the rich asshole’s lawyers had first face-to-face meeting with Mueller’s team days before president’s weekend Twitter tirade
some rich asshole (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Wikipedia)
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Lawyers for President some rich asshole and members of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team had their first face-to-face meeting last week — just days before the president went on a Twitter tirade against the special counsel.
CNN revealed the existence of the meeting in a Monday night report — a meeting that sources close to the proceedings said finally happened “after several weeks of informal discussions between the two sides.”
“The meeting makes clear that Mueller’s investigation into contact between Russians and the the rich asshole campaign and other criminal matters isn’t likely to end anytime soon,” CNN reported, noting that it also seem to “have unleashed a new level of the rich asshole’s public hostility toward Mueller, even while some of the President’s advisers show a willingness to negotiate the rich asshole’s testimony.”
Mueller was not in attendance at the meeting, the report continued, but his prosecutors — which includes Watergate prosecutor James Quarles III — “gave the rich asshole’s lawyers enough detail that the President’s team wrote a memo with possible questions they expect to be asked of him.”
According to one of CNN’s sources, “the rich asshole was interested in speaking with Mueller’s team if the probe would end soon.” Once he realized that there’s much more to come, however, “he’s become more agitated and has lashed out on Twitter.”
the rich asshole adds to legal team after attacks on Mueller
BY JONATHAN EASLEY - 03/19/18 08:40 PM EDT
President the rich asshole is adding prominent white-collar attorney Joseph diGenova to his personal legal team, the latest sign of an increasingly aggressive stance toward special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
The White House insists that there are no plans to fire Mueller. But the rich asshole’s own tweets and his decision to hire diGenova — a former U.S. attorney who has attacked the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) in conservative media outlets — are the latest signs that the president is moving to discredit Mueller’s probe.
The confrontational posture comes as Mueller’s investigation has reportedly extended to the rich asshole’s personal business empire, and as the White House and the special counsel negotiate the parameters of a potential interview.
“It shows they’re taking this very seriously and recognize that it’s not going away any time soon, and that the stakes are just climbing higher,” said former U.S. Attorney John Wood.
DiGenova has been a fixture in the Washington, D.C., legal community for years. He is married to Victoria Toensing, who represents an informant at the center of the Uranium One investigation being conducted by Republicans in Congress.
Like the rich asshole, diGenova has a harsh assessment of former FBI Director James Comey. DiGenova has described Comey as “the dirtiest cop in America” and accused him of destroying the FBI’s reputation with his “bizarre personal behavior.”
The New York Times first reported on diGenova’s hiring, and in that story highlighted his past claim that the Justice Department had framed the rich asshole by “creating a false crime” of collusion. One prominent legal figure described diGenova to The Hill as “a wild card.”
DiGenova joins a team of the rich asshole’s personal lawyers who have freely attacked the special counsel, breaking from the more reserved stance the president’s White House legal team has taken up to now.
the rich asshole attorney Jay Sekulow is a frequent guest on Fox News’s “Hannity,” where he has railed against alleged corruption at the FBI and DOJ and demanded a second special counsel investigate what he describes as irregularities in the separate investigations into Hillary Clinton and the rich asshole.
On his Monday radio show, Sekulow detailed the chain of events he said wrongly led to the special counsel investigation of the rich asshole and called out individuals at the DOJ and FBI by name for alleged anti-the rich asshole bias.
“You have to look at the totality of circumstances here and ask yourself, what is happening?” Sekulow said.
Sekulow’s remarks came one day after another of the rich asshole’s personal attorneys, John Dowd, sent Washington into a frenzy by calling for an end to the special counsel.
Dowd publicly pressured Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing the special counsel because Attorney General Jeff Sessionsrecused himself, to “bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation” that he said had been “manufactured” by Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whom Sessions fired on Friday night.
Dowd said the entire special counsel investigation was “based upon a fraudulent and corrupt dossier” compiled by British spy Christopher Steele and paid for in part by Democrats, including the Clinton campaign.
That statement preceded a round of blistering tweets from the president, in which the rich asshole vented his frustration with Mueller and singled him out for criticism by name for the first time.
the rich asshole accused Mueller of stocking his team with Democrats and said the special counsel was a “witch hunt” that was rife with “massive conflicts of interest.”
The White House quickly sought to throw cold water on the notion that Mueller’s firing was immanent.
“There are no conversations or discussions about removing Mr. Mueller,” deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said Monday.
Ty Cobb, who leads the president’s White House legal team, issued a similar statement.
“The President is not considering or discussing the firing of the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller,” Cobb said in a statement.
The White House position has long been that it is cooperating with Mueller in the hopes that he would conduct a swift investigation that clears the president of wrongdoing.
Cobb had been hopeful that the special counsel would wrap by the end of 2017 or in early 2018.
The White House legal team believes it has finished providing the thousands of internal documents the special counsel requested. Cobb’s team has been in a holding pattern, even as media reports indicate that Mueller’s probe has expanded to include everything from the the rich asshole Organization to Jared Kushner’s business dealings to a private meeting with a Russian official at an exclusive island resort in the Indian Ocean.
Still, Robert Ray, the former independent counsel for the Whitewater investigation during the Clinton administration, says that as long as Cobb is in charge of the White House legal team, any notion that there has been a change in legal strategy is overblown.
“Ty Cobb has been the constant fixture here,” Ray said. “There’s no indication anything has changed until he’s no longer in the loop. There is still a sense that they’re operating under the principle that the White House will cooperate and hand over the relevant witnesses and documents to try to bring this to a close. There will always be a political atmospherics and outside lawyers joining or leaving, but there haven’t been any fundamental changes.”
Mueller still has the confidence of lawmakers on Capitol Hill, with several Republicans warning the rich asshole against firing him on Monday.
Mueller, a Republican, was confirmed in a 98-0 vote to lead the FBI in 2001 under George W. Bush and by a 100-0 vote when Barack Obamaasked him to continue in the role in 2011.
“I think there would be a number of unintended consequences [if the rich asshole were to fire Mueller] and I’m not going to speculate what those are,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
Even Fox News anchor Sean Hannity, who is friends with the rich asshole and pillories Mueller every night on his top-rated cable show, sought to dampen speculation that the special counsel would be fired.
Hannity made a rare appearance on the morning show “Fox & Friends,” a program that the president is known to watch, and offered a word of caution about Mueller.
“If I was advising the president, I’d say, let this investigation go forward. We’re probably coming to the end of it, if I had to render a guess, and it would be in his best interest
probably not to comment,” Hannity said.
probably not to comment,” Hannity said.
“All the president was saying was, this [special counsel investigation] should never have been. This never should have happened,” Hannity continued. “I would argue we’re
getting to the end of the process. There’s not going to be any firing of Mueller.”
getting to the end of the process. There’s not going to be any firing of Mueller.”
The president saw the segment and tweeted out praise for Hannity shortly after it was over.
Michael Cohen: Stormy Daniels payment was not about the campaign
BY JULIA MANCHESTER - 03/19/18 07:45 PM EDT
President the rich asshole's personal attorney Michael Cohen said in an interview published on Monday that the $130,000 nondisclosure payment he made to adult film star Stormy Daniel in October of 2016 had nothing to do with the next month's election.
“People are mistaking this for a thing about the campaign,” Cohen told Vanity Fair.
“What I did defensively for my personal client, and my friend, is what attorneys do for their high-profile clients. I would have done it in 2006. I would have done it in 2011. I truly care about him and the family — more than just as an employee and an attorney," he said.
Cohen has repeatedly said that he paid Daniels the $130,000 out of his own pocket and was not reimbursed.
Democrats and election watchdog groups say the payment, which came shortly after the release of the rich asshole's infamous "Access Hollywood" tape, could violate campaign finance laws if it was intended to have an impact on the vote.
Daniels has offered to return the payment in order to speak publicly about the relationship she says she had with the rich asshole, but her lawyer said that the rich asshole and Cohen did not meet the deadline to have the money returned.
The White House has denied the affair with Daniels.
The president accused the adult film star in court papers filed last week of repeatedly violating the nondisclosure agreement. He is seeking $20 million in damages.
Cohen told Vanity Fair any money won from Daniels will be used to pay lawyers first, then donated to various charities.
"You know what?” Cohen said. “The more I’m thinking about it, I might even take an extended vacation on her dime.”
Daniels, who has said through an attorney that she's been physically threatened over the allegations, has set up a legal defense for her expenses.
the rich asshole prepared to hit China with $60B in annual tariffs: report
BY LUIS SANCHEZ - 03/19/18 06:43 PM EDT
President the rich asshole is planning to hit China with $60 billion worth of annual tariffs, following up on his threats to punish Beijing for intellectual property theft, The Washington Post reported Monday.
Senior aides had provided the president with a $30 billion tariff package — but the rich asshole ordered them to double it, according to the Post.
The package, which the rich asshole is expected to announce on Friday, will target more than 100 products.
the rich asshole argues that these products were developed using trade secrets from American companies that China either stole or forced them to give up in exchange for market access.
Many worry that if the rich asshole follows through with these proposed tariffs, China might retaliate, triggering a trade war that could have drastic effects on the U.S. economy.
The new tariffs follow the rich asshole’s recent announcement of a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum.
Although a couple of vital trading partners, such as Canada and Mexico, were excluded from the tariffs in the original announcement — and it’s possible more could be excluded — the European Union has said it will enact retaliatory measures, and other countries could follow suit.
Many Republicans have also spoken out against the steel and aluminum tariffs, and GOP Sen. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) has also introduced a bill to nullify them.
Gary Cohn, a supporter of free trade, resigned from his post as the rich asshole’s economic adviser following the announcement of the steel and aluminum tariffs.
the rich asshole’s lawyers increasingly anxious about letting him answer questions
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March 19, 2018
the rich asshole's legal team is reportedly working behind the scenes in a desperate attempt to minimize the rich asshole's exposure to Mueller, knowing that an interview with the special counsel could be the beginning of the end of his presidency.
the rich asshole’s lawyers reportedly turned over a trove of documents to special counsel Robert Mueller’s office as part of an ongoing, behind-the-scenes effort to shield the rich asshole from a potentially perilous interview with Mueller.
The Washington Post reported Monday evening that the rich asshole’s attorneys have provided Mueller’s team with “written descriptions that chronicle key moments under investigation” in an attempt “to minimize his exposure to the special counsel.”
According to the Post, “The lawyers are worried that the rich asshole, who has a penchant for making erroneous claims, would be vulnerable in an hours-long interview.”
They have good reason to be worried.
the rich asshole has a long history of lying under oath, and he regularly — and publicly — spews patently false claims about the Russia investigation.
In what may end up being one of the most significant pieces of evidence in Mueller’s investigation of obstruction of justice, the rich asshole went on national television and announced that he had fired former FBI Director James Comey because of his handling of the Russia investigation — a statement that completely undermined what the White House said about his firing.
The revelation that the rich asshole’s lawyers have turned over documents to Mueller is just the latest sign of panic coming from the rich asshole’s legal team.
Earlier this month, his lawyers laughably tried to broker a deal with Mueller, saying the rich asshole would sit down for an interview if Mueller agreed to end the Russia investigation within 60 days. (That’s not how investigations work.)
They have also taken to television to make their case on behalf of the rich asshole, even going as far as calling for Mueller to be investigated for having the audacity of doing his job.
And just two days ago, the rich asshole’s personal attorney John Dowd called for the Russia probe to be shut down.
If, as the rich asshole claims, he has nothing to hide, why are his lawyers trying so hard to keep him hidden from Mueller? That’s a question Mueller surely wants to answer.
the rich asshole lawyers give Mueller documents as they seek to limit scope of interview: report
BY JULIAN MANCHESTER AND JONATHAN EASLEY - 03/19/18 05:24 PM EDT
President the rich asshole's lawyers are seeking to limit the scope of a potential interview with special counsel Robert Mueller, fearing a lengthy talk could leave the president vulnerable, according to a new report by The Washington Post.
They are doing so by providing certain documents to Mueller's team, including summaries of internal White House memos and emails relating to the firing of former national security adviser Michael Flynn and other events that are being investigated by the special counsel.
In doing so, the rich asshole's legal team hopes to cut down on the subjects that Mueller could ask the rich asshole about.
the rich asshole, who has gone on the attack against Mueller in recent days, has previously suggested he is open to an interview.
“I'm looking forward to it," the rich asshole said in January.
But there have long been fears by some the rich asshole associates that doing so could endanger the president.
A source told the Post that the president is eager to sit down with Mueller, but the president’s in-house attorneys are eager to limit the breadth of any interview. There are reports that the White House is pushing for the back-and-forth to take place in writing, as there are concerns among some of the rich asshole’s allies about the potential for him to make a false statement under oath.
the rich asshole and his personal attorneys have increasingly expressed frustrated with the special counsel investigation, which has cast a cloud over the president's first year in office.
Over the weekend, the rich asshole’s attorney John Dowd called for it to come to an end and the president for the first time singled out Mueller by name for criticism, accusing him of stocking the special counsel with “hardened Democrats” who he said have “massive conflicts of interest.”
the rich asshole on Monday hired former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, who has accused the FBI and Department of Justice of seeking to frame the rich asshole, to join his personal legal team.
But the rich asshole’s White House counsel insist that they are cooperating with Mueller in the hopes that he will bring the investigation to a swift conclusion that absolves the president of wrongdoing.
Mueller will likely get only one shot at interviewing the president. The interview would likely signal that the special counsel investigation is nearing its end, or moving into a phase where Mueller focuses on prosecuting those indicted for crimes, rather than investigating potential new crimes.
The Post reports that the materials sent to Mueller's team included summaries of internal White House memos and communications about events that Mueller is probing, including the firings of Flynn and former FBI Director James Comey.
The developments come as the rich asshole has amped up his attacks on Mueller, attacking him for the first time by name on Twitter last weekend.
The Fake News is beside themselves that McCabe was caught, called out and fired. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars was given to wife’s campaign by Crooked H friend, Terry M, who was also under investigation? How many lies? How many leaks? Comey knew it all, and much more!
The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!
the rich asshole denied that collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin ever took place, and has referred to the federal and congressional probes investigating the
Conservatives Snowflakes Freak The F*ck Out Over Jim Carrey’s Sarah Sanders Painting
You know how conservatives called Obama a “monkey,” Hillary Clinton a “dyke” and “cunt” and the rest of us snowflakes for having a problem with it?
Well, those very same people just got hella “triggered” over actor Jim Carrey’s artwork depicting a surpisingly realistic Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
“This is the portrait of a so-called Christian whose only purpose in life is to lie for the wicked,” Carrey tweeted. “Monstrous!”
Though he never named Sanders, our frenemies on the Right were quick to identify her (while simultaneously claiming the portrait doesn’t resemble her in the least) and hoo boy are they mad!
Guess your career is over.
Jim @JimCarrey why did your girlfriend kill herself?
Judging from responses, you need to quit tweeting because people hate you and you are no longer relevant. I totally agree! You sold you’re soul and will pay the price. Those who speak the loudest... we ALL know.
Funny how All the sudden these Far left Liberals follow so closely what happens with this Republican president and are so opinionated about Everything but stayed silent about the horribly crooked and disgusting things that happened under Hussein Obama
says the dude who lies for a living pretending to be someone else
JIMMY JIMMY. YOUR AND IDIOT. I MEAN. LOOK AT YOUR MOVIES. THEY ARE STUPID!! JUST LIKE YOU. NOW YOU ARE WASHED UP!! PROBABLY JACK O_F!! ALL DAY!! LITERALLY. AND NOW YOU WANT PEOPLE TO FOLLOW YOUR SAY? LIKE I SAID. AN IDIOT!! ALWAYS SAID YOU WAS!! I AM RIGHT!
The demands for apologies were taken into consideration by Carrey, who decided the best thing to do was piss them off more with some of his other artwork:
Carry has been sharing his paintings on Twitter for quite some time now, and they’re actually really good. Here are a few others that cause right-wing blood to boil:
Isn’t it fun watching right-wing hypocrisy on full display?
Even Fox News knows McCabe’s firing spells trouble for the rich asshole
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Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano admitted the firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe "could very well be ... obstruction of justice."
Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano warned Monday that the abrupt dismissal of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe could constitute obstruction of justice by the rich asshole.
Speaking on the Fox News show “America’s Newsroom,” Napolitano said he thinks the firing of McCabe, which came less than two days before his scheduled retirement, was a “vindictive” and “reckless” move by by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“Andrew McCabe is more likely than not to be a witness against the attorney general’s boss, the president of the United States,” Napolitano told Fox host Bill Hemmer.
“I think that firing him in that environment could very well be interpreted as an effort to diminish his effectiveness as a witness. What’s that called? Obstruction of justice.”
McCabe was fired Friday evening after more than two decades at the FBI. His ouster was announced barely 24 hours before he was set to retire — a last-minute move that could mean he will lose the pension he earned during his years of service.
In a statement released shortly after his firing, McCabe said he believed his dismissal was part of an effort to undermine special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s election interference, in which McCabe is likely to be a key witness.
McCabe is one of only three people who can reportedly corroborate the circumstances surrounding the firing of former FBI Director James Comey, who testified under oath that the rich asshole pressured him to drop the Russia investigation before firing him.
That makes McCabe a particularly important witness in a potential obstruction case — and that, in turn, gives the rich asshole a strong motive to want to discredit him.
That’s also why the circumstances of McCabe’s firing could spell trouble for the rich asshole. And even Fox’s Napolitano — who the rich asshole once described as a “very talented legal mind” — can’t deny that fact.
the rich asshole political consultants admit to using sex workers to entrap opponents in explosive new video
But Cambridge Analytica's CEO, Alexander Nix, said that they were actually the ones entrapped.
The data firm that helped propel the rich asshole to the presidency used sex workers and bribes to entrap political opponents in compromising situations, according to an investigation by Channel 4 News in the U.K.
Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, told undercover reporters that it could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house,” adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well.” Nix also said that his firm, operating through a series of front companies and sub-contractors, would “offer a large amount of money to the candidate… we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the fact of our guy and we’ll post it on the internet.”
In the admissions, filmed at a series of London hotels between November 2017 and January 2018, the managing director of Cambridge Analytica Political Global, Mark Turnball, described the damaging information as “propaganda”.
"Send some girls around to the candidates house”
EXCLUSIVE: This is how Cambridge Analytica bosses reacted when our reporter brought up the subject of digging dirt on political opponents. #CambridgeAnalyticaUncovered
“We just put the information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then, and then watch it grow, give it a little push now and again,” Turnball said. “It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘that’s propaganda,’ because the moment you think ‘that’s propaganda’ the next question is, ‘who’s put that out?'” The executive went on to boast that Cambridge Analytica had worked in more than two hundred elections across the world.
“The fundamental human drivers when it comes to taking information onboard effectively are hopes and fears and many of those are unspoken and even unconscious,” Turnball said in a later interaction. “You didn’t know that was a fear until you saw something that just evoked that reaction from you, and our job is to drop the bucket further down the well then anybody else to understand what really are those deep-seated underlying fears.”
The new revelations come just days after the Guardian and New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal information from 50 million Facebook users — without their permission — to help the firm microtarget prospective voters for the 2016 election. Cambridge Analytica is also under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for possible links to Russian interference in the election and by the U.K. Parliament for data privacy violations. Offering bribes to public officials, as documented in the Channel 4 expose, is also illegal under both the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the U.K. Bribery Act.
On Monday, Facebook announced that it had hired a digital forensics firm to audit the claims about Cambridge Analytica and whether the firm still holds data on Facebook users. “If this data still exists, it would be a grave violation of Facebook’s policies and an unacceptable violation of trust and the commitments these groups made,” Facebook said in a blog post. “We are moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims.”
In an extraordinary statement, Cambridge Analytica denied Channel 4’s allegations and said that they were the ones being entrapped by the undercover journalists. “Cambridge Analytica held a series of meeting with the undercover reporter to discuss philanthropic, infrastructure and political projects in Sri Lanka,” it said. “The undercover reporter later attempted to entrap Cambridge Analytica executives by initiating a conversation about unethical practices.”
The statement added that “the company’s practice is to gently de-escalate the conversation before removing themselves from the situation. However CEO Alexander Nix acknowledges that on this occasion he misjudged the situation.” Apparently Cambridge Analytica de-escalation involves specifically mentioning the nationality of the sex workers he would allegedly use to entrap political opponents.
But even if there is a shred of truth to Cambridge Analytica’s statement — and Channel 4 is renowned in the UK for the strength of its investigative reporting — it ignores the wider issue of the firm allegedly accessing the personal data of 50 million Americans. Now the U.K.’s Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, said she is seeking a warrant to examine the data and servers used by Cambridge Analytica.
“We need to get in there, we need to look at the databases, we need to look at the servers and understand how data was processed or deleted by Cambridge Analytica,” she said.
____________________________________________________________________________________
This piece has been updated with Cambridge Analytica’s statement
‘Can you say Saturday Night Massacre?’: GOP congressman warns the rich asshole firing Mueller would ‘paralyze’ Congress
Special counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller. Image via Tim Sloan/AFP.
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One GOP member of Congress warned Monday night that if President some rich asshole fires special counsel Robert Mueller, it would “paralyze” the legislative branch.
Fox News White House correspondent Chad Pergram tweeted that Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) said the potential firing “would be an Archibald Cox moment,” referencing President Richard Nixon firing his special counsel and instigating the resignations of two top cabinet members.
“Can you say Saturday Night Massacre?” Dent asked Pergram rhetorically, referencing the post-Watergate episode. “It would paralyze this institution. We would then do nothing else.”
Dent also reportedly told the Fox News correspondent that he’d support legislation to protect Mueller — but that doing so could be a “poison pill.”
Dent has in recent weeks been a staunch critic of the rich asshole’s personnel choices. During a CNN interview last Tuesday, the Pennsylvania congressman blasted the president for making the “deplorable” decision to fire Secretary of State Rex Tillerson via tweet — a move he credited for swaying the state’s special congressional election in favor of Democrat Conor Lamb.
Over the weekend, Dent also criticized the rich asshole Justice Department’s decision to fire former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe just a day before he became eligible for his pension.
“This firing looks a bit forced, a bit rushed. Candidly, it looks like retribution and a bit vindictive,” Dent said on CNN. “And I think it’s unfortunate. The man said he’s resigning, you know, and on a Friday night before his 50th birthday he’s fired to take away his pension? I don’t like the optics of this, I really don’t.”
Dent, who earlier in March called out the president’s “crony capitalism,” announced last fall that he is not seeking re-election. He cited people within the Republican Party who “profit from polarization” and those who “love dysfunction” as his reasons for calling it quits after a nearly 30-year career in public service.
the rich asshole is so bad, Hawaii Republicans are leaving the party in droves
Former U.S. Rep. Charles Djou (R-HI) is the latest to bolt
In 2016, as Hillary Clinton beat some rich asshole 48 percent to 46 percent in the popular vote nationwide, she held him to just 30 percent of the vote in Hawaii. Now, President the rich asshole’s current approval rating in the Aloha State might be even lower than that. And with the administration pursuing nativist, anti-immigrant, racist policies and imperiling Hawaii’s existence via Twitter, his party has become quite toxic in a state with just a 25.8 percent white population.
So the Hawaii Republican Party, which held the governorship and one of the state’s two U.S. House seats as recently as 2010, is in deep trouble. And on Monday, one of its biggest names announced he will no longer be a part of the party of the rich asshole.
In a “community voice” opinion piece posted on Honolulu Civil Beat, former U.S. Rep. Charles Djou, who represented Hawaii’s 1st Congressional District as a Republican from 2010 to 2011 and lost races as the GOP nominee for the seat in 2012 and 2014, wrote that he “can no longer stand with a Republican Party that is led by a man I firmly believe is taking the party of Lincoln in a direction I fundamentally disagree with, and a party that is unwilling to stand up to him.”
Djou, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, noted that the rich asshole’s GOP “is now defined as a party hostile to immigration,” described the rich asshole’s callous attacks on veterans like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Gold Star mothers as “indicative of a man ignorant of honor and true sacrifice,” and lambasted his former party’s unwillingness to stand up to the president’s behavior. “Sadly today, too many Republicans either applaud the rich asshole’s tirades or greet them with silent acceptance,” he added. “This leads to an implicit ratification by the GOP of the rich asshole’s undisciplined, uninformed, and unfocused leadership as a core part of the Republican Party. This is something I cannot accept and will not be a part of.”
Djou is just the latest Hawaii Republican to leave due to the rich asshole and Trumpism’s hold on the GOP. Last March, state Rep. Beth Fukumoto left the Republican Party over its treatment of women and the rich asshole’s refusal to condemn the internment of 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II.
Fukumoto was more than just a rising star in the Hawaii GOP — she had been the state’s House Minority Leader from 2014 until 2017. She is now a Democrat. This brought the number of Republicans in the 51-member Hawaii House of Representatives from 6 down to 5. Democrats also control every single seat in the 25-member Hawaii Senate.
Back in November, a Los Angeles Times article observed that the “Republican Party is almost extinct in Hawaii — and it’s only getting worse.” Explaining the party’s near-extinction, another Republican former U.S. Representative observed at the time that “the success of Republicans nationally has had little effect in Hawaii. If anything, it solidified the Democratic grip here.”
In his 2016 victory speech, the rich asshole pledged “to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans, and this is so important to me.” His failure to even pretend to keep that promise may put the final nail in the coffin of his own party’s Hawaii branch.
Mueller sees the rich asshole lawyer Mike Cohen as ‘a potential cooperator’ in Russia probe: Ex-federal prosecutor
President some rich asshole's longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen (Screen capture)
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According to some legal experts, the legal debacle surrounding President some rich asshole’s alleged affair with Stormy Daniels may shape up to be more than just a national embarrassment.
CNBC reported Monday that the Daniels saga — and the rich asshole lawyer Michael Cohen’s role in it — may be of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller.
Though Cohen’s role in the Daniels scandal is not directly related to the special counsel’s probe, it could be used to cast doubt on his continued insistence that he did not collude with Russia.
“If the affair did happen,” CNBC’s report noted, “the rich asshole and Cohen’s denials could be used by Mueller to cast into doubt the reliability of their claims about other areas of his investigation.”
Stephen Braga, a white-collar criminal defense professor at the University of Virginia’s law school, told CNBC that “this information would go generally to both of their credibilities and, more specifically, to both of their potential modus operandi for trying to control information that might be adverse to the president’s interests.”
He went on to say that Mueller “might be able to use the potential threat of prosecuting Cohen for actions related to Daniels as leverage to get him to cooperate in the ongoing probe of the the rich asshole campaign.”
Mimi Rocah, former federal prosecutor and regular MSNBC contributor, said that “it may be that this doesn’t connect directly to Russia, but rather that Mueller sees Cohen as a potential cooperator.”
Because Cohen is named in the infamous “golden showers” dossier for allegedly meeting with Kremlin officials in a secret 2016 meeting in Prague, the report continued, his culpability in the Daniels lawsuit may be used to attain his testimony on that meeting.
Stormy Daniels’ lawyer blasts Michael Cohen for joking about taking an ‘extended vacation’ on her dime
Adult film actress Stormy Daniels (left, via Shutterstock) and the rich asshole's personal lawyer Michael Cohen (right, via screengrab).
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Stormy Daniels’ lawyer on Monday blasted the rich asshole attorney Michael Cohen for joking that he wants to take a vacation on the actress’ dime.
“The more I’m thinking about it,” Cohen told Vanity Fair for an article published earlier in the day, “I might even take an extended vacation on her dime.”
Linking to the article in a tweet, Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti cautioned the president’s longtime personal attorney to make sure he can get his money back.
“Mr. Cohen should ensure he makes REFUNDABLE reservations for that extended vacation he is planning on my client’s dime,” the Los Angeles lawyer tweeted.
Mr. Cohen should ensure he makes REFUNDABLE reservations for that extended vacation he is planning on my client’s dime.....vanityfair.com/news/2018/03/m…
In recent weeks, Avenatti has made waves in cable news appearances in defense of his client. He regularly makes jabs at Cohen, the most recent of which came just two days ago when he suggested to MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid that the lawyer was cowardly for hiring his own attorney to hide behind
‘Most insane scenario’: CNN panelist says the rich asshole White House is ‘Survivor meets Apprentice meets Game of Thrones’
President some rich asshole (Shutterstock)
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CNN panelists noted Monday that the the rich asshole White House resembles a reality TV show now more than ever.
Karine Jean-Pierre, an Obama campaign alumna who went on to work in the 44th president’s White House, said that in her years in the last administration, “there was never this type of drama.”
“[The the rich asshole White House] is Survivor meets The Apprentice meets Game of Thrones,” she said. “It is the most insane scenario that you have.
“You have staff who are stabbing each other in the back, leaking things,” Jean-Pierre continued. “But the problem is, it’s not TV reality. This is real life. They should be governing a country instead of infighting constantly.”
The former White House staffer’s comments came days after CNN host Jake Tapper, who hosted the panel she spoke on Monday, noted that President Donald Trump firing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson via tweet was akin to GoT‘s infamous “Red Wedding”scene.
Watch below, via CNN:
Watch MSNBC’s Katy Tur annihilate Jim Jordan with his own tweets: ‘What if Obama did all of the things the rich asshole’s done?’
Katy Tur and Jim Jordan on MSNBC/Screenshot
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Imagine for a second that President Obama said any of the things the rich asshole has—calling an ongoing investigations into his deeds a “hoax,” firing the head of the FBI to relieve “great pressure” or challenging a special prosecutor in a series of angry tweets.
MSNBC’s Katy Tur asked Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to just do that Monday. Not surprisingly, the the rich asshole-supporting congressman couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
“What if President Obama did all of the things President the rich asshole has done?” Tur asked.
“He did!” Jordan insisted.
Tur hit Jordan on a number of points—starting with why the rich asshole is so eager to shut down an investigation that’s already led to a raft of indictments and guilty pleas from his senior advisers.
“Don’t you want that investigation to be followed through if you are innocent?” Tur asked.
“Yes, sure, and the White House is clear about that,” Jordan claimed. “But at some point when does it end? It’s been almost a year that we’ve been talking about investigation into the the rich asshole campaign and coordination with Russia—to date and not one bit of evidence suggests there was coordination, any type of collusion.”
“If the president feels so confidently that he is innocent and feel so confident that it will end well in his favor and if he wants the Mueller investigation to go on unimpeded, why is he tweeting what he’s tweeting?” she asked.
Jordan, of course, had no good answers.
The cherry on top was Tur showing Jordan his own Obama-era tweets about investigations.
“You have one set conclusions for when it is a Democrat in power and another for when it is a Republican,” she said.
Watch the exchange below.
the rich asshole’s lawyers gave Mueller list of ‘key moments under investigation’ in effort to limit scope of Russia probe
Special counsel and former FBI director Bob Mueller (image via screengrab).
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Lawyers for President some rich asshole have turned over some documents requested by special counsel Robert Mueller in hopes of limiting the scope of his investigation.
The Washington Post reported Monday that two sources close to the matter said the president’s lawyers provided “written descriptions that chronicle key moments under investigation” to the special counsel’s office. The move comes in the aftermath of the rich asshole’s weekend Twitter tirade against Mueller.
The president’s lawyers, the report continued, expect Mueller to ask whether the rich asshole knew about communications between his former national security adviser Mike Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The Post‘s sources say the documentation the president’s lawyers gave to the special counsel “do not include the rich asshole’s personal version of events but provide a narrative of the White House view.”
“the rich asshole’s lawyers hope the evidence eliminates the need to ask the president about some episodes,” the report noted.
the rich asshole vows tougher borders to fight opioid epidemic
BY RACHEL ROUBEIN - 03/19/18 02:50 PM EDT
President the rich asshole vowed on Monday to toughen the country’s borders as a way to fight the opioid crisis that’s killing more Americans per year than traffic accidents.
the rich asshole unveiled his plan to combat the epidemic in New Hampshire, a state that’s been hit hard by the epidemic and one that the rich asshole once referred to as a “drug-infested den.” the rich asshole spent a portion of his speech slamming sanctuary cities, promoting policies to beef up border security and blaming the lack of an extension for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program on Democrats.
"Ninety percent of the heroin in America comes from our southern border, where eventually the Democrats will agree with us, and we'll build the wall to keep the damn drugs out,” the rich asshole said.
In his speech, the rich asshole quickly turned to enforcement measures, calling for some drug traffickers to face the death penalty and bringing up statistics aimed at bolstering the point that tougher border security measures are needed to stop immigrants from entering the country illegally.
“In 2017, [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] arrested criminal aliens with 76,000 charges and convictions for dangerous drug crimes,” the rich asshole said.
the rich asshole touted his immigration policies throughout the speech. He blamed Democrats for a current stalemate on DACA protections, which allow immigrants brought into the United States illegally as children to work and go to school. The White House and congressional Democrats both rejected competing DACA offers over the weekend.
“They don’t want to go with DACA because they don’t care about DACA, but they’re trying to tie the wall to DACA, and DACA to the wall,” the rich asshole said. “And they want to keep DACA for the campaign instead of getting it approved, which we could do very easily.”
He added: “We’ll make it part of the campaign also, and we’ll win because we’re going to win on those issues.”
the rich asshole also repeated his frequent scorn for sanctuary cities — which refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities — calling on Congress to block funds for sanctuary cities.
“Ending sanctuary cities is crucial to stopping the drug addiction crisis,” the rich asshole said, and, in an impromptu move, brought an ICE agent up on stage to say brief remarks.
The speech marked the unveiling of the White House’s plan to combat the opioid epidemic, consisting of a three-pronged approach: reducing the demand and over-prescription of opioids, cutting off the supply of illegal drugs and boosting access to treatment.
The plans aims to reduce the number of opioid prescriptions by one-third over three years. It also includes measures that addiction advocates have supported in the past, including increasing access to the gold standard of addiction treatment and incentivizing states to move to a national database monitoring opioid prescriptions to help flag people requesting numerous prescriptions.
The plans aims to reduce the number of opioid prescriptions by one-third over three years. It also includes measures that addiction advocates have supported in the past, including increasing access to the gold standard of addiction treatment and incentivizing states to move to a national database monitoring opioid prescriptions to help flag people requesting numerous prescriptions.
In a controversial move, the plan is also seeking stiffer penalties for high-volume drug traffickers, which includes a mandate to the Department of Justice to seek the death penalty when appropriate under current law.
A Justice Department official wrote in an email that, “under current law, the federal death penalty is available for several limited drug-related offenses—for example through violations of the ‘drug kingpin’ provisions in 18 USC 3591(b) and 21 USC 848(e).”
“If we don’t get tough on the drug dealers, we’re wasting our time,” said the rich asshole, who has been praising other countries’ use of the death penalty for drug traffickers for weeks.
The move faces high hurdles with advocates and some lawmakers slamming the measure as the wrong approach to curbing the crisis.
“We cannot arrest our way out of the opioid epidemic — we tried that and ended up with an even bigger addiction problem and the world’s largest prison population,” Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said in a statement. “Everyone from doctors to law enforcement understands that addiction is a disease, not a moral failing that can be beaten simply by getting ‘tough on crime.’”
‘Sure, why not?’: Jake Tapper mocks the rich asshole lawyer’s claim the Russia probe is an FBI plot to frame the president
Jake Tapper, the CNN anchor of 'The Lead'
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Jake Tapper on Monday tore into some rich asshole’s Twitter tirade against special counsel Robert Mueller, coupled with his decision to hire a lawyer who pushed the theory the Russia probe is a plot to frame the president, in a searing monologue on CNN’s “The Lead.”
Tapper was reporting on news the rich asshole hired Washington attorney Joseph diGenova, who went on Fox News in January to declare the special counsel investigation “a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn’t win the election, to then frame some rich asshole with a falsely created crime.”
“the rich asshole’s brand new lawyer wants you to know that the FBI and Justice Department tied to frame President the rich asshole on a phony crime,” Tapper said Monday. “Sure, why not?”
Tapper explained the rich asshole is “signaling” an “even more aggressive” response in his defense against the Russia investigation, “hiring a lawyer this afternoon who is openly claiming that the FBI and justice department are trying to frame the president.”
“It is all of a piece, with President the rich asshole claiming earlier that the Russia investigation is a total witch hunt with massive conflicts of interest,” Tapper continued. “Just the latest in President the rich asshole’s now three-day long Twitter rant alternating between boasting about former FBI deputy director Andre McCabe being fired and fuming about the special counsel’s Russia investigation in which the president named Mueller for the first time and complained about the need for an investigation at all.”
Tapper noted the Russia investigation is “empirically hardly a witch hunt, having wielded charges against 19 people and three companies so far, including five guilty pleas” which “includes four the rich asshole associates.”
The CNN host added the rich asshole’s rage rampage comes after Mueller reportedly “submitted questions for the president to the rich asshole’s legal team.”
“And it is all prompted concerns among members of the president’s own party they might be looking to fire Mueller,” Tapper said.
“With the president’s inner circle of level-headed voices shrinking, seemingly by the hour, and President the rich asshole’s temperature clearly rising, a new week dawning, we are all wondering if this might be the week president crosses that massive red line and orders the firing of the special counsel, Robert Mueller,” he added.
Watch below, via CNN:
What Hope Hicks Knows
The departure of the rich asshole whisperer has left the White House in even deeper chaos. Which surely pleases some outsiders angling to get back in.
By OLIVIA NUZZI 03-19-2018
On the morning of Wednesday, February 28, Hope Hicks arrived at the White House just after 8 a.m. Within a week, it would be snowing in Washington, D.C., but she was dressed for spring in a bouquet of purple, yellow, and blue, as if willing the end of winter with her miniskirt. She held on to her iPhone in the West Wing, in violation of a rule that normally diverted it to a locker secured by a shiny silver key, then retreated to her office, a first-floor broom closet that in the past had been assigned to presidential secretaries.
When the administration began 13 months before, competition among some staffers had manifested as a struggle for real estate here; Omarosa Manigault, a perennial reality-TV contestant, had gone so far as to steal a room that had been designated for Anthony Scaramucci, “the Mooch,” a hedge-fund millionaire obsessed with astrology and the word fuck, because of its status-confirming glimpse of the Washington Monument. Both of them were eventually fired, along with a procession of others who failed to maneuver the chaotic status hierarchy President the rich asshole seemed to cultivate out of boredom.
A view of duck-tour buses circling the mall wasn’t needed for Hicks to know her standing. What her office lacked in flair it made up for in proximity. While others were left wondering what the president was thinking, Hicks could often hear him shouting, even with her door closed. “Hope!” he’d scream. “Hopey!” “Hopester!” “Get in here!”
Many requests were mundane. “He doesn’t write anything down,” one source close to the White House told me. “He doesn’t type, he dictates. ‘Take this down, take this down: the rich asshole: richest man on Earth.’ ” A second source who meets regularly with the president told me that Hicks acted almost as an embodiment of the faculties the rich asshole lacked — like memory. “He’ll be talking, and then right in the middle he’ll be like, ‘Hope, what was that … thing?’ ” When the name of a senator or congressman or journalist came up, the rich asshole would prompt Hicks to provide a history of their interactions, asking, “Do we like him?” “And she fucking remembers!” (the rich asshole has said his own memory is “one of the greatest memories of all time.”) “She’s the only person he trusts,” the second source continued. “He doesn’t trust any men and never has. He doesn’t like men, you see. He has no male friends. I was just with one of them the other day, someone who’s described as one of his closest friends, and he doesn’t know him very well. But a small number of women, including his longtime assistant back in New York, he really listens to them — especially if he’s not banging them. Because, like a lot of men but more so, the rich asshole really does compartmentalize the sex and the emotional part.”
Hicks looked around her sepulchral space, outfitted with three mismatched chairs. On the desk was a tiny oil painting by her paternal grandmother, Lucile G. Hicks, an abstract work that looked like the sea or the inside of a cyclone, depending on your point of view. Fresh flowers were delivered by the White House florist each week; today they were pale-pink roses. With the president a motorcade ride away on Capitol Hill at the memorial of “the GREAT” Reverend Billy Graham, there was relative quiet.
Hicks took out one of her notebooks, black leather with the rich asshole name embossed in gold on the front. She’d prayed a lot over the weekend, and also written two lists in the same bubbly print that had recently been photographed on a note card in the rich asshole’s hand, reminding him to tell survivors of a school shooting, among other things, “I hear you.” One list contained reasons to resign as White House communications director immediately; the other, reasons to wait to resign. Not resigning at all wasn’t a consideration.
A Farewell to the rich asshole's Class of 2017
A Farewell to the rich asshole's Class of 2017
She’d come close twice before. Over dinner in Bedminster in early August, she told Jared Kushner and Ivanka the rich asshole that she was unhappy. She’d thought that being in the White House would feel different than the campaign, but instead, surrounded by eccentrics, maniacs, divas, and guys from the Republican National Committee who seemed to think they were managing a Best Buy in Kenosha, it was somehow sicker there in the stillness of it all. She suggested removing herself from the belly of the psychodrama to work elsewhere in the administration. Sharing her frustrations, Jared and Ivanka engaged her idea with caution; they asked her to give General John Kelly, the new chief of staff, a chance to change the West Wing for the better.
But as time went on, it became clear that the sickness was a feature, that anyone who entered the building became a little sick themselves. And no matter how dead any of the eccentrics or maniacs or divas appeared to be, how far away from the president their status as fired or resigned or never-hired-in-the-first-place should have logically rendered them, nobody was ever truly gone. The people who were problems on the campaign or on the inside continued to be problems. The president’s taste for the other and the new was so established that the most driven among them knew that all they had to do was wait for an opening, or shrewdly create one — a weakened staffer, a particularly demoralizing news cycle — and they could worm their way back in. The madness engulfing the White House, in other words, was not just a matter of staff infighting or factional ideological rivalries, as it was often portrayed in the press, but also, in part, the result of manipulation from the fringes of Trumpworld. In early December, Hicks had seriously considered resigning again. When her apartment’s annual lease came up for renewal, she couldn’t bring herself to sign the papers. Instead, she signed a six-month lease at a significant cost inflation.
Over the weekend, she had sketched out in her notebook various courses of action and how they might play in the press. If she resigned immediately, the assumption would be that it was the result of the bad news that had defined the winter. There was the question of her legal exposure in the special-counsel investigation into Russia’s interference in the election; already, she’d been interviewed by Robert Mueller and had appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee. “She’s never failed to impress me, and I’m not an easy guy to impress, historically. I’m not a cheerleader,” White House counsel Ty Cobb told me. “She’s sort of the last person on my list that I worry about.” Yet Hicks surfaced at pivotal moments that were of interest to investigators, and she was now being mentioned along with phrases like obstruction. Soon she’d testify in the House, where she would take questions for nine hours, one moment of which, when it leaked — her admission that she’d told “white lies”on her boss’s behalf — made headlines around the globe (some suggesting the president was furious with her). And then there was her personal life, which, with a tabloid story that swelled into a background check and classified-information scandal, had collided with the country’s national security in a way that rarely happens outside Netflix.
Yet, if she waited, she probably couldn’t avoid the impression that she was leaving because of a crisis, because there was always a crisis. If she’d resigned in August, they’d have said it was owed to Charlottesville. In December? Mueller or Roy Moore. January? Fire and Fury. From a public-relations perspective, there would never be a right moment to leave, but public relations as it’s traditionally understood had almost no relevance in this White House. By Sunday, her gut had decided for her what her head couldn’t.
When the president returned from the Capitol around noon, Hicks opened her office door, which clasps with a ring at its center, and walked about ten feet to her right, into the Oval Office. Before she could finish resigning, the rich asshole interrupted her. He told her that he cared about her happiness, that he understood her decision, and he would help her do anything she wanted to do in her life. He said he hoped she would go make a lot of money. He also said he hoped that she would come back at some point.
Then the president added something else: “I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through.”
Hope Hicks wasn’t a victim; on this both her allies and critics agreed. She didn’t faint in a field of poppies and wake to find herself on some rich asshole’s campaign, 35,000 feet up and strapped in aboard a Boeing 757. Over the course of three years, she’d spent more time with the rich asshole than anyone, more than his own children and his wife, and she acknowledged his flaws and idiosyncrasies. She had made her choices knowingly, even if she couldn’t know where they’d lead her. But she believed the rich asshole was a good person, and she was angered that his critics didn’t seem open to the parts of his personality that would lead them to believe the same. To Hicks, the president’s policies were secondary considerations — the man himself came first. And at the end of the day, she really liked him. “Part of it is because of the proximity,” a source close to her said, “part of it is human nature.” She even sounded a little like him sometimes, uttering words like loser in her sugary voice.
It would require an extraordinary sequence of events for her to finally quit. According to dozens of interviews conducted, over five weeks, with more than 30 current and former senior White House officials, what Hicks “went through,” to borrow the words of the president, wasn’t really about her at all. She was something more like a pawn in a campaign to upend the White House from afar.
“When I decided to run for president, I said, ‘Hope, lots of luck, hang on!’ ” the rich asshole told me once. It was April 2016, and we were in his office in the rich asshole Tower. He hadn’t yet secured the Republican nomination, but he was about to, and I was there to talk to him about his uncommonly press-shy press secretary, who sat in silence beside me, radiating discomfort. While nearly everyone else associated with the campaign seemed to think of it primarily as an opportunity to get on TV, Hicks feared attention, a quality that worked in her favor — her boss wanted all the attention for himself — until it didn’t.
Hicks was 26 years old in 2015 when she was called to the same office, high above 57th and Fifth, and asked to accompany the future president someplace she’d never been: a political event (the Iowa Freedom Summit) in a caucus state. She didn’t overanalyze her decision to join the campaign, thinking of it almost the way you’d think about a semester studying abroad. “The feeling was, You know what? I’m just going to roll with it. Let’s see what happens until the election,” a source who has known her since before the campaign told me. “She wasn’t someone who was in it for the politics. She was in it because of the person, and the relationship with the family, and the experience.”
Hicks was raised in Greenwich; PR and politics were recurring themes in her family. Her maternal grandfather, G.W.F. “Dutch” Cavender, had served in the Department of Agriculture under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon; her maternal grandmother, Marilee Cavender, had worked at the Department of Transportation; her mother, Caye Cavender Hicks, had been an aide to Ed Jones, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee; her father, Paul Hicks, was the spokesman for the NFL. He’d once worked as an aide to Stewart B. McKinney, a Republican congressman from Connecticut, and, in the ’80s, had served as part of the local Greenwich government.
That Hicks could bridge this Republican Establishment to the very anti-Establishment the rich asshole was invaluable to the insurgent candidate. “Does some rich asshole go and become an effective social figure in Hope’s world? No,” said a source close to the president. “People would be like, ‘What? Fuck you.’ By the way, they’ve already said ‘Fuck you,’ which was the whole point of the rich asshole running.”
Hicks spent her childhood playing lacrosse and modeling for tween book covers and children’s clothing, often leaving public school to drive with her mother into Manhattan for go-sees, then heading back to school in time for practice. In the handful of years after graduating from Southern Methodist with a B.A. in English, she waded into the family business, working for the publicist Matthew Hiltzik, a former Clinton operative and Miramax executive whose communications firm had clients ranging from Justin Bieber to Glenn Beck.
She met Hiltzik in Texas during Super Bowl XLV, at a tailgate with Alec Baldwin, who starred in a movie Hicks had auditioned for. (“How odd,” Baldwin told me when I asked him to provide his memory of the meeting. “I have no recollection of that.”) But Hicks made an impression on Baldwin’s then-rep, and within a few years, she was handling the rich asshole Organization account at Hiltzik Strategies and working closely with Ivanka the rich asshole, who at the time was hustling a lifestyle brand.
By then, Hicks had the trust of the family, which meant she had the trust of The rich asshole. This, combined with the fact that she was the only founding staff member who didn’t look like a relative of Louie De Palma, made the earliest days of the campaign play out like a season of The Bachelorette: Apprentice. It was an ensemble of two-bit villains, but even among them, the former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who departed after allegedly grabbing a reporter’s arm at a press conference, stood out.
Sam Nunberg, the screwy adviser you may recall from his recent decision to appear on live TV, possibly while drunk, to encourage special investigators to arrest him and to announce, in this publication, that the rich asshole has a “fat ass,” today maintains that Lewandowski was to blame for getting him fired two months into the campaign (already, Nunberg had been fired and rehired, then fired and rehired again by the rich asshole). Nunberg believes it was Lewandowski who leaked to the press racist social-media posts he’d made seven years prior, and that it was Lewandowski, in coordination with Hicks, who ignored the rich asshole’s promise to keep the firing quiet (they released a statement labeling him a “low level” operative).
In response, Nunberg went nuclear, accusing Lewandowski and Hicks in court documents of having an affair, after the rich asshole sued him for violating an NDA. It was intended to hurt Lewandowski more than Hicks, but the former didn’t seem to mind; he never made any effort to deny the accusation, and privately, he encouraged it. (Michael Wolff reported the affair as fact in Fire and Fury.)
For Lewandowski, there would be many more Nunbergs to deal with throughout the campaign, or people whom the president liked, for some reason, and who were thus a threat. This included Paul Manafort, a comically wicked creature of the Washington Establishment who made a career lobbying for foreign dictators, hired in April 2016 to help with delegates at the Republican convention. When Lewandowski was fired in late June — the result of a coup led by the rich asshole’s children — Manafort became the campaign chairman. But Lewandowski refused to accede to his exile, and in the days leading up to the election, when Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Bannon were leading the campaign after Manafort had been fired, he made an unofficial return, traveling on the plane with the candidate.
He’d been there in the beginning, and he believed he was owed a big piece of what came next. “He didn’t really want any responsibility. He just wants to be able to be with the president and just do whatever he wants him to do,” a source who worked with Lewandowski and is close to the White House told me. “He’s been very focused, from day one, to get into the White House.”
There were some issues, of course. Lewandowski had fallen out with Hicks; he was hated by the family; and, when John Kelly joined the White House, Lewandowski quickly developed a conflict with him, a stricter gatekeeper than the previous chief of staff. But Lewandowski did have something important going for him: Although nobody could really explain why, the president liked him. When Kelly prevented him from entering the White House in January, “the president was upset,” according to a former senior White House official. “He complained extensively about Why wasn’t Corey allowed in!”.
From the time Hicks arrived in Washington, her existence had been an insular one, confined to a radius of only a few blocks past the White House, where she worked 15-hour shifts punctuated by crises and presidential decrees-by-tweet.
From the time Hicks arrived in Washington, her existence had been an insular one, confined to a radius of only a few blocks past the White House, where she worked 15-hour shifts punctuated by crises and presidential decrees-by-tweet.
She woke at 4 a.m.; responded to emails from the night before; read the bookmarked articles she’d been meaning to get to; met her trainer in the 3,200-square-foot gym on the first floor of her building; and arrived early at the northern gate, usually by 7:30 a.m.
But on a Saturday night in late January, Hicks left her apartment and went to Hogan Gidley’s home. Gidley, who lived nearby, was a deputy press secretary brought on to the White House staff in October by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, whose father, Mike Huckabee, was Gidley’s former boss. Gidley and Hicks shared a love of Tommy Boy and mint candies, and they became fast friends. They were joined at Gidley’s house by Josh Raffel, who was considered the White House spokesman for Jared and Ivanka; Hicks had worked with him at Hiltzik Strategies and considered him her best friend. They were also joined by Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary Hicks had been dating since the fall. At the last minute, the group decided to meet Raj Shah, another deputy press secretary, to get dinner at Rosa Mexicano.
They were unaware that they were not alone. Throughout the course of the evening, their every movement was being watched: Outside Hicks’s apartment, at Gidley’s home, outside the restaurant, walking into the lobby of her apartment building. Each moment was documented in photos and video, even through the window in the back of the cab home. Hicks was being tailed by a group called Probe-Media, “an elite agency” that “deals in exclusive material and provides images and video footage and reconnaissance in a service uniquely tailored to meet our clients’ needs,” according to the company’s sparse website.
Probe-Media offers what it refers to as “a bespoke service” to “international news outlets, intelligence agencies and corporate and individual clients.” Perhaps by design, basic information about Probe-Media is difficult to locate. The o in its logo is a lens, and above the company’s name is an outline of a skyline in which the Statue of Liberty sprouts from the middle of a block of suburban houses and urban buildings. When I reached out through a form on the website, I received a response sent from an iPhone. “Yes it was us that got the pictures and yes they did lead to further events but the process how the shots were taken cannot be discussed as that’s why we get commissioned for our deep surveillance approach and discretion,” read another response. “Thank you for reaching out though, Kind regards, The team at Probe-media.”
Five days after the dinner, on February 1, grainy images of Hicks and Porter taken by Probe-Media were published by the Daily Mail, a tabloid based in the U.K. At first, the story seemed unimportant, even if it was a sign of the times to see it show up in the Mail. the rich asshole was a creation of the Daily News and the New York Post, but not since the Lewinsky scandal had there been so much tabloid interest in Washington, where the Mail now has a robust presence, including a respected investigative reporter, a White House correspondent, and a string of freelance photographers who, since the inauguration, have staked out the Kalorama home of Jared and Ivanka for a near-daily report on Ivanka’s outfits.
The Daily Mail story outing Hicks and Porter as a couple was written by a New York–based reporter named Martin Gould, a tabloid veteran who in 1997 was charged with driving Victoria Gifford Kennedy, the estranged wife of Michael Kennedy, off the road in pursuit of a photo after she’d left her husband over his affair with their babysitter. Gould had worked for Star magazine and at Newsmax, an outlet owned by Christopher Ruddy, a confidant of the president’s.
The story called Hicks and Porter a “red-hot couple,” quoting an “eyewitness”: “As soon as the taxi took off they both moved from their sides of the cab to the middle. Rob was kissing Hope’s neck all the way home.”
“I think covering the love life of two single people in any administration is just ridiculous,” Gidley told me. “People are literally staked outside of her house. People literally follow her around town. People literally stare at her whenever she’s out. That’s enough to make, you know …” he paused. “Britney Spears shaved her head and hit a car with an umbrella, right?”
Rob Porter was a Harvard-educated Mormon with good manners and what seemed like a gentle nature, but at only 40 years old, he’d already been married and divorced twice. He’d also been entangled in an on-and-off relationship with another administration official, and within their D.C. social circle — which as of Inauguration Day included some of the most powerful people in the country — their private woes were well known. The fact that Porter was dating Hicks entered the capital’s gossip stream at the same time, too.
In late November, the official read private messages Porter had exchanged with Hicks, where the nature of their relationship was revealed plainly. She informed Porter’s colleague, White House counsel Don McGahn, whom she knew. She also told McGahn that Porter had issues relating to violence in his two marriages.
The White House didn’t need the tip. Although the public wouldn’t know it for over a year, the FBI began interviewing Porter’s former wives beginning in January 2017, as part of a background check for his security clearance. Colbie Holderness, his first wife, would later tell The Intercept that, days before she met with the FBI, a friend of Porter’s approached her current husband to tell him that she was “not obligated” to tell them anything, but Holderness disclosed to the FBI that during their marriage, Porter abused her physically and emotionally. Jennifer Willoughby, his second wife, did the same. The FBI informed the White House, and deep into the first year of the new presidency, Porter hadn’t been granted a high-level security clearance, which was a hindrance; as staff secretary, documents intended for the president flowed through him, and yet on at least one occasion, Porter’s request for documents was denied. The White House would go on to claim ignorance and to claim that Porter’s background check was ongoing. But in January, according to FBI testimony, the White House was handed the bureau’s final review on the matter. Porter maintained only an interim clearance.
In April, Willoughby posted a blog on her personal website that mentioned physical abuse she’d suffered in a past relationship. Porter wasn’t identified by name, but it worried him that it was out there at all. When he repeatedly asked her to take it down, she refused; she didn’t see how anyone would ever care enough to dig it up, and even if they did, she’d managed to forgive him.
In late January, Porter called Willoughby, frantic and paranoid, and asked her a final time to remove the post. “He did not name names, but he implied that there was a former staffer from the White House who was unhappy with him and was out to get him and take him down and somehow had gotten wind of my blog post,” she said. “He’s demanding that I take it down and telling me that this former staffer is going to send it to the media.” Willoughby assumed that Porter was talking about Bannon, because he had specifically mentioned “how ‘he’ was angry Rob had blocked him in getting his ideas, or ‘racist agenda,’ pushed through,” she said. But later, she came to believe Porter was talking about Lewandowski, even though Lewandowski had never formally worked in the White House.
As it happened, Lewandowski lived in a townhouse he shared with a former the rich asshole-campaign operative who worked at the same government agency as the official Porter dated. (If this thread is starting to feel tangled — it is.) The townhouse belonged to Citizens United, the conservative group run by veteran right-wing agitator David Bossie, though Politico had christened it “The Lewandowski Embassy.” Lewandowski occupied the top floor while his roommate dwelled in the basement apartment. In between were the offices of Turnberry Solutions, a lobbying group founded by former staff from Lewandowski’s old lobbying group. (Lewandowski, who hasn’t registered as a lobbyist in several years, claims to have no involvement with Turnberry Solutions.) Lions, light-pink roses, and a phrase from Isaiah 35, repeated three times, decorate the corridor leading past the entrance: THE WILDERNESS SHALL BLOSSOM AS THE ROSE.
On February 5, four days after the Daily Mail disclosed the “red-hot” relationship between Hicks and Porter, two reporters contacted Willoughby after receiving tips about her blog. Willoughby told Porter about the calls, she said, and agreed to negotiate a joint statement. But there were two phrases Porter pushed for that Willoughby told me she couldn’t stomach: “didn’t accurately depict my marriage,” and “it was a therapeutic post in which I took many liberties.” Willoughby had already talked to the Mail, and she and Porter stopped negotiating; they never put out a joint statement.
The following day, the Mail published interviews with Porter’s former wives, in which they claimed they’d been physically, verbally, and emotionally abused (Porter responded to the story by saying, “Many of these allegations are slanderous and simply false”), and that they’d informed the FBI — to apparently little effect.
The report prompted Hicks and Porter to break up, but the feeling around Washington was that the saga was the product of some political spycraft. “This had been planned and choreographed and coordinated and known long in advance by a group of people who were trying to play political games,” a source with direct knowledge of the events said, “knowing that this would be part of a larger story related to security clearances and John Kelly and others, seeking to sow chaos and dissension. They saw this as a useful catalyst, which it turned out to be.”
For as long as he’d been in politics, Lewandowski had been defined by two qualities: his ruthless pursuit of an enemy’s destruction and always having an enemy. This was true even when it was small ball; in New Hampshire, he once fucked over a local official by claiming that his fantasy-football league, with a grand prize of $200, was an illegal gambling ring. By the time Lewandowski was done, the official had lost his job and was the subject of a criminal probe.
For as long as he’d been in politics, Lewandowski had been defined by two qualities: his ruthless pursuit of an enemy’s destruction and always having an enemy. This was true even when it was small ball; in New Hampshire, he once fucked over a local official by claiming that his fantasy-football league, with a grand prize of $200, was an illegal gambling ring. By the time Lewandowski was done, the official had lost his job and was the subject of a criminal probe.
There were plenty of reasons for Lewandowski to consider Porter his enemy. Whatever was or wasn’t true about his relationship with Hicks, Lewandowski’s unusual preoccupation with her was well established. “He has, sort of, Single White Male characteristics,” a source who had worked with Hicks before the campaign told me. In the fall, he began asking around, trying to figure out whom she was dating. “I think that he thinks he should control her,” a second source said. “He got wind that she was dating Porter, and he could not handle that,” a third source, who is close to the White House and worked with Lewandowski, said. “There were still raw feelings.”
Complementary to Lewandowski’s hatred of Porter was his rivalry with John Kelly. To establish order in the West Wing, Kelly had made the president less accessible to outsiders and outside information less accessible to him. A source close to the White House said that, soon after Bannon was fired in August, he became high on the idea of seeing Kelly replaced with a combination of Lewandowski and Bossie, who had co-authored a book called Let the rich asshole Be the rich asshole. They would be the ideal gatekeepers for people who would otherwise need to jump the gate.
During the campaign, Charles “Chuck” Johnson, an early supporter of Ted Cruz, said Lewandowski tried to hire him to do opposition research. Johnson said he declined the offer but that he and Lewandowski remained friends. Periodically, Johnson would use his website GotNews to prop Lewandowski up, once announcing, when there were murmurs he might work in the White House, “HE’S BACK!”
Johnson liked to call himself a journalist and “debunker of frauds,” but he was known primarily as a pervasive far-right menace, an oddity with few personal boundaries who’d once raised $150,000 for a neo-Nazi’s legal defense fund. In 2012, he had promoted unfounded accusations involving underage prostitutes and Bob Menendez, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, on the conservative website the Daily Caller. At the time, the publication’s executive editor overseeing the Menendez coverage was David Martosko. Today, Martosko is the political editor of the Daily Mail. About the Daily Mail’s Porter scoop, “I don’t know what I’m allowed to say,” Johnson told me. “Probe-Media, from my understanding, is going to be doing a lot more work with private eyes.”
Johnson was always taking credit for things he didn’t seem to have any connection to. He was usually wrong, but he did seem to know things, sometimes, that turned out to be true, and, sometimes, he seemed to know them before anyone else. He also seemed to benefit from the fact that the new administration was populated by people who hadn’t been following politics very closely in recent years. He claimed he knew about Porter months in advance of the stories, and that some mysterious “we” was pleased with how things unfurled, even if he was surprised it took so long. Johnson said Lewandowski had nothing to do with the stories and that he wasn’t among the people he’d told about Porter. (Reached repeatedly for comment, Lewandowski did not answer questions.)
Political genius wasn’t required to predict that the White House would respond to the Porter news by somehow making it even worse news. The story about Porter and Hicks became the story about Porter and the women who said he abused them. That became a story about the White House covering up Porter’s secrets, which became a story about Hicks and Kelly, which became a story about Hicks and the rich asshole, which became a story about security clearance and Jared and Ivanka, which became a story about Kelly again. Eventually, it was just a story about who populates our anarchic new government and whether or not we can trust them.
In the past month, since Hicks’s resignation, the administration has entered into a new level of disorder, with the departures of Gary Cohn, the president’s top economic adviser, and the secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, who was fired in a tweet. For emphasis, the rich asshole also fired one of Tillerson’s aides. Next, he fired John McEntee, a longtime personal aide whose security clearance had been revoked (though he was immediately hired by the rich asshole 2020 campaign). Kelly, national-security adviser H. R. McMaster, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have all been rumored to be next. There are many possible explanations for this new chaos — pressure from the Mueller investigation, burnout from a very messy year, the president’s frustrations with the “adults in the room” and his eagerness to replace them with people he knows are his people. But the drama surrounding Hicks, for several years now the rich asshole’s most trusted confidante, was inarguably a trigger, too.
The first story about the Porter allegations contained statements from the White House defending his character. Kelly’s read, “Rob Porter is a man of true integrity and honor, and I can’t say enough good things about him. He is a friend, a confidant and a trusted professional. I am proud to serve alongside him.” It was reported that his words had, in fact, been written by Hicks, and, relatedly, that her involvement was seen internally as a problem: The president was frustrated with her, according to unnamed sources, and her judgment was called into question. But five senior White House officials told me that Kelly dictated the statement himself. “She did not take part in drafting it,” Kellyanne Conway told me. “That’s correct,” Sanders agreed. Yet Kelly allowed Hicks to be blamed and didn’t make an effort to correct the reporting.
For months, sources had been murmuring about Kelly’s preference for the woman who replaced Hicks as director of strategic communications, Mercedes Schlapp. “Mercy” is one half of a Catholic conservative power couple — her husband, Matt Schlapp, is the chairman of the group that hosts the Conservative Political Action Conference — and before she joined the White House, she was a Fox News commentator. “Mercedes has been waging just an incredible war,” the former official said.
A second former senior White House official elaborated: “The battle between Mercedes and Hope was ugly as hell. I mean, Mercedes was fucking cutting her up.” The second official was sure that Kelly would install Mercy in Hope’s place — assuming he doesn’t resign or get fired himself, an important caveat for all White House speculation. “Kelly wanted Hope to move out of the anteroom to the Oval Office and into the communications office,” the first former official said. “He did not like that she had that level of access and influence.”
There was some irony there. Getting Kelly into the West Wing had required a veritable hostage situation dreamed up by Jared and Ivanka, who hired the Mooch as a means of pushing out Reince Priebus, which worked more efficiently than they’d anticipated: Mooch was fired about a week later, and there was a bonus resignation from Sean Spicer, whom they also disliked. By the time the country was becoming fluent in the Mooch’s delightfully goonish parlance, he’d already served his purpose. When he was fired, Hicks was promoted to communications director.
But just as Kelly didn’t understand Jared and Ivanka, he also didn’t understand Hicks, and he sometimes blamed her for habits the rich asshole had been forming for 71 years. “He was extraordinarily dismissive of her. He would refer to her as ‘the high-schooler,’ he would joke about how she was inexperienced, she was in over her head, she was immature,” a former senior White House official told me. “He doesn’t like a woman that potentially has some position of power over him. He thinks women should be subservient to him. If you look at his relationship with Ivanka or Hope — women who aren’t subservient to him — he has problems with those people.”
In conversations with me, Mercy didn’t have a critical word to say about Hicks. She called herself “mother hen” and said it upset her to hear what people were saying about their relationship. “I love that girl and I want her — we really are there for each other.” However, when I asked Mercy about Kelly’s statement, and whether she believed what five of her colleagues had confirmed to me was true, she wouldn’t engage. “I was not involved at all in that process. I was working on the job I was doing, which is my calendar. So I’m not going to comment on it.”
At that point, to Mercy’s relief, Gidley entered the room and the conversation turned to how the staff could be described as characters. If it were Saved by the Bell, they immediately agreed, Hicks would be Kelly Kapowski, “the beautiful one,” Mercy said. “I’m Screech,” Gidley added.
It was the middle of March, and though it had been only 16 days since Hope Hicks had resigned, she was no longer the most recent official to leave the rich asshole administration — not even close. Still, interest in Hicks was undying. The Daily Mail was stationed almost permanently in front of her apartment building, usually with just one photographer, but sometimes with more. Today, it was Matthew Paul D’Agostino, a freelance photojournalist, idle beside his gekko-green Honda Element, wearing two cameras draped over his chest. On Valentine’s Day, they’d sent several. “She’s gonna make it after all! Hope Hicks is all smiles as she glides out of her DC apartment in white high heels, a low-cut sundress and bare legs (with a self-tanner fail on her feet),” read the headline. Hicks was holding bags from Whole Foods. Inside were the sugar cookies she’d baked and decorated with her mother, Raffel, and Gidley to give out to the communications staff. Each cookie package included a note she’d written in silver marker. “Believe in love,” read one message. Underneath, she’d drawn a small heart.
“I think the Daily Mail is reflecting the fact that Hope Hicks is a fascinating person — and she is,” Piers Morgan told me. Morgan writes a column for the Daily Mail,and he’s also a British TV personality, which is how he came to know the rich asshole, having competed against Omarosa on Celebrity Apprentice. “Hope is becoming ever more famous,” Morgan said, explaining that he didn’t see how Hicks could ever slink back from here to relative anonymity. He added that he found her personally appealing because she always acted in good faith, an impression Morgan shared with many members of the press during the campaign and in the White House. “I’ve never known her to deliberately mislead me or lie to me or be anything but completely honest. Which, again, is not a particularly common character trait in Washington.”
In terms of ambience, Washington is unlikely to feel much different without Hicks around; she wasn’t exactly Sally Quinn, hosting salons or hitting the embassy party circuit, and the Daily Mail still has Ivanka. But for the president, who gets out even less — he eats dinner at home, except for rare meals at the restaurant in the hotel bearing his name a few blocks away — Hicks’s decision seems like an amputation.
Hicks identified May 1 as the latest she was willing to stay in the White House, though April 1 was her preferred time frame — possibly even before then. She planned to return home to Greenwich, where she went most weekends anyway, and then move back to Manhattan. Even though more than half the country believed she’d spent three years working for a dishonorable cause, she hadn’t become famous for being publicly dishonorable herself, like so many of the more visible figures around her. When Saturday Night Live tried to parody her, it fell flat because you can’t parody a person most people have no concept of. “Many things explain her longevity, all of which are positive in my view,” Conway said. “She may not go on TV or take the podium, but she is asked directly and regularly by the president of the United States, ‘Hope, what do you think about this?’ That’s a much more important, much more immediate and consequential audience, I would argue, for the actual policies.” But not appearing on TV or giving interviews did protect Hicks, Conway said. “I do consider that a luxury, at the same time. It is a luxury.” One of the only cases of Hicks speaking on the record was in an interview for the Forbes “30 Under 30” list, in which she said her favorite song was “Friends in Low Places” and her favorite emoji the “see-no-evil” monkey. Asked when she decided what she wanted to do with her life, she said, “Still deciding!”
After the White House, the scope of options for Hick’s future looked, in ways, almost limitless. But she didn’t yet seem to have a firm sense of what she wanted to do next. When she spoke to the president about her plans to leave, she didn’t say specifically when that would be — and the rich asshole didn’t ask. In some ways, it seemed like he was not yet ready to think about what it would mean for her to be gone. During a conversation about an event taking place weeks and weeks in the future, he told her not to worry about providing him with her thoughts immediately; she’d still be in the White House when he needed them.
“She is the one person he thinks is totally on his side. And I happen to think that he’s right,” the source who meets regularly with the president told me. “the rich asshole’s main problem with other people is he sees them as competition, and he doesn’t see Hope that way, because she’s not.” The source went on, “This is why he’s fired all these people. This is why he hated Bannon, the problem with Scaramucci. They were seeking to eclipse him and he can’t handle that.”
the rich asshole also had a different relationship with Hicks than he did with his children, who keep what the source called “ironic distance” from their father. “He knows that Ivanka has a separate agenda. Ivanka refers to him as ‘DJT’ just like the boys do, and Ivanka understands that her father is gonna be dead in ten years.”
For her part, Hicks was a reminder of another time, before the rich asshole came under Secret Service protection, when he would ride shotgun to direct a one-car motorcade through McDonald’s drive-throughs or walk up to crowds and hand out dollar bills. The source added, “Hope’s never gonna write the memoir. She has no political aspirations. She doesn’t particularly like politics. She’s loyal to some rich asshole.”
*This article appears in the March 19, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!
the rich asshole hiring former federal prosecutor who's argued FBI framed president
BY REBECCA SAVRANSKY - 03/19/18 01:18 PM EDT
President the rich asshole is hiring longtime Washington lawyer Joseph diGenova, who has suggested that the FBI is seeking to frame the rich asshole, to his legal team.
"Former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Joe diGenova will be joining our legal team later this week," Jay Sekulow, a counsel to the president, said in a statement. "I have worked with Joe for many years and have full confidence that he will be a great asset in our representation of the President."
The hiring was first reported by The New York Times, which wrote that diGenova is unlikely to take a lead role on the team, but that he would add an aggressive presence.
The president is increasingly signaling he intends to go in a different direction with his legal strategy, and this weekend began attacking by name special counsel Robert Mueller.
the rich asshole's lawyers had previously advised him not to attack Mueller.
Adding diGenova suggests the rich asshole wants to go more on the offensive, given diGenova's past statements arguing that investigations of the rich asshole are meritless.
“Make no mistake about it: A group of FBI and DOJ people were trying to frame some rich asshole of a falsely created crime,” he said.
Over the weekend, the rich asshole tweeted that the Mueller probe should "never have been started."
"There was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary [Clinton] and the [Democratic National Committee], and improperly used in [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!" the rich asshole tweeted.
On Monday, the rich asshole again called the investigation a "witch hunt" and claimed it had "massive conflicts of interest."
the rich asshole's lawyer John Dowd over the weekend also called on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to shut down Mueller's Russia probe.
On Monday, White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said there are "no conversations or discussions about removing" Mueller. He also reiterated that there has been no collusion.
Jealous Corey Lewandowski leaked info about Rob Porter’s abuse because he wasn’t over Hope Hicks: report
Corey Lewandowski with former girlfriend Hope Hicks/Screenshot
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Who was behind the leak of information about Rob Porter’s alleged abuse of his two ex-wives?
A new profile of Hope Hicks in New York magazine suggests the source was Corey Lewandowski, the rich asshole’s former campaign manager who was also a former boyfriend of Hicks.
Lewandowski had a “preoccupation” with the former model 15 years his junior, according to the story, which quotes an anonymous source as saying he had “Single White Male characteristics.”
The piece says an obsessive Lewandowski figured out that Hicks was dating Porter, and then looked into dirt on Porter. Which he found.
Jennifer Willoughby, Porter’s second ex-wife, had written a blog post that alluded to the abuse she suffered without naming Porter. But, according to the article, Porter repeatedly asked her to take it down. She refused. Porter told her that someone was out to get him—she thought it was Bannon, the report says, but then later realized it was likely Lewandowski.
“[Lewandowski] got wind that she was dating Porter, and he could not handle that,” an anonymous source said. “There were still raw feelings.”
The piece says Lewandowski also leaked racist social media posts made by Sam Nunberg and then embarrassed Nunberg by leaking news of his low-key firing.
Read the full article here
the rich asshole is moving into a more dangerous phase of his madness
President some rich asshole delivers remarks to the press Jan. 18, 2018, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. (DOD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Dominique A. Pineiro)
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the rich asshole is moving into a new and more dangerous phase.
Before, he was constrained by a few “adults” – Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster, and John Kelly – whom he appointed because he thought they had some expertise he lacked.
Now he’s either fired or is in the process of removing the adults. He’s replacing them with a Star Wars cantina of toadies and sycophants who will reflect back at him his own glorious view of himself, and help sell it on TV.
Narcissists are dangerous because they think only about themselves. Megalomaniacs are dangerous because they think only about their power and invincibility. A narcissistic megalomaniac who’s unconstrained – and who’s also president of the United States – is about as dangerous as they come.
The man who once said he could shoot someone dead on Fifth Avenue and still be elected president now openly boasts of lying to the Canadian Prime Minister, deciding on his own to negotiate mano a mano with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, unilaterally slapping tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, and demanding the death penalty for drug dealers.
For weeks, the rich asshole has been pulling big policy pronouncements out of his derriere and then leaving it up to the White House to improvise explanations and implementation plans.
“the rich asshole is increasingly flying solo,” report the Associated Press’ Catherine Lucey and Jonathan Lemire. “the rich asshole has told confidants recently that he wants to be less reliant on his staff, believing they often give bad advice, and that he plans to follow his own instincts, which he credits with his stunning election.”
the rich asshole has always had faith in his instincts. “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things,” he said on the campaign trail. “I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right,“ he told Time Magazine last year.
But instincts aren’t facts, logic, or analysis. And it’s one thing for a business tycoon or even a presidential candidate to rely on instincts, quite another for the leader of the free world to rely solely on his gut.
Worse yet, the new the rich asshole believes no one can lay a glove on him. He’s survived this far into his presidency despite lapses that would have done in most other presidents.
So what if he paid off a porn star to keep quiet about their affair? So what if he’s raking in money off his presidency? So what if there’s no evidence for his claims that three to five million fraudulent votes were cast for Hillary Clinton, or that Obama wiretapped him? There are no consequences.
The new the rich asshole doesn’t worry that his approval ratings continue to be in the cellar. By his measure, he’s come out on top: His cable-TV ratings are huge. Fox News loves him. He dominates every news cycle. The pre-selected crowds at his rallies roar their approval.
He’s become the Mad King who says or does anything his gut tells him to, while his courtiers genuflect.
How will this end?
One outcome is the rich asshole becomes irrelevant to the practical business of governing America. He gets all the attention he craves while decision makers in Washington and around the world mainly roll their eyes and ignore him.
There’s some evidence this is already happening. The Republican tax bill bore almost no resemblance to anything the rich asshole had pushed for. the rich asshole’s big infrastructure plan was dead on arrival in Congress. His surprise spending deal with “Chuck and Nancy” went nowhere. His momentary embrace of gun control measures in the wake of a Florida school shooting quickly evaporated.
Meanwhile, world leaders are now taking the rich asshole’s braggadocio and ignorance for granted, acting as if America has no president.
But another possible outcome could be far worse.
the rich asshole could become so enraged at anyone who seriously takes him on that he lashes out, with terrible consequences.
Furious that special counsel Robert Mueller has expanded his investigation, an unbridled the rich asshole could fire him – precipitating a constitutional crisis and in effect a civil war between the rich asshole supporters and the rest of America.
Feeling insulted and defied by Kim, an unconstrained the rich asshole could order an attack on North Korea – precipitating a nuclear war.
The mind boggles. Who knows what a mad king will do when no adults remain to supervise him?
the rich asshole lashes out, cites 'massive conflicts of interest' in Russia probe
BY JONATHAN EASLEY - 03/19/18 09:48 AM EDT
President the rich asshole unloaded on special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe in a Monday morning tweet, calling the investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election a “witch hunt” filled with “massive conflicts of interest.”
A total WITCH HUNT with massive conflicts of interest!
That tweet follows a weekend in which the president vented his frustration with Mueller, singling out the special counsel for criticism by name for the first time and raising questions about whether he is preparing to fire him.
Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans? Another Dem recently added...does anyone think this is fair? And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!
There have been conflicting signals coming from the rich asshole’s legal team about whether a Mueller firing is imminent, although the White House has consistently said it is working with the special counsel in hopes of bringing the investigation to a swift conclusion.
On Sunday, the rich asshole’s personal lawyer, John Dowd, called on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing the special counsel because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself, to end the investigation.
"I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by [Andrew] McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier,” Dowd said.
But Ty Cobb, the rich asshole’s White House attorney in charge of dealing with Mueller, sought to squash the budding questions over whether a firing was imminent.
“In response to media speculation and related questions being posed to the Administration, the White House yet again confirms that the President is not considering or discussing the firing of the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller,” Cobb said in a statement.
the rich asshole over the weekend also lashed out at the FBI and the Department of Justice in a searing string of tweets that escalated his feud with law enforcement officials.
The president’s Monday tweet about conflicts of interest could be an effort to lay the groundwork for a second special counsel to investigate the FBI and Justice Department's handling of the separate investigations into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's handling of classified material and into the rich asshole campaign officials.
The Justice Department must have evidence of a crime and a conflict of interest to launch a second special counsel.
Late Friday night, Sessions fired former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe just days before he was set to retire with full pension benefits.
The FBI’s personnel office had recommended McCabe be fired, but some Republicans have said the firing appeared malicious in light of McCabe’s intent to retire.
The FBI inspector general will release a report soon that is expected to be critical of McCabe’s handling of the investigation into Clinton’s personal email server.
McCabe was briefly the acting director at the FBI after the rich asshole fired former FBI Director James Comey, who is slated next month to release a tell-all book about his interactions with the rich asshole.
The Fake News is beside themselves that McCabe was caught, called out and fired. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars was given to wife’s campaign by Crooked H friend, Terry M, who was also under investigation? How many lies? How many leaks? Comey knew it all, and much more!
After his firing, McCabe launched a media blitz to get his side of the story out, saying the firing was part of the president’s effort to undermine the special counsel.
By
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March 19, 2018
the rich asshole's plan to address the opioid epidemic is mostly just TV commercials and the death penalty.
the rich asshole gave a rambling and incoherent speech to promote his opioid crisis initiatives, which included the absurd claim that he could end drug addiction by airing television commercials.
“This is something that I have been very strongly in favor of,” the rich asshole told the crowd at Manchester Community College in New Hampshire Monday afternoon. “Spending a lot of money on great commercials showing how bad it is.”
the rich asshole didn’t say how much money he wants to spend.
“When they see these commercials, they say ‘I don’t want any part of it,’ that’s the least expensive thing we can do,” the rich asshole said. “Where you scare them from ending up like the people in the commercials, and we’ll make them very, very bad commercials.”
the rich asshole promised a “large-scale rollout of commercials that show how bad it is for the kids,” adding that “when they see those commercials, hopefully they’re not going to be going to drugs of any kind, drugs of any kind.”
the rich asshole’s speech also included his bizarre plan to imitate some of the world’s most brutal dictators by imposing the death penalty on drug dealers. the rich asshole also used the speech to launch an extended and vitriolic political attack on Democrats over immigration policy.
the rich asshole’s plan to end drug addiction through advertising is, of course, not new, and already a failure. Programs like Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign and “D.A.R.E.” have been around for decades, and have proven ineffective at best, and harmful at worst.
the rich asshole has exploited the politics of the opioid epidemic for a very long time, but his administration has done worse than nothing, cutting funding for anti-drug programs and handing off the issue to a sham policy initiative headed by Kellyanne Conway.
the rich asshole’s “plan” to kill drug dealers and run anti-drug commercials will be more of the same: long on political exploitation, and very short on results.
White House confuses America with Venezuela in an email addressing the Latin American country’s ‘situation’
Sarah Huckabee Sanders (screen grab)
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The White House on Monday sent out an email announcing the president’s new executive order addressing “the situation in Venezuela”—but confused the Latin American country with the United States.
“Executive Order on Taking Additional Steps to Address the Situation in America,” the email’s subject line reads. The body of the email, which was circulated by journalists on Twitter via screenshot, showed the EO with its actual aim.
Soon after the revelation of the White House press office’s typo, Twitter reveled in their mistake.
CQ Roll Call’s Gopal Ratnam declared his relief that it was a typo rather than the president declaring martial law.
INBOX from @WhiteHouse with headline: Executive Order on Taking Additional Steps to Address the Situation in America.
So I click to see if @POTUS has declared martial law...and I find to my relief it's about Venezuela.
Canadian tech journalist Bryson Masse, meanwhile, noted how “Freudian” the gaffe appeared.
The White House is taking steps to “address the situation in America....” pic.twitter.com/o9qBri0JOx
well that's freudian isn't it twitter.com/kaitlancollins…
Check out more responses below:
Either the White House still has no copy editor or this is the best Freudian slip ever. twitter.com/kaitlancollins…
Latest White House typo, but my favorite is still a reference to the Israeli-Palestinian "peach process" twitter.com/kaitlancollins…
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