The ENTIRE GOP party is complicit in this. They were fine with letting this dipshit in office as long as he was on their side. But now that's he gonna blow up trade and screw their states, they suddenly want to do something. This is why they must be primaried and kicked out and the Democrats need to take back the House and Senate. The Dems may not be perfect but at least they're not fucking nuts.
Europe retaliates against U.S. heartland following the rich asshole trade threats
Areas like Kentucky and Wisconsin would be impacted. Republican lawmakers aren't happy.
The European Union is preparing retaliatory tit-for-tat tariffs on a number of well-known U.S. brands and products in response to President the rich asshole’s moves to impose tariffs on aluminum and steel imports from other countries.
A list tallied by the European Commission indicates a 25 percent levy on multiple U.S. goods, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. The tariffs will impact upwards of 2.8 billion euros ($3.5 billion) in U.S. exports, including agricultural and steel products. Motorcycles and blue jeans are also among the items included. The range of goods listed will disproportionately hit parts of the United States with strong manufacturing centers, including the Rust Belt and larger Midwest and Appalachia regions.
“These tariffs right now are just talk, but they have the potential to become quite inflammatory and impact economic growth,” Kristina Hooper, chief global market strategist at Invesco, told Bloomberg Television. “Tariffs beget more tariffs. It’s like putting bacteria in a petri dish.”
the rich asshole announced last week that he would seek to impose high tariffs on steel and aluminum of 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively. The threats sparked outcry from Canada — the top supplier of steel to the United States — and led experts to worry a trade war might be imminent, to say nothing of the demise of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) renegotiation talks, which are ongoing. the rich asshole fired back, arguing on Twitter that “trade wars are good, and easy to win” while bemoaning U.S. deficits.
But Canada isn’t the only country the United States has to worry about. European countries expressed concern following the rich asshole’s announcement, with European automakers in particular urging the president to reconsider. International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organization (WTO) officials criticized the decision, while a number of business leaders called for calm.
“I’m suggesting that we stop playing tit-for-tat, that we get our blood pressure to go back down to normal (and) that we sit down at the table and find a way to resolve this issue,” said Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne on Tuesday. “I don’t think we have to escalate this into a full-blown trade war.”
But European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker made it clear that any U.S. tariffs would be met with similar force.
“If the Americans impose tariffs on steel and aluminum, then we must treat American products the same way,” Juncker said last Friday following the rich asshole’s initial announcement. “We must show that we can also take measures. This cannot be a unilateral transatlantic action by the Americans,” he said. “I’m not saying we have to shoot back, but we must take action.”
Now it seems Europe is moving forward with tit-for-tat retaliation tariffs seemingly targeted to impact U.S. businesses. That reality isn’t lost on lawmakers, including members of the president’s own party. Bourbon, from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky, is among the products named. Many Harley Davidson motorcycles, meanwhile, are assembled in Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s home, Wisconsin.
In a statement released Monday — prior to news of the E.U. retaliatory tariffs — Ryan criticized the rich asshole’s plans.
“We are extremely worried about the consequences of a trade war and are urging the White House to not advance with this plan,” a spokesperson for the Speaker said in a statement. “The new tax reform law has boosted the economy and we certainly don’t want to jeopardize those gains.”
A number of other conservative lawmakers have also expressed concern, including another top-ranking Republican, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (TX).
“This is not a real estate transaction. While you could maybe walk away from a real estate transaction, we really can’t walk away from these trade agreements without jeopardizing the economy,” Cornyn argued on Monday.
Republicans have reportedly been meeting with the rich asshole in an effort to dissuade the president from moving forward with proposed tariffs. In the meantime, various industries are already taking a hit from the White House’s economic rhetoric. the rich asshole’s repeated attacks on NAFTA are already impacting U.S. agriculture and farmers, as Mexico turns away from the United States and towards a more appealing trading partner, Brazil. They aren’t alone. Mining organizations have expressed concern that the president’s proposed steel tariffs could be bad for another industry the rich asshole has historically touted: coal.
Sam Nunberg’s crazed interviews reveal Roger Stone is the ‘center of the enchilada’ in Mueller probe: MSNBC analyst
Ari Melber (MSNBC)
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MSNBC legal analyst Ari Melber said Sam Nunberg’s over-the-top antics have obscured the news bombshells he dropped about the special counsel probe of Russian election interference.
The former the rich asshole campaign aide and Roger Stone protégé shared a copy of his grand jury subpoena Monday on air with Melber, which offered a rare glimpse inside Robert Mueller’s investigation.
“He believes they wanted to put him in the box so he would provide testimonial evidence against one Roger Stone who, again, remains one of the longest-serving and advisers and political fixers for some rich asshole,” Melber said. “In a land of Papadopouloses, I don’t have to tell you or this knowledgeable panel what it would mean if in Nunberg is half-right or third right that there is investigative interest in Roger Stone.”
“Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski paused a moment to appreciate Melber’s reference to former the rich asshole campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who helped spur the FBI probe of Russian meddling and eventually pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents.
Nunberg commanded the spotlight by appearing to be drunk or having a manic episode, but Melber said his revelations about Mueller’s investigation were highly significant.
“Mr. Stone appears to be a person at the center of the international intrigue, as you mentioned, the contact with Wikileaks allegedly, which is believed to be by Bob Mueller of investigative interest of a Russian plot that’s already been charged in U.S. federal court,” Melber said. “This is the center of the enchilada, this is not a chip on the edge of the plate. That is why it is so fascinating what Mr. Nunberg is disclosing.”
Nunberg threatened to tear up the grand jury subpoena, although he later conceded he would comply with the court order, but Melber said that drama was only a sideshow.
“I think it would be a potential mistake to read all of this as a ‘will he or won’t he’ story about Mr. Nunberg’s cooperation with the special counsel,” Melber said. “That is not what gives it such legal, political and journalistic heat. What gives it so much heat is how much he’s disclosing regardless of what he later does, because he is basically saying that he has this belief that they’re setting up a case, his words, against Roger Stone.”
Nunberg blurted out that he had been offered immunity in exchange for his testimony, and Melber said the claim was credible since it was allegedly made through his attorneys — and he said the offer was significant.
“It matches with the fact that he did have a grand jury testimony request, meaning put him in the box to say things that could later be used in court against people — which never happens to most witnesses,” Melber said. “So, yes, in that sense, that is, forget whatever Sam Nunberg says or believes, that is an indication we have that the Mueller prosecutors want something more from him, hence the immunity.”
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March 6, 2018
the rich asshole to American jobs: Drop dead.
the rich asshole’s trade war will cost Americans at least 146,000 jobs, but Sarah Huckabee Sanders made it clear this administration just doesn’t care about that.
At her most recent daily briefing, Sanders was asked about a new report showing that the rich asshole’s snap decision to start a trade war will cost 146,000 Americans their jobs.
“Has the White House studied how many house would be lost or created because of this policy?” asked Fox Business Network’s Blake Burman.
“Look, this is something the president is committed to doing, and he feels that both our national security (sic) are vitally important in this process, and we have to be able to have these industries to protect that, and so that’s a big part of the goal,” Sanders responded, completely skirting the question.
Sanders’ response makes clear that there hasn’t been a White House study on job losses since the rich asshole’s snap decision, and that job losses didn’t figure at all in the rich asshole’s decision making.
“Uh, I’m not going to say that we’re not looking at every facet of this, because we certainly are,” Sanders said as she made it clear jobs weren’t a strong concern. “It’s been a very thoughtful and long process, um, but [national security is] the focus of… the decision that he’s making.”
And the news can only get far worse, because the Trade Partnership study does not account for the effects of trade retaliation, which has already begun.
the rich asshole’s hasty decision has been a rolling political disaster that has made a fool of everyadministration official who has tried to defend it. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is the latest, but she surely won’t be the last.
‘Washed up celeb’: Internet laughs at the rich asshole insisting he’s an A-list ‘Star’ in pathetic ‘kidding’ tweet
some rich asshole and Jeb Bush following the CNN debate (Photo: Screen capture via video)
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As part of his Tuesday Twitter storm, President some rich asshole blamed the low ratings of the 90th Academy Awards on the fact that there aren’t big stars anymore, except for him. He then noted he was joking.
“Lowest rated Oscars in HISTORY. Problem is, we don’t have Stars anymore – except your President (just kidding, of course)!” he said.
In previous Oscars tweets, the rich asshole has touted himself as a better host.
I should host the #Oscars just to shake things up - this is not good!
The internet was quick to wonder if perhaps the president wasn’t “kidding” after all.
You should worry more about fact we have lowest-rated president in history
Your ego is disgusting. Why are you attacking American tradition?
Why is a president tweeting about this? And of course you’re not kidding.
Some also noted that this continues more of the rich asshole’s obsession with ratings. While others wondered why Americans have the lowest rated president in history.
Lowest rated president in history
Lowest rated fake president in history
So you accept the fact that you're not liked anymore?
The rest you can see below:
Smallest inauguration crowd…lowest approval of any POTUS entering office…lowest approval of any POTUS at this point in presidency..dead last on list of most popular presidents …Shall i go on? twitter.com/realDonaldTrum…
The sad thing is, you’re not kidding! You really think you’re a star and that this whole presidency thing is about ratings!
The sad thing is, you’re not kidding! You really think you’re a star and that this whole presidency thing is about ratings!
Children are being murdered in school, the stock market is plummeting, the nation is racially polarized, and Trump is tweeting about the ratings of the #Oscars
Its like sorry not sorry
Awww you want to be invited to sit with the cool kids so bad and it eats you up inside that no one wants you at any party.
Tweeting about the Oscars...how about you read the daily briefing instead?
No, we all know you believe that.
Dude you will always be a washed up celeb.
You are so mad Hollywood doesn't want you lol fucking pussy
I fear dementia is setting in.
Well atleast Trump and the Oscars have the historically low ratings in common
I'd rather have Alec Baldwin doing this SNL Trump at the Oscars then actual Trump
Trump's world is falling apart and he's tweeting about the Oscars.
Nunberg got you that rattled eh? @realDonaldTrump twitter.com/realDonaldTrum…
Lowest rated Oscars in HISTORY. Problem is, we don’t have Stars anymore - except your President (just kidding, of course)!
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March 6, 2018
Two days after the rich asshole touted his tough talk with North Korea, the White House was forced to admit that he got his countries mixed up.
Speaking to a crowd of journalists on Saturday night, the rich asshole claimed that he had spoken with North Korea recently and issued a demand for them to “de-nuke.”
That would be major news — if it were true.
But as it turns out, the rich asshole was referencing the wrong Korea when he made the remarks at the annual Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, DC.
“They, by the way, called up a couple of days ago and said, ‘We would like to talk,'” the rich asshole claimed, referring to North Korea.
“And I said, ‘So would we, but you have to de-nuke, you have to de-nuke,'” he added.
Less than 48 hours later, the White House was forced to clarify the rich asshole’s comments, admitting that the rich asshole “did not have a call with the North Koreans.”
Speaking to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency, a senior official from the National Security Council (NSC) said the rich asshole was actually referencing a March 1 phone call with South Korean President Moon Jae-in.
Notably, South Korea ended its nuclear weapons program decades ago.
It’s unclear if the rich asshole was lying when he said he talked to North Korea, or if he actually believed he was speaking with North Korean officials during his phone call with the leader of South Korea.
Either way, this is yet another example of the rich asshole’s reckless approach to dealing with North Korea’s nuclear program.
Earlier this year, the White House leaked an outrageous plan to launch a preemptive strike on North Korea after the rich asshole’s twitter rants failed to win over the country’s despotic leader.
Although he’s not yelling “fire and fury” or threatening to start an imminent nuclear war, the rich asshole’s latest remarks about North Korea are every bit as ignorant and careless as his previous ones.
GOP strategist Steve Schmidt: Sam Nunberg just another low-life the rich asshole character from the ‘Star Wars cantina’
Steve Schmidt (MSNBC)
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Republican strategist Steve Schmidt said Sam Nunberg’s on-air meltdown represented a new low in the the rich asshole presidency.
President some rich asshole promised to hire “the best people,” but Schmidt said his administration has instead been populated with “a wretched hive of scum and villainy” like the Mos Eisley cantina in “Star Wars.”
“We’ve been having this discussion for the last year, which is how low can go?” Schmidt told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “Each week we find a way to hit a new low. Sam Nunberg, what we saw yesterday is this ‘Star Wars’ cantina bar scene, these characters melting down on national TV every 24 or 36 hours.”
He said the televised spectacles masked a genuine national security scandal engulfing the the rich asshole presidency.
“The United States has been attacked in a new type of war — an information war, a cyber war — and the president of the United States and his retainers, his loyalists around him, they refuse to defend the country,” Schmidt said. “They don’t defend America’s election process, they don’t defend our rule of law, they don’t defend our important institutions. In fact, some rich asshole and his apologists constantly are attacking these essential institutions that are necessary for the security of the country. It’s a remarkable moment in the history of the country.”
Host Joe Scarborough pointed out that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had not used $120 million budgeted for his department to counter foreign election interference, which Schmidt found baffling.
“The president of the United States won’t acknowledge the attack, nobody in the administration will criticize the Russians — it’s extraordinary,” Schmidt said. “We woke up (Monday), the president of the United States, his focus is attacking Canada and Mexico, not the Russians who are attacking our election process. Our democracy is sustained by two things, right? A free election process, which has been undermined by the Russians, but also the rule of law.”
Schmidt said Republicans had looked the other way at both Russian interference and aided and abetter the rich asshole attacks on the rule of law.
“We have this fruit, loops conspiracy theory, nutcase group of Republicans and right-wing media that are constantly attacking the rule of law in this country, our most vital institutions to protect the security of the country, on a range of conspiracy theories,” he said. “We’ve never seen anything like this in this country.”
Rich asshole lackey Kobach at it again.
Kansas Secretary of State seeks to deliver a devastating blow to voting rights
Kris Kobach and the ACLU face off in court over how Americans register to vote.
When Tad Stricker moved to Kansas from Illinois in 2013, he procrastinated getting a new driver’s license. He was busy with work and settling into his new city, and wasn’t eager to spend a day at the Department of Motor Vehicles. But when the registration deadline for the upcoming gubernatorial election approached, he decided it was time.
When he first arrived at the local DMV, he was told he didn’t have the proper documentation to get his license, so he hurried home to collect several forms of ID and proof of address.
“I grabbed every piece of document that I could find in my house,” he told ThinkProgress. “I grabbed mortgage statements, I grabbed tax documents, I grabbed my birth certificate, I grabbed utility bills, literally everything I could get my hands on to prove I was who I said I was.”
Back at the DMV, he was told he’d receive his permanent license and voter registration card in the mail.
“I left the DMV that day under the impression that I was registered to vote,” he said. The license arrived in the mail, but the voter registration card never did.
It wasn’t until Election Day in November 2014, when he went to cast a ballot near his home in Sedgwick County, that he realized he wasn’t on the voter rolls. An elections official told him he would have to cast a provisional ballot. Stricker would later find out that his registration has been put on a suspended list because he did not provide a document to prove his U.S. citizenship when he registered. Nobody at the DMV had mentioned to him that he was required to show a birth certificate, passport, or other document to verify his citizenship to be added to Kansas’ voter rolls.
Kansas began to require documentary proof of citizenship from all Kansas residents when they register to vote in 2011, though courts have since blocked that law. The state passed the requirement after Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) took office and began pushing for laws he claimed would protect against the threat of non-citizens casting ballots.
Since 2011, Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia have all passed proof of citizenship laws similar to the one Kobach wrote in Kansas. Courts have blocked all three states’ laws.
Now the Kansas law could meet a similar fate. The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in 2016, claiming the law violates the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the Motor Voter Law. In October 2016, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit upheld a temporary injunction that requires Kobach to register voters without proof of citizenship until the case is decided. In that order, the court said the law creates a “mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right.”
Starting Tuesday, Kobach will have to defend his law in a federal courtroom, as the ACLU attempts to prove that it is unconstitutional. Over about a week, the ACLU will question Kansas voters in court over the discriminatory effects of the law. Kobach, who is representing himself, will call as one of his witnesses a researcher whose work has been discredited time and time again.
“Kobach’s position is that states can require any kind of documents they want from people when they register to vote,” Dale Ho, the director of the ACLU’s Voting Project and an attorney for the plaintiffs, told ThinkProgress. But the Motor Voter Law was passed to prevent just that, Ho said.
According to the ACLU, the Kansas law blocked more than 35,000 people in that state from casting a ballot between 2013 and 2016 — about 14 percent of all new voter registrations. But if Kobach prevails, the decision would have implications beyond Kansas.
A ruling in favor of the proof of citizenship law could set an example for other states hoping to set new, more stringent requirements on citizens seeking to register to vote. As the ACLU explains, a uniform system of voter registration under the NVRA could be turned into a “patchwork.” Kobach’s ultimate goal is to gut the NVRA and enact a national proof of citizenship requirement.
Ho warns that a ruling in Kobach’s favor would spell disaster for Americans’ right to vote.
“If Kobach prevails, it’ll blow a hole right through the Motor Voter law,“ he said. “It’ll transform Motor Voter and completely undermine that system and pave the way for a patchwork of laws and restrictions.”
Who is Jesse Richman, Kobach’s star expert witness?
This week, Kobach will likely argue that his proof of citizenship law is necessary because, he claims, a significant number of non-citizens have and will continue to cast ballots in Kansas elections.
Much of Kobach’s case rests on the work of Jesse Richman, a professor of political science at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Though he is relatively unknown outside academic and voting-rights circles, Richman’s work has for years formed the bedrock on which conservative lawmakers have built up claims that millions of non-citizens vote illegally and therefore decide elections in favor of Democrats.
Richman is best-known for a 2014 article that used the Cooperative Congressional Election Study — an online survey of 32,800 adults’ political views — to estimate how many non-citizens voted in the 2008 general election.
Richman and his two co-authors concluded that between 38,000 and 2.8 million non-citizens voted in 2008. The paper also argued that “non-citizen voters” lean left, and it made outlandish claims about their impact on Democrats’ 2008 – 2010 congressional majority.
“Non-citizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress,” Richman and his co-authors wrote.
Those claims drew a lot of attention — especially on the right, where they seemed to confirm longstanding fears about voter fraud and the effect new immigrants are having on American society. But the facts behind those claims began to unravel just as quickly.
Richman and his colleagues based their estimates on a sample of just 38 people out of 32,800 in the Cooperative Congressional Election Study who said they were non-citizens and that they voted. Of those 38, the survey was able to confirm that five actually did vote. From there, Richman and his co-authors extrapolated that between 0.2 and 2.8 percent of all non-citizens living in the U.S. voted in 2008.
There are several glaring problems with these findings, according to Brian Schaffner, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who co-runs the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.
First, Schaffner said, many of the respondents who said they were non-citizens are probably citizens who clicked the wrong button. Richman and his co-authors argued that people who said they were non-citizens in the survey shared demographic and ideological characteristics with other non-citizens. But Schaffner said he and his colleagues re-contacted many of those supposed non-citizens, who confirmed that they’re citizens who answered the question incorrectly.
“Some people just click the wrong button, basically,” Schaffner told ThinkProgress. “When we account for that, we can’t find any non-citizen voters, basically.”
The second problem is the small sample size. Schaffner says it’s not accurate to extrapolate out to every non-citizen in the country from a sub-sample of just 38 respondents in a survey that isn’t representative.
As part of the Kansas case, Kobach commissioned Richman for a statistical analysis of noncitizen voting in the state. It came to light for the first time last April, after ThinkProgress obtained a copy. As ThinkProgress reported then, it extrapolated from very small, non-representative samples to come up with six separate estimates for Kansas’s non-citizen voting rate.
In one of the estimates, which Kobach quotes widely, Richman found six potential non-citizen voters in a sample of 37 noncitizens. Using those figures, he estimated 18,000 potential noncitizen voters across Kansas.
But “no self-respecting social scientist would try to make an inference from such a small response to a survey,” Schaffner said.
Schaffner and more than 190 other political scientists wrote an open letter in January 2017 that was heavily critical of Richman’s research and asked that it “not be cited or used in any debate over fraudulent voting.”
That hasn’t dissuaded Kobach or White House senior policy advisor Stephen Miller: Both have used Richman’s research to support the rich asshole’s claim that millions of non-citizens voted illegally in 2016, tipping the popular vote to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
“I think it’s in excess of a million if you take the entire country, for sure,” Kobach said of noncitizen voting during an appearance on Fox Business Network in February 2017.
Richman rejected that claim during a sworn deposition in the Kansas case. He painted himself as a victim of both “weak, sometimes baseless” criticisms from the left and overblown uses of his research from the right.
“I’ve been trying to fight a two-front battle with distortions of it,” Richman said in the deposition.
Richman’s analysis in the Kansas case took pains to argue that any non-citizen voting is a serious concern because it could swing an election with a very small margin of victory — especially at the state or local level. But some of Richman’s other writing seems to conceded that non-citizen voting is not a serious problem.
“[A]lmost all elections in the U.S. are not determined by non-citizen participation, with occasional and very rare potential exceptions,” Richman said in a 2016 blog post.
For his part, Kobach has defended his interpretation of Richman’s research and his own public comments about millions of non-citizens potentially voting across the country.
“Richman’s analysis, I think, is very good, both in our case and in his 2014 article,” Kobach told ThinkProgress last April.
Kobach’s other key experts are short on expertise and credibility
Also on Kobach’s expert witness list is Hans von Spakovsky, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation and former Republican commissioner on the Federal Election Commission. He will likely attempt to bolster not only Kobach’s claim that voter fraud is rampant in Kansas, but that voter fraud is prevalent across the country.
As a member of President the rich asshole’s now-defunct Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, von Spakovsky — who tried to keep Democratsoff the panel — was a driving force behind the panel’s efforts to push for suppressive national voting laws.
“We expect Hans von Spakovsky to trot out his usual falsehoods and exaggerations about non-citizen registration and voter fraud,” Ho said.
In January, a federal judge ruled that von Spakovsky does not have the direct knowledge or academic training needed to argue some of the claims he hoped to make before the court, including testimony that a survey could prove Kobach’s law is not a burden to potential voters.
“It is clear that von Spakovsky is not qualified to testify as an expert about this survey,” Judge Julie Robinson wrote.
He will still be permitted to testify about other matters.
Also included in Kobach’s expert list is Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), an anti-immigration think tank in Washington, D.C. that the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a hate group.
“Camarota doesn’t even have any background or experience when it comes to voting and registration,” Ho said, “But he’s going to come in and say that the law hasn’t affected voter participation in Kansas, which is well beyond the scope of any kind of relevant background or expertise that he has.”
Pat McFerron, an Oklahoma-based political pollster, is another of Kobach’s witnesses. McFerron drafted the survey results that von Spakovsky used in his expert report. McFerron will likely make the claim that most Kansas citizens have birth certificates.
“We don’t dispute that,” Ho said. “Most people do have birth certificates. The issue is whether or not people are carrying them around with them.”
The ACLU intends to highlight voters who have been or could be disenfranchised because of the law, including young voters and voters of color, to convince the court that the law is discriminatory and unlawful.
“Even though most people have these documents, there are some people who don’t and that means they’re going to pay some money for it, and that’s not constitutional,” Ho said. “That’s the problem.”
Tad Stricker acknowledges that as a 39-year-old, property-owning white man, he is not the typical disenfranchised voter. But his experience being told he could not vote made him realize the scope of the harm that can be caused by proof of citizenship laws.
“My experience is something that really could happen to anyone,” he said. “If this can happen to me — I have proof of citizenship, I was born in the United States, I own a home, I am a contributing member of society — this can literally happen to anybody. That to me is the scariest thing.”
MSNBC’s Morning Joe thinks Nunberg’s TV meltdown is a ‘smokescreen’: ‘the rich asshole and Roger Stone would be proud’
Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough (MSNBC)
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MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said former the rich asshole campaign aide Sam Nunberg’s on-air meltdown Monday on various cable news programs is a very bad sign for the president.
The “Morning Joe” host said the shocking outbursts by Nunberg — who was fired twice by the rich asshole, first in February 2014 and then in August 2015 — and another crazed morning tweet from President some rich asshole showed how high the special counsel had ramped up pressure.
“There’s so much evidence out there that again, a tweet like some rich asshole’s really does — it just seems to prove what (former CIA director John) Brennan said, and that is how nervous he is becoming with where this (Robert) Mueller investigation is going,” Scarborough said.
Co-host Willie Geist agreed, saying the president’s panicked tweets showed how isolated and alone as the investigation closed in.
“We know the president watches a lot of cable news, yesterday could not have been comforting,” Geist said. “You can try to say he was a guy that he fired, which is true in August of 2015, but the fact is Sam Nunberg provided a window into Bob Mueller’s investigation. You have to take some of what he said with a grain of salt, but there is no question that President the rich asshole is worried about what’s happening and he’s going to build up whatever smokescreen he can find to distract people from it.”
Scarborough suspected, however, that Nunberg’s bizarre, and possibly alcohol-fueled, outburst was part of a setup to protect his political mentor and “surrogate father,” Republican dirty trickster Roger Stone, and his old boss.
“Sam Nunberg, a former campaign guy who’s now in the focus of the special prosecutor, panicking, literally having a nervous, what appeared to be a nervous breakdown, on national TV on as many outlets as possible,” Scarborough said. “I’m sure both some rich asshole and Roger Stone would have been very proud of him.”
Scarborough pointed back to communications director Hope Hicks, who abruptly resigned the day after testifying for hours before the House Intelligence Committee, and the rich asshole’s irrational reaction to the departure of his “emotional support” in the White House.
“After he hears she’s going to depart, him losing it and deciding he’s going to start a trade war,” Scarborough said. “Kind of like kicking a dog because you’re an angry child. It seems like, again, the wheels are starting to come off.”
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March 6, 2018
Imaginary jobs are way up under the rich asshole.
On Tuesday morning, the rich asshole fired off a scattershot barrage of tweets on familiar topics, including one in which he quoted a Drudge headline that said “BOOM: USA Set to Be World’s Largest Oil Producer.”
“We are getting it done – jobs and security!” the rich asshole claimed.
But like the 50,000 imaginary coal jobs and the Detroit car factory he invented last month, the oil jobs the rich asshole is bragging about don’t exist. In fact, oil industry employment has declined by several thousand jobs since the rich asshole took office.
The report that the rich asshole references is an International Energy Agency (IEA) study that projects U.S. oil production will lead the world by 2023, projecting a roughly 14 percent increase from 10.6 million barrels per day this year to 12.1 million barrels a day in 2023.
But crucially, the IEA report makes no mention of job creation, and the Wall Street Journal reports that “technological advances” and “improved efficiency” will enable the increased production.
The report also pegs the expected growth in output to higher oil prices, reminding us that while the rich asshole was losing thousands of oil jobs, the price of crude oil jumped 20 percent since his inauguration. Gas prices have risen sharply as well under the rich asshole.
First, the rich asshole invented 50,000 new coal jobs that didn’t exist, and now he’s imagining job growth in another sector that has actually lost jobs under his administration.
Only the rich asshole would try to distract people from the massive number of jobs he’s killing with his trade policy by pointing out thousands of additional jobs lost, all set to the background of rising prices for American consumers.
POLITICS
the rich asshole Pal Carl Icahn Unloaded Millions In Steel-Related Stock Days Before Tariff
The billionaire sold before shares of crane manufacturer Manitowoc Co. plunged on the rich asshole’s tariff plan.
Billionaire Carl Icahn, President some rich asshole’s longtime friend and former special adviser, sold $31.3 million in shares of a steel-related company just before the rich asshole announced tariffs on imported steel and aluminum.
Icahn unloaded nearly 1 million shares in crane manufacturer Manitowoc Co. of Wisconsin from Feb. 12 to Feb. 23, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission first reported by the website Think Progress. Manitowoc relies on steel, and shares in the company fell after the rich asshole announced on Thursday that he plans to impose a 25 percent tariff on steel. The Commerce Department’s report recommending the tariffs was made public Feb. 16.
Icahn told CNBC Thursday that he hadn’t had “much interaction” with the rich asshole in the “past four or five months,” and had no special knowledge of what the rich asshole planned to do or when. But the CNBC question concerned his opinion about market effect, not whether he had any privileged information. Stock trades based on insider information not available to the public are illegal.
Icahn’s selloff represented about one-third of his stake in the company, according to CNBC. Last month’s selloff was his first trading in the company’s shares since January 2015, The Washington Post reported.
Icahn’s stocks sold for between $32 and $34 a share. The shares were worth $26.93 when the market closed Friday.
Icahn quit his informal White House role as adviser on regulatory reform in August, shortly before The New Yorker reported he had been pushing to overturn an environmental regulation promoting biofuels and renewable energy that was costing him millions through his stake in oil refiner CVR.
He said in his resignation letter that he “never had access to nonpublic information or profited from my position.” He said he “only expressed views that I believed would benefit the refining industry as a whole,” and that he was quitting out of an “abundance of caution.”
As the rich asshole’s adviser, Icahn also battled a law passed during the George W. Bush administration that required oil refiners to blend biofuels like ethanol into gasoline ― a requirement costing his operations more than $200 million, The Washington Post reported.
President some rich asshole’s new tariff orders on steel and aluminum perfectly illustrate the rich asshole’s feral genius for playing to popular resentment of foreigners ― and the high costs of his incompetence when it comes to the details of strategy and diplomacy. These tariffs were the wrong version of a long-overdue response to the predatory trade practices of China that are devastating American industry.
But the rich asshole is onto something. It does matter whether the United States retains steel and aluminum industries, especially when their decline is the result of unfair trade practices by other nations. And the knee-jerk reaction to the rich asshole’s orders shows how orthodox economists and the mainstream press refuse to grasp how trade really works, or what’s at stake. Instead, we got the usual sermon about the folly of protectionism and the risks of a general trade war.
But if you want to appreciate true protectionism, take a good look at China’s entire economic system. Steelworkers’ union president Leo Gerard put it perfectly: “Some of these idiots that say we are going to start a trade war ― well, we are in a trade war now, and we are just sitting back.”
What’s the nature of this trade war? Beijing subsidizes production, floods the world with a glut of products at prices below their true costs, blocks imports, demands trade deals with Western “partners” on terms that transfer technology and leadership to China, uses state intelligence agencies to steal intellectual property whose transfer it can’t coerce ― and then demands and gets special treatment under the WTO as a developing country! All of this grossly violates free market norms, and grabs market share in industry after industry at the expense of nations like the U.S. that mostly play by the rules.
China produces more than 800 million metric tons of steel, close to half of all the steel produced in the world. By comparison, the U.S., once the world’s leader, produces just over 70 million metric tons. Industry experts calculate that more than half of China’s steel output, about 425 million metric tons, is excess capacity.
The mainstream critics who have attacked the rich asshole’s action make a couple of arguments that entirely miss the deeper point. For starters, they note that China only provides about 3 percent of steel imports into the U.S., so why go after Beijing? But look a little deeper. In response to past complaints that resulted in tariffs against particular categories of dumped Chinese steel, China simply increased its exports of steel to other nations, such as South Korea, for re-export. The Koreans then fabricated the steel into products like pipeline sections, which they exported to the U.S. Thus, Chinese steel evaded existing U.S. measures by detouring through other countries.
But the core of the problem remains China’s predatory excess capacity.
He goes for the most simplistic, vivid and demagogic remedy.
the rich asshole’s timing may be suspicious, with a special election for a vacant House seat coming up in Pennsylvania’s steel country on March 13. But the rich asshole did not just pull these tariffs out his ear. A voluminous technical report by the Commerce Department, made public Jan. 11, found that relentless increases in import penetration had reduced U.S. steel production to below 70 percent of capacity, “a non-financially viable and unsustainable level of operation.”
In a public statement Feb. 16, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross proposed several possible options. One was an across-the-board increase in steel and aluminum tariffs. The second was a targeted tariff increase complemented by targeted quotas aimed at nations that were the source of the problem, most notably China. The third was a quota system generally.
the rich asshole, being the rich asshole, went for the most simplistic, sensationalist and headline-grabbing move ― tariffs on all steel imports. This was hardly a surprise.
Back in August, Axios published a leaked summary of a meeting between the rich asshole and his senior trade advisers. At that meeting, the rich asshole declared, “I want tariffs.” the rich asshole’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, previously of Goldman Sachs, was plainly unhappy. the rich asshole ended the meeting by declaring to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly: “I know there are some people in the room right now that are upset. I know there are some globalists in the room right now. And they don’t want them, John, they don’t want the tariffs. But I’m telling you, I want tariffs.”
So was the rich asshole’s move smart or dumb? Basically, it was a dumb variant of a long overdue policy. the rich asshole adviser Peter Navarro was right on Fox News on Sunday when he referred to China as the deeper source of these gluts. “It doesn’t matter who is sending us this product, the fact is that if we keep receiving it the way we have, we are not going to have an aluminum industry,” he said.
The fact that the mainstream has been ducking the reality of China’s state
capitalism and its effect on U.S. industry leaves the field to far-right ultra-
nationalists like Navarro and the rich asshole, who are inclined to use a blunderbuss
approach that alienates allies as well as adversaries.
capitalism and its effect on U.S. industry leaves the field to far-right ultra-
nationalists like Navarro and the rich asshole, who are inclined to use a blunderbuss
approach that alienates allies as well as adversaries.
For decades, Republican and Democratic presidents alike have waltzed around the deeper challenge that Chinese state capitalism poses, both to the global trading system and to America’s place in it. Intermittently, the West has imposed selective anti-dumping duties against the Chinese, but has not challenged the predatory logic of the entire Chinese mercantilist system.
In part, this reticence is due to the fact that key players in America’s economic elite have figured out ways to profit from relations with a predatory China, even though Beijing is stealing their clothes in the long run. (Like climate change, that long run has arrived abruptly.) Apple loves the fact that it can make its products in China, using a well-trained, cheap and docile work force one cut above slave labor. Goldman Sachs makes a fortune brokering financial deals with the Chinese.
Usually, the influence of these players is sufficient to keep American presidents from taking too hard a line against Beijing. So China treats the occasional get-tough order as a bee sting.
Under the rich asshole, however, the internal White House politics changed. The top officials dealing with trade policy, for once, are hard-liners: Commerce Secretary Ross, a former private equity billionaire who knows the steel industry well; U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who has a long history as a tough negotiator; and senior economic adviser Navarro. Backstopping these three among senior White House staff is Stephen Miller, who reinforces the rich asshole’s impulse to pander to economic ultra-nationalism.
In the internal staff discussions on the steel issue, this group of hard-liners won and the Goldman Sachs alums, Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, lost. But the sheer simple-mindedness of the rich asshole’s move to impose flat tariffs on all steel exporters stunned even the trade hawks.
If the main problem is China, why retaliate against Canada, which actually buys more steel from the U.S. than it sells? Why attack the European Union, whose close cooperation America needs if we are to have a general strategy of seriously challenging Chinese mercantilism?
The EU, in fact, has its own history of levying tariffs against Chinese exports, including a 28.5 percent tariff imposed last year against pipes and tubes exported at prices below the cost of production. But the rich asshole, in a stroke, managed to get Canada, the EU and China all on the same side.
But that is the rich asshole. He goes for the most simplistic, vivid and demagogic remedy. Pressured on all sides, he may yet walk back the details of his order, so that it targets the true offenders, namely China, and certainly not Canada or the EU.
American trade policy has long been hobbled by ideological blinders, compounded by wishful thinking about China’s evolution into a free market democracy. But in the quest for a drastically different trade policy, the rich asshole is about the last leader who would change course competently or constructively.
A serious trade policy would go after the root of China’s state capitalism, enlisting every possible ally rather than alienating them. It would connect trade objectives to the revival of U.S. manufacturing across the board, supercharged by an infrastructure program that favored domestic producers.
Raising tariffs on state-subsidized steel is a good and necessary part of the right policy. But the rich asshole’s version, at least so far, has energized his critics and united America’s adversaries.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His forthcoming book is Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
George W. Bush calls out the rich asshole for ‘sorta making me look pretty good’
Former US President George W. Bush (AFP Photo/Ronald Martinez)
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Former President George W. Bush thinks that compared to the current administration, his doesn’t seem quite as bad.
While smirking, Bush 43 has reportedly been heard joking that President some rich asshole’s scandals “sorta makes me look pretty good,” National Journal reported Monday night.
“He’s shaking his head like everyone else wondering why they can’t get their act together,” a GOP official close to the rich asshole White House told the research agency. “He wants the guy to succeed but thinks a lot of his problems are self-inflicted.”
Bush 43 on Trump: "Sorta makes me look pretty good, doesn't it?" - per @nationaljournal's Tom DeFrank
March 5, 2018
(PANAMA CITY) — the rich asshole hotel executives were ousted from their offices in Panama’s the rich asshole Hotel on Monday, as Panamanian officials stepped in to resolve a 12-day standoff between the rich asshole’s company and the property’s owners. the rich asshole’s security guards also left the property, and crews immediately began stripping the rich asshole’s name from the building.
The action began when a Panamanian judge and armed police officers escorted the head of the hotel’s owner association into the rich asshole-branded 70-story, luxury property on Panama Bay, with the rich asshole’s security staff departing soon after. A legal dispute over the rich asshole’s management contract at the hotel continues, but Monday’s developments indicated the rich asshole had effectively surrendered physical control of the property.
“This was purely a commercial dispute that just spun out of control,” said Orestes Fintiklis, a private equity investor and the head of the hotel’s owners’ association, shortly before entering the hotel management’s offices. “And today this dispute has been settled by the authorities and the judges of this country.”
A Panamanian judicial official told The Associated Press a statement would come later in the day. The rich asshole Hotel’s website had ceased offering direct bookings at the hotel by early Monday afternoon.
“We apologize,” the site said. “There are no available rooms for your requested stay.”
The judicial intervention resolved the most contentious part of a 12-day standoff between the rich asshole’s hotel business and Fintiklis, who sought to take physical control of the property on behalf of the hotel owners. Though the owners tried to fire the rich asshole’s company last year, the rich asshole Organization had disputed the termination as legally invalid. As part of his fire sale purchase of 202 of the hotel’s 369 units, Fintiklis signed a February 2017 agreement not to challenge the rich asshole’s management contract — a deal that the rich asshole Organizations consider binding.
Fintiklis quickly changed course after the deal closed in August, arguing that alleged mismanagement by the rich asshole’s staff and the deterioration of the rich asshole brand rendered keeping the property in the rich asshole hands impossible. In late December, the rich asshole’s management team ran off a team of Marriott hotel executives visiting the property at Fintiklis’ invitation.
“Our investment has no future so long as the hotel is managed by an incompetent operator whose brand has been tarnished beyond repair,” Orestes wrote to his fellow hotel owners in a January email obtained by the AP.
The most recent and intense feuding began Feb. 22, when the Miami-based Fintiklis came to the property with termination notices for the rich asshole’s management team. the rich asshole hotel officials turned away Fintiklis and his entourage, refusing to let Fintiklis check into any of his private equity fund’s 202 hotel rooms.
A legal complaint filed by Fintiklis said that, late that same evening, he and others in his party witnessed the rich asshole’s management team destroying hotel documents, which the rich asshole officials have denied.
For more than a week, the rich asshole’s hotel business staved off efforts by Fintiklis and his allies to gain control of the property, with rival security teams skirmishing over physical control of key infrastructure including the administrative offices and the hotel’s closed caption security system, which was housed in the condo association within the same building. Grainy footage of the encounter obtained by the AP shows the rich asshole security officials shoving a representative of the condo owners’ association and a brawl in a stairwell between opposing security guards.
Initially invited by the rich asshole’s managers, the Panamanian police repeatedly visited the hotel to keep the peace. At least one the rich asshole security official was taken off the property in handcuffs, though a police source told the AP he was not arrested.
the rich asshole officials denounced Fintiklis’ efforts to take control of the property as “thug-like, mob-style tactics” and pledged it would not give in to “bullying and the use of force” in a February statement.
Until litigation and arbitration involving the property was concluded, the rich asshole officials said, they had no intention of leaving.
“They have no right to forcibly remove the rich asshole Hotels as manager,” the company said.
While the rich asshole staffed up with additional security — stationing guards at the hotel’s administrative offices for more than one week — the fight for physical control of the hotel ended quietly with the intervention by Panamanian authorities. the rich asshole security officials exited the property on their own accord, leaving the hotel’s administrative office vacant.
The whereabouts of the rich asshole hotel management team could not be immediately determined, but Fintiklis declared the fight over. A representative of the rich asshole Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Today Panama has made us proud,” Fintiklis said, adding that he intended to apply for Panamanian citizenship. Though Fintiklis has generally declined to comment on the dispute, he appeared to gloat Monday. Sitting at the piano in the hotel’s lobby, surrounded by reporters and news cameras, he played “Accordeon,” a Greek song celebrating that country’s fight to overthrow a fascist regime.
Within two hours, a man using a hammer and a crowbar began stripping the rich asshole signage from a stone plaque in front of the building.
Ex-the rich asshole aide says he'll likely cooperate with Mueller
By JILL COLVIN and TOM LoBIANCO
03-05-2018 930pm
WASHINGTON (AP) — A former the rich asshole campaign aide spent much of Monday promising to defy a subpoena from special counsel Robert Mueller, even throwing down the challenge to "arrest me," then backed off his defiance by saying he would probably cooperate in the end.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Sam Nunberg said he was angry over Mueller's request to have him appear in front of a grand jury and turn over thousands of emails and other communications with other ex-officials, among them his mentor Roger Stone. But he predicted that, in the end, he'd find a way to comply.
"I'm going to end up cooperating with them," he said.
It was a reversal from his tone throughout the day, when he lashed out at the rich asshole and his campaign and threatened to defy Mueller in a series of interviews.
"Why do I have to do it?" Nunberg told CNN of the subpoena. "I'm not cooperating," he said later as he challenged officials to charge him.
In the earlier interviews, Nunberg said he thought Mueller may already have incriminating evidence on the rich asshole directly, although he would not say what that evidence might be.
"I think he may have done something during the election," Nunberg told MSNBC of the president, "but I don't know that for sure." He later told CNN that Mueller "thinks the rich asshole is the Manchurian candidate." A reference drawn from a Cold War novel and film, a "Manchurian candidate" is an American brainwashed or otherwise compromised to work on behalf of an adversarial government.
Shortly after Nunberg lobbed the first allegation, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders rebuffed him during the White House press briefing.
"I definitely think he doesn't know that for sure because he's incorrect. As we've said many times before, there was no collusion with the rich asshole campaign," Sanders said. "He hasn't worked at the White House, so I certainly can't speak to him or the lack of knowledge that he clearly has."
Nunberg also said he thinks former the rich asshole foreign policy adviser Carter Page, a key figure in the Russia investigation, worked with the Kremlin. "I believe that Carter Page was colluding with the Russians," Nunberg said on CNN. "That Carter Page is a weird dude."
Page called Nunberg's accusations "laughable" in a comment to The Associated Press.
The Justice Department and FBI obtained a secret warrant in October 2016 to monitor Page's communications. His activities during the presidential campaign that raised concerns included a July 2016 trip to Moscow.
In the interviews, Nunberg said he believes the president probably knew about the June 2016 the rich asshole Tower meeting between his eldest son, top campaign staff and a team of Russians, which the rich asshole has denied. And he blamed the rich asshole for the investigation into Russia meddling, telling MSNBC that he was "responsible for this investigation ... because he was so stupid."
A spokesman for the special counsel's office declined to comment.
During his afternoon tirades, Nunberg detailed his interview with Mueller's investigators, mocking them for asking such questions as if he had heard Russian being spoken in the rich asshole Tower. He then said he would reject a sweeping demand from Mueller for communications between him and top the rich asshole advisers.
"I think it would be funny if they arrested me," Nunberg said on MSNBC.
He later added on CNN: "I'm not going to the grand jury. I'm not going to spend 30 hours going over my emails. I'm not doing it."
Nunberg said he'd already blown a 3 p.m. Monday deadline to turn over the requested communications. He said he'd traded numerous emails a day with Stone and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and said spending 80 hours digging through his inbox to find them all was unreasonable.
But in his call with the AP, Nunberg said he might be more willing to comply if Mueller's team limits the scope of its request.
"I'm happy if the scope changes and if they send me a subpoena that doesn't include Carter Page," he said, insisting the two had never spoken.
He also said he believes the only reason he's being asked to testify before the grand jury is to provide information that would be used against Stone, a longtime the rich asshole adviser, which he says he won't do.
Nunberg is the first witness in the ongoing federal Russia investigation to openly promise to defy a subpoena. But he's not the first to challenge Mueller: Former the rich asshole campaign chairman Paul Manafort filed a lawsuit in January challenging Mueller's authority to indict him.
It's unclear how much Nunberg would know about the inner workings of the rich asshole campaign or the White House. He never worked at the White House and was jettisoned from the rich asshole campaign early on, in August 2015, after racist social media postings surfaced. the rich asshole filed a $10 million lawsuit against Nunberg in July 2016, accusing him of violating a nondisclosure agreement, but they settled the suit one month later.
John Dean, a White House counsel to President Richard Nixon during Watergate, tweeted Monday that Nunberg can't flatly refuse to comply with a grand jury subpoena.
"This is not Mr. Nunberg's decision, and he will be in criminal contempt for refusing to show up. He can take the Fifth Amendment. But he can't tell the grand Jury to get lost. He's going to lose this fight."
Nunberg appeared pleased by his performance, telling the AP that he was "doing something I've never seen."
"They don't know what's going on," he said, speculating that Mueller would not appreciate his comments and suggesting the authorities might send police to his apartment.
His usual cockiness, however, did appear, at times, to ebb. At the end of an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, Nunberg asked whether the TV anchor thought he should instead cooperate with Mueller.
"If it were me, I would," Tapper responded, telling Nunberg: "Sometimes life and special prosecutors are not fair, I guess."
In an interview with The Associated Press, Sam Nunberg said he was angry over Mueller's request to have him appear in front of a grand jury and turn over thousands of emails and other communications with other ex-officials, among them his mentor Roger Stone. But he predicted that, in the end, he'd find a way to comply.
"I'm going to end up cooperating with them," he said.
It was a reversal from his tone throughout the day, when he lashed out at the rich asshole and his campaign and threatened to defy Mueller in a series of interviews.
"Why do I have to do it?" Nunberg told CNN of the subpoena. "I'm not cooperating," he said later as he challenged officials to charge him.
In the earlier interviews, Nunberg said he thought Mueller may already have incriminating evidence on the rich asshole directly, although he would not say what that evidence might be.
"I think he may have done something during the election," Nunberg told MSNBC of the president, "but I don't know that for sure." He later told CNN that Mueller "thinks the rich asshole is the Manchurian candidate." A reference drawn from a Cold War novel and film, a "Manchurian candidate" is an American brainwashed or otherwise compromised to work on behalf of an adversarial government.
Shortly after Nunberg lobbed the first allegation, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders rebuffed him during the White House press briefing.
"I definitely think he doesn't know that for sure because he's incorrect. As we've said many times before, there was no collusion with the rich asshole campaign," Sanders said. "He hasn't worked at the White House, so I certainly can't speak to him or the lack of knowledge that he clearly has."
Nunberg also said he thinks former the rich asshole foreign policy adviser Carter Page, a key figure in the Russia investigation, worked with the Kremlin. "I believe that Carter Page was colluding with the Russians," Nunberg said on CNN. "That Carter Page is a weird dude."
Page called Nunberg's accusations "laughable" in a comment to The Associated Press.
The Justice Department and FBI obtained a secret warrant in October 2016 to monitor Page's communications. His activities during the presidential campaign that raised concerns included a July 2016 trip to Moscow.
In the interviews, Nunberg said he believes the president probably knew about the June 2016 the rich asshole Tower meeting between his eldest son, top campaign staff and a team of Russians, which the rich asshole has denied. And he blamed the rich asshole for the investigation into Russia meddling, telling MSNBC that he was "responsible for this investigation ... because he was so stupid."
A spokesman for the special counsel's office declined to comment.
During his afternoon tirades, Nunberg detailed his interview with Mueller's investigators, mocking them for asking such questions as if he had heard Russian being spoken in the rich asshole Tower. He then said he would reject a sweeping demand from Mueller for communications between him and top the rich asshole advisers.
"I think it would be funny if they arrested me," Nunberg said on MSNBC.
He later added on CNN: "I'm not going to the grand jury. I'm not going to spend 30 hours going over my emails. I'm not doing it."
Nunberg said he'd already blown a 3 p.m. Monday deadline to turn over the requested communications. He said he'd traded numerous emails a day with Stone and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and said spending 80 hours digging through his inbox to find them all was unreasonable.
But in his call with the AP, Nunberg said he might be more willing to comply if Mueller's team limits the scope of its request.
"I'm happy if the scope changes and if they send me a subpoena that doesn't include Carter Page," he said, insisting the two had never spoken.
He also said he believes the only reason he's being asked to testify before the grand jury is to provide information that would be used against Stone, a longtime the rich asshole adviser, which he says he won't do.
Nunberg is the first witness in the ongoing federal Russia investigation to openly promise to defy a subpoena. But he's not the first to challenge Mueller: Former the rich asshole campaign chairman Paul Manafort filed a lawsuit in January challenging Mueller's authority to indict him.
It's unclear how much Nunberg would know about the inner workings of the rich asshole campaign or the White House. He never worked at the White House and was jettisoned from the rich asshole campaign early on, in August 2015, after racist social media postings surfaced. the rich asshole filed a $10 million lawsuit against Nunberg in July 2016, accusing him of violating a nondisclosure agreement, but they settled the suit one month later.
John Dean, a White House counsel to President Richard Nixon during Watergate, tweeted Monday that Nunberg can't flatly refuse to comply with a grand jury subpoena.
"This is not Mr. Nunberg's decision, and he will be in criminal contempt for refusing to show up. He can take the Fifth Amendment. But he can't tell the grand Jury to get lost. He's going to lose this fight."
Nunberg appeared pleased by his performance, telling the AP that he was "doing something I've never seen."
"They don't know what's going on," he said, speculating that Mueller would not appreciate his comments and suggesting the authorities might send police to his apartment.
His usual cockiness, however, did appear, at times, to ebb. At the end of an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, Nunberg asked whether the TV anchor thought he should instead cooperate with Mueller.
"If it were me, I would," Tapper responded, telling Nunberg: "Sometimes life and special prosecutors are not fair, I guess."
A former aide to some rich asshole’s presidential campaign delivered an extraordinary string of interviews with newspapers, websites and cable news outlets on Monday, defying special counsel Robert Mueller’s subpoena to testify before a grand jury, undercutting key claims made by the rich asshole administration on possible election collusion with Russia, and leading many of his interrogators to question his own mental state.
Sam Nunberg, who served as an adviser to then candidate some rich asshole in 2015, said Monday that he would refuse to appear before the federal grand jury investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election — and that he believes Mueller may have damning evidence against the rich asshole.
“I think that he may have done something during the election,” Nunberg said in an afternoon interview with MSNBC’s Katy Tur, adding: “I don’t know that for sure.”
In a separate interview hours later with CNN, Nunberg continued to undercut the rich asshole administration’s claims that no collusion had taken place between its campaign staff and the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
“I believe Carter Page colluded with the Russians,” Nunberg told host Jake Tapper about the former foreign policy adviser who has become a focal point in Mueller’s investigation.
Nunberg was also asked by Tapper whether he believed the president was telling the truth when he said he “knew nothing about the meeting” between Russians and members of his campaign team at the rich asshole Tower in June 2016.
“No,” Nunberg replied. “He talked about it a week before. And I don’t know why he did this. All he had to say was, ‘Yeah, we met with the Russians.’”
Throughout the day, Nunberg took credit for several of the rich asshole’s signature campaign promises, including the construction of a wall along the southern U.S. border and a ban on immigration from Muslim-majority countries. He also reiterated his message to Mueller.
“I’m not cooperating,” he told Tapper. “Arrest me.”
During her daily press briefing, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders dismissed Nunberg’s speculation about what sort of case Mueller may have built against the president.
“I definitely think he doesn’t know that for sure because he’s incorrect,” Sanders said. “As we’ve said many times before, there was no collusion with the rich asshole campaign.”
Earlier Monday, Nunberg told the Washington Post that he received a subpoena from Mueller’s office to appear before the grand jury. Nunberg said the two-page subpoena is seeking documents related to the rich asshole and nine other people, including all email exchanges he may have had with campaign officials during and after his time on the rich asshole team.
Former FBI Director Robert Mueller; former the rich asshole campaign aide Sam Nunberg (Photos: Alex Wong/Getty Images; Business Week/Yahoo View)
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Nunberg, who was interviewed by Mueller’s team last month, said he will refuse to appear before the grand jury and will not turn over any documents — in particular, his correspondence with former the rich asshole campaign CEO Steve Bannon and ex-adviser Roger Stone.
“I’m not spending 80 hours going over my emails with Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and producing them,” Nunberg told the Post. “some rich asshole won this election on his own. He campaigned his ass off. And there is nobody who hates him more than me.”
If Nunberg does refuse to cooperate, he could face federal contempt of court charges — a possibility he dismissed in his interview with MSNBC.
“Let him arrest me,” Nunberg told the Post. “Mr. Mueller should understand I am not going in on Friday.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
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“I think it would be really, really funny if they wanted to arrest me,” he told Tur. “I’m not going to cooperate when they want me to come into a grand jury for them to insinuate that Roger Stone was colluding with [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange. Roger is my mentor. Roger is like family.”
Echoing the rich asshole, Nunberg called Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt.”
“What does Bob Mueller need to see — my emails when I send Roger and Steve clips and we talk about how much we hate people?” Nunberg wondered.
After having spent hours answering questions on cable news networks, his responses lit up social media and made him the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter, Nunberg returned for a second CNN interview. Host Erin Burnett cut to the chase with a question.
“Talking to you, I have smelled alcohol on your breath.”
“Well, I have not had a drink,” Nunberg replied.
When Burnett pressed him, Nunberg repeated his claim that he had not had a drink. “Besides my meds. Antidepressants, is that OK?”
‘Carter Page is going to be super jealous’: Internet goes berserk over Sam Nunberg’s bonkers media blitz
Former the rich asshole aides Carter Page and Sam Nunberg (Composite / RawStory)
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Onetime some rich asshole aide Sam Nunberg on Monday called into CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper”—moments after speaking with CNN’s Gloria Borger,MSNBC’s Katy Tur and the Washington Post.
In a freewheeling interview with Tapper, Nunberg asked the host’s advice about ignoring a subpoena from special counsel Robert Mueller, and demanded to know whether he was the only person who’s ever ignored such a demand.
Nunberg’s media blitz was reminiscent of another former the rich asshole aide, Carter Page, who visited multiple news networks last year in a series of bizarre interviews immediately after Mueller revealed onetime the rich asshole adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
The Internet on Monday was simultaneously baffled and amused by Nunberg’s multiple live TV appearances. Read some of the best replies, below:
Annnd Nunberg is back on @cnn now with @jaketapper
Nunberg now on with @jaketapper to make plea for better mental health funding in America.
It’s like if Carter Page were the original indie hit and Nunberg was the big flashy studio sequel. twitter.com/zekejmiller/st…
Carter Page : Sam Nunberg :: The Pixies : Nirvana twitter.com/mattdpearce/st…
More: "I am not a fan of Donald Trump. He treated me like crap." Trump sued Nunberg.
Sam Nunberg's mission is accomplished twitter.com/kyledcheney/st…
Sam Nunberg's mission is accomplished twitter.com/kyledcheney/st…
CNN’s Erin Burnett To Sam Nunberg: I Smell Alcohol On Your Breath
She did not end the interview before asking the former the rich asshole campaign aide if he had been drinking.
President some rich asshole’s former campaign aide Sam Nunberg spent Monday afternoon sitting for a series of interviews on cable news shows, bombastically stating that he would not comply with a subpoena he received to appear before a federal grand jury regarding Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Before wrapping his appearance on Erin Burnett’s show, the CNN host said she could smell alcohol on his breath and asked Nunberg if he had been drinking.
“We talked earlier about what people in the White House were saying about you ― talking about whether you were drinking or on drugs or whatever had happened today,” she said. “Talking to you, I have smelled alcohol on your breath.”
Nunberg said he had not had a drink and had only taken his medication ― antidepressants ― earlier Monday.
The former the rich asshole aide, who was fired from the campaign after racially charged social media posts he allegedly wrote surfaced, told The Washington Post on Monday that he would not cooperate with special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling into the 2016 election.
“I think it would be really, really funny if they wanted to arrest me because I don’t want to spend 80 hours going over emails I had with Steve Bannon and Roger Stone,” he said during an interview with MSNBC.
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