Ernst, whose candidacy for Senate in 2013 was almost entirely Koch-backed.
The stock market is not cooperating with the fairy tale some rich asshole has been telling his most devoted supporters, so now he is attacking the market. All of it.
some rich asshole broke his silence about the recent downturn in the stock market to complain that the entire market is not properly responding to the news. He believes he knows better.
the rich asshole, who has professed to have advanced knowledge on a series of topics despite sending his company into bankruptcy six times, insisted Wednesday that the markets are in the process of a “big mistake.”
The Dow Jones average continues to wildly gyrate, and recently suffered the single largest point decline in history. The key index dropped 1,175 points in one day on Feb. 5, more than it ever has.
While the stock index is not the only measure of economic health, the rich asshole has repeatedly cited the bull market spurred on by the Obama-era recovery as an indicator of support.
Before the recent downturn, the rich asshole had boasted about the market once every 35 hours over the course of his presidency.
But then when his favorite signal departed from the narrative he created, the rich asshole went silent.
Now, apparently, he has decided on a storyline to sell to his most devoted followers: The market has wronged him.
It fits the pattern of conspiratorial and nonsensical behavior from the rich asshole, in which the entire world is always in cahoots with each other to attack him.
He insists to his supporters that despite objective facts and reality, that “up” is in fact “down.”
In his fairytale version of events, when the stock market goes up that is thanks to his economic policies and not the difficult choices and policies put in place by President Obama over the course of eight years.
And in the rich asshole reality, when the market goes down and makes him look bad, that isn’t his fault, but rather the market not understanding what good and bad economic information and news are.
No matter what the outcome is, in the rich asshole’s fake reality, he’s always the hero and the victim.
The truth, of course, is that the stock market is complex and its day to day gyrations are not easily explained away.
But crackpot economic ideas, like passing tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy while leaving the middle class hanging, are easy to explain. They don’t work.
Those policies have already harmed the economy by forcing the government to raise more money than expected.
That is a reality that millions of Americans, and the world who relies on the U.S. economy, will have to deal with very soon. And lecturing the stock market from Twitter won’t change any of that.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who immigrated from India, treated a right-wing talk show host to a lesson on how family immigration actually works.
some rich asshole and his supporters are desperate to end the practice of family reunification for immigrants, which they derisively refer to as “chain migration.” It was even a key talking point at the State of the Union address.
But the arguments for doing so are based on myths and fall apart under scrutiny.
On Tuesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson learned this the hard way when he invited Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal, an Indian-American immigrant, onto his show to discuss it and got schooled.
“I think it’s great when families are unified, I’m very pro-family,” said Carlson. “But when you’re trying to make the country as impressive as you possibly can, why wouldn’t you choose the most impressive possible people, regardless of who they’re related to?”
“Because we’re bringing the most impressive people,” Jayapal replied. “If you look at technology companies, you know, the enormous number of small businesses. Same thing. If you look at any field of science, research, technology—”
“I’m not arguing against immigrants!” Carlson interrupted. “I’m merely saying — want to get the most impressive ones. You’re saying we’re required — or a racist — to give citizenship to the people who snuck in here, and their parents, and their siblings, and possibly their grandparents and uncles too. Or else we’re racists!”
Jayapal burst out laughing. “That’s just not true,” she said. “What you said is not true, because we don’t allow grandparents into this country. We don’t — we don’t allow cousins to come in and be sponsored.”
“Yes we do.”
“No we don’t, we don’t have any categories along that,” Jayapal said as Carlson continued to try to interrupt her. “If you listen to your show, to people on Fox News, to some rich asshole … you would think that this family immigration system is somehow out of control. It’s not. It took me 17 years to become a U.S. citizen. By the time I could become a U.S. citizen, my parents were already very elderly, and it would have taken another several years for them—”
“Let me just ask you, does this standard apply to any other country?” Carlson interjected, visibly skeptical that this lawmaker and naturalized U.S. citizen knew more than he did about naturalization law.
“Sure,” she said.
Carlson then posed a bizarre hypothetical about the prime minister of India being forced to give Pakistani nationals immediate voting rights, and Jayapal busted him again. “That’s just not what we’re talking about.”
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The family immigration system is far stricter than Carlson and other Republicans make it sound. Only spouses, children, parents, and siblings can be sponsored, and then only after the sponsor becomes a citizen, which can take years or even decades. The wait times are so long it is almost impossible to “chain” extended families into the country.
Moreover, contrary to Carlson’s claim that family reunification prevents us from getting “impressive” people, studies show immigrants sponsored by family members are no less high-earning or high-skilled than other immigrants.
In fact, family reunification attracts high-skilled workers, because we are competing with other countries for such workers, and they will tend to choose countries that let them bring their families with them. That is why most developed countries have some form of family sponsorship.
Carlson brought a knife to a gunfight. For all his bluster, he had no idea how the U.S. immigration system works, and Jayapal was all too happy to clue him in.
White House staff secretary Rob Porter has resigned over abuse allegations by his ex-wives.
Porter’s second wife, Jennifer Willoughby, told reporters he was physically abusive during their marriage, which left her “walking on eggshells” to avoid his explosive anger.
His first wife, Colbie Holderness, confirmed she left Porter because “he was verbally, emotionally and physically abusive.”
She shared photos of herself with a black eye she claims Porter gave her.
Both women say they informed the FBI about Porter’s abuse during a background check before he started working at the White House.
President some rich asshole’s chief of staff John Kelly defended Porter after the women went public, saying the White House official was “a man of true integrity and honor, and I can’t say enough good things about him.”
But Porter, who denies the allegations, stepped down Wednesday.
UPDATE, 1:56 p.m. ET: Senate leaders announced on Wednesday afternoon that they had reached a two-year budget deal to avert a government shutdown.
“I am pleased to announce that our bipartisan, bicameral negotiations on defense spending and other priorities have yielded a significant agreement,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stated.
The bill now goes back to the House of Representatives, where it is likely to be met with pushback from Democrats, many of whom are refusing to vote for any package that does not include protections for Dreamers.
Last month, Senate Democrats shut down the government in an effort to secure protections for hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. That’s looking less likely this month, as lawmakers eye a budget deal averting a shutdown — one that would boost spending for the military while completely overlooking Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients.
Senate leaders are close to finalizing a two-year budget deal that would both bolster defense spending — something President the rich asshole has pushed for — while also increasing funding for domestic programs, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday. A bill passed by the House of Representatives Tuesday night funding the majority of government agencies through March 23 is a non-starter in the Senate due to Democratic opposition, but the Senate proposal appears to have backing from both parties. The deal would boost defense spending, adding another $80 billion to its current $549 billion; non-defense funding would see a $63 billion increase, up from $516 billion. While the proposal would provide two years of funding for the federal community health center program, it reportedly includes no major references to immigration.
Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) voiced optimism about the deal.
“We’re on the way to getting an agreement and on the way to getting an agreement very soon,” said McConnell. Schumer voiced similar sentiments, saying, “I am very hopeful that we can come to an agreement, an agreement very soon.”
That show of unity is a far cry from last month’s display of defiance. The president ended DACA last September, giving Congress until March 5 to decide the future of the Obama-era directive. But feuding over the issue has left recipients in limbo — in exchange for any DACA protections, the rich asshole has demanded funding for his controversial U.S.-Mexico border wall, in addition to staggering crackdowns on documented immigration and an end to the diversity visa program. Democrats initially rejected those asks, leading to a government shutdown on January 19.
Last month’s scenario initially seemed destined to repeat itself this week. Congress passed a temporary spending bill to reopen the government on January 22, but funding is set to run out on February 8. This week, a flurry of comments from the White House seemed to set up another fight over immigration. On Tuesday, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly claimed many young undocumented immigrants — or “Dreamers” — were “too lazy to get off their asses” to register for the DACA program. He also asserted that a hardline immigration proposal from the White House was “beyond what anyone could have imagined” with regards to protections for undocumented immigrants, something DACA recipients have strongly refuted.
That same day, the rich asshole himself indicated he was open to shutting down the government again if Democrats failed to capitulate on immigration.
“If we don’t change the legislation, if we don’t get rid of these loopholes where killers are allowed to come into our country and continue to kill — gang members, and we’re just talking about MS-13, there are many gang members that we don’t mention — if we don’t change it, let’s have a shutdown. We’ll do a shutdown,” the rich asshole told reporters. “It’s worth it for our country. I’d love to see a shutdown if we don’t get this stuff taken care of.”
“If we don’t straighten out our border, we don’t have a country. Without borders we don’t have a country,” he added. “So would I shut it down over this issue? Yes. I can’t speak for our great representatives here, but I have a feeling they may agree with me.”
White House Spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders later clarified that the rich asshole was not hoping for a shutdown. “The only people that have caused a shutdown are the Democrats,” she said.
Democrats were expected to fight hard for immigration concessions or threaten another shutdown — but that’s looking less and less likely. Schumer told the Washington Post following the last shutdown that Democrats were reluctant to spark another.
“We believe strongly in the Dreamers, but we can’t just let that occupy the whole stage. We have to fight for middle class,” Schumer said, seemingly indicating a binary division between the two groups.
While Democrats may not fight against the new budget deal, some hardliners are still expected to reject the proposal.
“This is a bad, bad, bad, bad — you could say ‘bad’ a hundred times — deal,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), a member of the House Freedom Caucus. “When you put it all together, a quarter-of-a-trillion-dollar increase in discretionary spending — not what we’re supposed to be doing.”
Another Freedom Caucus member, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), blasted any inclusion of a debt increase, along with funding for areas hit hard by hurricanes and other natural disasters, something the deal is expected to include. “It’d get zero support” from most Freedom Caucus members, Meadows said.
If a budget deal is reached without any protections for DACA recipients, it is unclear when such a compromise might occur. Recipients technically have until March 5 for legal protections and work permits to expire and the White House announced on Tuesday that the rich asshole is not expected to extend the deadline. But the date is largely arbitrary — a January court order requires the administration to continue accepting renewal applications extending DACA status by two years pending an appeal from the White House. In the meantime, Dreamers are still being detained and deported and tens of thousands have already lost their status.
Ron johnson speaks to NBC (screen grab)
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Right-wing media have once again been forced to reap what they sow by promoting stories based on out-of-context text messages sent between the GOP’s new favorite boogeymen.
As CNN’s Oliver Darcy, a former editor at Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, wrote on Wednesday, “members of the pro-the rich asshole media acted like they hit the goldmine on Wednesday morning” when Fox News published an article and released an “alert” about a single text message.
The message was sent from FBI lawyer Lisa Page to agent Peter Strzok, the erstwhile lovers at the heart of the GOP’s allegations of anti-the rich asshole bias and corruption at the highest ranks of the FBI and Justice Department. Sent September 2, 2016, Page told Strzok that former President Barack Obama wanted “to know everything we’re doing.” The text made its way to the center of a 25-page report released by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who said it proved Obama was involved in the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server scandal.
“The misleading messaging was delivered to millions of people through Fox News’ airwaves and through other pro-the rich asshole media, which went into overdrive,” Darcy wrote, noting that the story was featured prominently on the Drudge Report, Breitbart and fringe right-wing sites like InfoWars and the Gateway Pundit.
Soon, President some rich asshole himself was on the bandwagon, tweeting in all caps that the “new FBI texts” are “bombshells.”
Johnson, however, appears to have been taken for a ride once again after touting the existence of an FBI “secret society” mentioned in another single text between Page and Strzok that ended up being a reference to gag gift calendars full of “beefcake” photos of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
When cross-referencing the timeline of the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s private email server during her time as secretary of state, CNN found that September 2, the day the text was sent, landed squarely between when the bureau closed the probe in July and re-opened it in late September.
Three days after the text was sent, in fact, Obama confronted Putin at the G20 summit in China about Russia’s meddling in the American election.
“A person familiar with Strzok’s thinking reiterated this account,” Darcy wrote, “telling CNN that the text referred to Obama’s broader interests in issues of potential Russian interference in the election more generally.”
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