Four-star Army general warns: the rich asshole’s ‘ability to do harm’ is growing
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Retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey is warning the country that the rich asshole is unraveling before our eyes.
the rich asshole has entered a dangerous phase of volatility as a maelstrom of scandals and incompetence consume his presidency. And his erratic and unhinged behavior has even retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey sounding the alarm.
Speaking to the Washington Post, McCaffrey was unequivocal in his dire assessment of the rich asshole presidency.
“I think the president is starting to wobble in his emotional stability and this is not going to end well,” he said.
“the rich asshole’s judgment is fundamentally flawed, and the more pressure put on him and the more isolated he becomes, I think, his ability to do harm is going to increase,” he added.
The Post reported that aides have described “an air of anxiety and volatility” at the White House, “with an uncontrollable commander in chief at its center.”
the rich asshole reportedly “fumes in private” that every time he looks at cable news coverage, the headlines are about one of the multiple scandals engulfing him and his inner circle. And he has reportedly been telling his friends that he’s “uncertain about whom to trust” in his own administration.
Over just the past week, the situation in the White House has grown exponentially more disarrayed. There was the departure of communications director Hope Hicks, a day after she told congressional investigators about lies she has told on his behalf. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson was caught spending lavishly on furniture for his office.
There was the rich asshole’s hastily arranged announcement of tariffs that would raise the costs of many goods. And his petulant threat of a trade war against the U.S. auto industry.
And then the rich asshole himself was brought to heel in a one-on-one meeting with the NRA that changed his tone on teenagers buying semiautomatic weapons.
And he is clearly worried about the future of his presidency. Iowa voters received glossy propaganda pamphlets touting all of the rich asshole’s supposed “accomplishments” to fend off primary challengers.
the rich asshole’s administration is a mess, and his own mental state is reportedly no better. It all serves as a stark reminder that most people did not choose him for the job for which is so clearly unfit.
And figures like McCaffrey are clearly worried that the rich asshole’s incompetence and lust for combat could drag the nation into even more dangerous territory.
WATCH: Devin Nunes whines about Stephen Colbert mocking him — then calls it ‘dangerous for the country’
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Photo by Gage Skidmore.
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House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) lashed out at “the left” on Fox News Saturday after being mocked by CBS The Late Show host Stephen Colbert on Friday night.
Colbert derided the Fresno Republican as a “failed clone of Steve Carrell” during a trip to DC investigate the dueling memos issued by Intel Chair Nunes and ranking member Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA).
Following Colbert’s “investigation of the investigators” segment, Fox News personality Neil Cavuto asked Nunes about Colbert’s comedy sketch.
“Yeah well, I think this is the danger that we have in this country, this is an example of it,” Nunes warned. “So the left controls not only the universities in the country, but also control Hollywood in this country, and the mainstream media, so conservatives in this country are under attack and I think this is a great example of it, so I hope they’ll continue to do it.”
Nunes added the left must “resort to going to their friends in Hollywood to make fun of people and attack people trying to get to the truth.”
“When they say, ‘you’re doing the president’s bidding,’ is that fair?” Cavuto asked. “Is that right? What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Nunes replied. “We don’t get any orders from the White House. We don’t get any orders from anybody else.”
In February, Nunes denied being a Russian agent.
“I was asked to serve on the transition team. It was at that point I began getting accused by all sorts of media and some platforms that I was some sort of secret Russian agent,” he remarked. “If anybody was going to be accused of being a Russian agent, I would have been down towards the bottom of the list, after you listed all the Democrats in Congress.”
Watch Rep. Nunes on the “danger” Colbert represents:
What Fresh Hell?: Trumpism is just a massive grift edition
some rich asshole addresses supporters in West Des Moines, Iowa, on February 1, 2016 (AFP Photo/Jim Watson)
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Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and threats of nuclear annihilation coming out of the current White House.
This week, we learned that the rich asshole is capable of such depravity that the Republican establishment finally says, ‘enough is enough already.’ And that iniquity is… tariffs on tin and steel, of all things. The Wall Street Journal called it “the biggest mistake of his presidency.” It wasn’t cancelling DACA or blabbing highly sensitive Israeli intelligence to the Russians or tasking his idiot son-in-law to fix the Middle East — it was these tariffs. The move, according to The Journal has “rattled GOP lawmakers.” Economic advisor Gary Cohn, who didn’t resign when his boss said that Nazis marching through Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” were fine and dandy people, warned that the tariffs may prove too much for him to bear. The policy, wrote David Frum without apparent irony, exposed the rich asshole’s “Nixonian” side. Of course, Papaya Pol Pot didn’t help his case when he said that trade wars are “good” and “easy to win.”
Accusing the rich asshole of hypocrisy is like complaining that water is wet, but just for the record, let’s pause here to note that “in at least two of the rich asshole’s last three construction projects, the rich asshole opted to purchase his steel and aluminum from Chinese manufacturers rather than United States corporations based in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. In other instances, he abandoned steel altogether, instead choosing the far-less-expensive option of buying concrete from various companies, including some linked to the Luchese and Genovese crime families.”
Anyway, the news out of Trumpland this week was dominated by reports of the president’s erratic moods. “the rich asshole was angry and ‘unglued’ when he started a trade war,” according to NBC News. “When White House aides arrived at work on Thursday,” reported The New York Times, “they had no clear idea of what some rich asshole would say about trade.” the rich asshole’s announcement supposedly “blindsided” his aides.
Another WH econ adviser told me re the tariff announcement: "“I don’t understand what we announced, I don’t know what the policy is." politico.com/story/2018/03/…
But how does one square that picture of the rich asshole impulsively shocking the global economy during a temper tantrum with the fact that his buddy Carl Icahn dumped $31 million in steel-related holdings a week earlier? We suppose it’s possible that Icahn, who had previously secured a White House advisory gig for the sole purpose of getting an obscure fuel standard that hurt his businesses changed – a matter that may have violated insider trading laws – knew that the rich asshole was going off the deep end and simply made a bet that he’d impose new tariffs, but Occam’s razor says that he knew exactly what was coming and profited handsomely from it.
The White House may have become a reality TV show, with crazy staffers coming and going at a dizzying pace and Strawberry Selassie lurching from one conflict to the next, but keep in mind that there are competent people somewhere in this regime. The Heritage Foundation announced this week that “the the rich asshole administration has already implemented nearly two-thirds of the 334 agenda items” the right-wing think tank called for, “a pace faster than former President Reagan,” according to The Washington Examiner. And according to a report in The Intercept, “the network of wealthy donors led by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch have taken credit for a laundry list of policy achievements extracted from the the rich asshole administration and their allies in Congress.” Make no mistake: amid all the chaos, people are getting things done. Bad things, but things nonetheless.
And of course, there’s the grifting. the rich asshole’s sycophantic minions are making fortunes large and small off his presidency. His appointees, ostensibly chosen to “drain the swamp,” are living high on the hog at tax-payers’ expense. It’s the nature of the regime: one of New York’s sleaziest real estate developers and his sordid spawn have brought with them exactly the kinds of chiselers and charlatans that you might expect.
The story that probably should have dominated the headlines this week was The Intercept’s report that Jared Kushner’s heavily indebted real estate firm “made a direct pitch to Qatar’s minister of finance in April 2017 in an attempt to secure investment in a critically distressed asset in the company’s portfolio,” and just weeks after the Qataris said no deal, “Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a group of Middle Eastern countries, with Kushner’s backing, led a diplomatic assault that culminated in a blockade of Qatar. Kushner, according to reports at the time, subsequently undermined efforts by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to bring an end to the standoff.” That was followed by NBC reporting that “federal investigators are scrutinizing whether any of Jared Kushner’s business discussions with foreigners during the presidential transition later shaped White House policies in ways designed to either benefit or retaliate against those he spoke with.”
This week, we’re going to do something a little different at What Fresh Hell?: We’re going to ignore the regulatory shenanigans and the unhinged things the rich asshole’s clownish appointees have done and said, and focus exclusively on one week’s worth of corruption. Because in the end, it’s really all one giant grift.
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Item: HUD Secretary Ben Carson’s $31,000 dining set certainly didn’t fly under the radar. It was big news. But we think the fact that Helen Foster, a senior HUD official, was “demoted and replaced with a some rich asshole appointee” for “refusing to break the law by funding an expensive redecoration of Ben Carson’s office.” According to The Guardian, Foster’s crime was pointing out that the agency can only legally spend up to $5,000 on renovations.
I got my desk chair for $79 at Officemax. It's pretty decent.
"Helen Foster said she was told '$5,000 will not even buy a decent chair' after informing her bosses that this was the legal price limit for improvements to Carson’s suite of offices." gu.com/p/87v32/stw
And here’s the larger story, also via The Guardian:
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud) has agreed to spend $165,000 on “lounge furniture” for its Washington headquarters, in addition to a $31,000 dining set purchased for housing secretary Ben Carson’s office.The revelations on Tuesday of Carson’s expensive decor spending come as some rich asshole’s administration has proposed a cut of $6.8bn to Hud’s annual budget, or roughly 14% of its total spending, which would lead to reductions in programs aimed at poor and homeless Americans.
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Item: Brad Parscale, “the political strategist and online guru who was named President some rich asshole’s 2020 campaign manager Tuesday[,] has a close financial relationship with a penny-stock firm with a questionable history that includes longstanding ties to a convicted fraudster.” The AP has more.
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Item: “the rich asshole ally” Elliott Broidy, “a venture capitalist and prominent Republican fundraiser,” was “in talks to collect up to $75 million” if he could convince the Justice Department to drop “its investigation into the theft of billions of dollars from a Malaysian development fund.”
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Item: “Internal Interior Department emails and memos” obtained by The New York Times “show the central role that concerns over gaining access to coal reserves played in the decision by the the rich asshole administration to shrink the size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by about 47 percent, to just over 1 million acres.
From the start of the Interior Department review process, agency officials directed staff to figure out how much coal, oil and natural gas — as well as grass for cattle grazing and timber — had been put essentially off limits, or made harder to access, by the decision to designate the areas as national monuments.
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Item: “A tiny Nebraska startup” that “lists just one employee in its Omaha office” was “awarded the first border wall construction project under President some rich asshole.” It is, according to Talking-Points Memo, “the offshoot of a construction firm that was sued repeatedly for failing to pay subcontractors and accused in a 2016 government audit of shady billing practices.”
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Item: What Fresh Hell?
i suppose "an actual barrel of hazardous waste" turned down the offer first twitter.com/KevinBogardus/…
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Item: The New York Times reported that Melania the rich asshole “has parted ways with an adviser after news about the adviser’s firm reaping $26 million in payments to help plan President the rich asshole’s inauguration. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who has been friends with Mrs. the rich asshole for years, had been working on a contract basis as an unpaid senior adviser to the office of the first lady.”
Wolkoff established the firm “only weeks before the inauguration,” and pulled in $26 million bucks, which really stretches the definition of “unpaid advisor.”
Meanwhile, people are wondering how Melania, a mid-level fashion model, secured an “Einstein visa” that’s usually “reserved for people with ‘extraordinary ability.’” (Get your mind out of the gutter!) Mary Jordan reports for The Washington Post that Melania’s “ability to secure her green card not only set her on the path to U.S. citizenship, but put her in the position to sponsor the legal residency of her parents, Viktor and Amalija Knavs… President the rich asshole has proposed ending the sponsorship of relatives such as parents, slamming as ‘chain migration’ the decades-long ability of U.S. citizens to assist relatives in obtaining legal residency.” Oh well.
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Item: The National Labor Relations Board vacated one of its most important pro-management rulings last year after the agency’s inspector general found that a the rich asshole appointee, William Emanuel had a conflict of interest in the case. Turns out he had represented companies that gained directly from the ruling. “This is, so far as I’m aware, unprecedented,” former NLRB chair William Gould IV, a professor emeritus at Stanford’s law school, told Bloomberg. “There is no decision on a matter of such high import that has been vacated based upon a breach of conflict-of-interest rules.”
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Item: Finally, “the president’s personal pilot is on the administration’s short list to head the Federal Aviation Administration,” according to Axios. “One industry insider equated this to the Seinfeld episode when Cosmo Kramer used his golf caddy as a jury consultant.”
That’s just one week’s worth of grifting. And there have been similar reports every other week of Persimmon Perone’s ridiculous shitshow of a presidency.
the rich asshole Twitter-rages at EU with threat of a trade war after push-back over his steel tariffs
Pres. some rich asshole gives an angry response during an interview (Screen capture)
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President some rich asshole broke his Saturday Twitter silence to rage about trade imbalances after a week in which his proposal to institute massive tariffs on steel and aluminum was roundly blasted, and caused a massive drop in the stock market.
Saturday afternoon the rich asshole tweeted, “The United States has an $800 Billion Dollar Yearly Trade Deficit because of our ‘very stupid’ trade deals and policies. Our jobs and wealth are being given to other countries that have taken advantage of us for years. They laugh at what fools our leaders have been. No more!”
Moments later he added, “If the E.U. wants to further increase their already massive tariffs and barriers on U.S. companies doing business there, we will simply apply a Tax on their Cars which freely pour into the U.S. They make it impossible for our cars (and more) to sell there. Big trade imbalance!”
You can read the tweets below:
the rich asshole’s White House Is a Black Hole
Character is fate. That’s as true for a president as it is for anyone else, and so it’s no surprise that the rich asshole presidency is engulfed in chaos.
The policy process is broken and incoherent, with the White House lurching from one position to another. Factions are warring. Top aides are embroiled in scandal and bailing out. President the rich asshole is escalating his attacks on his own advisers, especially his attorney general, and is increasingly isolated and embittered.
The Republican Party is learning what should have been obvious from the outset: some rich asshole’s chaotic personality can’t be contained. Indeed, combining it with the awesome power of the presidency virtually guaranteed he would become more volatile and transgressive. His presidency is infecting the entire party.
In the realm of policy, some rich asshole is reshaping some traditional Republican views. A party that was once firmly in favor of free trade is now home to a president who just announced plans to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum and declared: “Trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore — we win big. It’s easy!”
The Republican Party once championed the principles of liberty and limited government, yet some rich asshole is indifferent to them.
Republicans once sought to strengthen relations with Mexico; today they delight in antagonizing our neighbor. Not long ago, Republicans made outreach to Hispanics a top priority; today the signals that the president and his party send are that Hispanics are alien, unwelcome, nothing but trouble.
In 2012, Republicans defended Mitt Romney when he said Russia was our biggest geopolitical threat; today they are wholly untroubled by its effort to subvert the 2016 presidential election. While they may not have always lived up to their own ideals, Republicans have long argued that human rights should play a central role in American foreign policy, from the presidency of Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush’s. Today human rights are viewed at most as an afterthought.
On the flip side, some rich asshole has embraced conventional Republican positions on taxes and deregulation, on judicial appointments and social policy, on health care and funding the military. On policy, then, the marriage between some rich asshole and the Republican Party has become what marriages often are, with each partner changing the other in some significant respects.
But policy is hardly the whole story. When it comes to the Republican Party and some rich asshole, the most profound and dangerous shift has occurred not in policy but in the province of disposition and demeanor, temperament and cast of mind. This arena is more amorphous than policy but can be at least as important.
At the national level the Republican Party has become a destructive and anarchic political force in American life.
The president and his acolytes are championing conspiracy theories and a sweeping, uncalibrated, all-out assault on our institutions. There is reckless talk by Republicans about “secret societies,” “silent coups” and the “deep state.” the rich asshole supporters have engaged in a desperate effort to discredit the Mueller investigation.
The president dehumanizes and belittles his opponents and (at best half-jokingly) accuses Democrats of being “treasonous” for not applauding him during his State of the Union speech. Rather than nourishing a sense of gratitude, he stokes grievances. And he tells lie after lie after lie after lie.
One White House aide, asked by The Washington Post whether John Kelly, the president’s chief of staff, could have been more truthful or transparent about the dismissal of the staff secretary Rob Porter, answered honestly: “In this White House, it’s simply not in our DNA. Truthful and transparent is great, but we don’t even have a coherent strategy to obfuscate.” Could there be a more emblematic statement of the low point we have reached?
Yet most Republicans are silent, their moral and civic reflexes seemingly dead.
All of this is antithetical to conservatism. On balance, Republicans are seeking to conserve very little; instead they have become the courtiers and court pastors of a man who delights in tearing things down. It calls to mind the line spoken by Alfred in “The Dark Knight”: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
Now consider this: The Republican Party once prided itself as a defender of objective truth against postmodernism. Today, it has become the party of perspectivism — the view, articulated by Nietzsche, that all truth claims are contingent on a person’s perspective rather than on fundamental reality. “It is our needs that interpret the world,” Nietzsche wrote in “The Will to Power.”
Evangelicals who once professed the importance of personal character and “family values” now eagerly give the president a mulligan for his immorality.
The national Republican Party, at least for now, has become a vehicle less for advancing high ideals than for exercising raw power. Of course, political parties have always been about the business of pursuing power, and there’s nothing inherently wrong in doing so. Power used in the right way can advance justice. But something very different is going on in the Republican Party today. It has become the institutional expression of some rich asshole’s distorted and impulsive personality.
There are notable exceptions to this in the Republican Party, but that’s the point. They are the exception rather than the rule. Party leaders who were once willing to challenge some rich asshole, to call him out now and then, are now far more compliant and therefore far more complicit. That’s because among the Republican base, some rich asshole was and remains the people’s choice — evidence that, while the president has accelerated the worst tendencies of the Republican Party, he is not solely responsible for them. He did not appear out of thin air.
The problem for the Republican Party is that while President the rich asshole is popular with Republicans — 85 percent approve of his performance so far — for most of the rest of the country, he’s toxic. The trauma of the rich asshole presidency is creating pushback. Americans are longing for a more ennobling, less exhausting political leader.
Joe Trippi, the chief media strategist for Doug Jones, the Alabama Democrat who defeated Roy Moore last year in a special Senate election, agreed recently in an interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein that people are tiring of the incessant conflict created by politics these days. “They don’t want to feel this way,” Mr. Trippi said.
But as long as some rich asshole is president, they will feel this way. He won’t change, and neither will the Republican Party. That’s how institutional corruption happens, from the top down.
the rich asshole threatens to slap retaliatory tax on European cars as trade war talk heats up
03-03-2018CNBC.com
President some rich asshole threatened to hit car exports from the European Union with a retaliatory tax, an apparent response to European officials threatening policy changes of their own in the wake of newly announced tariffs on steel and aluminum.
In a post on Twitter, the rich asshole cited a "big imbalance" between the two countries, said if the 28-nation bloc insisted on imposing punitive taxes on U.S. goods, America would strike back on European car exports.
"If the E.U. wants to further increase their already massive tariffs and barriers on U.S. companies doing business there, we will simply apply a tax on their cars which freely pour into the U.S.," the president said on Twitter.
If the E.U. wants to further increase their already massive tariffs and barriers on U.S. companies doing business there, we will simply apply a Tax on their Cars which freely pour into the U.S. They make it impossible for our cars (and more) to sell there. Big trade imbalance!
In 2016, the EU shipped more than 6 million cars abroad, and the U.S. — its largest market by far — absorbed more than 1 million of those, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association.
the rich asshole's hasty decision to impose tariffs on steel imports has stoked talk of a brewing trade war, roiling both the political establishment and the global economic order. The move also prompted E.U. trade chiefs to weigh hitting a broad array of U.S. imports with a 25 percent tax, Reuters reported this week.
the rich asshole threatens to raise taxes on EU 03-03-2018
President the rich asshole tweeted on Saturday afternoon that if the European Union increases tariffs on U.S. companies, the U.S. will apply "a Tax on their Cars which freely pour into the U.S."
Why it matters: This is what you'd call a trade war. This has been the primary concern since the rich asshole announced new tariffs on steel and aluminum this week. But per Axios' Mike Allen and Jonathan Swan, tariffs are what the rich asshole has wanted and now he's feeling like a man of steel.
Law enforcement: Man shot himself outside White House
(CNN)A man shot himself in front of the White House on Saturday, a law enforcement source told CNN.
"Secret Service personnel are responding to reports of a person who allegedly suffered a self-inflicted gun shot wound along the north fence line of @WhiteHouse," the Secret Service tweeted.
President some rich asshole and first lady Melania the rich asshole are at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. They are scheduled to return to Washington on Saturday night for the annual Gridiron Club Dinner.
"We are aware of the incident," deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said. "The President has been briefed. I refer you to the Secret Service for any more information."
The Secret Service tweeted an update on the situation moments later: "No other reported injuries related to the incident at @WhiteHouse."
Secret Service spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan said the incident occurred on the north fence line, the victim suffered a single gunshot wound and Secret Service personnel did not fire any shots. She would not comment on the status of the victim.
The agency also tweeted that pedestrian and vehicular traffic around the White House has been affected by the incident.
Shots fired near White House: report
FILE PHOTO: A restricted area sign is seen outside of the White House in Washington November 27, 2015. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
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According to CNN, the immediate area around the White House is on lockdown after shots were reportedly heard near North Lawn.
CNN’s Geoff Bennett reports, “We’re sheltering in place at the White House briefing room. A report of ‘shots fired’ near North Lawn, per a U.S. Secret Service agent. Trying to learn more.”
According to an update, the Secret Service is now reporting that shooter suffered a “self-inflicted wound” and that an investigation is ongoing.
You can see his tweet below:
‘What is he, the nanny?’: Joy Reid ridicules the rich asshole for telling Kelly to boot Ivanka and Jared out of the White House
AM Joy host Joy Reid -- screenshot
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Addressing a report that President some rich asshole has asked White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to force his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner out of the White House and back to Manhattan, MSNBC host Joy Reid mocked the former general for sinking to acting as the rich asshole’s nanny.
The New York Times reported this week that “some rich asshole has told the couple that they should keep serving in their roles, even as he has privately asked Mr. Kelly for his help in moving them out,” which has just added to the “White House is in chaos” narrative.
“Steve Bannon, the sort of not so curious white supremacy person that was pushed out of the White House, now almost appears to have been the smartest person in the White House when he was there,” the AM Joy host began. “He kept saying the problem is Jared and Ivanka, throughout the book, the Michael Wolff book. Now some rich asshole is saying the problem may be Jared and Ivanka.”
“Privately some aides have expressed frustration that Mr. Kushner and Ivanka have remained at the White House, despite some rich asshole at times saying they should never have been there and now the counterintelligence unit may be investigating a business deal that Ivanka the rich asshole may be involved in — a hotel tower in Vancouver that may be under investigation,” Reid read from the New York Times. “Does the rich asshole want his kids in or out?”
“some rich asshole does not want to fire anyone directly,” journalist Natasha Bertrand offered. “Right now he wants his chief of staff, John Kelly, to tell his kids, to tell Ivanka and her husband to go back to New York.”
“What is he, the nanny?” Reid smirked.
“Right,” Bertrand agreed. “So he has to avoid this confrontation. He knows deep down that hiring Jared Kushner as his senior adviser was a bad idea. Jared Kushner did not have any political experience when he entered this administration. When he was managing the transition period he was meeting with foreign investors to get support for his 666 5th Avenue building which is over a billion dollars in debt now. He came into this still invested in Kushner companies, he did not fully divest himself from his business empire.”
Watch the video below via MSNBC:
One of the rich asshole’s most devious tactics is how he tries to silence his critics
some rich asshole (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Wikipedia)
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Every week seems to bring a new target for the rich asshole’s wrath. He simply can’t let anything go. But when his grievances against his enemies are too severe simply to attack them in a series of hateful tweets, you can count on the rich asshole to take it to the next level: the courtroom.
Most recently, the rich asshole has vowed to seek revenge on BuzzFeed for publishing the Steele Dossier almost a year ago. Now, the rich asshole lawyer Michael Cohen is suing BuzzFeed for defamation.
BuzzFeed stands by its decision to publish the dossier. Katie Rayford, a BuzzFeed spokesperson, told AlterNet: “The dossier is, and continues to be, the subject of active investigations by Congress and intelligence agencies. It was presented to two successive presidents, and has been described in detail by news outlets around the world. Its interest to the public is obvious. This is not the first time the rich asshole’s personal lawyer has attacked the free press, and we look forward to defending our First Amendment rights in court.”
the rich asshole loves both suing and threatening lawsuits over any perceived slight, whether it’s an artist who depicted the president nude with a micropenis, or an analyst who (correctly) predicted the Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino would fail. The president has a long history of using bogus claims of libel and defamation to bully opponents and tie them up in court. The American Bar Association has called him a “libel bully,” but was afraid to make the claim public because its lawyers feared the rich asshole might sue in retaliation. There’s even a nifty online counter tracking the number of hours since the rich asshole last threatened a journalist or critic. According to the makers of the counter, he’s threatened to sue at least 45 times since the 1980s.
As outrageous as some of the rich asshole’s claims are, being sued for defamation or libel is no laughing matter. It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, not to mention the opportunity cost of time spent in court, plus the emotional strain and reputation damage that can occur during a complicated lawsuit. For someone as powerful as the rich asshole, who can hand these burdens off to someone else, lawsuits are an easy way to threaten anyone who challenges him.
Here are some of the least credible and most obnoxious lawsuits the rich asshole has followed through on in an effort to silence his opponents.
1. The Chicago Tribune
Back in 1984, the rich asshole sued Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Gapp for a staggering $500 million after the writer mocked a proposed the rich asshole building in the New York financial district. Gapp called the building plan unrealistic and “one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city”—and the rich asshole was not having it.
The case was tossed out by a particularly sardonic judge, whose full statement is a delight to read. In Gapp’s defense, the building design was totally silly, as you can see below.
(Credit: Chicago Tribune)
2. the rich asshole biographer Timothy O’Brien
In 2005, the rich asshole sued his own biographer, Timothy O’Brien, for writing in TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald that the real estate mogul was worth only $150 to $250 million. the rich asshole insisted he was worth at least $5 billion, and took the case to court. Seriously. A judge ultimately dismissed the case. After he lost, the rich asshole bragged to the Washington Post: “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees but they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make [O’Brien’s] life miserable, which I’m happy about.”
3. Miss USA contestant Sheena Monnin
In 2012, pageant contestant Sheena Monnin complained on Facebook that the Miss USA contest the rich asshole oversaw was “fraudulent,” “trashy” and “rigged.” the rich asshole sued her for $5 million in response and won an arbitration award. the rich asshole attorney Michael Cohen later bragged that he and the rich asshole had “destroyed” Monnin’s life.
4. The Daily Beast
the rich asshole’s team sued the Daily Beast in 2015 after it published an article about Ivana the rich asshole’s accusations of rape against her ex-husband. On that occasion, attorney Cohen, who headed many of these lawsuits, made it perfectly clear that the suit was intended to punish anyone who smeared the rich asshole’s name.
“I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,” Cohen told the Daily Beast. “So I’m warning you, tread very f—ing lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be f—ing disgusting. You understand me?”
“You write a story that has some rich asshole’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up…for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet…you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it,” he said.
5. Union workers at the rich asshole Hotel Las Vegas
In 2015, the rich asshole sued the Culinary Union and Bartenders Union at his own Las Vegas hotel for printing “misleading” flyers that suggested the rich asshole himself did not stay at the rich asshole Hotel Las Vegas because the rooms weren’t luxurious enough. At the time, employees at the hotel were in the midst of efforts to unionize.
A union spokesperson told the Hollywood Reporter: “This lawsuit is an effort to distract from the unionizing effort…There are over 500 workers who are fighting for justice and respect at the the rich asshole Hotel Las Vegas.”
6. Univision
the rich asshole’s long and well-publicized feud with Univision has resulted in threats of several lawsuits, including one against programming chief Alberto Ciurana for posting an Instagram with the rich asshole’s face spliced next to Dylann Roof’s. So basically, the rich asshole threatened to sue over a meme calling out his blatant racism.
It’s no wonder Univision’s lawyers called the rich asshole “thin-skinned” in response. Their memorandum to dismiss the suit nails the rich asshole’s tactics of intimidation perfectly: “There is a rich irony to the rich asshole’s cry that he is the target of an effort to ‘suppress [his] right to free speech,’ when it is the rich asshole himself—a candidate for president—who is attempting to invoke the coercive power of the courts to punish a citizen’s speech.”
House intel member demands Congress subpoena ‘stonewalling’ Hope Hicks to face contempt proceedings
President some rich asshole, Hope Hicks -- screenshot
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A prominent member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence blasted Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) for allowing Intel Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) to obstruct the investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
“I believe what’s happening now is the Republicans want to shut down this investigation,” charged Congressman Mike Quigley (D-IL). “When you team it with the Nunes White House midnight excursion, the memo which wasted five weeks, and many other episodes, couple that with the president’s firing Comey, trying to fire Mueller several times and clearly now shooting up efforts to get rid of Jeff Sessions.”
Rep. Quigley told MSNBC anchor Alex Witt that the one person who can fix the situation is Speaker Ryan.
“Today’s message must be, the one person I think who can stop this, is Speaker Ryan. This is his committee, he has control over that, he appoints Mr. Nunes committee,” Quigley explained. “Right now, I would ask the Speaker of the House — ‘do you want to be part of obstructing the most important investigation of our lifetime? Do you want that as part of your legacy?'”
Only Speaker Ryan can fix the Congressman Nunes situation, at least until the 2018 midterm elections.
“In the final analysis, he’s the one that’s initiated the rogue investigations and the memo and clearly he is controlling the subpoenas and how testimony goes,” Quigley suggested. “So to answer your question, there are no Republicans pressing anybody other than Steve Bannon. They laid a subpoena on Steve Bannon, because apparently nobody likes him and he’s a man without a country.”
“Do you anticipate wanting to recall Hope Hicks once she departs the White House, which is supposedly happening in just a matter of a few weeks?” Witt asked.
“I think we need Ms. Hicks back, Mr. Bannon back, Mr. Lewandoski, Mr. Sessions, Eric Prince — they all refuse to answer critical questions. Most of them were not under subpoena,” Rep. Quigley noted. “So we need help, again, from the Speaker of the House, to compel the leadership of this committee to subpoena witnesses, and to press them and to force them and when they don’t answer questions, they’re going to have to face contempt proceedings.”
Watch:
Swedish appliance manufacturer pulls plug on $250 million Tennessee plant investment in retaliation for the rich asshole tariffs
U.S. President some rich asshole speaks during an interview with Reuters at the White House in Washington, U.S., January 17, 2018. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
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According to Reuters, Swedish appliance manufacturer Electrolux announced on Friday that it will put off a plan to make a $250 million investment in a plant in Springfield, Tenn., after President the rich asshole’s announcement of new tariffs on aluminum and steel.
The report states that the company is waiting to see the final details of the rich asshole’s proposed 25 percent tariffs on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum imports before making a decision to once again proceed
The company’s decision stands out because Electrolux already purchases all the steel it uses in its U.S. products domestically.
“We are putting it on hold. We believe that tariffs could cause a pretty significant increase in the price of steel on the U.S. market,” company spokesman Daniel Frykholm said.
Ethics issues pile up for the rich asshole Cabinet officials
BY LYDIA WHEELER - 03/03/18 09:04 AM EST
Ethical controversies involving President the rich asshole’s Cabinet officials are piling up and becoming a major headache for the White House.
Reports of administration officials taking lavish trips, traveling on private jets, accepting gifts and buying expensive furniture have raised deep concerns among outside groups, Democrats and even some Republicans about the way taxpayer money is being spent under the new administration.
the rich asshole himself has drawn ire for refusing to divest his business interests and taking frequent weekend trips on Air Force One to his private resort in Palm Beach, Fla.
“Some of the problem is the result of President the rich asshole’s pledge to do things differently in Washington,” said Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan government watchdog group.
“He has brought people into public service that are new to government and what we’re seeing is some of the differences between public service and what might be acceptable in the business world. Unfortunately that can be a recipe for waste and abuse and the taxpayer ends up holding the bill.”
At least one Cabinet official has already been forced to resign over his use of taxpayer funds.
In September, former Georgia Rep. Tom Price (R) stepped down from his post as the rich asshole’s Health and Human Services secretary after it was revealed he was using private jets for official business at taxpayers’ expense, at a cost of more than $1 million. Price reimbursed the government for a little over $51,000 for his seat on the planes.
The spotlight is now on Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson after it was reported he ordered a $31,000 dining room set for his office late last year.
Here’s a look at who’s in hot water.
Ben Carson
The HUD secretary said on Thursday he has directed his staff to cancel the order for the $31,000 dinning room set and that he was just “as surprised as anyone” to find out about the purchase.
A HUD spokesman told The New York Times Carson didn’t know the table had been purchased and wants to be “as fiscally prudent as possible with the taxpayers’ money.”
Helen Foster, a senior career official at HUD, said in media reports that she was replaced after refusing an order from the then-acting secretary to find a way around a $5,000 legal limit set for office redecorating.
It isn’t the first controversy Carson has faced as secretary.
The Washington Post reported in January that Carson allowed his son to help organize and participate in an agency “listening tour,” despite department lawyers warning him that it could violate ethics rules.
Citing current and former HUD officials, the Post reported that Carson’s wife, son and daughter-in-law have all attended official HUD meetings. The department’s inspector general is reportedly investigating.
Carson said the media is smearing his family.
"This week, my family and I have been under attack by the media questioning our integrity and ethics. I have openly asked for an independent investigation to rest these unfounded biases," he said in a statement.
The Veteran Affairs (VA) secretary has been struggling with the fallout over a July trip to Europe.
A VA inspector general investigation found he misused government resources by not only scheduling significant personal time to sightsee while abroad, but accepting tickets to the Wimbledon tennis championships for himself and his wife.
The report said Shulkin misled investigators into believing the tickets were from a friend and therefore qualified for the “personal friendship” exception to the rule prohibiting government officials from accepting gifts. The report also found that Shulkin’s chief of staff had changed an official email to get government approval for his wife’s airfare.
Shulkin last month told USA Today that he had reimbursed the government $4,312 for the cost of his wife’s flights and would reimburse the adviser to the Invictus Games for the Wimbledon tickets.
“I do recognize the optics of this are not good,” Shulkin said in testimony to Congress. “I do accept responsibility for that, but I do believe it’s important the United States continues its work with its allied countries.”
Rep. Mike Coffman (Colo.), a Republican who could face a tough reelection race next year, is calling for Shulkin’s resignation.
In a letter to the rich asshole this week, Coffman said Shulkin “clearly lacks the moral authority to lead the VA” and the “integrity expected” of a Cabinet official.
“Inevitably, employees throughout the VA will consider the example set by Secretary Shulkin as a ‘green light’ to avoid accountability, to take opportunities for personal enrichment, or other violations of laws, regulations, and their duties,” he said.
The Environment Protection Agency (EPA) administrator is being scrutinized over reports that he routinely flies first or business class at taxpayers’ expense.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) asked Pruitt to submit a detailed account of his flights after The Washington Post reported dozens of first class trips, including one from Washington to New York that cost $1,641.53.
Pruitt has also been asked to hand over all documents showing agency authorization of the non-coach accommodations. Gowdy said “blanket” authorization to fly first class is prohibited unless the traveler has an up-to-date documented disability or special need.
Gowdy has given Pruitt until 5 p.m. on March 6 to respond to his request.
Pruitt has defended his flights, saying his accommodations were determined entirely by his security detail. On Thursday he told CBS News’s “The Takeout" podcast the quantity, quality and types of security threats he's faced is unprecedented.
Pruitt said he was flying coach until a threat assessment showed the best way to protect him was for him to sit in a place where he could quickly leave if a threat arose, but that he's told his security to find a different way to handle threats.
"I've instructed those same individuals to accommodate those security threats in alternate ways, up to and including flying coach going forward," he said. "There’s a change coming."
Pruitt said his next flight will be coach.
The Interior secretary is another Cabinet official who has been feeling the heat over his travel costs and arrangements.
Members of Congress have pressed Zinke about his use of charter planes — one trip cost $12,000 — as well his use of military and government aircrafts.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington shared documents it obtained with CNN that said Zinke's office was told in October that he was on pace to be $200,000 over budget for travel. Zinke’s office has denied that accusation, saying there is no firm budget specifically for travel.
Zinke is also being investigated by watchdogs for potentially violating the Hatch Act, which bans federal employees from using their positions for political purposes, after speaking to the Golden Knights, an NHL team.
The team’s owner, Fidelity National Financial Chairman Bill Foley, personally donated to Zinke’s reelection bid for a Montana House seat in 2013 and 2014.
And CNN reported this week that Zinke is now being questioned for meeting with wealthy Republican donors during a trip to Texas in September to speak at an annual gun retreat.
Interior has said that Zinke follows all agency procedures for his travel and has his trips approved by the department’s ethics office.
The Treasury secretary and his wife, Louise Linton, created controversy when they took a government plane to Fort Knox in August on the day of the solar eclipse.
Linton was slammed by critics for posting a photo of herself exiting the jet on Instagram and naming in hashtags the luxury fashion designers she was wearing.
The post came amid backlash over reports that Mnuchin had requested to use the government plane for the couple’s honeymoon earlier that year.
Mnuchin said he only explored the idea to ensure he could perform his duties while abroad.
“Let me be clear. I’m very sensitive to the use of government funds. I’ve never asked the government to pay for my personal travel,” he said.
In a tweet, Mnuchin said he didn't use the government plane on his honeymoon, but if he had he would have paid for it himself.
‘Don’t apologize! Double down’: Pastor reveals the rich asshole encouraged him to post pictures of Hillary in blackface
President some rich asshole and Pastor Mark Burns, composite image.
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A controversial black preacher revealed that President some rich asshole called to scold him for apologizing after posting a tweet showing 2016 Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in blackface.
Pastor Mark Burns revealed the phone call in an interview with The Post and Courierhyping his Republican Party bid for the South Carolina seat being vacated Congressman Trey Gowdy (R-Spartanburg).
“Pastor! Who told you to apologize?” the rich asshole allegedly said in the call. Pastor Burns recounted his apology had previously been requested by the rich asshole campaign manager Kellyanne Conway.
“Don’t apologize! We don’t apologize! Double down,” the rich asshole reportedly demanded. “Tell them you meant to do it.”
Now deleted tweet by Pastor Mark Burns (R-SC)
Pastor Burns took the rich asshole’s advice and went on MSNBC to defend his blackface tweet.
“I am standing behind that picture,” Pastor Burns insisted. “We as African-Americans, we need to make Democrats fight for our vote. We need to make them fight for us. We need to make them do what they say they are gonna do, because we are just as valuable as every race in the great state of the United States of America.”
In January, Joy Reid, the host of “AM Joy” on MSNBC, had to cut Pastor Burns’ microphone during a bizarre rant excusing President the rich asshole’s racism. Pastor Burns replied that Reid should “just move to Haiti.”
The feud with MSNBC anchor Reid started one day after Burns embarrassed himself on CNN by offering a biblical defense for the rich asshole’s “sh*thole” comments.
“It’s because of some rich asshole that I became a Republican, learning his principles and learning what the conservative movement really stood for,” Burns told the The Post and Courier.
“He was just such a normal person,” Pastor Burns added.
Watch Pastor Mark Burns defend his blackface tweet in 2016:
‘He’s become part of the chaos’: Conservative editor turns on John Kelly and calls for chants of ‘lock him up’
Retired General John Kelly has been confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security, a sprawling department responsible for everything from domestic antiterrorism to border security and disaster prevention. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
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Appearing on CNN’s “New Day,” the deputy managing editor of the Weekly Standard tore into White House Chief of Staff for enabling President some rich asshole’s worst tendencies and said that, instead of reining in a chaotic White House, Kelly has become part of it.
With rumors of more firings to come, longtime staffers leaving on their own, and Kelly reportedly asked to force Jared Kushner and Ivanka the rich asshole out the White House, Kelly Jane Torrance of the Standard explained that she is appalled at what has transpired during the rich asshole’s presidency.
“You know, some rich asshole won election as an anti-establishment outsider candidate, and he thinks he can govern that way, too,” Torrance began. “I think he and the people around him are discovering that doesn’t always work. Remember when John Kelly was brought in to stamp out the chaos in the White House? Now he himself has become part of it.”
Torrance then equated the job Kelly has done with the rich asshole’s ineffectiveness, saying, “I wonder if the rich asshole hires people that are like him and have the same sort of lackadaisical attitude for the way things are done as he does or do people change after working for some rich asshole and end up becoming apologists for him.”
Noting Kelly’s botched handling of security clearances inside the White House, including hanging onto former aide Rob Porter after it was revealed he had had a history of spousal abuse and allowing the rich asshole son-in-law Jared Kushner access to secret documents, Torrance wondered if Kelly was criminally culpable.
“John Kelly himself admits that they mishandled how they mishandled how they dealt with clearances,” Torrance explained. “I’m waiting for the chants of ‘lock him up’ to be heard here in Washington.”
Watch the video below via CNN:
Watch ex-AG Holder explain to Parkland survivor David Hogg the steps he needs to take to beat the NRA
Former Attorney General Eric Holder, Parkland survivor David Hogg -- HBO screengrabs
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During the “Overtime” portion of the HBO’s “Real Time,” former Attorney General Eric Holder engaged Parkland survivor David Hogg in a fascinating discussion on how the NRA has manipulated gun laws in the U.S., with Holder giving the teen some tips for fighting back.
‘The way I feel about gun reform is, we don’t have many limitations on the 2nd Amendment,” Hogg began. “I believe in owning a gun, my father has a gun… I do see a reason to have a weapon. But I think we should have limitations on the 2nd Amendment, just like we have limitations on the 1st.”
“If the only thing that comes out of this tragedy is we outlaw bump stocks and we raise the age of people who are allowed to buy an AR-15, that will be a failure,” Holder replied. “Because the reality of what we need to do, which I have always tried to do, is ban the sale of AR-15s, have universal background checks, and also take away the ability to buy these large magazines.”
“See, the problem is, is makes way too much f*cking sense for our elected officials to take care of that,” Hogg interjected.
Holder went on to talk about allowing the CDC to study the effects of gun violence, saying,”That’s another thing that needs to be done.”
Additionally, Holder criticized Republican lawmakers for limitations they have put on the ATF for maintaining records on gun purchases.
Watch the video below via HBO:
Rediscovered tapes reveal EPA head Pruitt’s bizarre Christian beliefs about God, guns and gay rights
Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
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Environmental Protection Chief Scott Pruitt believes the “most grievous threat” facing America are the courts, which he called the “imperialistic judiciary” and the “judicial monarchy,” claiming their objective is to create “religious sterility.”
Pruitt made those staggering remarks and many others in a series of interviews with an Oklahoma talk radio station in 2005, according to Politico which obtained the tapes from an anonymous source.
In the interviews Pruitt also condemned evolution as an unproven “theory” that is at the base of humanism.
“There aren’t sufficient scientific facts to establish the theory of evolution, and it deals with the origins of man, which is more from a philosophical standpoint than a scientific standpoint,” Pruitt said in 2005. More recently, despite the overwhelming conclusion of 97 percent of climate scientists, Pruitt remains not quite a climate change denier, but definitely a skeptic.
He also believes that people will only do the right thing if they are people of faith who follow an organized religion.
But apparently not just any religion. Pruitt did not disagree when the radio host said Islam is “not so much a religion as it is a terrorist organization in many instances.” He did interject moments later to agree with her on another point.
Pruitt also tied so-called “gun rights” to the Christian God.
“If you can tell me what gun, type of gun, I can possess, then I didn’t really get that right to keep and bear arms from God,” he says in the recordings. “It was not bequeathed to me, it was not unalienable, right?”
He also voiced support for banning same-sex marriage and abortion via a constitutional convention, which he also wanted to use to “protect the Pledge of Allegiance and the Ten Commandments,” Politico reports.
The EPA administrator made his remarks when he was a state senator, before becoming the Attorney General of Oklahoma. Politico reports the EPA refused to say if its top official still holds these beliefs.
The meeting is supposed to take place next week
Almost as quickly as it came together, some rich asshole’s video game summit seems to be falling apart.
Last week, in the aftermath of the school shooting in Florida that killed 17, the rich asshole held a meeting on school safety at the White House where he said, “We have to look at the internet, because a lot of bad things are happening to young kids and young minds, and their minds are being formed, and we have to do something about maybe what they’re seeing and how they’re seeing it. And also video games.”
At an official briefing yesterday, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced that the president planned to meet next week with leaders from the video game industry “to see what they can do on that front.”
This came as news to many of the biggest companies in the video game industry, which not only had no plans to attend the summit, but were unaware it was taking place. Representatives of several major game companies reached by The Verge were caught off-guard by the announcement, and we were unable to locate anyone in the industry who had been contacted or said they would be willing to attend. The Entertainment Software Association, an industry group that represents companies including Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Nintendo, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Capcom, Square Enix, Ubisoft, and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, responded with a statement that both denied knowledge of the meeting and pushed back against its premise.
“ESA and our member companies have not received an invitation to meet with President the rich asshole,” the group said in a statement. “The same video games played in the US are played worldwide; however, the level of gun violence is exponentially higher in the US than in other countries. Numerous authorities have examined the scientific record and found there is no link between media content and real-life violence.”
It’s still unclear what the White House has planned for the meeting, and it’s entirely possible new guests may still come out of the woodwork — but it doesn’t seem likely. For video game companies, this is a no-win situation. The legal case for games as free speech is even stronger than it was after Columbine, but with political outcry growing against any and all organizations seen as enabling gun violence, it feels like the wrong time to play hardball.
But even showing up for the meeting carries significant political risks. CEOs who joined in the president’s Advisory Council at the beginning of his term saw immediate blowback, and most of the councils were disbanded in the wake of later controversies. There’s also no strong case for a link between violent video games and mass shootings, and buckling to the rich asshole’s demands could spark an enormous backlash from gamers who are hypersensitive to even a hint of censorship. There’s no upside for game companies in any of this, and countless ways to hurt themselves.
The best outcome would be if everyone involved simply forgot it ever happened. Because this is the rich asshole, it’s a real possibility. Sanders was vague about the timing of the meeting, saying simply “next week,” but that’s still remarkably soon. If the next week passes without anyone at the White House remembering this announcement, there will be plenty of executives breathing sighs of relief.
03-02-2018
The 2016 election was less than a month away, and some rich asshole’s attorney had blown the deadline for paying Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her alleged affair with the future president.
In an Oct. 17 email, an attorney for Daniels — a porn star whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — threatened to cancel the nondisclosure agreement by the end of the day.
That very morning, the rich asshole’s attorney, Michael Cohen, had created a limited liability company, public records show, that ultimately would serve as a vehicle for Daniels’s payoff. But the money had not arrived. A second email to Cohen, a short time after the first, said Daniels was calling the deal off.
“Please be advised that my client deems her settlement agreement canceled and void,” Daniels’s lawyer, Keith Davidson, wrote in the email, which The Washington Post obtained.
Ten days later, the $130,000 payment arrived, according to another email reviewed by The Post. Daniels’s story about her sexual encounter with the rich asshole a decade earlier would remain under wraps long past Election Day.
The account of how the deal came together — and how it briefly fell apart — adds a dimension of brinkmanship to the public understanding of the transaction. On the day that Daniels canceled the deal, protesters gathered in front of the rich asshole Tower in New York City to express outrage over week-old revelations that the Republican presidential nominee had once bragged about grabbing women by the crotch, news that was prompting a number of women to come forward with stories of alleged sexual misconduct by the candidate.
“The media is trying to rig the election by giving credence — and this is so true — by giving credence to false stories that have no validity and make it the front page,” the rich asshole told supporters that Oct. 17 night in Green Bay, Wis. “They take a story with absolutely nothing, that didn’t exist, and they put it in front-page news because they want to poison the minds of the voters.”
Reached by phone late Friday, Cohen asked that questions be sent to him by email and then did not respond to them.
The White House and representatives of the rich asshole campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
The timing of the Oct. 27 payment, 13 days after the initial deadline and just 12 days before the election, could be significant. Two complaints filed with the Federal Election Commission argue that the payment was intended to influence the Nov. 8 election and violated campaign finance law because it was not reported as an in-kind donation.
In one complaint, the progressive research group American Bridge argues that had the rich asshole been interested only in protecting his reputation, he could have secured Daniels’s silence in 2011, when she first spoke with reporters about the alleged affair. Instead, the complaint says, Cohen waited until October 2016 — when the rich asshole faced the prospect of a news story about his marital infidelity landing shortly before the election.
The second complaint was filed by Common Cause, a government watchdog group.
“The fact that this payment was made immediately before the presidential general election strongly supports Common Cause’s claim that the payment was about the election and to influence the election,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause.
Some campaign-finance experts see parallels to the case of former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.), who was indicted by federal authorities in 2011 on charges that he used money from wealthy donors to hide an extramarital affair. The jury acquitted him on one charge and deadlocked on five other counts.
Cohen has denied violating campaign-finance law.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the payment to Daniels in January. The cancellation of the deal and the exact date of the payment have not been previously reported.
After the Journal published its story, Cohen initially dismissed reports of the payment as a “false narrative.” He later issued a statement in which he said he “used my own personal funds to facilitate” a payment of $130,000 to Daniels. He said that neither the rich asshole Organization nor the rich asshole campaign was a party to the transaction and that neither had reimbursed him for the payment.
Gina Rodriguez, a representative for Daniels, did not respond Friday to messages seeking comment.
A spokesman for Davidson said he could not comment on client matters.
Two other FEC complaints focus on a reported $150,000 payment in August 2016 by American Media, publisher of the National Enquirer, to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who told the New Yorker that she had a nine-month affair with the rich asshole.
Former AMI employees have told The Post that the company would routinely pay money to “catch and kill” stories about celebrities friendly with chairman and CEO David Pecker, and that he was close to the rich asshole.
The complaints, filed by Common Cause and Free Speech for People, a group that seeks to limit corporate money in politics, argue that AMI paid to bury the story of the rich asshole's infidelity and thereby influence the presidential election. The payment was made in coordination with the rich asshole campaign and constituted an illegal and unreported in-kind campaign contribution, according to the two complaints.
The White House has dismissed those allegations as “fake news.”
In a statement, AMI called the claims “meritless.”
“Despite the level of hysteria and partisanship in American politics, we are surprised and disappointed by the unprecedented attack on a media company by an organization that purports to value free speech,” the company’s statement said.
The FEC may launch an official investigation only if all four current commissioners — two Republicans, a Democrat and an independent — agree to do so. The commission does not comment on the status of any investigation until it has been resolved.
Daniels has said she met the future president at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in July 2006. He was a reality television star whose wife, Melania, had recently given birth to their son, Barron; she was a porn star working at a booth promoting Wicked Pictures, an adult-film company.
Daniels accepted an invitation from the rich asshole to ride around the lakefront course in his golf cart.
“That was actually my first time on a golf course, and when you’re riding around with some rich asshole in an Escalade golf cart during your first time out on a course, I’d say I was doing all right,” she told Adult Video News, a trade publication.
Two other media outlets recently revealed that she had shared her account of a romantic relationship. Slate reported in January that in the months leading up to the 2016 election, Daniels had told the outlet about the affair and said she was paid in exchange for her silence. Years earlier, in May 2011, she gave a lengthy interview to In Touch magazine. Jordi Lippe-McGraw, the reporter who spoke with Daniels, told The Post that the transcript as published by the magazine last month accurately reflected the interview.
Citing former employees of the tabloid’s publisher, the Associated Press has reported that In Touch killed the story after Cohen threatened to sue.
Blogger Nik Richie who runs a gossip site, thedirty.com, reported on the rich asshole’s alleged infidelity with Daniels in October 2011, five months after the In Touch interview. Daniels’s lawyer later threatened him with a cease-and-desist order, Richie recently wrote.
The payment was routed through a bank account controlled by Davidson. Eleven months later, in September of 2017, the bank, City National Bank in Beverly Hills, asked Davidson about the source of the payment, according to an email reviewed by The Post. The reason for the bank’s interest was not clear.
Bank officials declined to comment on whether the inquiry was provoked by a request or subpoena from law enforcement officials, was the result of a routine audit or came about for some other reason.
“As a matter of policy, we don’t confirm or comment on inquiries from regulatory agencies or law enforcement, including subpoenas,” read a statement from the bank.
Two House Democrats called Friday for an FBI investigation into the payments to Daniels and McDougal. In a letter, Reps. Ted W. Lieu (Calif.) and Kathleen Rice (N.Y.), both former prosecutors, described the payments as “evidence of moral failings by the President” and said they believed the transactions may have violated federal election law.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson doesn’t criticize some rich asshole very often, but he did so on Thursday night after the president suggested taking guns away from potentially dangerous people before due process.
“Imagine if Barack Obama had said that,” Carlson said. “Just ignore due process and start confiscating guns.”
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
Carlson said Obama would’ve been “denounced as a dictator” for making such a comment.
“We would have denounced him first, trust me,” Carlson said. “Congress would be talking impeachment right now. Some would be muttering about secession.”
Carlson also had a warning for the rich asshole about Constitutional rights:
“Those rights are what makes us citizens and not mere subjects of the powerful, and the president needs to be reminded of that. Maybe we all do once in a while. If voters wanted that kind of government, they could have voted Democrat, and actually they still have a chance to vote Democrat in the midterms, which he should keep in mind.”
It was the second time in recent months that Carlson had broken with the president. In January, Carlson called out the rich asshole for indicating that he would be willing to protect young undocumented immigrants, who are also known as dreamers. Noting that the rich asshole’s campaign platform was tough on immigration, Carlson asked: “So what was the point of running for president?”
- This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
CNN analyst nails John Kelly: ‘He really wanted to ignore these women’
By
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Kirsten Powers has no patience for the White House chief of staff's misogynistic dismissal of Rob Porter's abuse victims.
White House chief of staff John Kelly finally admitted Friday that he mishandled the Rob Porter domestic violence scandal. But even with his admission, he is still downplaying his complicity — and as CNN analyst Kirsten Powers pointedly noted, Kelly still has much to answer for.
Appearing on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” Powers pointed out how, despite his admission of wrongdoing, Kelly had perpetuated dangerous myths about domestic abusers that lead people to doubt women when they come forward with accusations of abuse.
“What he’s saying is just adding more questions, I think, than answering anything,” Powers told CNN host Anderson Cooper. “And so, even the way he is talking about it, he said, when he met with reporters, that he had never seen Rob Porter be abusive in any way, he was a total gentleman. I mean, that is just so beside the point. And it’s unbelievable that, after everything we have been through with the Me Too movement, that he would saying something like that.”
Powers, a former Fox News employee who went public with allegations of sexual harassment against disgraced ex-Fox host Bill O’Reilly, also noted how high the standard of proof was for Kelly when it came to believing women — and how low the bar was set when it came to letting abusers off the hook.
“The idea that because this person wasn’t abusive to his boss, you know, doesn’t mean that he is not abusive in his private life ― and they’ve been presented with very credible information,” she went on. “So what it says is that he really, really wanted to just ignore these women and believe what the man said.”
She continued: “It really did take having a photo, and this sort of public shaming, in order for him to believe it, but I think the message he’s still sending and also talking about sort of, it was only ― I thought it was only emotional abuse. Well, you know, emotional abuse is actually really serious, and often can be as bad as physical abuse.”
Powers laid bare the problem. Kelly refused to think badly of a powerful and charismatic man, or to believe the women who warned him about Porter’s true character. Instead, he continued to insist Porter was “a man of true integrity” even after the women came forward.
Even after being shown incontrovertible photographic proof of the bruises and beatings, Kelly still tried to minimize the horror the women went through.
While Kelly is by no means alone in perpetuating this culture of toxic masculinity at the White House, he was always supposed to be the person in charge of discipline and order. Instead, he covered for an alleged serial abuser, and now he refuses to take real responsibility for his actions.
If Kelly has any shred of the integrity he was once broadly touted for, he should resign. His moral authority is already over.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder perfectly schools the rich asshole and Jeff Sessions: ‘I had a president I did not have to protect’
Former Attorney General Eric Holder (Photo: RealTime/Twitter)
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During a panel discussion on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” former Attorney General Eric Holder couldn’t help but take a few shots at the current top law enforcement officer who holds the position.
Maher began by mocking President some rich asshole’s resistance to ever learn anything. Namely, the fact that the job of attorney general is not to protect the president.
“I’ll say this about some rich asshole: When he doesn’t know something, it stays unknown. That is consistent. There is a list of things he refuses to learn,” Maher joked. He then read off the rich asshole’s comment that Holder “protected” Obama while he was the attorney general.
“The difference between me and Jeff Sessions: I had a president I did not have to protect,” Holder replied.
“So, this notion that I am somehow protecting Obama from things that he had done inappropriately or illegally is simply not true,” Holder said.
Historian Jon Meacham noted that the rich asshole learned about politics and government from Roy Cohn, Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s lawyer.
“Usually you have to make a joke, like, ‘Oh, he’s just like Joe McCarthy.’ Jesus, he is Joseph McCarthy!” Mecham said.
He went on to note, “it’s a very Fox-centric view of the world. There was so much churning of the Obama administration and all these manufactured scandals throughout the years that I’m sure that’s kind of an ambient noise in his head.”
Maher asked about security clearances of the Obama White House and if they had similar problems. Holder confessed they certainly took longer than anticipated but at this stage Obama’s White House did not have the problems the rich asshole does.
Later, Holder noted that the job for Obama was a lot harder than for the rich asshole, who doesn’t have to deal with attacks from racist or other hate groups. While the rich asshole must contend with progressive, late-night comedians, reporters and a slew of other typical political problems, his only additional issues are of his own making.
Watch the videos below:
Part 1:
Part 2:
the rich asshole Pushes Republicans in Congress to Oppose Funding Hudson Rail Tunnel
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President the rich asshole is pressing congressional Republicans to oppose funding for a new rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey, using the power of his office to block a key priority for the region and his Democratic rivals, according to several people with knowledge of his actions.
some rich asshole urged Speaker Paul D. Ryan this week not to support funding for the $30 billion project, two people familiar with the conversation said.
The president’s decision to weigh in forcefully against the so-called Gateway infrastructure project, which has been one of the United States’ top transportation priorities for years, adds a significant obstacle to getting the project underway in the near future.
some rich asshole’s opposition to the project is in part the result of his belief that it is important to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, according to one person with knowledge of the president’s thinking on the issue.
some rich asshole has told Republicans that it makes no sense to give Mr. Schumer something that he covets — funding for the tunnels — at a time that Mr. Schumer is routinely blocking some rich asshole’s nominees and other parts of his agenda, the person said.
The president, who was at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Friday night for a Republican fund-raiser, has told members of his party that they should not support initial funding for the tunnels in the spending bill that lawmakers in Washington must pass this month to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year, according to the people with knowledge of the conversations.
Mr. Schumer could not be reached for comment. News of the president’s efforts was first reported by The Washington Post.
The Obama administration, which had ranked the Gateway project the country’s No. 1 priority in transportation infrastructure, had informally agreed that the federal government would split the cost of the first phase of the project with New York and New Jersey. That phase was estimated to cost $11 billion, out of about $30 billion for the entire initiative.
some rich asshole and Mr. Schumer have at times expressed a desire for their parties to work together on a broad effort to rebuild the country’s crumbling infrastructure, though there has been little consensus on the details of the projects that would be included and how to pay for them.
In September, Mr. Schumer and some rich asshole gathered at the White House with other officials — including senators and governors from the region and administration officials — in a meeting that participants described as a productive discussion about ways to make progress on the expensive transportation initiative.
But while both men are New Yorkers and have known each other for decades, they have also become fierce rivals in Washington since some rich asshole took office last year. And efforts to reach deals on other issues, like immigration, have faltered amid partisan bickering and recrimination.
In recent days, some rich asshole has grown increasingly angry about Democratic efforts in the Senate, led by Mr. Schumer, to block or delay his nominees to fill key government posts. This week, at the beginning of each news briefing, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, began highlighting examples of nominees who had been blocked.
On Thursday, she accused Democrats of blocking efforts to confirm Kevin McAleenan, the president’s nominee to lead Customs and Border Protection.
“Senator Schumer should stop putting the safety and security of the American people at risk,” Ms. Sanders said.
If some rich asshole succeeds in persuading Republicans to oppose funding the tunnel project, it would be a drastic reversal in fortunes for the region’s politicians, who had secured commitments from the president’s predecessors.
A spokesman for the Gateway Development Corporation declined on Friday to comment.
This is not the first time that some rich asshole’s administration has signaled that he may not support the Obama administration’s agreement.
In December, the acting administrator of the Federal Transit Administration, K. Jane Williams, said in a letter to officials in New York and New Jersey that any such agreement was “nonexistent” and that she had serious concerns about the project.
Ms. Williams said the proposed funding plan would be “a move towards even greater federal dependency.”
That response was seen in the New York area as a political maneuver, intended to rewind the negotiations between the federal government and the local sponsors. But it still deflated hopes that the project would maintain its momentum.
The project was meant to supplement the existing tunnels that carry trains under the Hudson River. Those tubes are more than 100 years old and in urgent need of an overhaul after filling with saltwater during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Elected officials and Amtrak executives have warned that the loss of one of the existing tubes would reduce the capacity for trains between New York and New Jersey by 75 percent and cause chaos for commuters in the region.
In an interview this week, Rick Cotton, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, called Gateway “the most pressing infrastructure project in the country at the moment.”
He added that “any national infrastructure program worthy of the name could not possibly fail to provide significant funding for Gateway.”
If it gets built, the project includes the replacement of a rail bridge in northern New Jersey that is a contemporary of the existing tunnels and improvements at Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. Officials at Amtrak, which owns Penn Station and the existing tunnels, have been pressing for it for years since former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey canceled a different project, which was known as the ARC tunnel.
The ARC project, sponsored by New Jersey Transit, the state-run operator of commuter trains and buses, involved digging a new tunnel that would carry trains to a new station deep below 34th Street in Midtown Manhattan. Construction had already begun on that project when Mr. Christie, a Republican who endorsed some rich asshole for president, halted it in 2010.
Michael D. Shear reported from West Palm Beach, and Patrick McGeehan from New York. Shane Goldmacher contributed reporting from New York, and Thomas Kaplan from Washington.
Bill Maher calls Jared Kushner ‘so stupid’ he might as well be called ‘Jared Palin’
Jared Kushner and Sarah Palin (Photo: Screen capture)
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Bill Maher stared Friday’s show naming off the week of scandal. He said that there was so much that all he could do was move through chronological
At this point, so many people have left he half wonders if the rich asshole will be stuck in the White House talking to a volleyball
“All this scandal makes it very difficult for the NRA to run the country,” Maher half-joked. He called out the Republicans who freaked out at the table in the White House as the rich asshole talked about taking guns and worrying about due process later. “That’s right Republicans, it turns out there is a president who will ignore the Constitution and come for your guns. The one you f*cking idiots voted for!”
When talking about former communications director Hope Hicks, Maher recalled the way she helped the campaign by steaming the rich asshole’s pants while he was wearing them. She was the keeper of the steamer.
“Hope Hicks feels like she can be more effective steaming the pants of those in the private sector,” he joked.
When it came to Jared Kushner, he couldn’t believe someone would be so stupid as to hold a meeting in the White House for his own personal business affairs.
“I want to see his birth certificate,” Maher said. “I think it’s going to say: Birthplace: Alaska. Birth name: Jared Palin.”
Watch the hilarity below:
Pence lies to families about guns hours after the rich asshole caved to NRA
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Whatever Pence says, the rich asshole's actions speak the loudest.
At a gathering in Michigan hosted by America First Policies, Mike Pence made it clear that the rich asshole is going to solve school shootings.
“President the rich asshole said it well,” Pence said. “No child, no teacher, should ever be in danger in an American school.”
“School safety is now the top priority of the rich asshole administration,” Pence continued, to thundering applause. “And I’ll make you a promise, Michigan: Working with federal and state leaders, we’re going to take strong action to strengthen background checks.”
But Pence’s promise was undercut by the fact that just hours previously, the rich asshole huddled with National Rifle Association officials in the Oval Office.
So far, the rich asshole’s position on gun control has been all over the map, but one thing has stayed constant: Every time the NRA has directly appealed to him, he has listened to them over anyone else.
For example, the rich asshole threw away the idea of raising the age limit to purchase military-style weapons of war after a lunch meeting with the NRA earlier this week — although Sarah Huckabee Sanders tried to pretend he had not.
It should be noted that Pence himself has little moral authority on the matter, as he did everything in his power to make guns as easy as possible to acquire and carry, both as a congressman and as governor of Indiana.
So when Pence promises that he is going to work to “strengthen background checks,” which the NRA has consistently opposed, he is writing our nation, and the families and friends of school shooting victims, a check that he knows cannot be cashed.
Activists will no longer stay silent on guns. The time has come for real action, and Pence cannot talk it away with empty promises.
the rich asshole takes revenge out on an entire country for saying no to Jared
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When Jared Kushner didn't get his way, a diplomatic crisis ensued.
After the Qatari government turned down a solicitation for investment by Jared Kushner’s family, the rich asshole helped spearhead a regional crisis in which numerous Middle Eastern countries cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and closed all air, land, and sea borders.
According to the Intercept, Kushner’s family real estate business tried and failed to secure an investment from the Qatari government just a month before Kushner put his weight behind a blockade of the country.
The report is one of the clearest indications yet that Kushner may have used his role as a government official to take part in private business dealings — and then, apparently, to retaliate against a country when the deal didn’t work out.
The Intercept reports that Charles Kushner — Jared’s father — met with Qatar’s Finance Minister in New York in April 2017, hoping to secure financing from the Qatari government for the Kushner Companies’ troubled 666 Fifth Ave. property.
The luxury New York City property, which Kushner Companies purchased in 2007, has been losing money for years, leaving the Kushner family with a $1.4 billion debt that will come due in 2019. The family has previously pursued financing for the property from other foreign investors, including a Qatari businessman and an insurance group in China.
Ultimately, no deal came of the April 2017 meeting — but that’s not where the story ends.
“The failure to broker the deal would be followed only a month later by a Middle Eastern diplomatic row in which Jared Kushner provided critical support to Qatar’s neighbors,” the Intercept reported. “Led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a group of Middle Eastern countries, with Kushner’s backing, led a diplomatic assault that culminated in a blockade of Qatar. Kushner, according to reports at the time, subsequently undermined efforts by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to bring an end to the standoff.”
At the time, the rich asshole took credit for the blockade of Qatar, which took place on the heels of his May 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia. But the rich asshole may have had some help in that effort. According to news reports at the time, Russian hackers breached Qatar’s state news agency and planted a fake story that ended up fueling the diplomatic crisis.
While we don’t know for sure if the rich asshole’s decision to urge the Middle Eastern countries to cut ties with Qatar was motivated by Kushner not getting what he wanted, the timing of the incident raises serious questions — serious enough that special counsel Robert Mueller is reportedly looking into them.
NBC News reported Friday afternoon that Mueller’s team of investigators is “scrutinizing whether any of Jared Kushner’s business discussions with foreigners during the presidential transition later shaped White House policies in ways designed to either benefit or retaliate against those he spoke with.”
According to NBC, Mueller is looking at “Kushner’s efforts to secure financing for his family’s real estate properties, focusing specifically on his discussions during the transition with individuals from Qatar” and several other countries, including Russia, Turkey, and China.
This adds to the ongoing controversy surrounding Kushner’s conflicts of interests, which have taken center stage in recent days.
On Tuesday, Kushner’s security clearance was downgraded amid reports that foreign officials had discussed how they could use Kushner’s financial history and lack of experience to manipulate him. Congressional investigators say Kushner is a national security risk, and several members of Congress have issued calls this week to remove Kushner from the White House.
“Jared Kushner is a liability to [some rich asshole], and a known national security risk,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) tweeted Friday afternoon. “If he truly cares about his father-in-law, and our nation, he would step aside.”
It may not be up to Kushner, though: If Mueller gets to him first, his removal from the White House might not be voluntary.
Campbell’sbusts the rich asshole team for lying about tariffs and soup
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The rich asshole team tried to say tariffs would not seriously hurt the cost of soup. Then the biggest soup company destroyed their entire story.
A senior the rich asshole administration official’s use of prop soup cans to sell the idea of trade tariffs backfired after Campbell’s Soup released a statement detailing how consumers stand to lose from the idea.
Appearing on CNBC to calm investor fears after the rich asshole’s impromptu announcement of trade tariffs, Ross held up soup cans and said that with the tariffs the cost of soup in cans would go up “about six-tenths of one cent.” He added, “Who in the world is going to be too bothered by six-tenths of a cent?”
Ross also claimed increases in car costs would not be a problem. He is a multimillionaire.
Soon after the appearance, Campbell Soup Company replied to Ross.
Speaking to Business Insider, spokesperson Thomas Hushen said, “Any new broad-based tariffs on imported tin plate steel — an insufficient amount of which is produced in the US — will result in higher prices on one of the safest and more affordable parts of the food supply.”
The company’s concerns echo those of many other businesses, who are raising red flags about tariffs.
the rich asshole decided to push for tariffs without consulting experts on the issue, and many companies have said they will pass on increased costs to consumers.
Sparking a trade war could create a backlash that hurts American companies, including those in red states that supported the rich asshole.
Relevant government agencies, like the State, Treasury, and Defense Departments, were caught flat-footed by the announcement. And since then, things have spiraled out of control.
Ross’s embarrassing demonstration on television didn’t take long for Campbell’s dispel with just a few words.
It shows that the chaotic approach embraced by the rich asshole is bad for business, the economy, and families who simply want to eat soup for dinner.
Fox News’ Judge Jeanine Pirro goes to war with Jeff Sessions: ‘He lost his prosecutorial balls’
Fox News personality Judge Jeanine Pirro
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Filling in for Sean Hannity, Fox News personality Judge Jeanine Pirro went on a tirade against Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The show began with Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) demanding that Sessions appoint a second special counsel.
“The problem here is we need to get to the bottom of a ton of questions about the DOJ and the FBI’s handling of both the Hillary Clinton investigation and the Russia investigation,” Fox contributor Lisa Boothe suggested. “I don’t think we can trust either the FBI or DOJ to conduct that investigation themselves.”
“Look, in some ways I think like many Americans we see scandal after scandal, finally the curtain is being drawn back,” Fox contributor Tammy Bruce added. “And it wouldn’t surprise me if even someone like Jeff Sessions is shocked by the nature of what we’re seeing unfold.”
Attorney General Sessions’ “body was the Senate and he moved it for innumerable length of time and can’t dismiss the impact of living in that bubble,” Bruce added.
“So he lost his prosecutorial balls?” Pirro asked.
“I’m a big fan of Jeff Sessions,” Bruce replied, without answering the question. “Thank goodness for the president, that he has got an eye on this, publicly making sure individuals know how serious this is.”
Watch:
ENTERTAINMENT
some rich asshole Attacks Alec Baldwin In Early Morning Twitter Rant Amid Week Of Chaos
the rich asshole misspelled Baldwin’s name twice in the unhinged rant.
President some rich asshole took a break from dealing with the turmoil in his administration to lash out once again at actor Alec Baldwin in an early-morning Twitter rant.
Earlier this week, Baldwin told The Hollywood Reporter that portraying the rich asshole on “Saturday Night Live” had become “like agony.”
“Anybody over this guy,” said Baldwin. “It doesn’t matter. We have to get rid of him.”
Baldwin’s comments apparently struck a nerve for the rich asshole, whose administration is reeling from a string of setbacks this week, including the departure of one of his closest confidants, Hope Hicks. He’s also been criticized for appearing to cave to the NRA just a day after he promised to tackle gun control.
The president responded to Baldwin’s comments with a rambling error-strewn post, in which he twice misspelled the actor’s name, as well as the word “dying.”
the rich asshole also urged “SNL” to bring back Darrell Hammond, who portrayed the then-reality star on the show until 2016.
The tweet remained live for around 10 minutes before it was deleted. the rich asshole quickly replaced it with this correctly spelled post:
Hammond has yet to respond, but Baldwin hit back first with this tweet:
Baldwin then imagined what the rich asshole’s Presidential Library might look like:
Criticizing Baldwin has become something of a habit for the rich asshole. He repeatedly tore into Baldwin over his “SNL” portrayal during the 2016 election campaign and has been taking regular shots at the actor ever since.
POLITICS
Leaked Emails Appear To Show A Top the rich asshole Fundraiser Abusing His Power
The messages suggest that Elliott Broidy tried to use his influence with the rich asshole administration for personal gain.
Emails and documents an anonymous group leaked to HuffPost this week appear to show a Los Angeles lawyer asking for more than $80 million to scuttle a Department of Justice investigation into a multibillion-dollar scandal involving Van Gogh paintings, the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street,” the prime minister of Malaysia — and the lawyer’s husband, a Republican National Committee deputy finance chair Elliott Broidy, trying to use his influence with the rich asshole administration to help.
Broidy and his wife, attorney Robin Rosenzweig, deny any wrongdoing.
“It’s definitely a hack,” Rosenzweig said of the emails, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal. “They’ve hacked attorney-client privileged documents.”
Broidy’s assistant also said that “Mr. Broidy has been a victim of a hack.”
HuffPost has not been able to identify the people who leaked the documents, who call themselves L.A. Confidential. ”We expose people associated with hollywood,” the group said in an email. It’s not clear what the group’s motivations are.
After HuffPost provided Rosenzweig with the leaked emails and documents, she said she didn’t recognize some of them — although she did not identify which ones looked unfamiliar. Rosenzweig (who also goes by Robin Broidy) and her husband are conducting a personal investigation, she said.
The “dossier,” as the leakers called it, demonstrates Broidy’s clear and continued fascination with a topic of great financial interest to his wife and one of her prospective clients.
The story starts in July 2016, when the Justice Department filed civil forfeiture complaints seeking to recover more than $1 billion in assets allegedly acquired with funds misappropriated from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a state-owned development company established by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak. The Justice Department’s complaint stated that Low Taek Jho, a Malaysian businessman, had laundered in the U.S. more than $400 million stolen from 1MDB. The 1MDB funds was allegedly used to buy real estate, Van Gogh and Monet paintings, and a private jet, and to finance “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
Malaysian investigations into 1MDB found no wrongdoing on the part of the company or Najib, the prime minster, according to The Wall Street Journal. Najib, Low and 1MDB have denied any wrongdoing, and 1MDB has said it will cooperate with any investigations into its business.
But the Justice Department was still pursuing Low, and he needed help.
It’s not entirely clear how Low and Rosenzweig first got in touch. On March 12, 2017, shortly after President some rich asshole took office, Rosenzweig wrote up a draft agreement in which she would agree to work for Low.
“Please feel free to call or email me or Elliott with any comments or concerns you have,” she wrote in an email, referring to her husband.
In the draft agreement, Rosenzweig proposed that Low would pay her and her firm, the Colfax Law Office, $8 million upfront. The deal would also give her and the firm an incentive to work fast: Low would pay an additional $50 million if the firm succeeded in “settling the Matter” — the DOJ investigation — within a year. That figure jumped to $75 million if the firm succeeded within 180 days.
Rosenzweig later adjusted the draft agreement to provide for a flat fee, after learning that “success fees” and a “non-refundable retainer fee” are not legal in New York, she wrote to her husband and a consultant working on the case.
The emails given to HuffPost do not indicate whether Rosenzweig’s firm ever finalized an agreement to provide services to Low.
Although Broidy is a convicted felon ― he pleaded guilty in 2009 to giving New York public pension officials nearly $1 million worth of illegal gifts to help his venture capital firm make a deal with the pension fund — it’s easy to see how Low could have benefited from working with the couple. Broidy has close ties to the rich asshole and the Republican Party. During the 2016 presidential race, he served as a vice chairman for the rich asshole Victory Fund. He gave more than $160,000 to the Republican National Committee last year. One month after Rosenzweig wrote the draft agreement with Low, the RNC announced that Broidy had been named a national deputy finance chairman, along with Michael Cohen and Louis DeJoy.
In May, Rosenzweig indicated that her law firm would need to enter into a contract with Pras Michel, a friend of Low’s and a member of hip-hop group The Fugees. According to the emails, Low wanted to pay Rosenzweig through Michel. Michel and his publicist did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After Rosenzweig started working on an agreement with Low, her husband began circulating talking points that described efforts to convince the Justice Department to halt the Malaysia investigation.
In August 2017, Broidy sent an assistant at his investment firm an email titled “Malaysia Talking Points *Final.*” The email does not note who wrote the talking points or who was expected to deliver them, but they appear to be drafted from the perspective of a Malaysian official in preparation for a meeting with a U.S. official. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Malaysia two days later as part of a Southeast Asia tour. And the rich asshole hosted Najib, the Malaysian prime minister swept up in the 1MDB scandal, at the White House in September.
The talking points email laid out four priorities ― the first three being North Korea, counterterrorism cooperation and the economy. The fourth, however, was 1MDB, and it included five main points (emphasis ours, misspelling theirs):
1. 1MDB message on all levels this is being handles by Saudia Arabia and Abu Dhabi, and Malaysia.2. Malaysian Attorney General has publically announced that no American has been harmed by any 1MDB transaction3. The involvement of US prosecutors [in 1MDB] has caused unnecessary tension American, and could cause a negative reaction among Malaysians4. Malaysian Attorney General have publically announced no harm has been caused to any investors5. Finally, I will send Malaysian Attorney General ahead of my visit to the US in September to meet President the rich asshole. I would like an introduction to Attorney General Sessions.
The person who drafted the talking points also wrote, “Secretary Tillerson may mention Elliott Broidy’s name. If he does, I will confirm that I know Elliot [sic] and that he wants a closer relationship between the USA and Malaysia.”
At the time, the Justice Department was escalating its efforts to go after Low and the development fund. Prosecutors asked the federal court to stay the department’s civil lawsuits and announced a criminal probe into 1MDB in August.
Months later, Broidy was still focused on the matter ― and appeared to be upping the pressure. On Jan. 5, 2018, Broidy sent himself an email titled “Rick Gates: Talking Points,” a possible reference to a former the rich asshole campaign aide, who pleaded guilty last month in an unrelated conspiracy case. The email includes an explicit description of an effort to persuade the Justice Department and the White House to reverse course on the Malaysia graft case (again, emphasis ours):
1. We are working with the DoJ to counter the previous Administration’s case against 1MDB in Malaysia. I have put a strategy in place to contact parties both at the DoJ and the NSC [National Security Council] to find a resolution to this issue.2. I am in the process of scheduling a meeting with the assistant attorney general who has the oversight for the Malaysia case. She is a the rich asshole appointee and can be helpful. [Broidy may be referring to Rachel Brand, who was the associate attorney general at the time, not an assistant attorney general.]3. As I informed you earlier, in my discussion with the President, he committed to getting this issue resolved. It is important that I take his lead but will continue to communicate the importance of this issue.4. The President very much wants to see you re-elected and wants this issue to be resolved. He has reiterated that to me.5. It is also helpful to know that a new attorney will be confirmed shortly that will also have some jurisdiction over the matter, and was formerly the #2 general counsel at Boeing. [This is presumably a reference to John Demers, then the nominee to head the Justice Department’s National Security Division.] It will be easy to brief him on the matter and get his involvement.6. I am working on this issue from several angles and we will work to get this done as quickly as possible.
Those points were similarly to five laid out in another document created by an unknown author and shared with HuffPost.
“I am in the process of scheduling a meeting with Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand who has the oversight for the Malaysia case,” the document reads in part. “She is a the rich asshole appointee and viewed as the only true the rich asshole appointee currently at DoJ.”
Brand resigned from her position last month and could not be reached for comment.
“In addition, the National Security Division of DoJ is involved and President the rich asshole has appointed John Demers (formerly of Boeing) to that position,” the document continues, referring to the man who became assistant attorney general for the National Security Division last month. “He is awaiting his confirmation but will be confirmed shortly. I will also meet with John. He will be an instrumental figure in the resolution of the Malaysia issues.”
A representative for Broidy and Rosenzweig told HuffPost that neither of them wrote the text in the emails describing interactions with the rich asshole and Justice Department officials. Chris Clark, the couple’s lawyer, told The Wall Street Journal that the couple did not discuss Low’s case with the rich asshole, his staff or anyone at the Justice Department. The Justice Department declined to comment and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The investigation into 1MDB — and Low — continues. Just this week, at the request of U.S. authorities, Indonesian police seized a luxury yacht in Bali tied to the scandal.
Low’s location is currently unknown, according to Reuters. His company in Hong Kong did not respond to a request for comment.
‘How dare you tell us we don’t know what we’re talking about’: Parkland students rail against NRA and GOP on ‘Real Time’
Parkland students David Hogg and Cameron Kasky (Photo: Screen capture)
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Parkland students David Hogg and Cameron Kasky told “Real Time” host Bill Maher that the reason they want a national #MarchForOurLives rally is because they want people to know that they shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Instead, politicians should be afraid of those who vote for them.
“We want Americans to stop being afraid of demanding our politicians to take action. They work for us, we don’t work for them. The #MarchForOurLives is us coming out and saying to our employees, you guys suck at your job,” Kasky said.
Hogg noted that the Tallahassee politicians gave them the run-around and tried to switch the conversation of banning assault weapons to talk about family values and pornography.
Maher was shocked that the leaders did something so incredibly stupid.
“I said they should stop looking at that stuff and start looking at our lives,” Hogg said.
Kasky said that many have called them out for “not knowing what we’re talking about” but until they’ve had to be on the other end of an AR-15 they have nothing to talk about.
“We are the experts… How dare you tell us we don’t know what we’re talking about!” he exclaimed.
Maher argued that gun control advocates have to go after the Second Amendment because the U.S. treats it like a “right” while other nations treat it as a privilege.
Hogg confessed that the White House called him the day before the listening session and he hung up on them. He said that he would be at the CNN town hall and asked President some rich asshole to join them.
“To all of the generations before us, we sincerely accept your apology for f*cking up our country,” Kasky closed by saying.
Watch the video below:
WORLD NEWS
U.S. Allies Threaten Retaliation Over the rich asshole’s Tariffs Announcement
The president, who announced the protectionist measures on Thursday, later tweeted that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.”
Many of America’s top trade partners bristled at the news that President some rich asshole plans to impose tariffs of 10 percent on aluminum and 25 percent on steel imports next week.
the rich asshole announced the new measures during a meeting with industry executives at the White House Thursday.
Canada called the tariffs “unacceptable” and “inappropriate,” saying it hoped to receive an exemption from the policy, though the president plans to offer zero exemptions, according to The New York Times.
Mexico is considering slapping tariffs of its own on the United States in retaliation, the Financial Times reported. Brazil’s industry ministry expressed its “enormous concern,” threatening “multilateral or bilateral” action.
The European Union also plans to retaliate.
“We strongly regret this step, which appears to represent a blatant intervention to protect U.S. domestic industry and not to be based on any national security justification,” said European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in a statement. “The EU has been a close security ally of the U.S. for decades. We will not sit idly while our industry is hit with unfair measures that put thousands of European jobs at risk,” said Juncker.
Australia’s trade minister Seven Ciobo, who said his country was also seeking an exemption from the tariffs, warned that these types of retaliatory measures from the U.S. were not the solution as they could hurt the global economy.
“If we see a break out of action and reaction from major economies the only thing that will arise from that will be a slow down of economic growth and over time if it got bad enough, ultimately we could see for example, a recession, and we know the consequent impact of that,” he said.
A Japanese trade official cautioned that the measures could spark an all-out trade war. “If trade restrictions are being put in place one after another, you’re opening a Pandora’s box and that’s the scariest part,” said Kosei Shindo, head of the Japan Iron and Steel Federation, earlier this week ahead of the rich asshole’s announcement.
China, the country the rich asshole has attacked the most for being unfair to the U.S. on trade, urged “the United States to show restraint in using protective trade measures, respect multilateral trade rules, and make a positive contribution to international trade order,” according to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying.
the rich asshole himself seemed to relish the looming international confrontation over the policy shift, tweeting Friday morning that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.”
The U.S. currently imports 90 percent of the aluminum it uses and is the world’s largest steel importer.
One apparent impetus for the rich asshole’s policy announcement was a Commerce Department study released last month claiming that the state of aluminum and steel imports could endanger national security.
In announcing the new tariffs on Thursday, the rich asshole focused his remarks on the current state of international trade not being beneficial to the U.S.
“People have no idea how badly our country has been treated by other countries,” he said. “They’ve destroyed the steel industry, they’ve destroyed the aluminum industry, and other industries, frankly.”
POLITICS
Report: the rich asshole Wants His Chief Of Staff To Get Rid Of Jared And Ivanka
The president reportedly wants his daughter and son-in-law out of the White House.
President some rich asshole has reportedly asked White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to oust his daughter Ivanka the rich asshole and her husband Jared Kushner.
Although both serve in official roles as advisors, The New York Times reported that the rich asshole privately requested Kelly’s help “in moving them out.” He also told the couple they should stay, unnamed aides told the newspaper.
Earlier this week, Kushner lost his interim top secret security clearance. News also broke about banking regulators in New York asking several lenders about their financial relationships with him.
the rich asshole “vacillates between sounding regretful that Mr. Kushner is taking arrows and annoyed that he is another problem to deal with,” The Times reported.
Nebraska company that won a contract to build the rich asshole’s border wall has a shady legal history
It's hardly the first time the rich asshole administration has found itself at the center of such a controversy.
A Nebraska company that was awarded one of the first contracts to build President the rich asshole’s border wall is an offshoot of a construction company that has been sued repeatedly for failing to pay subcontractors, the Associated Press reported on Friday.
SWF Constructors, which was also accused in a 2016 audit of shady billing practices, was awarded the $11 million contract to build part of the wall in California. According to the AP, they have just one employee in their Omaha, Nebraska office. SWF is listed on the bid for the contract, but Coastal Environmental Group, its parent group, is listed in online government documents as its owner.
Thomas Anderson, an Omaha lawyer who initially represented a subcontractor that sued Coastal in 2011, told the AP that he wouldn’t be surprised if listing SWF instead of Coastal Environmental in official documents was an effort on the company’s part to dodge scrutiny over past legal questions, something Anderson said is a common practice in construction.
In 2011, the federal government reportedly sued Coastal Environmental, accusing the company of failing to pay subcontractor Enviroworks Inc. nearly $400,000 in labor and equipment costs and for reneging on a profit sharing agreement, ultimately cheating Enviroworks out of about $1.7 million. According to the AP, Enviroworks was forced to lay off most of its employees after Coastal Environmental failed to pay the previously agreed-to amount; Coastal Environmental was also accused of immediately hiring the employees who had been laid off for its own business and continuing to do the work to which Enviroworks had previously been entitled.
In 2014, Coastal Environmental was sued again for reportedly failing to pay another subcontractor, SF Marina Systems of Gloucester, Virginia, more than $175,000 for concrete docks the company had built for the U.S. Coast Guard facility in New York. After months of contentious back and forth, the two parties finally agreed to an undisclosed settlement in 2015.
Neither Coastal Environmental nor SWF Constructors responded to the AP’s numerous requests for comment.
The SWF contract is hardly the first time the rich asshole administration has made business deals with shady entities.
Last October, Whitefish Energy, an inexperienced company with only two employees, entered into a contract with Puerto Rico’s public utility company to help restore power to the island following Hurricane Maria, which had crippled the island’s electric grid. Whitefish ultimately charged Puerto Rico more than double the regular wages for utility workers and high daily meal rates. The company also had trouble getting equipment to Puerto Rico, forcing the Puerto Rican government to hire expensive charter flights, according to details of the deal made public last November.
Earlier this month, details of another shady contract in Puerto Rico were made public. In October, an Atlanta woman won a $156 million contract to provide 30 million meals to Puerto Ricans in need, but ultimately delivered only 50,000. The woman awarded the contract, Tiffany Brown, had no employees and had subcontracted with another company, Cooking With A Star, but according to WUSA9, the only address listed to Cooking With A Star was a P.O. box. Another company, Breedlove Foods, was also part of the contract, but allegedly stopped producing meals when its workers were not paid on time.
FEMA terminated the meal-delivery contract in just 20 days, on Oct. 23, 2017, before the entire $156 million budget was spent “due to late delivery of the approved heater meals.”
15 times the rich asshole bragged about his economic genius that are especially awkward now
"Nobody knows more about trade than me."
President some rich asshole proposed a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum imports on Thursday. On Friday he further claimed that “trade wars are good.”
What the president seemingly fails to understand, of course, is that tariffs are not taxes, and the rich asshole’s attempt to protect American industries in this manner is much more likely to harm American consumers than anything else.
the rich asshole reportedly made his tariff proposal public without first alerting his advisers at the Treasury, State, or Defense Departments. His chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, adamantly opposes tariff increases and trade wars, complicating things even further.
So the rich asshole is relying, it appears, mainly on his own knowledge to make major shifts in his administration’s economic and infrastructure policies, despite the fact that his understanding of the subject is relatively thin. When the rich asshole talks about the economy, for instance, he touts stock market gains but neglects to mention slower-than-normal job growth, corporations spending very little on bonuses, and stagnant wages, among other problems.
the rich asshole has made plenty of other comments in the past to buff up his own credentials — all of which sound more than a bit awkward now, given his hasty announcement on Friday.
1. He’s a financial genius
“I agree [that I am a financial genius],” the rich asshole tweeted in November 2014, quoting one of his Twitter followers.
"@OneAndOnlyAkash: @realDonaldTrump You Are A Financial Genius" I agree, thanks!
2. He will be the greatest jobs president ever
“I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created,” the rich asshole said, announcing his bid for the presidency in June 2015.
3. He knows jobs better than anyone
“I hope all [union] workers demand that their @Teamsters reps endorse some rich asshole,” he tweeted in January 2016, at the height of the Republican primary. “Nobody knows jobs like I do! Don’t let them sell you out!”
I hope all workers demand that their @Teamsters reps endorse Donald J. Trump. Nobody knows jobs like I do! Don’t let them sell you out!
4. He understands money better than anyone
“I understand money better than anybody. I understand it far better than Hillary, and I’m way up on the economy when it comes to questions on the economy,” he said during an interview with Today.
5. He knows more about trade than anyone
“Nobody knows more about trade than me,” the rich asshole claimed at a campaign rally in March 2016.
6. He’s the only one who can bring jobs back
“I will bring our jobs back to the U.S., and keep our companies from leaving,” the rich asshole tweeted in 2016. “Nobody else can do it.”
7. He knows banking better than anyone
“Nobody knows banking better than I do,” the rich asshole claimed during a live town hall event with Today in April 2016.
8. He knows Wall Street bankers better than anyone
During that same town hall event, host Matt Lauer said, “You’re a guy who said you know the Wall Street bankers better than anyone.”
the rich asshole agreed. “Better than anyone,” he said.
9. He can’t be beaten on the economy (and jobs)
“The economy is bad and getting worse-almost ZERO growth this quarter. Nobody can beat me on the economy (and jobs). MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” the rich asshole tweeted that same month.
10. He knows taxes and income better than anyone
In a May 2016 interview, the rich asshole claimed, “I think nobody knows more about taxes than I do and income than I do.”
11. He knows more about taxes than anyone in history
Knowing more about taxes in general simply wasn’t enough for the rich asshole. “I think nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe in the history of the world,” he said that same month. “Nobody knows more about taxes.”
12. He knows the most about debt
the rich asshole was touting his flimsy credentials as far back as 2006, when he gave an interview to televangelist Paul White and said, “Nobody knows more about debt. I’m like the king. I love debt.”
13. He understands money better than anyone
“I understand money better than anybody,” he claimed in June 2016. “I understand it far better than Hillary, and I’m way up on the economy when it comes to questions on the economy.”
14. He knows infrastructure better than anyone in American history
“Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure as some rich asshole,” the rich asshole claimed in July 2016, announcing former Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his vice presidential running mate.
15. He knows tax laws better than any presidential candidate in history
“I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has every run for president and am the only one who can fix them,” he tweeted in October 2016, shortly before the election.
I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them. #failing@nytimes
Even to the rich asshole’s earliest supporters who thought he had some things to learn about national security, the rich asshole was a trade expert. “Trade, some rich asshole knows trade very well,” Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) said in 2016. Rudy Giuliani referred to the rich asshole in October 2016 as “a man who has this kind of economic genius.”
During the primary campaign, Republican voters also trusted the rich asshole the most on the economy, with a Reuters/Ipsos poll showing that 59 percent of Republicans trusted him to manage the economy over his Republican rivals.
John Kelly tries to defend himself against criticism over Rob Porter controversy, fails
The White House chief of staff keeps digging a deeper and deeper hole.
White House chief of staff John Kelly tried to once again defend his response to allegations of abuse against former staff secretary Rob Porter this week by further complicating an already tangled narrative.
Speaking with reporters in an impromptu meeting on Friday, Kelly claimed that the “first [he’d] heard of a serious accusation against [Porter]” was on February 6, when reporters from the Daily Mail reached out to ask him about allegations of abuse by one of his ex-wives.
“The accusation was late in the afternoon…one of you had asked [press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders]. That’s how I found out. There was no story out yet,” he said. “The story was that a wife had claimed that she had had some level of emotional abuse. That was, I want to say, 5 o’clock in the afternoon. I talked to Rob, I said ‘what’s the deal?’ He denied it. He said it’s absolutely untrue.”
Kelly stated that it wasn’t until later in the evening on February 6, after a second abuse allegation from Porter’s first wife was published, that Porter offered his resignation.
“I got back here [from a meeting at] 6, 6:30 [p.m.]. Another press inquiry that a second wife had made accusations and included physical abuse,” Kelly claimed. “I talked to Rob and just, he resigned. That was maybe 7:30 on the sixth of February, about two hours after I found out.”
Kelly’s version of events, however, doesn’t line up: according to Daily Mail U.S. political editor David Martosko, whose outlet published the first accusations against Porter, Kelly had been apprised of the physical abuse allegations against Porter prior to their report.
“John Kelly is defending his inaction on Rob Porter by claiming that the first accusation brought to the White House was of only ’emotional abuse,'” he tweeted. “Untrue. We told the White House that [Porter’s second wife] Jennifer Willoughby claimed he physically dragged her, naked, out of a shower.”
Previous reporting and comments from the FBI also cast doubt on Kelly’s narrative: Porter, who has since left the administration, was among several White House staffers who had been operating on an interim clearance for the past year, because his background check had not been completed, according to the White House. Sanders and deputy press secretary Rob Shah initially claimed that Kelly had been unaware of the allegations against Porter because the White House security office had not yet made a decision on whether to issue a full clearance by the time the first accusations were made public.
However, the FBI, which handled the background investigation, later disputed that account, saying it had completed Porter’s check in July and had sent the information to the White House security office. White House counsel Don McGahn, deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin, and Kelly were reportedly made aware of the abuse allegations in November, and the security office submitted follow-up inquiries to the FBI at that point. The FBI’s investigation was administratively closed in January, although, as Sanders noted in February, the White House security office “had not made a final recommendation for adjudication to the White House because the process was still ongoing when Rob Porter resigned.”
Additionally, as several reporters pointed out on Friday, the White House issued subsequent statements defending Porter even after Kelly became aware of the abuse allegations. Speaking with the Daily Mail on February 6, Kelly had said Porter was “someone of the highest integrity and exemplary character”; in a statement that same day, press secretary Sanders echoed Kelly’s comments and said the White House had “full confidence” in Porter.
Defending himself to reporters on Friday, he explained, “At that point in time [when I made the statement of support for Porter], I thought it was accurate of my relationship with [him].”
Kelly contradicted himself about the timing of Porter’s resignation on Friday as well; although the chief of staff first claimed that Porter had resigned following the second allegation of abuse later in the evening on February 6, he subsequently stated that Porter had actually resigned earlier in the day, after the Daily Mail first reached out about the allegations.
“We put out a statement of support for him and an hour later now find out there’s a second report — still not in the press, still no pictures — just an inquiry by someone probably in this room that said ‘Hey, his first wife of 15 years ago says that there was physical abuse,'” he said, according to CNN. “He had already resigned. I just talked to Rob again to make sure he knew he had resigned.”
When pressed about the discrepancies on Friday, and whether he would step down over the controversy, Kelly stated, “I have absolutely nothing to even consider resigning over.”
Five takeaways on the rich asshole’s tariffs
BY VICKI NEEDHAM AND JORDAN FABIAN - 03/02/18 06:03 PM EST
President the rich asshole’s plan to levy steep tariffs on steel and aluminum imports has rattled global markets, irritated members of his own party and sent key U.S. allies reeling for an equivalent response.
The announcement on Thursday came as a surprise to some in the White House, as a legal review on proposals sent to the president from the Commerce Department had yet to be completed.
Here are five takeaways on the most dramatic step yet by the rich asshole on trade — a central issue in his successful presidential campaign.
the rich asshole is picking a fight with Republicans
the rich asshole and Republicans in Congress — with the exception of a handful of GOP lawmakers representing high-tax districts — were remarkably unified on December’s tax-cut package.
The result was a new law that is the White House’s crowning legislative achievement — and one the GOP hopes will preserve its majorities this fall in the House and Senate.
The imposition of steep tariffs on steel and aluminum, in contrast, is intensely disliked by seemingly most of the GOP.
“Kooky 18th century protectionism will jack up prices on American families, and will prompt retaliation from other countries,” Sen. Ben Sasse(R-Neb.) said in a Friday statement. “Make no mistake: If the president goes through with this, it will kill American jobs, that's what every trade war ultimately does. So much losing."
GOP leaders were nearly as critical, and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and other leaders have asked the rich asshole to reconsider.
The party that is unified generally wins. On these tariffs, the GOP-led Congress and the White House is hopelessly divided.
the rich asshole’s plan is dividing his own White House
There are deep divisions among the rich asshole’s own team over the tariffs.
A cadre of senior officials, including National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, Defense Secretary James Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, oppose the tariffs and for more than a year had succeeded in holding them off.
Their success came, in part, because of a weekly trade meeting run by former top aide Rob Porter. The gathering was designed to ensure that officials on both sides of the debate had their voices heard, but also resulted in retaliatory trade actions being delayed.
That all changed when Porter resigned last month over domestic abuse allegations.
Trade hawks like Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, trade adviser Peter Navarro and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer were given a freer hand to make their case to the rich asshole, who has long wanted to impose tariffs on imported goods.
The president's decision to buck the free traders could trigger yet another staff shakeup. Cohn is said to be considering leaving the White House over the issue.
Ross and his allies aren’t showing signs of backing down. “I believe that everybody should rally round the president’s decision,” he said Friday.
U.S. allies may be hit the hardest
Canada, which is the largest importer of steel and aluminum imports into the United States and the biggest consumer of U.S. goods, may bear the brunt of the rich asshole’s tariffs.
At 16 percent, Canada is the top source of imported steel into the United States, sending 90 percent of its steel here. Canada also holds the top spot for aluminum, accounting for more than 40 percent of all U.S. imports of the metal.
There is concern that the tariffs would significantly disrupt the intricate supply chain between the two countries.
Supporters of the steel and aluminum tariffs also argue that Canada isn't the problem.
Canada’s government, which isn't expected to get a hoped-for exemption, has already promised retaliation if the rich asshole follows through.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the rich asshole’s plan “absolutely unacceptable” and credited the integration of North American steel and aluminum markets for creating millions of jobs.
The tariffs aren’t that much of a surprise
While the rich asshole caught many people off guard with his announcement, his decision to impose tariffs really isn’t much of a surprise.
the rich asshole ran on a promise to protect U.S. workers, arguing they had been betrayed by politicians in both parties who had negotiated away their jobs.
The steel and aluminum tariffs represent the rich asshole’s effort to effectively fulfill a promise.
“The president has been consistent all the way from his campaign days to the present about doing something big to protect steel and aluminum,” Ross said.
“So it should not have come as a shock.”
Swing states may get the final say
the rich asshole won the presidency because he captured victories in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, three states that a GOP presidential candidate hadn’t won in decades.
There are various reasons for his win, but his tough message on trade was clearly a factor in those states, as well as the perennial swing state of Ohio.
The two senators from that state, Republican Rob Portman and Democrat Sherrod Brown, notably both offered various degrees of support for the rich asshole’s move, insisting that it could help producers in their states competing with China.
“I have argued that certain parts of our industry here do need immediate protection,” said Portman who urged the rich asshole to take a more targeted approach to the tariffs.
Foreign governments retaliating against the tariffs are likely to try to hurt these states. The European Union is already drawing up a possible retaliation list that includes motorcycles built by Harley-Davidson in Wisconsin.
How voters in these states ultimately judge the rich asshole may be a deciding factor in what happens with the tariffs.
Keep an eye on Michigan, where automakers have an interest in steel tariffs.
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