China calls on US to ‘cease and desist’ from endangering trade relations
US President some rich asshole signs trade sanctions against China to retaliate against the alleged theft of American intellectual property AFP / Mandel NGAN
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Beijing forcefully denounced President some rich asshole’s decision Thursday to impose tariffs on billions of dollars in Chinese goods, accusing him of putting the two economies on course for a trade war.
“If a trade war were initiated by the US, China would fight to the end to defend its own legitimate interests with all necessary measures,” China’s embassy in Washington said in a statement.
“We urge the US to cease and desist,” the embassy said, warning that by endangering China-US trade relations Washington will “eventually end up hurting itself.”
“We urge the US to cease and desist,” the embassy said, warning that by endangering China-US trade relations Washington will “eventually end up hurting itself.”
In the latest in a series of aggressive moves on trade, mostly targeting China, the rich asshole authorized new sanctions on up to $60 billion of Chinese imports to retaliate against “theft” of American intellectual property.
The tariffs and the goods targeted will be identified in the coming weeks, but the rich asshole said they could be as high as 25 percent – what he called a “reciprocal tax.”
The embassy’s statement was issued moments after markets closed on Wall Street but investors had already taken the rich asshole’s move as a bad omen, with the benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average falling more than 700 points amid fears of a tit-for-tat trade confrontation.
Washington accuses Beijing of forcing US companies to enter joint ventures and transfer technology and trade secrets to their Chinese partners. At the same time US companies are not able to license intellectual property in China.
US officials also allege China has hacked US networks and conducted industrial espionage to steal intellectual property.
The embassy said China had shown “sincerity in making reasonable suggestions” and made “great efforts” to deal with the current trade imbalance with the United States.
The United States recorded a record $337.2 billion trade deficit with China last year, and the rich asshole demanded it be reduced by $100 billion.
For the second time in a month, events in Washington whipped anxiety that the rich asshole’s “America First” confrontations with major trading partners were headed toward full-scale trade conflict.
But Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross suggested the new measures on intellectual property were in fact a way of bringing Beijing to the table, calling them “the prelude to a set of negotiations.”
the rich asshole replaces McMaster with Bolton as national security adviser
BY JORDAN FABIAN - 03/22/18 06:31 PM EDT
President the rich asshole announced Thursday he will replace national security adviser H.R. McMaster with former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton.
The president wrote in a tweet that Bolton, the hawkish former Bush administration official, will take over for McMaster on April 9.
“I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9,” the rich asshole wrote.
I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.
McMaster, a three-star Army lieutenant general, will retire from the military, a White House official said. The general has been discussing his departure with the rich asshole for some time and both men decided to make his exit official now because the constant speculation about his job status was interfering with his duties, according to the White House.
McMaster’s exit comes amid a period of upheaval involving the rich asshole’s national security team. Just last week, the rich asshole axed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and named CIA Director Mike Pompeo to replace him.
the rich asshole is dealing with a number of high-stakes decisions, including planned talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and an upcoming deadline to extend sanctions relief under the Iran nuclear deal.
Bolton, who has worked as Fox News analyst and at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, has been an informal adviser to the rich asshole. He was spotted walking in the West Wing on Thursday afternoon hours before his hiring was announced.
Bolton appeared on Fox Thursday evening shortly after the news broke, saying he did not expect the decision to be made official so soon.
“It’s still sinking in, so I haven’t thought about it a great deal," he told host Martha MacCallum when asked what getting the job means to him.
the rich asshole’s decision to bring Bolton aboard signals he is seeking to move to the right on national security issues. Both Tillerson and McMaster were seen as moderates and both men urged the rich asshole not to scrap the Iran deal. Tillerson also supported talks with North Korea to resolve the crisis over the rogue state's nuclear program.
Pompeo, like McMaster, is seen as a national security hawk.
The president decided to replace McMaster following months of friction between the two men. the rich asshole publicly scolded McMaster in February after his national security adviser said there was “incontrovertible” proof that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.
“General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems,” the rich asshole tweeted at the time.
the rich asshole hired McMaster in February 2017 to replace Michael Flynn, who was fired for lying to Vice President Mike Pence and other senior officials about his conversations with Russia's ambassador to the U.S.
McMaster pushed out a number of hard-line officials Flynn had hired on the National Security Council, irking the rich asshole allies who complained that the moves undermined the president's ability to carry out his agenda.
McMaster, a detail-oriented military strategist, also struggled to build a personal relationship with the freewheeling the rich asshole. Multiple reports have noted that the rich asshole often scoffed at the general’s lengthy briefings on foreign-policy subjects.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently sought to tamp down that McMaster’s ouster was imminent.
“Just spoke to @POTUS and Gen. H.R. McMaster - contrary to reports they have a good working relationship and there are no changes at the NSC,” she tweeted last Thursday.
White House officials said the decision for McMaster to leave was mutual and that the two men are on good terms. They said that it was not related to one moment or incident, an apparent reference to a damaging leak of information from briefing papers for the rich asshole’s call to Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, in which the president congratulated the Russian leader on his recent reelection.
“I am thankful to President some rich asshole for the opportunity to serve him and our nation as national security advisor,” McMaster said in a statement Thursday. “I am grateful for the friendship and support of the members of the National Security Council who worked together to provide the President with the best options to protect and advance our national interests.”
In a statement distributed by the White House press office, the rich asshole said McMaster’s “bravery and toughness are legendary” and that his leadership “helped my administration accomplish great things to bolster America’s national security.”
Chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who pushed McMaster to take the job, called him "a fine American and military officer" who "brought and maintained discipline and energy" on the rich asshole's national-security team.
"A true solider-scholar, his impact on his country and this government will be felt for years to come," Kelly said.
The White House had reportedly asked the Army to give McMaster a fourth star, which would have allowed him to transition into a plum military post. Kelly reportedly viewed the move as important to show that fired White House officials can find good work after leaving the building. But that did not happen.
Bolton’s hiring was met with opposition among Democrats on Capitol Hill, who expressed fear that he could help lead the country into an overseas war. As President George W. Bush’s U.N. ambassador, Bolton was a vocal proponent of the Iraq War.
“With the appointments of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, @realDonaldTrump is successfully lining up his war cabinet,” tweeted Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) “Bolton played a key role in politicizing the intel that misled us into the Iraq War. We cannot let this extreme war hawk blunder us into another terrible conflict.”
Republicans cheered the rich asshole’s decision.
“I know John Bolton well and believe he is an excellent choice who will do a great job as National Security Advisor,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a statement. “General McMaster has served, and will continue to serve, our nation well and I thank him for his service.”
Ex-Playboy model shares fresh details on alleged love affair with the rich asshole
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Ex-Playboy model shares fresh details on alleged love affair with the rich asshole
March 22, 2018
Michael Finnegan
Los Angeles Times
Posted with permission from Tribune Content Agency
A former Playboy model recalled having sex with Donald Trump dozens of times in the early years of the president's marriage to Melania Trump, sharing elaborate details in an interview televised Thursday of what she described as a 10-month love affair.
Karen McDougal, the magazine's 1998 Playmate of the Year, told CNN that she was racked with guilt about Trump cheating on his wife, especially when he showed her the couple's Trump Tower penthouse apartment when Melania was not home.
"That just puts a little stab in your heart," McDougal told anchor Anderson Cooper. "I couldn't wait to get out of the apartment, actually."
McDougal, 46, said Trump flirted with her when they met in 2006 at a Playboy Mansion party celebrating the taping of an "Apprentice" episode there. He asked for her phone number, then invited her to meet for dinner a week later at the Beverly Hills Hotel, she said.
His bodyguard, Keith Schiller, picked her up and drove her to the hotel, where after a nice dinner in his bungalow McDougal had sex with Trump, she told CNN. Trump, she said, offered her money at the end of the evening, but she turned him down and told him she wasn't that type of woman.
She recalled feeling deeply hurt. "I was crying in the back seat of the car," she said.
But they grew to love one another and wound up seeing each other at least five times a month until she broke up with him in April 2007, according to McDougal.
"If he weren't married, I wouldn't have any regrets," she said.
McDougal said she was a Republican and voted for Trump.
She spoke out as Trump's alleged marital infidelity and sexual misconduct toward women are becoming a source of growing trouble for the White House.
Stripper and porn actress Stormy Daniels, who says she had a fling with Trump in 2006 around the same time as McDougal, will appear Sunday on CBS to share her story on "60 Minutes."
The spectacle of a president's alleged mistresses telling all on prime-time television is reminiscent of the Bill Clinton dramas of the 1990s.
With McDougal and Daniels suing to break confidentiality agreements that they say are shams, it could take years to play out.
Trump, whose spokeswomen have denied he had sex with McDougal or Daniels, has met the latest allegations with near silence. On Thursday, first lady Melania Trump tweeted a photograph of herself with her husband, smiling on a White House patio with the snow-covered South Lawn as their backdrop.
The president retweeted the photo for his 49 million followers.
It was as close as Trump would get to responding to the growing public-relations mess of multiple sex scandals.
"Having them together in these photogenic moments is important," said political scientist Terry Madonna of Pennsylvania's Franklin & Marshall College.
McDougal, now an Arizona actress and fitness model, filed suit Tuesday in Los Angeles to break the confidentiality agreement that has barred her from speaking publicly about her alleged affair with Trump.
American Media Inc., the parent company of The National Enquirer, paid McDougal $150,000 in August 2016 for exclusive rights to the story of what she describes as a 10-month romance with Trump that started in 2006.
American Media, led by Trump's close friend David Pecker, declined to publish the story. Pecker told The New Yorker last year that when AMI bought the rights to McDougal's story under a contract that also promised her monthly columns and her photo on magazine covers, "she can't be bashing Trump."
"The guy's a personal friend of mine," Pecker explained.
McDougal alleges that her attorney at the time, Keith Davidson of Beverly Hills, was secretly colluding with Trump representatives to protect the newly named Republican presidential nominee from public disclosure of his extramarital affair.
AMI, she says, threatened her with financial ruin if she told the truth about Trump.
In a statement on Wednesday, AMI denied threatening her and said it had not yet decided "if, when, or how her story may be published."
"The story is more valuable today than it was two years ago," the statement said.
The only thing McDougal can't do, AMI said, is sell her story rights to another publisher.
McDougal's attorney, Peter K. Stris, said she "was explicitly told that they would not produce a story on her relationship with Trump."
"Despite their claims, it has always been AMI's intention to manipulate and silence Karen, and we look forward to freeing her from this bogus contract so she can move on with her life in peace," he said.
Also suing Trump is former "Apprentice" contestant Summer Zervos. Trump called her a liar after she accused him in October 2016 of trying to force himself upon her in 2007, sparking her defamation complaint. On Tuesday, a judge rejected Trump's request to dismiss it.
MEDIA
Ex-Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal: the rich asshole Said I Was Beautiful, Like His Daughter
Former Playmate of the Year claims she had an affair with some rich asshole in 2006.
Karen McDougal, the former Playboy model who says she had an affair with some rich asshole in 2006, described an extremely awkward compliment she received from the future president.
the rich asshole compared her to one of his daughters, Ivanka the rich asshole.
“He’s very proud of Ivanka, as he should be. I mean, she’s a brilliant woman. She’s beautiful. That’s his daughter, and he should be proud of her,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an interview that aired Thursday.
“He said I was beautiful like her, and, you know, ‘You’re a smart girl,’” she said. “And there wasn’t a lot of comparing, but there was some, yeah. I heard a lot about her.”
However, McDougal said she didn’t find it weird ― and then made a strange comparison of her own.
“I know a lot of people think it’s odd. But do I think it’s strange that a father would love his daughter so much that he brags about her? No, I brag about my dog that much.”
That wasn’t the only eyebrow-raising moment: McDougal also said the rich asshole made her cry after the first time they were intimate.
McDougal, who was Playmate of the Year in 1998, is suing a publisher to get out of an agreement that she says forbids her from talking about her 10-month affair with the rich asshole, which took place about the same time as his alleged relationship with adult film star Stormy Daniels.
By
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March 22, 2018
The GOP is facing huge losses come November, but the rich asshole is already trying to explain why that shouldn't be his fault.
the rich asshole has been a clear liability for Republicans in special elections, but he’s already trying to shield himself from blame for the impending blue wave in the 2018 midterms.
On Thursday, the rich asshole popped into a “millennial” photo op populated by administration officials and a few dozen young the rich asshole supporters, and sat for an embarrassingly sycophantic interview with right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
During the interview, the rich asshole recounted a pair of rallies he held for losing GOP special election candidates.
“You know, we gave a speech the other night in Pennsylvania for a very nice guy, Rick Saccone,” the rich asshole said, referring to the state representative who was defeated by Democrat Conor Lamb. “And it was — the level of love in that room was incredible.”
“We were in Pensacola, Florida, a couple of weeks ago, the place was just rocking,” the rich asshole continued, talking about a campaign rally he held just before accused child molester Roy Moore was defeated by Democrat Doug Jones in the Alabama Senate race.
“Now, I don’t know if it’s transferable,” the rich asshole said. “I hope it’s transferable because we have to do our agenda. We have to win in ’18. We have to get the agenda. We need more Republicans.”
the rich asshole is so in denial about his own political toxicity that he’s bragging about two races that he helped Republicans lose, including the exact Pennsylvania township where the rich asshole’s latest rally was held. And Democrats have been flipping state and local seats all over the country under the rich asshole.
But even in special elections that Republicans have won, Democrats have vastly outperformed their 2016 results.
There are 119 Republican-held House seats that are more competitive than the one the rich asshole helped Saccone lose. If Republicans were smart, they would pray with all their might that this the rich asshole effect is not transferable.
‘The godfather of stupid wars!’: MSNBC host explodes in epic rant over the rich asshole hiring Bolton to replace McMaster
John Bolton -- screengrab
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Kicking off Thursday night’s Hardball, MSNBC host Chris Matthews practically came out of his chair ripping into President some rich asshole’s selection of John Bolton as his new nationals security adviser.
As is his custom, Matthews did let his guests get a word in edgewise as he ranted about the rich asshole’s selection of Bolton, calling the appointment: “The worst thing he’s done.”
“It’s extraordinary. I’m a little emotional about this because I’ve never seen a president behave like this in one day,” said Matthews of a day that saw the rich asshole’s personal attorney flee the president’s legal team because his client won’t listen to his advice, only to later have the rich asshole dismiss the steady and highly-regarded McMaster with Bolton who can charitably be called a bomb-thrower and a warmonger.
“This may be the worst thing he’s done,” Matthews ranted. “John Bolton — Mr. Hawk. Their kids do all the fighting and getting killed and losing their legs and everything else. He [the rich asshole] said to them, ‘no more stupid wars.’ And now he brings in the godfather of stupid wars, John Bolton.”
Watch the video below via MSNBC:
‘We’re gonna need a bigger wall’: Maddow mocks the rich asshole dumping McMaster and filling up her massive list of departures
Rachel Maddow -- MSNBC screenshot
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MSNBC host Rachel Maddow smirked her way through the announcement that President some rich asshole has cut yet another cabinet member loose from his administration by turning to her big board of departures and wondering where she could fit H.R. McMaster’s name.
For weeks the puckish MSNBC host has been keeping a running list of high and mid-level the rich asshole firings and resignations on a big blue board behind her — and Thursday she was able to chalk another one up.
“Nothing in the news, a quiet night,” Maddow began with a knowing smile. “The president fired his lead lawyer for the Russia scandal — maybe for a very specific reason. The secretary of state said good-bye and left his job and the president hired yet another Fox News personality to join the Russia legal team and hired another Fox News personality to become the new national security advisor, which means he’s firing the existing national security advisor right now.”
“Just in the past three weeks, this president and this White House have chewed up and spat out the communications director who is reportedly the president’s single most trusted aide, Hope Hicks,” she continued. “Also the president’s personal assistant, also his staff secretary, also his chief economic advisor, also the deputy White House chief of staff, the deputy director of the FBI and the aforementioned secretary of state replaced by the person serving as director of the CIA which means there needs to be a new director of the CIA tonight as well and the national security advisor is out too.”
Taking a breath, and turning to her updated blue board, Madddow quipped: “We’re going to need another wall soon.”
NYT’s Habermann: ‘Certainly possible’ the rich asshole timed McMaster firing to distract from CNN’s playmate interview
New York Times' reporter Maggie Haberman (left) and President some rich asshole inside the Oval Office. Image via screengrab.
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Known for her access to the West Wing, New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman said Thursday afternoon that it’s “certainly possible” President Donald the rich asshole fired National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster earlier this evening as a distraction.
CNN host Anderson Cooper started the interview by asking Haberman if McMaster and the rich asshole’s parting, which the president announced via tweet, seemed “amicable.”
“To the extent that you can be ritually humiliated week after week with stories leaking out about the president being unhappy with you,” the correspondent said, “I suppose that’s about as amicable as that gets.”
“Things between President the rich asshole and H.R. McMaster were never good,” she explained. “They never had a great relationship, they didn’t have a good rapport, the president didn’t like H.R. McMaster’s briefing style. The president likes to mix up these conversations when there are actual briefings with his schtick and H.R. McMaster did not respond well to that.”
Haberman went on to say that for all the awkwardness between the president and his second national security adviser, he was most disliked in the West Wing by the White House chief of staff due to a number of reasons that included differences in military rank.
“John Kelly really didn’t like H.R. McMaster,” the reporter said, “and that, I’m told by several people, accelerated this timeframe.”
The Times correspondent went on to say that in the rich asshole White House, any explanation is possible for the timing of McMaster’s departure, which came nearly a week after the Washington Post reported that the president intended to oust him and after months of speculation.
“Knowing this president as well as you do and I do, you can envision a world where, yes, maybe it was to knock off your interview with [Playboy playmate and alleged the rich asshole mistress] Karen McDougal tonight,” Haberman said. “That’s certainly a possibility.”
“I think anything is possible with him,” she concluded. “I also think there’s a possibility that because John Bolton resisted it, he decided to do it for that reason and made a series of impulse purchases on staff and on policy.”
Watch below, via CNN:
‘Let’s be real’: CNN’s Burnett snaps at the rich asshole adviser for insisting China tariffs didn’t cause stock market plunge
CNN host Erin Burnett (left) and White House trade czar Peter Navarro (right). Images via screengrab.
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Until he joined the the rich asshole administration, conservative economist Peter Navarro was a tariff “purist” — a position CNN host Erin Burnett brought up Thursday evening when the White House trade czar defended the president’s latest stock market-depressing decision.
Navarro tried to claim that President some rich asshole imposing a $50 billion dollar tariff on China didn’t cause Thursday’s multiple-hundred point stock market drop, but the host cut him off.
“You and I both know the tariffs are the big reason the market fell 700 points,” Burnett said. “It could go up tomorrow, but let’s just be real.”
After blaming “bullish” market predictions on the dramatic stock drop and touting the importance of a “tariff regime” to boost American aluminum and steel trades, Burnett came back at the rich asshole’s trade chief with a clip of him espousing the opposite opinion on tariffs in a CNN interview aired earlier in March.
“You mention aluminum and steel,” the host said. “And you’ve been a purist on this issue for as long as I’ve known you, which as you point out goes many years back. You believed in those steel and aluminum tariffs, part of why you joined this administration, and you fought for them. You’ve been consistent.”
“So when you say tariff,” she continued, “you mean a tariff on everybody, and you said that very directly here on CNN earlier this month.”
Burnett then played a clip of Navarro during a March 4 interview arguing that allowing any exemptions to tariffs would create a “slippery slope.”
“It’s such a slippery slope that we’re going down a black diamond,” the host said, listing off the half-dozen countries who are exempt from the rich asshole’s controversial heavy metal tariffs.
When she asked Navarro how he took the exemptions, the trade czar exclaimed that he’s “ecstatic.”
“They’re temporary exemptions,” he said as the host raised her eyebrows in disbelief.
Watch below, via CNN:
‘There are no adults left in the room’: CNN security expert rips ‘insanity’ of the rich asshole dumping McMaster for Bolton
Julia Kayyem -- CNNscreenshot
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During a panel discussion with Erin Burnett, CNN national security analyst Julia Kayyem warned that President some rich asshole threw his administration into even greater chaos by ousting National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and replacing him with noted warmonger John Bolton.
Speaking with the host while on a panel that seemed stunned by the abrupt announcement by the president on Twitter, Kayyem said their the absence of the respected three star general means there will be no “more adults in the room” when the rich asshole is advised on international security policy.
“We knew McMaster was a dead man walking,” Burnett proposed. “This was a major shake-up at national security adviser and this is a huge change.”
“It is a huge change,” Kayyem explained. “And not just for the White House, but obviously for all the agencies in the national and Homeland Security space who look to McMaster’s office as a semblance of sanity in the insanity.”
“This comes the same week that the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson left, so you have unease there,” she elaborated. “You have a shift from the CIA head over to the State Department, you’ve got lots of moving pieces with agencies that don’t like chaos, for obvious reasons. They like order because their job is to maintain order.”
“So my quick takeaways from this is if this president wants chaos, he will get chaos — that’s what this president wants,” she continued. “There is no more adults in the room and no one going to control the process. This is what the president wants, and we will see.”
As for Bolton, Kayyem added, “This is someone who has no internal checks. This is a man who sees war and military effort as the only solution to a very complicated world. So if I sound a little bit more exercised than I normally do, that is because, for John Bolton, he is the hammer and everything is a nail.”
You can watch the video below via CNN:
‘Diary notes and photos’: Ex-Playmate tells CNN’s Cooper she has proof of 15-month sexual relationship with the rich asshole
Karen McDougal -- CNN screenshot
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Using a teaser clip of CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s interview with former playmate Karen McDougal explaining her sexual relationship with some rich asshole, the CNN host relayed that she told him she has diary entries and photos that will prove their 15-month-affair actually happened.
Speaking with CNN host Wolf Blitzer, Cooper teased out some details from his interview with McDougal to be broadcast Thursday night.
“What did she tell you, just a little while ago, about her encounter with some rich asshole?” Blitzer asked.
“Well, it was far more than just one encounter,” Cooper recalled. “She says this was a relationship that went on for well over a year. I think she said, about 15 months or so, and she has diaries in which she marked the days that she spent or saw him or the evenings that she spent with some rich asshole. She would put a ‘DT’ at the bottom of each diary entry.”
“There’s also photographs of her with some rich asshole — even a photograph of her with some rich asshole, Melania the rich asshole and Ivanka the rich asshole at an event, an ‘Apprentice’-related event at the Playboy mansion,” he explained.
“She says this went on and she had multiple sexual encounters, dozens and dozens of sexual encounters with some rich asshole over the course of their relationship,” he added. “She said it was a real relationship; that she loved him, that he loved her. I asked her about the first time that they actually had a date after they met at the Playboy mansion. They talked, according to her, on the phone for several days after some rich asshole had asked for her number.”
“After we had been intimate, he tried to pay me, and I actually didn’t know how to take that,” McDougal told the CNN host.
When Cooper asked if the rich asshole tried to hand her money, McDougal said, “He did.”
“I don’t even know how to describe the look on my face,” she said. “It must have been so sad.”
Watch the video below via CNN:
The scariest things John Bolton has said
the rich asshole’s new national security adviser really, really wants to bomb Iran and North Korea.
National security adviser H.R. McMaster is the latest the rich asshole administration casualty. He will be replaced by former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, President some rich asshole announced in a tweet Thursday evening.
“I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend,” the rich asshole said. McMaster will officially leave his job April 9.
I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.
Bolton, who helped cover up the Iran-Contra scandal, holds a number of extreme foreign policy positions, and represents a shift even among the rich asshole administration officials. Here are some of his dangerous, hawkish foreign policy and national security stances.
On bombing Iran“The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program. Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure,” Bolton wrote in a 2015 New York Times column headlined, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.”
“The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.”
On bombing North Korea
“Pre-emption opponents argue that action is not justified because Pyongyang does not constitute an ‘imminent threat.’ They are wrong. The threat is imminent, and the case against pre-emption rests on the misinterpretation of a standard that derives from prenuclear, pre-ballistic-missile times,” Bolton wrote last month in a Wall Street Journal column headlined, “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First.”
“Pre-emption opponents argue that action is not justified because Pyongyang does not constitute an ‘imminent threat.’ They are wrong. The threat is imminent, and the case against pre-emption rests on the misinterpretation of a standard that derives from prenuclear, pre-ballistic-missile times,” Bolton wrote last month in a Wall Street Journal column headlined, “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First.”
“Given the gaps in U.S. intelligence about North Korea, we should not wait until the very last minute. That would risk striking after the North has deliverable nuclear weapons, a much more dangerous situation.”
On the war in Iraq
“We are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq,” Bolton said in 2002 while serving as President George W. Bush’s under secretary of state for Arms Control and International Security.
“We are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq,” Bolton said in 2002 while serving as President George W. Bush’s under secretary of state for Arms Control and International Security.
There were not, of course, hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq, but in 2015, Bolton said he had no regrets.
“I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct. I think decisions made after that decision were wrong, although I think the worst decision made after that was the 2011 decision to withdraw U.S. and coalition forces,” Bolton said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “The people who say, ‘Oh things would have been much better if you didn’t overthrow Saddam’ miss the point that today’s Middle East does not flow totally and unchangeably from the decision to overthrow Saddam alone.”
On ‘radical Islam’
“I think it’s important to say, at the outset every time the subject comes up, that we are talking about politics and ideology here,” he said at a conference in 2016. “This is not a question about religion. And those who say that ‘when you talk about radical Islam you are insulting Muslims all over the world,’ are simply engaged in propaganda.”
“I think it’s important to say, at the outset every time the subject comes up, that we are talking about politics and ideology here,” he said at a conference in 2016. “This is not a question about religion. And those who say that ‘when you talk about radical Islam you are insulting Muslims all over the world,’ are simply engaged in propaganda.”
On Obama’s drone program
“It seems to me that the approach that the Obama administration is following is consistent with and really derived from the Bush administration approach to the War on Terror,” Bolton said on Fox in 2013. “And I think it is entirely sensible. Whether it is foreign citizens who are involved with Al Qaeda or American citizens, we are in a war. They have attacked us. We have a congressional authorization to use military force in response. And that’s what’s at stake here. This is not, you know, robbing the 7-Eleven down on the corner. These people are engaged in war against the United States.”
“It seems to me that the approach that the Obama administration is following is consistent with and really derived from the Bush administration approach to the War on Terror,” Bolton said on Fox in 2013. “And I think it is entirely sensible. Whether it is foreign citizens who are involved with Al Qaeda or American citizens, we are in a war. They have attacked us. We have a congressional authorization to use military force in response. And that’s what’s at stake here. This is not, you know, robbing the 7-Eleven down on the corner. These people are engaged in war against the United States.”
On Syrian refugees
“We have no obligation to bring them into this country,” Bolton said in an interview with Fox News in 2015.
“We have no obligation to bring them into this country,” Bolton said in an interview with Fox News in 2015.
On a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine
“We have just seen in the past days the final crash, if you needed any more evidence, that the two-state solution is a nonstarter,” he said in 2014. “[A two-state solution] would inevitably lead to a terror state on the other side of the border with Israel.”
“We have just seen in the past days the final crash, if you needed any more evidence, that the two-state solution is a nonstarter,” he said in 2014. “[A two-state solution] would inevitably lead to a terror state on the other side of the border with Israel.”
On ‘provocative’ presidents
“We have a president who believes that our strength is provocative, only if we were less pushy, less American even,” Bolton said of Obama in 2012. “But it is American weakness that’s provocative and we have a very provocative president in the White House.”
“We have a president who believes that our strength is provocative, only if we were less pushy, less American even,” Bolton said of Obama in 2012. “But it is American weakness that’s provocative and we have a very provocative president in the White House.”
‘That’s it — we’re all gonna die’: Internet freaks out after the rich asshole picks ‘warmonger’ Bolton to replace McMaster
Fox News neocon and soon-to-be the rich asshole national security adviser John Bolton. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
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As soon as President Donald the rich asshole announced via tweet that he’s replacing national security adviser H.R. McMaster with neoconservative George W. Bush aide John Bolton, Twitter exploded with commentary on what the hawkish new adviser could mean for the country.
“John Bolton as National Security Advisor is the worst case scenario,” Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor tweeted. “the rich asshole campaigned against the disastrous decision to invade Iraq, but Bolton remains unrepentant and is now arguing to strike North Korea. Disaster.”
The Young Turk’s Emma Vigeland, meanwhile, noted that national security adviser is “a position that doesn’t require Senate confirmation, by the way.”
John Bolton, the biggest warmonger in America, is likely Trump's next National Security Advisor... a position that doesn't require Senate confirmation, by the way.twitter.com/charliespierin…
Check out more responses below:
With the appointments of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, @realDonaldTrump is successfully lining up his war cabinet. Bolton played a key role in politicizing the intel that misled us into the Iraq War. We cannot let this extreme war hawk blunder us into another terrible conflict.
Hold on to your hats, folks. How the White House gets ready for this North Korea summit in May amid all this turnover is beyond me... twitter.com/realDonaldTrum…
In case you need an introduction/reminder to the sort of thinker John Bolton is, this poorly argued piece is from Feb 28, 2018:wsj.com/amp/articles/t…
Probably the worst/biggest single day for geopolitical risk since I started @EurasiaGroup in 1998.
That bad huh? Is John Bolton that radical? pic.twitter.com/pHHdl8gR3N
the rich asshole announces dumping of McMaster as national security advisor to be replaced by John Bolton
President some rich asshole (Screen cap).
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In a late tweet Thursday, President some rich asshole announced that National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster will be replaced by former Bush-era official and Fox News contributor John Bolton.
According to the rich asshole: “I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.’
You can see the tweet below:
I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.
Kellyanne Conway says you can combat opioid addiction with french fries
It's the latest in a line of White House drug policy that boils down to "Just say no."
Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway offered her advice to a group of millennials Thursday, encouraging them to just eat more junk food instead of turning to opioids.
“On our college campuses, your folks are reading the labels, they won’t put any sugar in their body, they don’t eat carbs anymore, and they’re very, very fastidious about what goes into their body,” Conway said at a meeting with young people at the White House. “And then you buy a street drug for $5 or $10, it’s laced with fentanyl, and that’s it.”
Conway, who’s been charged with leading the White House’s efforts on managing the opioid crisis, encouraged students to take a different path.
“So I guess my short advice is, as somebody double your age: eat the ice cream, have the french fry, don’t buy the street drug,” she said. “Believe me, it all works out.”
In addition being poor health advice, Conway’s suggestion essentially sums up the administration’s plan for dealing with the opioid crisis, an epidemic that killed more Americans in 2016 alone than did the entire Vietnam War: Just ask people nicely not to do drugs.
At a speech Monday in New Hampshire, the rich asshole reiterated his belief that we should have “great commercials… where you scare them,” a la the “Just Say No” campaigns of the Reagan era.
Before the event, reporters had been briefed on a policy plan for combating the epidemic, which the rich asshole was going to lay out during the speech; instead, as the president is wont to do, the rich asshole gave a long, winding speech that was mostly about whatever was on his mind at that moment.
the rich asshole’s team is expected to require that doctors adhere to best CDC practices if they want to receive money from Medicare, Medicaid, or other publicly funded health care programs, and the rich asshole even suggested in the speech that the administration would file litigation against major prescription drug companies that have trapped people in addictive cycles.
Though the rich asshole and his allies often tout the administration’s work on opioids, they’ve done almost nothing since the rich asshole took office. They have not declared additional funding to fight the opioid crisis, and they have not heeded the advice of their own Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, which recommended expanding Medicaid.
the rich asshole has also refused to negotiate reduced pricing for governmental units of naloxone, a lifesaving overdose drug, and has he not worked to negotiate reduced pricing for effective medication-assisted treatments. The administration has also refused to make it easier for doctors to prescribe buprenorphine, an addiction treatment drug, or even reimburse doctors for taking the course needed to get certified in buprenorphine treatment.
the rich asshole seems to think none of that really matters, as he seems sure he has the silver bullet for ending the opioid crisis: Execute the drug dealers.
“This isn’t about being nice anymore,” the rich asshole said at his New Hampshire earlier this week. “These are terrible people, and we have to get tough on those people. We can have all the blue-ribbon committees we want. But if we don’t get tough on the drug dealers, we’re wasting our time — just remember that, we’re wasting our time — and that toughness includes the death penalty.”
the rich asshole official boasted to UN that America is a ‘pro-life country’ in push for abstinence-only sex ed
Bethany Kozma (screenshot)
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A the rich asshole administration official during closed-door talks with representatives of other nations at the UN said the United States is “a pro-life nation,” and advocated for language that would enable the promotion of “abstinence-only” sex education. The Independent’s Mythili Sampathkumar first reported the story, noting that U.S. law and the majority of the public support abortion rights.
“Bethany Kozma, a senior adviser in the office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment for US Agency for International Development (USAID), made the statement while countries negotiated the final document of the ongoing, annual women’s rights conference,” The Independent reports.
Kozma, a former blogger for the right wing think tank Heritage Foundation, was appointed by President the rich asshole to USAID, an independent agency that works closely with the State Dept. and the National Security Council. It has about 4000 employees and an annual budget of $27 billion.
Buzzfeed calls Kozma an “anti-transgender activist” who “held positions in the White House and Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, according to her LinkedIn profile, before dedicating herself full-time to raising her children.”
“In 2016, she launched a campaign to oppose the Obama administration’s guidance to public schools that said transgender students have the right to use facilities matching their gender identity; the guidance was withdrawn by the rich asshole administration in February.”
GLAAD notes that Kozma once testified at “her local school board that there is a direct link between sexual predators and trans access to facilities. ‘Imagine how predators will be emboldened and enabled, endangering other young girls if they are allowed to enter girls facilities and protected under your current policy,'” she said.
Here’s Kozma in 2016 addressing the Fairfax County Public Schools, and claiming there is a link between transgender women and sexual predators.
There is a petition urging the rich asshole administration to remove her from the official U.S. delegation to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).
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March 22, 2018
It may soon be Roger Stone's time in the barrel.
Guccifer 2.0, the hacker who claimed responsibility for providing WikiLeaks with a trove of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign, has been conclusively identified as an officer working out of Russia’s military intelligence agency.
According to The Daily Beast, which reported on the explosive revelation late Thursday, FBI agents were able to identify that Guccifer 2.0 was working out of Russia’s military intelligence agency, GRU, when the hacker failed to activate their virtual private networking (VPN) service.
That seemingly minor slip-up exposed Guccifer 2.0’s IP address as one belonging to a specific GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters in Moscow.
While Guccifer 2.0 was long believed to be a front for Russian intelligence, Thursday’s report confirms that the hacker was working directly for a Russian intelligence operation under the control of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Last January, Guccifer 2.0 denied having any connections to Russia, calling such reports a “crude fake.”
The Daily Beast also reported Thursday that special counsel Robert Mueller has taken over the investigation into Guccifer 2.0, teaming up with the same FBI agents who tracked down the hacker’s identity.
As Axios noted, “Special counsel Robert Mueller never explicitly implicated Russian President Vladimir Putin in his investigation. Connecting Guccifer to ‘Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency’ would do exactly that.”
The new evidence confirming the true identity of Guccifer 2.0 has profound implications for the Russia probe and those involved in it — especially former campaign aide and longtime the rich asshole confidante Roger Stone, who has admitted to exchanging direct messages on Twitter with Guccifer 2.0.
Stone, like many others in the rich asshole’s inner circle, has tried to cast doubt on the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia was behind the DNC hack, claiming that Guccifer 2.0 was a creation of the DNC — and that the hack was secretly an inside job.
In a 2016 Breitbart article published just after he communicated with Guccifer 2.0, Stone admonished the U.S. intelligence community and demanded that people “Stop Blaming Russia” for the DNC leaks.
“I have some news for Hillary and Democrats,” he wrote. “I think I’ve got the real culprit. It doesn’t seem to be the Russians that hacked the DNC, but instead a hacker who goes by the name of Guccifer 2.0.”
In his messages with Guccifer 2.0, Stone asked the hacker to retweet that article — a request that was granted.
Just days after exchanging direct messages with Guccifer 2.0, Stone sent a series of tweets raising questions about whether he had advanced knowledge that WikiLeaks was about to publish emails hacked from the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
“Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary,” Stone tweeted on Aug. 21, 2016.
With forensic evidence confirming that Guccifer 2.0 was working for a Russian intelligence operation, Stone’s communications with the hacker — and his statements in the days and weeks following those exchanges — are sure to be of intense interest to special counsel Mueller.
The new report also casts fresh doubt on the rich asshole’s frequent claims of “no collusion.” If, as the report states, Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian intelligence operative carrying out the orders of Putin, then there is now definitive proof that a the rich asshole campaign associate was in extensive contact with a Russian spy during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, amid this deluge of new evidence, the rich asshole has just appointed a new national security adviser who once suggested that Russian interference could be a “false flag operation.”
But try as he might, the rich asshole can’t escape the reality that is quickly catching up with him — and encircling those around him.
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March 22, 2018
Coal miners helped win Conor Lamb a victory in a deeply red Pennsylvania district — a sign of things to come.
In 2016, West Virginia represented the epicenter of Trumpism. the rich asshole posted a huge victory there, with 68 percent of the vote. But just 18 months later, West Virginia is emerging as a warning sign for how much trouble the Republican Party is in.
Specifically, the party may be in danger of losing chunks of white, working-class voters who propelled the rich asshole into office. The United Mine Workers of America is set to endorse two Democrats in West Virginia.
The endorsements come just two weeks after Democrats won a special election in deeply red district in western Pennsylvania, where coal miners likely played a key role on Election Day.
On Friday, the union will “endorse Richard Ojeda for U.S. Representative in the state’s third district, as well as incumbent Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat and former West Virginia governor,” Reuters reports.
In 2016, the union endorsed a Republican in Ojeda’s district.
Come November, Manchin’s Republican opponent could end up being Don Blankenship, the former head of Massey Energy Company. Following a huge blast at a Massey mine in 2010, which killed 29 miners, Blankenship was convicted and sentenced to prison for conspiring to violate federal mine safety standards.
Republican Party leaders are already fretting that if a convicted criminal wins the GOP nomination, the party might lose its chance to knock off a Democratic senator in a deeply red state.
In 2016, the rich asshole aggressively embraced coal miners and often featured them at rallies and events.
The mining industry represents, “on of the purest distillations of the rich asshole’s base, uniting right-wing business executives who hate environmental regulations and taxes along with blue-collar miners who wish America was more like it used to be when coal was king,” Politico noted.
At a White House event last year, the rich asshole stressed, “I made them this promise, we will put our miners back to work.” But it’s not happening.
Yet so far, the job gains for coal miners are virtually non-existent, with just 130 net new jobs being created since the rich asshole took office.
In Western Pennsylvania this month, Lamb made Democratic inroads among miners by promising to protect America’s safety net from Republicans who want to shred it. He also vowed to help coal miners protect their pensions.
“You elect this man to Congress and you won’t have to lobby him one minute,” the head of United Mine Workers of America assured voters in Pennsylvania this month. “This is a ‘yes’ vote!”
If Republicans are in danger of losing white, working-class voters like coal miners in West Virginia, they’re truly doomed come November.
Here are 8 conservative white men accused of domestic terrorism during the rich asshole’s presidency
some rich asshole and two supporters, Sean Urbanski (left) and Kenneth Gleson
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Aterrorist is dead in Austin, as the serial bomber who had been targeting minorities blew himself up as cops closed in.
Mark Anthony Conditt was an ideologue who belonged to an extremist religious group that worked firearms training into its practice and which reportedly discussed explosives.
However, Conditt, who also went by “Kelly Killmore,” was a white man and a conservative Christian. And so he has been described as a “quiet,” “nerdy” “young man” from a “tight-knit, godly family.”
The Austin bombing suspect was a quiet, “nerdy” young man who came from a “tight-knit, godly family,” said Donna Sebastian Harp, who had known the family for nearly 18 years nyti.ms/2FYMfv7
While they refuse to release his video confession, Austin police say Conditt was “a very challenged young man.”
Here are some other white conservative terrorists that have flown under the radar during the rich asshole administration—these are just the politically motivated terrorists from the past year, not including less recent white supremacist Dylann Roof or white males mass murderers who appear to be thrill killers like Stephen Paddock of Las Vegas.
Scott Ostrem/Booking photo
In 2017, Christian terrorist Scott Ostrem, walked into a Walmart in Littleton Colorado, where the Columbine shootings occurred, and shot three people waiting to pay for their groceries. He then drove home and spent the night in his apartment before fleeing as police came to arrest him. According to reports, Ostrem’s apartment had “a stack of Bibles and virtually no furniture.”
Ostrem’s sister blamed his murder’s on side-effects of acid he took in 1988. According to her, Ostrem came to believe he was possessed by demons. She said his only “treatment” was talking to his priest and described a Catholic priest visiting to read a Bible and bless Ostrem with a crucifix placed against his forehead as he asked the demons to leave his body.
Osteen would walk around his apartment complex wearing a karate outfit and carrying either a bow and arrow of a rifle in a bag. He would greet white neighbors but not Hispanic neighbors.
“He wouldn’t say nothing to us, but he talked to the only white couple who lives here,” one neighbor said. “I don’t understand where that hatred comes from.”
His sister said she told family that Ostrem needed to be committed before he harmed someone, but they never got around to doing it.
Alexandre Bissonnette/Booking photo
Conservative Christian Canadian terrorist Alexandre Bissonnette allegedly attacked a mosque in January 2017. He killed six peaceful Muslim worshippers and injured 17 others. Bissonnette held extreme rightwing views and was an outspoken advocate of French racist Marine Le Pen, who reportedly radicalized him during her visit to Canada.
Sean Urbanski/Booking photo
A brave American soldier was allegedly killed by a white conservative terrorist on the streets of Maryland in May 2017. Lieutenant Richard Collins, a black man, was walking down the streets he protected through his uniformed service when the alleged terrorist, the rich asshole-loving right-winger Sean Urbanski, told him to move out of the way.
The brave soldier refused to move, and the cowardly terrorist allegedly produced a knife and stabbed the American soldier to death in cold blood.
Urbanski was a member of a Nazi group called Alt-Reich Nation and frequently hit ‘like’ on racist and anti-semetic posts and memes.
Kenneth Gleason/Booking photo
Kenneth Gleason, an Eagle scout turned suspect terrorist, was arrested in Louisiana in 2017 on charges of committing two racially motivated murders of black men. The cowardly terrorist allegedly drove up to two different black men and gunned them down from his car. One of the victims was a homeless man, the other was a 49-year-old on his way to work as a dishwasher at a cafe. In both cases the alleged terrorist wounded the men and then walked up to shoot them, execution-style, with a 9mm handgun.
The alleged terrorist is a college drop-out and shoplifter. When police searched his home they found drugs—a gram of marijuana and vials of human growth hormone—plus a handwritten copy of an Adolph Hitler speech.
While making his perp walk, Gleason wore a t-shirt from Philmont, a remote training camp in New Mexico affiliated with the Boy Scouts. At Philmont, Gleason likely would have received firearms training, possibly including the use of Springfield 30.06, a high-caliber rifle preferred by snipers.
Alleged terrorist murderer James Harris Jackson/Screenshot
In March 2017, alleged terrorist James Jackson traveled to New York to stab a black man to death with a sword in what he described as “practice” for a larger-scale killing. Jackson allegedly found an elderly black man who was collecting cans and stabbed him to death. Jackson turned himself in a day later, and has been charged as a terrorist.
Samuel Woodward/Booking photo
In January, a gay Jewish man in Orange County was allegedly killed by Nazi terrorist Samuel Woodward, a member of a Nazi organization tied to five murders around the country.
The Nazi claimed to have Asperger’s Syndrome and is pleading not guilty.
Nicholas Giampa on social media/Screenshot
Fellow accused American Nazi terrorist Nicholas Giampa, also a member of Atomwaffen Division, is alleged to have committed a double-murder. The victims were the parents of the Nazi’s girlfriend, who urged her to dump the Papa John’s employee because of his radical beliefs. So he allegedly shot the parents and then himself, failing to kill himself.
DMV photo released by San Juan County Sheriff’s Office in New Mexico, U.S. on December 8, 2017. Courtesy San Juan County Sheriff’s Office/Handout
Terrorist school shooter William Edward Atchison, who shot two students and then himself at a New Mexico high school in December 2017, was a huge the rich asshole supporter and white supremacist. The terrorist, who had been watched by the FBI for years, killed two innocent Hispanic students at the high school he dropped out of.
Atchison was a big fan of video games and Nazi web sites. He liked the game Wolfenstein 3D—except for the killing Nazis part.
“It was revolutionary for its time,” he wrote in a review. “The problem I have with it is the fact that you spend the entire game killing germans – killing white people.”
Ex-FBI deputy intel chief: the rich asshole’s next lawyer will blame the Russia probe on ‘aliens from outer space’
Frank Figliuzzi -- MSNBC screenshot
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Appearing on Deadline White House, a former FBI counter intelligence deputy chief said it was unlikely there are any reputable attorneys who would be willing to fill the job vacated by President some rich asshole’s lawyer John Dowd, who resigned on Thursday morning.
Reacting to the report of Dowd’s fleeing from the rich asshole legal team, because his client wasn’t listening to his advice, former Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi said the pickings will be slim for the rich asshole, who has reportedly already been turned down by multiple high profile lawyers.
Noting that Dowd reportedly quit because Dowd was afraid the rich asshole would likely commit perjury if he spoke with special counsel Robert Mueller, fill-in host John Heilemann asked the ex-FBI man, “What kind of lawyer would, under these circumstances given the chaos that reigns and given the specific issues that are bones of contention right now and the president’s impulses, what kind of lawyer is going to want to walk into that kind of environment who has credibility?
“It is a lawyer that is not going to be wedded to the facts,” Figliuzzi scoffed. “He’s going to throw out conspiracy theories that there are aliens from outer space causing this to happen. That there is the deep state going on here. ”
“We’re going to hear the ‘no collusion’ phrase repeated several times every speech,” he added. “And that’s the lawyer’s approach that the rich asshole is going to go with. But it’s a signal to all of us that the facts are problematic for this president, and that he’s choosing to go with a public relations route.”
Watch the video below via MSNBC:
Fox News’ Judge Napolitano admits a the rich asshole-Mueller interview will be a disaster: ‘A field day for the special counsel’
Judge Andrew Napolitano (Photo: Screen capture)
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Discussing news that some rich asshole’s lawyer John Dowd quit the president’s legal team amid a reported dispute about the attorney’s advice regarding special counsel Robert Mueller, Fox News analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano admitted the move doesn’t bode well.
“This particular president has one of the strongest personalities and highest levels of self-confidence of any human being I’ve met,” the legal analyst told host Harris Faulkner. “This president, if told not to say something that he wants to say, will probably say it anyway.”
Dowd, the New York Times reported earlier on Thursday, concluded that the rich asshole was “increasingly ignoring his advice.” The top White House lawyer advocated for an alternative to a sit-down interview between the rich asshole and the special counsel.
“This president doesn’t always use — I’m being diplomatic now — an economy of words,” Napolitano continued. “That is, that recipe, is a field day for prosecutors and FBI agents that would like to trip him up.”
Though the judge said he’s a “big fan” of the rich asshole’s latest hire, land conspiracy theorist Joseph diGenova, who joined the rich asshole legal team earlier this week before Dowd’s resignation, he said the attorney now faces a “learning curve” because he joined the president’s defense in the middle of the Mueller probe.
“This is not good for all of this to happen to the president while he’s talking to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and signing tariffs on China, and negotiating spending with the Congress,” Napolitano said. “He can keep many balls in the air, but he is human, and this is almost like being under siege.”
Watch below, via Fox News:
Congress rejects Betsy DeVos’ education agenda
Congress is not moving forward with Betsy DeVos' education agenda in its spending bill.
Congress’ spending bill demolishes many of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ budget priorities and proposals. The bill rejects many of her proposed cuts for the department, and instead allocates more money to the Office for Civil Rights, preserves funding for before and after school programs, and keeps in place a grant program that helps provide school-based mental health services.
House and Senate leaders released this bill, which would fund the government through September, on Wednesday evening. Devos wanted to use $1 billion on her school choice priorities, such as promoting private school vouchers, magnet schools, and charter schools, but the omnibus bill excluded funding for her school choice program. Congress would also boost department funding by $3.9 billion.
DeVos wanted to cut the department’s Office for Civil Rights funding by $1.7 million, but the spending bill increased its budget by $8.5 million. DeVos’ efforts to cut spending for the office comes at a time when racial harassment complaints at schools are rising. The department has dismissed complaints from transgender students, rolled back guidance on campus sexual assault that sexual assault survivors support, and narrowed the scope of the office’s investigations.
Under DeVos’ proposal, the Federal Supplemental Education Opportunity Grant — a program that helps low-income college students finance the costs of college — would also have been eliminated, but members of Congress increased the program by $107 million in the spending bill instead. Private, non-profit institutions colleges and universities received a third of that funding, according to analysis by the Brookings Institution.
In a letter to Congress, the National Education Association urged members of Congress to vote for the spending bill. “This bill, while not perfect, takes the first step in reinvesting in education funding and prioritizes programs which help students most in need … The FY18 omnibus appropriations bill takes long overdue steps to increase education funding after years of austerity,” wrote Marc Egan, director of government relations at the National Education Association.
DeVos’ budget also would have eliminated the Student Support and Academic Enrichment grants program, which helps promote a well-rounded education and can be used for trauma-informed classroom management, anti-bullying programs, mental health services, and school violence prevention programs. Under this spending bill, the program, which was funded at $400 million last fiscal year, would be funded at $1.1 billion.
According to the American School Counselor Association, the average ratio of school counselors to students is one for every 482 students. Trauma-informed classroom management is becoming an important tool in addressing the school-to-prison pipeline, where students of color are disproportionately pushed into the criminal justice system through harsh school discipline and other factors. Twenty-five percent of young people in the United States have experienced a traumatic event. Students who have experienced trauma often struggle to manage stress and with trauma-informed approaches, school staff can de-escalate tense situations.
A teacher training program, Supporting Effective Instruction, a state grants program, and 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, a program supporting before and after school programs, which DeVos proposed to eliminate last year, also would have been eliminated under her budget but kept their funding under the omnibus bill. The 21st Century Community Learning Centers program helps 1.6 million kids. Robert Mahaffey, executive director of the Rural School and Community Trust told ThinkProgress when DeVos proposed to eliminate the program last year, “That would decimate after school programs.”
The department’s proposal argued that the teacher training program was “largely duplicative” and that the grant program that can be used for mental health services and school violence prevention “generally can be supported with funds from other sources” according to The 74 Million.
WATCH: the rich asshole whines about being the president during millennial summit interview
President some rich asshole during a Fox News interview. Image via screengrab.
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Speaking to an interviewer at the millennial-oriented Generation Next Summit, President some rich asshole appeared to complain about the difficulties of being president and getting bad press.
“What advice do you give to 25-year-old some rich asshole?” the young interviewer asked.
“Don’t run for president,” the rich asshole responded, to laughter from the crowd.
He went on to complain about how he had “great publicity” before he ran for office — and later shifted gears to discuss what he considers a presidential achievement.
“There is a lot of fake news out there, nobody had any idea,” the president said. “I‘m proud of the fact that I exposed it to a large extent. We exposed it. It’s an achievement.”
During the freewheeling interview, the rich asshole also said he believes a “majority” of college students on the “real campuses” in the “Middle West” support him.
Watch below, via Fox News:
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March 22, 2018
the rich asshole's new national security adviser once suggested that Russian election interference could have been a false flag operation.
the rich asshole is replacing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster with John Bolton, a Fox News contributor who has advocated for war with North Korea.
The news of McMaster’s ouster came, unsurprisingly, in the form of a tweet.
“I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor,” the rich asshole tweeted Thursday evening. “I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.”
This comes on the heels of the firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, which was also announced on Twitter. The revelation is just the latest indication that the White House is continuing its spiral into chaos, as a temperamental and impulsive president takes his rage out on those around him.
According to the New York Times, McMaster’s style was too orderly for the rich asshole, who “has little patience for the detail and nuance of complex national security issues.”
“They had differed on policy, with General McMaster cautioning against ripping up the nuclear deal with Iran without a strategy for what would come next, and tangling with some rich asshole over the strategy for American forces in Afghanistan,” the Times added.
the rich asshole also clashed with McMaster on issues related to Russia. In February, the rich asshole publicly criticized the seasoned military professional for saying during a speech that the evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election was indisputable.
“General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems,” the rich asshole wrote. “Remember the Dirty Dossier, Uranium, Speeches, Emails and the Podesta Company!”
McMaster, a graduate of West Point who went on to earn a doctorate in history from the University of North Carolina, was considered a moderating influence in the White House.
As the Times noted, “General McMaster’s position at the White House had been seen as precarious for months, and he had become the target of a concerted campaign by hard-line activists outside the administration who accused him of undermining the president’s agenda and pushed for his ouster, even creating a social media effort branded with a #FireMcMaster hashtag.”
Bolton, who will replace McMaster as the rich asshole’s third national security adviser in just 14 months, is currently employed as a Fox News contributor.
In contrast to McMaster’s stance on Russia, Bolton has suggested that Russian interference in the election might have been “a false flag operation.”
In other areas, however, Bolton’s stance is much more hawkish. He has, among other radical proposals, called for preemptive strikes on North Korea — a move that risks starting a nuclear war. He was also one of the strongest proponents of the Iraq war, and has called for scrapping the Iran nuclear deal.
The Washington Post reported last week that “the rich asshole also thinks Bolton, who regularly praises the president on Fox News Channel, is good on television.”
Replacing a general with a Fox News commentator is exactly the type of chaos that has come to be expected from the White House that considers competency a fireable offense.
the rich asshole kicks off constitutional firestorm over the death penalty
No one knows if the rich asshole administration’s plans to execute drug dealers are constitutional.
This week, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III sent a memo to prosecutors urging them to “seek capital punishment for certain drug-related crimes.” The letter follows some rich asshole’s comments praising the Philippines’ authoritarian leader Rodrigo Duterte, who is believed to be engaged in a campaign of extrajudicial killings of suspected drug dealers.
At least as a constitutional matter, much of the memo is uncontroversial under existing Supreme Court precedents. However at least one line of the memo explicitly urges prosecutors to push constitutional limits, potentially injecting capital punishment into an entirely new area of the law. (Unless noted otherwise, this piece uses the word “constitutional” to refer to a law that would survive constitutional scrutiny in the Supreme Court — a separate question from whether the law comports with an allegedly objective reading of the Constitution.)
If prosecutors actually do decide to bring capital cases against drug offenders, you can expect to hear the words “Kennedy v. Louisiana” quite a bit. Kennedy was a 2008 Supreme Court decision holding that, as a general matter, “the death penalty should not be expanded to instances where the victim’s life was not taken.” But Kennedy also included a somewhat cryptic line that could open the door to meting out death sentences to drug criminals.
The prohibition against executing offenders who do not kill, Justice Anthony Kennedy (no relation to the defendant in Kennedy) wrote, was limited to “crimes against individuals.” Kennedy did not address “crimes defining and punishing treason, espionage, terrorism, and drug kingpin activity, which are offenses against the State.”
Most federal laws that permit drug offenders to be sentenced to death involve homicides. One, for example, involves drug traffickers who murder another person with a gun. Another involves murder “in furtherance of a continuing criminal enterprise.” These are examples of the sorts of crimes that can be punished with the death penalty under Kennedy.
But Sessions’ memo also advises prosecutors to bring capital cases under a federal law dealing with drug traffickers who deal “in extremely large quantities of drugs,” but who do not necessarily commit homicide in the process.
To be sentenced to die under this provision, a defendant would have to be “the principal administrator, organizer, or leader” of a criminal enterprise or “one of several such principal administrators, organizers, or leaders,” and would have to commit a drug offense involving massive amounts of illegal drugs — $20 million worth, or about 60 kilograms of heroin, or 300 kilograms of cocaine.
A capital prosecution under this provision of the law could squarely present the question of whether a conviction for “drug kingpin activity,” to use the words of Kennedy, can justify a death sentence even when the defendant was not convicted of homicide.
What makes this a difficult legal question is that Kennedy imagines death sentences being doled out to individuals who commit “offenses against the State,” but it is somewhat odd to lump drug crimes — even massive drug crimes — in with offenses such as treason, espionage, and terrorism.
Treason, espionage, and terrorism are all political crimes — that is, they are crimes committed for the purpose of undermining the government or advancing political goals through criminal means. Drug trafficking, by contrast, is normally a crime of avarice. People don’t typically sell heroin because their goal is to bring down the United States government, intimidate it into changing its policies, or advance the goals of America’s enemies. People normally sell illegal drugs because they want to make money.
To be sure, there are some examples of drug kingpins whose activities can fairly be described as “offenses against the State.” In Mexico, for example, drug cartels have assembled massive private armies that rival the power of the nation itself — in some cases even recruiting elite soldiers directly from the ranks of the Mexican army. The infamous drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman allegedly ordered attacks on government buildings to “send the gringos a message.” This sort of activity is analogous to treason, terrorism, or other political crimes, and likely would qualify as an offense “against the State” under Kennedy.
But the Sessions memo may contemplate capital prosecutions against drug kingpins who are not engaged in such political crimes. That is a much harder reach under Kennedy — at least if the Supreme Court was serious when it said that death sentences should be reserved for people who kill and people who offend against the State.
It should be noted that Kennedy was a 5-4 decision, so this entire discussion may be moot if some rich asshole has the opportunity to replace a member of the majority in that decision. If the Court’s current majority remains intact, however, Sessions’ memo could create a very difficult legal dilemma — just how political must a crime be to qualify as an offense against the nation itself?
OOPS: DNC Hacker Conservatives Have Been Praising Is A Russian Government Operative
Marcel Lazar (or Guccifer 2.0 as he is better known), the “lone hacker” who kicked off a politically-motivated, years-long right-wing assault against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server, has been heavily praised by conservatives. This, of course, has to be pretty embarrassing because he was just revealed as a Russian intelligence operative.
The Daily Beast reports that a single slipup revealed the Russian hacker’s affiliation:
Guccifer 2.0 sprang into existence on June 15, 2016, hours after a report by a computer security firm forensically tied Russia to an intrusion at the Democratic National Committee. In a series of blog posts and tweets over the following seven months—conspicuously ending right as the rich asshole took office and not resuming—the Guccifer persona published a smattering of the DNC documents while gamely projecting an image as an independent Romanian hacktivist who’d breached the DNC on a lark. As Stone’s Breitbart piece demonstrated, Guccifer provided Moscow with a counter-narrative for the election interference.Guccifer famously pretended to be a “lone hacker” who perpetrated the digital DNC break-in. From the outset, few believed it. Motherboard conducted a devastating interview with Guccifer that exploded the account’s claims of being a native Romanian speaker. Based on forensic clues in some of Guccifer’s leaks, and other evidence, a consensus quickly formed among security experts that Guccifer was completely notional.“Almost immediately various cyber security companies and individuals were skeptical of Guccifer 2.0 and the backstory that he had generated for himself,” said Kyle Ehmke, an intelligence researcher at the cyber security firm ThreatConnect. “We started seeing these inconsistencies that led back to the idea that he was created hastily… by the individual or individuals that affected the DNC compromise.”Proving that link definitively was harder. Ehmke led an investigation at ThreatConnect that tried to track down Guccifer from the metadata in his emails. But the trail always ended at the same data center in France. Ehmke eventually uncovered that Guccifer was connecting through an anonymizing service called Elite VPN, a virtual private networking service that had an exit point in France but was headquartered in Russia.
Unfortunately, Guccifer 2.0 got sloppy:
But on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with the government’s Guccifer investigation. Twitter and WordPress were Guccifer 2.0’s favored outlets. Neither company would comment for this story, and Guccifer did not respond to a direct message on Twitter.Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow. (The Daily Beast’s sources did not disclose which particular officer worked as Guccifer.)Security firms and declassified U.S. intelligence findings previously identified the GRU as the agency running “Fancy Bear,” the ten-year-old hacking organization behind the DNC email theft, as well as breaches at NATO, Obama’s White House, a French television station, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and countless NGOs, and militaries and civilian agencies in Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.
So there you have it, folks: the “lone hacker” with whom the rich asshole ally Roger Stone interacted heavily and whom Stone has repeatedly defended as totally not a Russian operative, is a Russian government operative.
If you’re a conservative who has used DC Leaks as a source or defended Guccifer, you probably should feel pretty embarrassed right about now. You won’t, but you should.
‘Is she stoned?’: The internet mocks Kellyanne Conway for saying millennials should choose ice cream over drugs
Kellyanne Conway speaks to Fox News (screen grab)
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During an interview at Generation Next, a millennial forum hosted in D.C. on Thursday, White House adviser and opioid epidemic chief Kellyanne Conway said young people could avoid fentanyl by eating ice cream and french fries. Upon hearing her sage advice, Twitter had a field day.
“On our college campuses,” Conway told her millennial interviewers, “you folks are reading the labels, they won’t put any sugar in their body, they won’t eat carbs anymore, and they’re very, very fastidious about what goes into their body.”
“And then you buy a street drug for $5 or $10, it’s laced with fentanyl and that’s it,” she continued.
“My short advice is, eat the ice cream, have the French fry, don’t buy the street drug,” the rich asshole administration’s chief opioid counselor advised. “Believe me, it all works out.”
“Dear God,” Splinter’s Katherine Kreuger tweeted in response to Conway’s advice. “We’re all f*cked.”
“Go home, people,” comedian Thronton McEnery responded. “We just won the war on drugs.”
Check out more responses below:
Phew, so glad we finally solved the opioid crisis. It was looking bad for a while. twitter.com/dmartosko/stat…
Conway's advice on fentanyl: "Eat the ice cream, have the french fry, don't buy the street drug" hill.cm/4KVfemV pic.twitter.com/fZxQIOocH5
"Eat the ice cream, have the french fry," .... yeah, that's what I did in the 60's when I was stoned!!! Is Kellyanne stoned?
shattered your kneecap in an industrial accident? kill the excruciating pain with some delicious ice cream, or perhaps "the french fry" twitter.com/dmartosko/stat…
the folks over on capitol hill have a new plan to beat the opioid crisis: Ice Cream and French Fry. it's certainly promising, let's see how it goestwitter.com/dmartosko/stat…
Don't do the cocaine. Do the Jesus. That shit'll take you flying high to a little place called... Heaven. twitter.com/dmartosko/stat…
i wake up i reach for my fentanyl i pause i smell frying potatoes kellyanne is in the kitchen i am thankful i see the factory start up i get a job god bless twitter.com/dmartosko/stat…
neCan confirm, free-basing ice cream and eating one French fry is way more euphoric than one of the strongest opioids on the market. twitter.com/dmartosko/stat…
it’s Thursday in the desolate Rust Belt, you know what that means: it’s time to eat a single french fry and avoid opiate addiction twitter.com/dmartosko/stat…
I was considering doing fentanyl but now thanks to Kellyanne I’m just gonna “have the French fry” instead. Saved me from a life on the streets! twitter.com/dmartosko/stat…
In her first television interview about her alleged affair with some rich asshole, former Playboy model Karen McDougal said Thursday that he hurt her feelings by offering her money after they were “intimate.”
McDougal said she rejected the money in an interview with Anderson Cooper of CNN, two days after she sued to void a $150,000 confidentiality agreement about the alleged relationship more than a decade ago.
“After we had been intimate, he tried to pay me, and I actually didn’t know how to take that,” she said, according to an excerpt of the interview released before the broadcast. “I looked at him and said, ‘That’s not me. I’m not that kind of girl.’ And he said, ‘Oh,’ and he said, ‘You’re really special.’ ”
McDougal added that “it hurt me that he saw me in that light.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the interview, McDougal was expected to discuss her relationship with the rich asshole and her new lawsuit against American Media (AMI), the publisher of the National Enquirer, which bought the rights to her story three months before the 2016 election but did not publish it. The suit claims that her former attorney, Keith Davidson, worked secretly with AMI and the rich asshole attorney Michael Cohen as “part of a broad effort to silence and intimidate” her.
The complaint also alleges, without providing specifics, that Davidson had helped “catch and kill” other stories that would have been damaging to the rich asshole.
Hours before the CNN interview, Davidson demanded that McDougal stop accusing him of mishandling her case and said he was poised to defend himself publicly.
In a letter to her new attorney, Peter K. Stris, Davidson said, “The complaint and various media appearances portray an incomplete and misleading depiction of the facts, circumstances and communications related to my prior representation of Karen.” Any further disclosures, Davidson said, “will be deemed to be a complete express waiver of the attorney-client privilege.”
Stris responded Thursday in writing: “We disagree with multiple statements in your letter, but are writing to acknowledge that we have received it. We hope that you will comply with your ethical responsibilities.”
AMI has denied any wrongdoing and has said the contract with McDougal is valid.
McDougal is asking the court to declare her contract with AMI void, saying her story about the rich asshole “is core political speech entitled to the highest protection under the law.”
The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, comes two weeks after another woman, adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, sued the rich asshole to invalidate her own confidentiality agreement. Daniels’s deal was with Cohen, who has said he “facilitated” a payment of $130,000, using his own money. Cohen has sought to keep Daniels quiet through private arbitration, alleging in a court filing that she could owe as much as $20 million for violating the agreement.
Attorneys for Daniels on Thursday demanded that the rich asshole Organization and two banks preserve messages, documents and financial records they say relate to that payment.
“We intend on using all legal means at our disposal to uncover the truth about the cover-up and what happened,” Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s attorney, said in a statement. “And this is but one of many tools we will use. When we are done, the truth will be laid bare for the American people.”
In a letter to the rich asshole Organization’s chief legal officer, Alan Garten, Avenatti argued that the company has “unmistakable links” to the lawsuit. He asked the business to retain any messages Cohen exchanged regarding Daniels, along with banking records, account histories and text messages or emails that could relate to the rich asshole and Daniels’s alleged relationship.
Garten did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the letter. Cohen has said the rich asshole Organizaton was not involved in the deal with Daniels.
The letter to the rich asshole Organization also claimed that in February, Cohen “attempted to interfere” with Daniels’s ability to hire Avenatti, who has sought to push the deal into the public eye. Avenatti declined to comment further, and Cohen did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment about the letter or Avenatti’s claim.
Avenatti also on Thursday asked First Republic Bank and City National Bank, the banks involved in the $130,000 transaction, to retain records relating to the payment. Representatives for the banks declined to comment.
The lawsuits by McDougal and Daniels are not the only court cases involving the rich asshole and women that could present the president with legal and political challenges. On Tuesday, a judge ruled that a defamation lawsuit brought by former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos could proceed, potentially allowing her attorneys to collect evidence supporting her claim that the rich asshole forcibly kissed and groped her years ago.
Congress’ spending bill is a rude awakening for Sessions’ war on medical marijuana
The omnibus spending deal keeps the shackles on DOJ's pot work.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions will be prohibited from going after state medical marijuana growers, retailers, and patients for at least another fiscal year, after lawmakers included language tying the Department of Justice’s hands on therapeutic weed in an omnibus spending bill this week.
The restrictions defy Sessions’ personal plea to Congress from roughly a year ago, when he sent a letter asking for permission to interfere with the medical cannabis industry. Lawmakers have sheltered state medicinal pot programs from federal law enforcement for several years now using a policy rider in spending legislation. The language, known today in both political and pot industry circles as the Rohrabacher-Blumenauer Amendment (RBA), says the Department of Justice (DOJ) can’t spend a penny of its budget on investigations or prosecutions of medical marijuana actors in 46 states.
The omnibus deal hasn’t yet reached final passage. But if lawmakers or the White House were to attempt changes to it, the RBA would likely still be safe. Every spending measure adopted for the past three years has included some version of the language.
The lead sponsors of the policy say that Sessions’ attempts to crack down on marijuana have only strengthened congressional support for the protections. Though the attorney general has made noise on pot in various ways — including some chilling letters to legalization state officials where he cited erroneous statistics — he hasn’t yet managed significant or concrete action steps that could push the growing conflict between federal prohibition and state legalization into court.
In January, Sessions ripped up a series of DOJ memos spelling out the conditions under which a state-legal marijuana operation could expect to be left alone by the feds. The largely symbolic move prompted titters and eyerolling inside the industry — a line of business already worth billions and projected to grow at staggering rates in the coming years is not an easy target, and business owners know they’ve got significant support from both politicians and law enforcement organizations in their states — but nonetheless stoked concern that Sessions might take harder steps soon.
But it may have backfired. The January move “will give us something to rally behind, both Republicans and Democrats, to show that we need to have a comprehensive bill [for] not just medical marijuana but…all of the decisions of the states when it comes to cannabis,” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) told reporters at the time. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) agreed, saying he’s “seen steady progress throughout this Congress” on pushing to curtail federal interference with even adult-use recreational cannabis in states that have legalized it.
Merely maintaining the RBA in the omnibus is not really a win for Congress’ growing “Cannabis Caucus,” though, the Oregon lawmaker told ThinkProgress.
“While I’m glad that our medical marijuana protections are included, there is nothing to celebrate since Congress only maintained the status quo. These protections have been law since 2014. This matter should be settled once and for all,” Blumenauer said.
And though Attorney General Sessions is adrift through the end of the omnibus spending cycle, it’s a different Sessions who lawmakers must now target. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), head of the House Rules Committee, “is stonewalling,” Blumenauer said. The chairman has used his committee statute to kill a number of widely supported amendments and bills that would bring federal cannabis policy further in line with the popular will, as Politico detailed on Wednesday.
“They’re ignoring the will of the American people by blocking protections for state adult-use laws and cannabis banking. They even refused our veterans access to lifesaving medicine,” Blumenauer said. “Republican leadership is hopelessly out of touch, and they should be held accountable.”
the rich asshole asked four defense attorneys to join his legal team in recent weeks — and all of them said no
some rich asshole during CNN debate (Photo: Screen capture via video)
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In recent weeks, some rich asshole has approached four different defense attorneys to ask they join his legal defense team, CNN’s Katelyn Polantz reports.
All four of them declined.
The news comes amid another shakeup on the rich asshole’s legal team. On Thursday, John Dowd—who lead the president’s outside legal counsel for special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation—abruptly resigned. That decision followed the addition of Joe DiGenova, a lawyer who peddled a conspiracy on Fox News about the FBI and Department of Justice framing the rich asshole with the special counsel probe.
Earlier this month, the president indicated he was “VERY HAPPY” with his legal team, challenging a “false” New York Times report that he was unhappy with Dowd, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow. That Times report indicated the president had met with veteran Washington attorney Emmet Flood—who represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment process—in the Oval Office.
According to four sources, the rich asshole and Flood discussed the possibility of Flood joining the rich asshole’s legal team. It’s unclear if he turned down the president’s request.
Tuesday, the Washington Post reported the rich asshole’s legal team had reached out to Theodore Olson, who served as solicitor general in George W. Bush’s administration, to join his defense effort.
The global co-chair of Olson’s firm on Monday said that his partner would not be joining the president’s legal team.
“I can confirm that [the firm] and Theodore B. Olson will not be representing the rich asshole,” Theodore J. Boutrous wrote on Twitter.
I can confirm that @gibsondunn and Theodore B. Olson will not be representing @realDonaldTrump
the rich asshole attends event about campus political correctness crisis, accidentally admits it doesn’t exist
"I think it's highly overblown. Highly overblown."
For years, Charlie Kirk — a conservative activist and the executive director of Turning Point USA — has been crying out about the purported censorship of conservative voices on college campuses.
Kirk is also a big fan of President the rich asshole. During a Fox & Friends appearance in December, he said that “if a Democrat president achieved a fraction of what President the rich asshole has done, this last year, they would call it historic and they would call it breathtaking.”
On Thursday, Kirk was at the White House to moderate a forum event about young entrepreneurship and other issues of interest to millennial Republicans. the rich asshole dropped by, and Kirk had the opportunity to ask his hero some questions. At one point Kirk teed one up about the free speech crisis on campuses that has become his life’s calling.
“It’s harder than ever to espouse support of your presidency and the ideas that you’re fighting for,” Kirk began. “So thank you for what you’re doing to give us the courage of our convictions to fight against political correctness. But what advice do you have for young patriots and conservatives on campus that support your agenda that are being ridiculed and silenced because of administrations that are clamping down on free speech?”
the rich asshole, however, didn’t take Kirk’s bait. Instead, the president indicated he thinks that the problem Kirk is working to solve is “highly overblown,” because in actuality he has “tremendous support” among college students.
“I think the numbers are actually much different than people think,” the rich asshole said. “I think we have a lot of support. If they have one campus or two campuses, and we know what they are, it gets all the publicity. We have campuses where you have a vast majority of people that are perhaps like many of the people in this room, you could call it conservative, you call it whatever you want, but there are people that want free speech.”
“If you look [at] what’s going on with free speech, with the super-left, with Antifa, with all of these characters — I’ll tell you what, they get a lot of publicity, but you go to the real campuses and you go all over the country, you go out to the Middle West, you go out even to the coast in many cases, we have tremendous support,” the rich asshole continued. “I would say we have majority support. I think it’s highly overblown. Highly overblown.”
Kirk, unwilling to push back against his hero, simply said “I totally agree” before moving on to another topic.
While the rich asshole might believe he’s popular on college campuses, polling does not back him up. A biannual Harvard of Americans ages 18 to 29 conducted last fall pegged the rich asshole’s approval rating with that demographic at 25 percent — down 7 points from when that same poll was conduct in the spring of 2017.
Notably, the Harvard poll indicated the rich asshole isn’t even particularly popular even among young Republicans. Two-thirds (66 percent) of Republicans 18 to 29 said they approve of the rich asshole, down 12 percent from the spring of 2017 poll.
Even though the rich asshole dismissed Kirk’s question about a speech crisis on campuses, there appears to be no hard feelings. After the forum ended, Kirk tweeted that “it was a great honor to interview [the president] about student issues and the amazing success of this administration.”
“The accomplishments are historic, fixed the trajectory of America, and are beginning the process of turning this country around!” Kirk added.
the rich asshole retweeted Kirk, adding that participating in the forum was “My honor.”
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/976914287217258497
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