the rich asshole privately trashes GOP candidate after his own endorsement fails to boost him
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The Republican in Pennsylvania's special election is dangerously close to losing. So naturally, the rich asshole is attacking him.
The special election for Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District was never supposed to be close race. But even as the rich asshole struggles to prop up Republican candidate Rick Saccone, behind closed doors he is trashing him as a failure.
According to CNN’s Jeremy Diamond and Jake Tapper, the rich asshole has told senior White House officials that Saccone is a weak candidate and a poor fundraiser, and believes that his involvement can only help his struggling campaign.
On the one hand, Republicans do broadly agree that Saccone, an Air Force veteran and state representative, is a worse campaigner than Democratic candidate Conor lamb, a former Marine and federal prosecutor. Saccone has a checkered past that includes voting against protecting puppies from animal abuse and telling a mother that the government has no money to help her opioid-addicted son.
But try as he might, the rich asshole can’t absolve himself of all blame for the GOP’s struggles in Southwest Pennsylvania.
For one thing, the rich asshole carried this extremely conservative district by 20 points, and has already done a lot to promote Saccone’s candidacy. That public mood has soured so dramatically in the district, and that the rich asshole’s presence did nothing to stop the race from becoming a toss-up, speaks volumes about the staying power of the rich asshole’s support.
Furthermore, the rich asshole and his fellow Republicans tried to nationalize this race, making it a referendum on the GOP tax scam, but found that even their own voters were unenthused. At the last minute, they quietly pulled their ads touting the tax law, realizing it was not a winning issue for them.
Now, the entire strategy is blowing up in their faces, as former Vice President Joe Biden is campaigning with Lamb against the tax law.
But it is not surprising that the rich asshole is prepared to lay 100 percent of the blame on Saccone if the race ends up breaking against Republicans.
It is, after all, exactly what he did to Ed Gillespie after he lost his racist, the rich asshole-style campaign for governor of Virginia. He did the same thing to failed Alabama judge and accused child molester Roy Moore after he blew what should have been the most winnable Senate race imaginable.
the rich asshole endorsed and promoted both of those candidates, but immediately distanced himself and criticized them after they lost.
Now, it appears that the rich asshole is poised to do it again as he blames anyone and everyone but himself for the sad state of the party he leads.
MSNBC analyst Malcolm Nance says the Kremlin ‘knew all about’ the rich asshole’s sexcapades and his ‘pattern of paying people off’
President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin. Kremlin photo.
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NBC News intelligence and foreign policy analyst Malcolm Nance detailed why President some rich asshole’s history of payoffs has created a national security nightmare during a Friday appearance on The Beat with Ari Melber.
Melber, who is also MSNBC’s chief legal correspondent, played a 2016 clip of the rich asshole denying he settled legal cases.
“I don’t settle cases. You know what happens? When you start settling lawsuits, everybody sues you,” the rich asshole claimed on Morning Joe. “I don’t get sued too often, because I don’t settle cases, I win cases in court.”
“Well, let’s put that in common parlance, he settles to cover up past malfeasance,” Nance explained. “This is a national security nightmare, it just sounds salacious because it involves a porn star.”
“Here’s one group of people that probably know all about this: the Kremlin,” Nance predicted. “Whether this information was used as blackmail, we don’t know.”
“Who are the people he’s been paying off and why he’s being paying off so many people over the course of his life,” Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wondered.
“The whole question of national security comes into this, of this continuing pattern of him paying people off,” Nance concluded. “These are not settlements, these are under the table payments.”
Watch:
White House appears to backtrack on the rich asshole’s historic meeting with Kim Jong Un
The rich asshole administration is sending mixed messages.
Amid much fanfare, the White House announced Thursday that President some rich asshole had agreed to meet North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to de-escalate the spiraling tensions between the two countries, and work to denuclearize the Korean peninsula.
The proposal stunned analysts, particularly considering how the two had traded insults over the last year — with the rich asshole famously referring to Kim as “Little Rocket Man.” Conservatives were jubilant at the announcement, which was seen as a major victory. “This is perhaps the biggest foreign policy win that we have seen,” said former White House official and Fox News contributor Sebastian Gorka. “And it’s less than a year and a half into his administration.”
But on Friday, reporters starting asking the pesky questions of just when and under what circumstances the rich asshole would meet with Kim, and White House officials adopted a distinctly more guarded tone. In the daily press briefing, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that North Korea would have to verify that it is denuclearizing before the meeting takes place — which seems to contradict the rich asshole administration’s initial statement that the rich asshole had already accepted the summit and would meet Kim “as soon as possible.”
“Let’s be clear the United States has made zero concessions,” Sanders said. “This meeting won’t take place without concrete actions that match the promises that have been made by North Korea.”
But then the White House appeared to flip again, with an official reportedly telling the Wall Street Journal that “the invitation has been extended and accepted and that stands.”
Behind the scenes, an even more haphazard situation is emerging. According to the New York Times, the rich asshole was not scheduled to meet South Korean envoy Chung Eui-yong on Thursday, but requested it when he heard Chung was in the White House on unrelated business. the rich asshole summoned Chung and asked him about his recent meeting with Kim on Monday. When Chung told the rich asshole that Kim wanted to meet, the rich asshole immediately said yes and instructed him to go brief the press corps, which he dutifully did that night.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also downplayed the supposedly “historic” meeting. “We’re a long way from negotiations. We just need to be very clear-eyed and realistic about,” Tillerson said, when news of the meeting was leaked but not formally announced. He added that he didn’t know whether “the conditions are right to even begin thinking about negotiations.”
This would seem to suggest two possible scenarios: either the secretary of state is being kept in the dark about a historic diplomatic summit, or he’s trying to provide some wiggle room should the meeting not take place.
In the midst of all this, it’s important to remember that the rich asshole administration has been hopelessly lagging on adding diplomatic infrastructure on the Korean peninsula. The State Department’s foremost expert on North Korea, Joseph Yuan, left his post in February and has not yet been replaced. The rich asshole administration has also yet to nominate an ambassador for South Korea, despite the continued work with the country on the North Korea crisis.
‘There’s more evidence coming out’: Reporter warns the latest on Stormy Daniels story ‘this is just the beginning’
Stormy Daniels (Photo: Screen capture)
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In-Touch reporter Jordi Lippe-McGraw was the one approached prior to the 2016 election by Stormy Daniels when she was seeking to tell her story. After the payout, however, the communication cut off. Now that Daniels has come forward, McGraw has spoke about her knowledge of the story on cable news for the last week.
Friday, however, McGraw’s comments took a different route, warning there was more forthcoming.
“This story is just, not ending,” said Lippe-McGraw. “Like, the In-Touch interview coming out after the Wall Street Journal, it’s just building and building and building. And it’s going to hit a point where they can’t back away from this. And, I think this is just the beginning, to be completely honest.”
Host Ari Melber noted there seems to be strategic advice surrounding this scandal of “deny, deny, claim you won in secret arbitration” instead of “deny, deny, deny.”
Huffington Post reporter Lauren Bassett confessed she isn’t privy to the specifics around the scandal but she does know that the rich asshole has consistently lied about having knowledge of the payout. She cited Daniels’ lawyer, who said it was ludicrous that an attorney would issue a $130,000 payoff without his client knowing.
She also said that the rich asshole portrayed himself as the honest candidate in 2016. He might have been a wild card, she said, but he was always the one who never lied to the American people. This issue proves the opposite is the case.
“He’s way more corrupt than she ever was,” Bassett said comparing the rich asshole to former rival Hillary Clinton.
“There’s so much evidence out there now that I don’t know how they’re going to figure out their way around it,” McGraw said in agreement. “I feel like when The Wall Street Journal report first came out, it was one report that they could say ‘No, no, no.’ And even Stormy Daniels did. And the In-Touch report came out, with a 2,000-word transcript that just can’t be made up.”
Watch the full discussion below:
For the rich asshole’s numbers, close enough is frequently good enough
U.S. President some rich asshole speaks during an interview with Reuters at the White House in Washington, U.S., January 17, 2018. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
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When it comes to numbers, US President some rich asshole worries little about precision.
The latest example came as he announced negotiations were underway between Washington and Beijing to reduce the soaring US trade deficit with China — with the rich asshole misstating a central figure by 99 percent.
“China has been asked to develop a plan for the year of a One Billion Dollar reduction in their massive Trade Deficit with the United States,” the rich asshole said in a tweet on Wednesday.
China in fact runs a massive trade surplus with the United States. Furthermore, $1 billion would represent only 0.3 percent of the US goods and services deficit with China in 2016.
the rich asshole should have said $100 billion.
The Wall Street Journal corrected the president on Thursday in article by a Beijing correspondent, reporting that both sides had agreed on a $100 billion US deficit reduction during a recent visit to Washington by Chinese economic adviser Liu He.
the rich asshole’s tweet remained uncorrected on Twitter as of midday Friday.
On Thursday, as he unveiled steep new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, the rich asshole declared that the US had a trade deficit with China of “at least $500 billion,” adding that if losses on intellectual property were counted, “it’s much bigger than that.”
Wide off the mark again.
In goods alone, the US trade deficit with China in 2017 was a record $375.2 billion.
The $500 billion figure may represent the value of US imports from China without taking into account the value of US exports to that country.
During the week, the rich asshole’s permissive attitude toward the facts also extended to the family of a steelworker invited to the White House for the tariff announcement.
“Your father Herman is looking down, he’s very proud of you right now,” the rich asshole said to Scott Sauritch.
“Oh, he’s still alive,” Sauritch answered.
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March 9, 2018
Even the rich asshole doesn't know what the rich asshole agreed to with North Korea.
the rich asshole’s hastily reached decision to accept an invitation to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has sent the White House into a tailspin, leaving senior administration officials scrambling to coordinate talking points about an agreement upon which no one seems to have agreed.
In a span of less than 24 hours, the White House announced at least three different positions on the meeting — the most recent of which involved walking back the walk-back it issued earlier in the day.
On Friday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the talks will not take place unless North Korea takes “concrete and verifiable actions” toward denuclearization — a stipulation that was not made Thursday when the rich asshole blurted out the announcement.
“They have made some major promises. They have made promises to denuclearize. They have made promises to stop nuclear and missile testing,” Sanders said Friday in a briefing with reporters. “We’re not going to have this meeting take place until we see concrete actions that match the words and the rhetoric of North Korea.”
During the briefing, Sanders repeatedly asserted that North Korea had “promised” to denuclearize and said the meeting would not take place until that process had started.
That differs from what Sanders said Thursday evening, when she confirmed that the rich asshole “will accept the invitation to meet with Kim Jong Un at a place and time to be determined.”
Also on Thursday, another senior administration official said, “At this point, we’re not even talking about negotiations. What we’re talking about is an invitation by the leader of North Korea to meet face-to-face with the president of the United States. The president has accepted that invitation.”
At the time, the White House said North Korea had committed to halt nuclear tests ahead of the meeting with the rich asshole, but it did not say North Korea had made any commitments to start the process of denuclearization.
But on Friday, Sanders appeared to walk back the initial announcement, prompting MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson to question her about the likelihood that the meeting will even take place.
“Is there a possibility that these talks with North Korea with Kim Jong-Un may not happen?” Jackson asked.
“A lot of things are possible,” Sanders responded. “I won’t sit here and walk through every hypothetical that could exist in the world, but I can tell you the president accepted that invitation on the basis that you have concrete and verifiable steps.”
But that wasn’t the end of the debacle.
Less than 90 minutes after Sanders walked back the initial announcement, the White House came out with another statement walking back the statement that Sanders had just given.
“The invitation has been extended and accepted, and that stands,” a White House official said.
It’s unclear how the White House plans to coordinate high-level talks about denuclearization, given that it can’t even coordinate its talking points — which explains why experts say there is no way the rich asshole will be prepared if the meeting does take place.
Of course, it would also help if the rich asshole actually knew the difference between the two Koreas.
the rich asshole is getting his grand military parade — but it will be missing something big
US President some rich asshole has toyed with the idea of a parade in Washington to showcase American muscle and underscore his role as commander-in-chief since before being sworn in. (AFP/File / SAUL LOEB)
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President Donald the rich asshole is getting his military parade after all — but it’s not gonna have any tanks like the Paris Bastille Day event that inspired it.
CNN reported Friday that the rich asshole’s grand military parade but “will not involve any heavy military vehicles like tanks to avoid doing damage to the streets of Washington.”
In a memo CNN acquired sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon noted that the parade will “include wheeled vehicles only, no tanks” and that “consideration must be given to minimize damage to local infrastructure.”
The parade is to coincide with the annual DC Veteran’s Day parade, and will focus on veterans from the Revolutionary War to the present “with an emphasis on the price of freedom.”
‘Unbelievable’: CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin rips Cohen’s ‘unethical, improper’ payout to Daniels
CNN's Jeffrey Toobin (Screengrab)
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An incredulous Jeffrey Toobin on CNN Friday was stunned by Michale Cohen’s claim he took out a home equity loan to pay off a porn star just before the 2016 presidential election, explaining the claim by some rich asshole’s personal, longtime attorney is “not ethical” and “doesn’t make any sense.”
Cohen defended his use of a the rich asshole Organization email to facilitate a payout to Daniels, who claims she was offered hush money by the president in the lead-up to the election. Cohen has maintained he paid Daniels $130,000 of his own volition, and on Friday explained to ABC he did so using his personal line of credit.
Michael Avenatti, Daniels lawyer, slammed Cohen’s claim on Friday, noting if the longtime the rich asshole aide is to be believed, “he borrowed $130k on his house and pays interest on it in order to give that same $130k (on behalf of a Billionaire) to a woman who according to him was lying.”
So let me get this straight - Cohen now claims he borrowed $130k on his house and pays interest on it in order to give that same $130k (on behalf of a Billionaire) to a woman who according to him was lying.youtu.be/AR6eXWNJzoY via @YouTube
CNN’s Toobin agreed the claim “strains credulity”—and has since Cohen first maintained the rich asshole did not know about the Daniels’ payout.
“This whole idea that Mike Cohen has to go into his home equity line—he doesn’t have $130,000 lying around—he has to take, in effect, a home equity loan to pay Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet for an affair or relationship that she had with some rich asshole,” Toobin began. “Lawyers don’t do that. They don’t do that with their own money, it’s not ethical. It’s not proper to do that without talking to the client and it also just doesn’t make any sense. It is one thing if he was such a billionaire he had $130,000 sit go around.”
“The idea that he goes into a home equity line and then writes the check and just does it out of the goodness of his heart, it’s just unbelievable.”
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March 9, 2018
the rich asshole keeps acting like someone who's deeply compromised by Moscow.
One after another, in an extraordinary display of red-flag waving, senior military officials are stating quite plainly that under the rich asshole the U.S. has done next to nothing to combat the growing threat posed by Russia.
The threats, they stress, come in the form of cyberattacks like the ones from the 2016 presidential election, as well as Russian attacks inside Syria.
The latest public warning came on Thursday from Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, the top U.S. general in Europe. Testifying during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing and asked whether there has been a unified effort across the U.S. to confront Russian cyber threats he said, “I don’t believe there is an effective unification across the interagency with the energy and the focus that we could attain.”
Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, nominated to run the National Security Agency and United States Cyber Command, acknowledged that plans were in place to strike back at Russia for its election hacking in 2016. (Those actions would require some rich asshole’s approval, which haven’t come.)
But General Nakasone said the Russians seem unimpressed by the U.S.’s potential response. “I would say right now they do not think much will happen to them,” he said this week. “They don’t fear us.”
Gen. Joseph Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, warned lawmakers on Tuesday that Russia continues to pose a grave threat to stability in Syria.
“Moscow is playing the role of arsonist and firefighter, he said. “Fueling tensions and then trying to resolve them in their favor, and then manipulating all the parties they can in order to achieve their objectives.”
Late last month, U.S. Cyber Command chief Adm. Mike Rogers shocked many when he was asked by Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) if he had been directed by the President, through the defense secretary, to confront Russian cyber-operators at the source. Rogers responded, “No, I have not.”
Rogers added that the U.S.’s response to Russia’s cyber threat to date “has not changed the calculus or the behavior on behalf of the Russians.”
“President some rich asshole has only glancingly and grudgingly acknowledged the consensus view of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential campaign with a view to helping him get elected,” CNN recently noted.
Indeed, even when Russian President Vladimir Putin recently bragged about the country having “invisible” nuclear missiles that cannot be stopped, and even when he showed a video simulating an attack on Florida, the rich asshole did nothing in response.
Also, it was reported on Monday that the rich asshole’s State Department has spent none of the $120 million allocated to fight Russian meddling.
By refusing to act and by refusing to defend the U.S. from growing threats, the rich asshole certainly acts like a man who’s deeply compromised by Russia.
Sam Nunberg called his media blitz ‘one of the greatest days’ of his life — and claims he might never drink again
Former the rich asshole campaign aide Sam Nunberg. Image via screengrab.
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On the eve of making sworn testimony he’d sworn days earlier he wouldn’t do, onetime the rich asshole campaign aide Sam Nunberg described his whirlwind media blitz as one of his best days — and claimed he’d be keeping out of the spotlight from now on.
Nunberg gave his alleged “final interview” to Yahoo News, and told White House correspondent Hunter Walker that he intends to “lay low” following his testimony before special counsel Robert Mueller’s grand jury in Washington, D.C.
“I am not giving any comments,” Nunberg told Walker on Thursday night for the article published Friday afternoon. “I am not describing the grand jury. I am not going around doing interviews.”
Despite telling the Washington Post and later multiple cable TV news anchors that he wouldn’t be cooperating with Mueller’s subpoena, Nunberg told Yahoo News that he “never said he wouldn’t testify before the grand jury and was only objecting to the unrealistic timeframe in which he was being required to supply thousands of emails and documents.”
Following that claim, however, the early the rich asshole campaign aide admitted he “milked” the impression that he was refusing to testify to continue his time in the limelight.
“That is fair to say,” Nunberg told Yahoo News. “Politics is performance art.”
Though he still denies accusations that he was drunk for his multiple phone and in-person interviews Monday, Nunberg said he plans to cut back on the booze — after celebrating his media tour, of course.
“I went to [infamous Manhattan bar] Dorrian’s to celebrate one of the greatest days of my life,” he said. “I’m not sure if my parents think it is, but that’s a different story.”
Nunberg went to the bar with the knowledge that he would “not have a drink definitely the rest of the week,” he told Yahoo News.
“There will be no more celebrating any time soon, and maybe — hopefully — never again,” he said. “We’ll see.”
“The fun’s over and I’ve got to get back to the real world,” Nunberg concluded, before calling Walker and saying “I didn’t have the meltdown. I melted down the media.”
Nicolle Wallace lists the three key reasons why Stormy Daniels is a credible witness
MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace and former adult film performer Stormy Daniels, composite image.
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MSNBC’s Deadline: White House anchor Nicolle Wallace laid out three key reasons why former porn star Stormy Daniels is a more credible narrator than President some rich asshole.
“Jill Colvin, can you weigh in on the mountain of irony here, if the Steve Mnuchin run Treasury Department ends up being the federal agency that is in receipt of a flag from a bank about a payment that originated from one of some rich asshole’s accounts to payoff a porn star that he wanted to keep quiet?” Wallace asked the Associated Press White House reported.
“Just think of the sentence you just said, and how incredible it is that we’re all talking about it right now, that possibility here,” Colvin replied.
“I can’t believe I said it,” Wallace said with a laugh.
“Ken Dilanian, to a lawyer these are obviously important distinctions,” Wallace noted to the NBC News intelligence and national security reporter. “But to the general public, where I believe close to 70 percent of the public already disapprove of this president and the job he’s doing as president, he runs the risk of adding to that the number of humans that may just disapprove of the job he does as a husband. I mean, there is a human element to this story.”
“Stormy Daniels is a compelling figure for three reasons,” Wallace observed.
“One, she’s willing to give back the money to tell her story,” the host explained. “She doesn’t look like she’s after any financial gain.”
“Two, her original account that in In Touch magazine humanized the president. She didn’t tell the story of any unpleasant encounter, she talked about some rich asshole as someone who was afraid of sharks,” Wallace reminded. “She talked about how he offered to help her on The Apprentice, she doesn’t tell a story of any sort of encounter gone awry.”
“And three, the encounter took place after he was married to Melania the rich asshole, so, he is highly motivated, you can certainly understand his motive for keeping it quiet,” the host continued. “Far greater than you could understand anything she’s seeking to gain by telling the truth.”
“Oh, that’s absolutely right, Nicolle,” Dilanian replied. “And I agree with everything you just said.”
Watch:
‘They still haven’t apologized’: Rob Porter’s ex-wife blasts the rich asshole White House for downplaying her abuse
Former White House staffer Rob Porter (left) and his second ex-wife, Jennie Willoughby (right). Images via screengrab.
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Despite the the rich asshole administration “mishandling” the outing of former White House staffer Rob Porter as a documented domestic abuser, the erstwhile aide’s ex-wife says they’ve yet to apologize to her — or to fully understand the breadth of what he did to her and his first wife.
“It has been one month since the story became public of the abuse I suffered at the hands of my ex-husband, Rob Porter, along with accusations from his first wife, Colbie Holderness,” the former aide’s second ex-wife, Jennie Willoughby, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed published Friday. “Yet the White House has still not acknowledged our names or apologized to us for mishandling the situation.”
Last week, Willoughby wrote, White House chief of staff John Kelly “added insult to injury” when he quadrupled-down on his defense of Porter because he considered it nothing more than “the accusation of a messy divorce” that included “some level of emotional abuse.” Willoughby, he continued, “made no mention of any type of physical abuse.”
“I can barely contain my indignation,” she wrote.
Kelly’s statement was not only categorically false — Willoughby’s description of Porter dragging her from the shower and punching through glass in a fit of rage at her were in the initial stories about the abuse and were known to the FBI — but they also “serve to diminish the significance of emotional abuse,” she wrote.
“Granted, it is difficult for any outsider to understand what takes place in a marriage,” Willoughby continued. “But Kelly’s dismissive remarks about my having suffered only ’emotional abuse’ grossly understate the seriousness of this conduct and the trauma it inflicts.”
“The constant and repeated insulting, degrading, ignoring and undermining of someone’s intelligence, looks and choices is abuse,” she wrote. “So is persistent name-calling, lying and manipulation. This abuse represents an extreme and targeted form of bullying, one that damages the victim’s sense of self-worth and creates a fear of retaliation for standing up for oneself. It is insidious, demoralizing, paralyzing. It is real.”
Willoughby’s editorial about the effects of abuse on her and people who experience it at large comes just shy of a month after a similar editorial written by Holderness, Porter’s first wife whose black eye photos reportedly enraged both Donald and Ivanka the rich asshole
GOP rep ripped to shreds by ex-CIA analyst after saying the rich asshole team used ‘backchannels’ because Obama wiretapped him
GOP Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) and Fox News' Marie Harf
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Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI, formerly of the Real World Boston) got a lesson in telling the truth on Friday after Fox News analyst Marie Harf pushed back on his claim that some rich asshole associates had to use backchannel lines of communication with the Russians because “he had a fear that his own the rich asshole Tower was a being surveilled by the intelligence committee.”
The “Outnumbered” co-hosts were reacting to a report former adviser to the United Arab Emirates, George Nader, is cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller reportedly has evidence that Blackwater founder and the rich asshole associate Erik Prince attended a meeting with Nader to establish a backchannel with Russia—contradicting Prince’s testimony before Congress.
Duffy tried to argue that because “no one expected” the rich asshole to win, people in other countries were trying to “figure out how to actually get into the White House and make connections,” hence the backchannel.
“To have a back channel is not illegal,” Duffy said. “What’s the big deal about a backchannel? Prince says said he didn’t do that, but if he did, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Harf explained while it might not seem like a big deal to Duffy, Nader is reportedly testifying that what Prince told Congress is inaccurate.
“I am sure that [Prince] will have to speak with [Mueller’s team], and there are two stories,” Harf said. “Someone is not telling the truth. And I think Bob Mueller will get to the bottom of that, but what I have also repeatedly said is folks tied to the rich asshole campaign—acting on their behalf—say they did nothing wrong with Russia. They certainly seem like they are trying to cover something up, and they are acting guilty. And if Erik Prince is a lying to Congress—I am not saying that he is—he has been accused of that, Bob Mueller is going to call him in.”
“A secret channel looks shady,” Harf added.
“Anybody connected to the rich asshole campaign is being accused of setting up a backchannel when official channels would have been perfectly fine,” Townhall editor Katie Pavlich complained.
“Then they should have done that,” Harf replied.
“Backchannels are not illegal,” Duffy later said. “Just think, when he first took office, he could not have a private conversation with anybody without that conversation being leaked out. He had a fear that his own the rich asshole Tower was a being surveilled by the intelligence committee.”
Off-camera, Harris Faulkner demanded to know why Harf was “shaking her head” at Duffy.
“There is no indication that the rich asshole Tower was tapped,” Harf said. “He just said that, there’s no evidence to back that up that is why I was shaking my head.”
“That will come out at one point in the near future, I think,” Duffy pledged. “Why wouldn’t you set up private conversations when you don’t think that the conversations that you have are not being listened to?”
“Don’t lie about it to Congress then, that’s the problem,” Harf shot back.
“Ugh!” co-host Sandra Smith exclaimed.
Watch below:
the rich asshole’s story on Stormy Daniels starts to fall apart
A new report suggests the rich asshole Organization was involved after all.
An email obtained by NBC News suggests the story President some rich asshole’s personal attorney told about an October 2016 hush payment to an adult film actress with whom the rich asshole allegedly had an affair may not have been truthful.
In a statement provided to the Wall Street Journal last month, the rich asshole’s attorney, Michael Cohen, confirmed that a $130,000 payment was made to Stormy Daniels (real name Stephanie Clifford), but claimed it came from his personal funds and that the rich asshole wasn’t involved.
“Neither the the rich asshole Organization nor the the rich asshole campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly,” Cohen said, with the Journal adding that Cohen “declined to say why he would spend his own money to pay” Daniels.
But an email obtained by NBC suggests the money did not come from Cohen’s account. It also indicates that Cohen used his the rich asshole Organization email account during his communications with the bank that handled the transaction to Daniels.
From NBC:
The email, dated Oct. 26, 2016, was sent to Cohen by an assistant to First Republic Bank senior managing director Gary Farro. The email appears to have been a reply to Cohen; the subject was “RE: First Republic Bank Transfer” and the message confirmed that “the funds have been deposited into your checking account.”The email did not provide any more details about the accounts the money was transferred from or to, and it was not clear whether they were personal accounts or corporate accounts. It also did not specify the amount.
If Cohen really used his personal money to pay Daniels, it’s unclear why he’d need funds to be shifted from one account to another beforehand. Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, told NBC that the email “seriously calls into question the prior representation of Mr. Cohen and the White House relating to the source of the monies paid to Ms. Clifford in an effort to silence her… we smell smoke.”
As attorney Susan Simpson pointed out, Cohen’s story about the Daniels payment coming from his personal funds is further drawn into question by records of the rich asshole campaign disbursements to the rich asshole-owned properties that suspiciously match up with the hush payment.
Cohen’s claim about the origins of the money used to pay Daniels isn’t the only aspect of his story being questioned this week. His insistence that the rich asshole wasn’t at all involved in the hush payment to Daniels was belied by White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ comments on Wednesday, when she acknowledged to reporters that some sort of arbitration proceeding recently took place between the president and Daniels.
If the rich asshole in fact won some sort of arbitration procedure against Daniels, that indicates there is some sort of agreement between the rich asshole and Daniels, because if the rich asshole was never involved with her, there would be nothing to arbitrate. So Sanders’ comments seemed to confirm the rich asshole’s involvement in a hush payment made at a time when his treatment of women was a major national topic.
During a CNN interview on Friday morning, Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti claimed he’s able to prove that the rich asshole knew about the payment.
“We’re going to prove that Mr. Cohen is not telling the truth about this,” he said. “We are going to be able to obtain discovery and documents and testimony that is going to show, I am highly confident, that at all times the rich asshole knew exactly what was going on.”
As Paul Seamus Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at watchdog nonprofit Common Cause, told ThinkProgress, the question of where the money used to pay Daniels came from is more than academic.
“This was a big payment, $130,000 payment, to keep information away from voters that voters probably would have cared about when they were walking into the election booth back in November of 2016,” Ryan said. “We don’t know where this $130,000 came from… If it came from anyone other than some rich asshole himself, then it was an illegally large, or perhaps an illegal corporate, political contribution.”
the rich asshole lawyer Michael Cohen says he paid Stormy Daniels $130k from his personal home equity line
President some rich asshole's longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen (Screen capture)
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some rich asshole’s attorney Michael Cohen sent $130,000 to Stormy Daniels by transferring money from his home equity line, ABC News reports.
“The funds were taken from my home equity line and transferred internally to my LLC account in the same bank.”
Michael Avenatti, the attorney for Daniels, provided emails to ABC News to prove Cohen used his the rich asshole Organization email to facilitate a payout to Daniels just days before the 2016 presidential election.
Avenatti said Cohen’s use of the email proves the rich asshole was aware of the payout.
“We’re one step closer to demonstrating that the assertion by Cohen and the White House that President the rich asshole knew nothing about this is ridiculous,” Avenatti said.
In a statement to ABC News, Cohen said Daniels’ attorney “has clearly allowed his 15 minutes of fame to affect his ludicrous conclusions”
“ The earth-shattering uncovered email between myself and the bank corroborates all my previous statements; which is I transferred money from one account at that bank into my LLC and then wired said funds to Ms. Clifford’s attorney in Beverly Hills, California. How Mr. Avenatti or the media at large believes this to be ‘breaking news’ is a mystery to me,” Cohen said.
Cohen—when asked where the money came from—told ABC News, “the funds were taken from my home equity line and transferred internally to my LLC account in the same bank.”
By Nicole Lafond | March 9, 2018 5:14 pm
President some rich asshole’s personal lawyer transferred funds from his home equity line to an account for his private company within the same bank — First Republican Bank — to pay porn actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 on the heels of the 2016 election.
The money was then transferred from the rich asshole attorney Michael Cohen’s LLC account to Daniels’ lawyer, Cohen told ABC News. The origin of the funds is just the latest revelation in the saga involving Cohen and the payment he made to Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. The payment was reportedly part of a non-disclosure agreement to keep Clifford quiet about an alleged affair she had with the rich asshole in 2006.
Cohen has previously acknowledged he paid Clifford the $130,000 after reports surfaced that the funds were part of a hush agreement between the porn star and the President. Cohen claims the President had no knowledge of the arrangement, but Clifford, through her attorney, alleges she has evidence that would prove otherwise. One piece of evidence Clifford’s attorney shared with NBC News Friday: Cohen used his the rich asshole Organization email address to arrange the payment.
Clifford filed a lawsuit against the rich asshole this week, alleging the President did not sign the non-disclosure agreement, making it null, she claims. Clifford has denied the affair several times, but has made statements in interviews suggesting it might have taken place. Her attorney said she is suing the rich asshole so she can openly discuss the alleged affair.
Planning Begins for Kim Jong-un Meeting Some the rich asshole Aides Believe Will Never Happen
WASHINGTON — A day after President the rich asshole accepted an invitation to meet Kim Jong-un of North Korea, the White House began planning on Friday a high-level diplomatic encounter so risky and seemingly far-fetched that some of some rich asshole’s aides believe it will never happen.
The administration is already deliberating over the logistics and location of the meeting, with a senior State Department diplomat noting that the most obvious venue is the Peace House, a conference building in the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.
But several officials said Friday that the United States still needed to establish direct contact with North Korea to verify the message from Mr. Kim that was conveyed by South Korean envoys to some rich asshole on Thursday. They warned that Mr. Kim could change his mind or break the promises he made about halting nuclear and missile tests during talks.
“The United States has made zero concessions, but North Korea has made some promises,” said the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “This meeting won’t take place without concrete actions that match the promises that have been made by North Korea.”
The White House later clarified that Ms. Sanders was not adding new preconditions to the meeting, but merely emphasizing the consequences if Mr. Kim conducted tests or interfered with joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea that are scheduled to begin at the end of March.
On Friday night, some rich asshole reiterated on Twitter that “the deal with North Korea is very much in the making,” and that it would be, “if completed, a very good one for the World.”
“Time and place to be determined,” he said.
The White House’s muddled message highlighted the confusion sowed by some rich asshole’s on-the-spot decision to meet Mr. Kim. Having built its North Korea policy on sanctions and threats of military action, the administration must now learn the language of engagement.
It also served as a reminder of how many hurdles lie ahead before some rich asshole’s spontaneous decision on Thursday afternoon leads to a meticulously staged meeting between the American president and the dictator who rules the world’s most reclusive country.
“North Korean offers typically come with caveats and asterisks that need to be examined,” said Daniel R. Russel, a former Asia adviser to President Barack Obama. “We all hope that the multiyear pressure campaign has had an effect, but we shouldn’t prematurely celebrate.”
At the State Department, where some diplomats quietly applauded some rich asshole’s gamble, there was a fear that more hawkish aides in the White House might throw up further hurdles to the meeting. The White House, they said, has invested more in sanctions and military options than in diplomacy. Officials there have in the past expressed frustration about what they viewed as the Pentagon’s reluctance to provide options for a military strike on the North.
With all the potential traps and internal misgivings, some officials said they believed the chances of a meeting between the two leaders actually happening were less than 50 percent.
some rich asshole’s decision stunned allies and his own advisers, not least Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, who was caught unaware while traveling in Africa when the president accepted Mr. Kim’s invitation.
Mr. Tillerson’s lack of involvement in the announcement underscored how marginalized the State Department has become in North Korea policy. The department’s chief negotiator on the North, Joseph Yun, resigned from the Foreign Service last week.
Other State Department officials insisted that Mr. Tillerson had not been singled out; some rich asshole blindsided all of his advisers. And the secretary, speaking to reporters in Djibouti, argued that some rich asshole’s decision was not the bolt from the blue that it seemed.
“This is something that he’s had on his mind for quite some time, so it was not a surprise in any way,” Mr. Tillerson said. “He’s expressed it openly before about his willingness to meet with Kim Jong-un.”
Ms. Sanders said the president was in a “great mood” after two momentous days in which he had announced sweeping tariffs on steel and aluminum — fulfilling a cherished campaign promise — and had scrambled the equation on his most pressing foreign policy challenge.
Privately, however, some rich asshole sounded muted rather than buoyant, according to a person familiar with a round of calls he made Thursday evening to solicit feedback about his surprise move.
While the president told people he liked the concept of a once-in-a-lifetime breakthrough, the person said, he struck a less boisterous note than he usually does publicly when he places a bet on himself.
But in the past 24 hours, the president has told confidants that he felt vindicated by his decision to accept the invitation for a meeting, suggesting his approach has led to a potential new path.
Some advisers in the room with some rich asshole and the South Korean envoys — including Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster — expressed concerns about a meeting, according to a senior official. But nobody vocally opposed it.
some rich asshole also had to mollify a rattled ally, Japan, which got no advance notice of his decision. In a call, the president reassured Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that the United States would not ease its pressure campaign on North Korea. Mr. Abe, officials said, asked for a meeting with him.
some rich asshole’s call on Friday morning with President Xi Jinping of China was more relaxed. The Chinese have long called for direct talks between the United States and North Korea. Americans officials said they expected that Mr. Xi would offer Beijing as a venue for the meeting.
The location is one of a number of unresolved issues, including the size and composition of the delegations and the agenda. Some officials said some rich asshole and Mr. Kim would set a broad framework for the talks, and leave the actual negotiating to subsequent sessions with lower-level officials. Even the logistical issues might require a couple of preliminary meetings, they said.
Still, the lack of direct communication between Pyongyang and Washington was a yellow light to some experts. The two countries communicate through independent channels, one of which — the “New York Channel” — goes through North Korea’s mission to the United Nations.
In recent months, these channels have been used mostly for communications about Americans detained in North Korea. Mr. Yun, the former State Department negotiator, used such a channel to negotiate the return of Otto F. Warmbier, the college student from Cincinnati who suffered an irreversible brain injury while held in prison in Pyongyang.
At some point, officials said, they expected North Korea to send a message about the rich asshole-Kim meeting through one of the channels. The administration will parse it carefully to assess if it aligns with the message brought to Washington by the South Korean envoys.
South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, has tried tirelessly to broker a meeting between American and North Korean officials. He sent his envoys — Chung Eui-yong, the national security adviser, and Suh Hoon, the director of the intelligence service — to the White House almost immediately after they returned from their meeting with Mr. Kim in Pyongyang.
The message from the envoys, American officials said, was that the economic sanctions had really crippled the North. Mr. Kim, one official said, referred to North Korea as a poor country.
“This was the most forward-leaning report that we’ve have had in terms of Kim Jong-un’s — not just willingness — but his strong desire for talks,” Mr. Tillerson said. “What changed was his posture in a fairly dramatic way that, in all honesty, came as a little bit of a surprise to us.”
the rich asshole bets on himself with high-stakes Kim gamble
President some rich asshole (AFP/File / Fabrice COFFRINI)
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some rich asshole’s on-the-fly decision to meet Kim Jong Un — the most audacious gambit of a norm-defying presidency — has left the White House and his lieutenants scrambling to catch up.
It was utterly shocking, and totally predictable.
Perched in the Oval Office, President the rich asshole floored his own advisors and left his South Korean guests flabbergasted when he agreed — just like that — to accept an offer to meet nuclear-armed dictator Kim Jong Un.
Successive White Houses had deeply considered and roundly rejected such offers, haunted by visions of John F. Kennedy’s disastrous 1961 meeting with Nikita Khrushchev that fueled the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Unencumbered by that historical baggage, this neophyte president agreed to meet Kim without consulting his team, not least Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was half the world away in Addis Ababa.
the rich asshole’s boosters were quick to spin the decision as evidence of political brilliance — the president had browbeaten North Korea to the negotiating table, and then been big enough to accept their capitulation.
More than one the rich asshole supporter imagined a trip to Oslo may be on the cards. “President the rich asshole should be well on his way to his own Nobel Peace Prize,” said Republican Congressman Luke Messer.
the rich asshole’s chaotic first year in office suggests another explanation for events.
– Fire and Fury –
From the start, the rich asshole has instinctively believed that “getting tough” with North Korea is the only course, chastising previous presidents for being weak and leaving him to clean up the mess.
Economic sanctions and barbed insults followed, paired with threats of reining “fire and fury” down on anything north of the 38th parallel.
“That is some rich asshole’s world,” said Victor Cha, who until recently had been tipped to be ambassador to Seoul. “Black is white, front is back, chaos is good.”
Then on Thursday evening, a South Korean envoy came to the White House and unexpectedly relayed Kim’s invitation to meet.
Faced with a monumental decision, with war and peace hanging in the balance, this president of superlatives — the “biggest crowds,” “the best people” — summarily opted for the maximum drama of a never-done-before meeting.
Who would not watch a summit between the world’s two most idiosyncratic leaders? It is sure to get great ratings.
Even Basketball superstar and freelance Korea envoy Dennis Rodman tweeted his approval: “Much respect to President the rich asshole and Marshall Kim Jong Un for their upcoming historic meeting.”
– Upside down world –
This is just the latest example of the rich asshole upending how Washington and the White House works.
In normal administrations, the idea of a summit would be kicked around almost to death, before a range of options are served up to the president for decision.
More often than not, there would be one unacceptably meek option, one with eye-watering political risk and a third “Goldilocks” option which the experts think is just right.
That process is why the National Security Council was invented.
The NSC takes the temperature of the great offices of state — Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA — and figures out where interests meet and how pitfalls can be avoided.
But the rich asshole has turned the process on its head, deciding first then leaving aides to make the policy and equities fit.
“They are scrambling right now,” said Kelly Magsamen, a veteran of the NSC, State Department and Pentagon.
“Regardless of whether it’s a heads-of-state summit coming too early or not, I don’t think the rich asshole team has an actual diplomatic negotiating strategy in place.”
But the rich asshole has repeatedly argued that Washington group think did not solve any of these problems before he got there, so it’s time to give his way a whirl.
The jury is still out on the rich asshole’s similarly impetuous decisions to slap tariffs on foreign steel, decertify the Iran nuclear deal or recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
But in talks with Kim, the stakes could not be higher.
“He either gets really pissed off or frustrated the first time the North Koreans inevitably do something wrong or cheat, and he rushes to go to war,” says Magsamen, setting out two grim scenarios.
“On the other hand, he could just not fully understand the issues and give up a lot of American security interests, especially when it comes to our alliance with Korea.”
“What’s slightly terrifying is that the two extremes are equally possible.”
What is clear from the last 13 tumultuous months is the rich asshole doesn’t just believe in Great Man Theory — the idea that gifted individuals can bend the course of history through their guile and smarts alone. He believes he is living it.
Running for president? Sure. Arab-Israeli peace? Why not. Denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Let’s do it in May.
An intoxicating idea, but one fraught with risk.
MARCH 9, 2018 / 4:55 PM / UPDATED AN HOUR AGO
the rich asshole steel tariffs may leave these U.S. steelworkers jobless
FARRELL, Penn. (Reuters) - Mick Lang has been a steelworker for nearly 40 years and voted for businessman some rich asshole in the hopes he would bring about a renaissance for the long-suffering U.S. steel industry - now he worries President the rich asshole’s tariffs on imports of the metal will cost him his job.
“This is not what I voted for. I voted for the rich asshole because I thought he’d straighten things out, not do something like this,” said Lang, 59, a third-generation steelworker, whose son also works at the same steel mill in Farrell in western Pennsylvania’s Mercer County.
The county voted for then-Republican candidate the rich asshole by more than 24 points in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Some Republican strategists said the rich asshole’s tariffs appeared partly to be timed to sway voters in Pennsylvania steel country, where a special election is being held for a U.S. House of Representatives seat next Tuesday.
the rich asshole is scheduled to visit Moon Township about 60 miles southwest of Farrell on Saturday to support the Republican candidate and he is expected to be warmly received in an area he also won handily in 2016. U.S. steel companies such as U.S. Steel Corp and AK Steel Holding Corp - seen as winners thanks to the president’s actions - have lauded the rich asshole’s tariff on imported steel.
U.S. Steel said it would restart one of two idled blast furnaces at an Illinois steel plant, creating up to 500 jobs.
America is the world's largest steel importer, buying about 35 million tons in 2017. GRAPHIC: tmsnrt.rs/2oPeo1z
But Lang is one of around 780 workers at the Novolipetsk Steel PAO (NLMK) mill, NLMK’s U.S. subsidiary which imports around 2 million tons of steel slabs annually from its Russian parent company. The slabs that the mill rolls into sheets for customers including Caterpillar Inc, Deere & Co Harley Davidson Inc and Home Depot Inc, are almost impossible to acquire from U.S. steel producers.
Bob Miller, Chief Executive Officer of NLMK’s U.S. unit, said if his company’s customers refuse to accept a 25 percent price hike as a result of the tariffs, nearly 1,200 workers could eventually lose their jobs - and the ones in Farrell would be the first to go when supplies of imported slabs run out.
The U.S. steel industry employed about 147,000 people in 2015, according to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic analysis. Manufacturers that need steel employ about 6.5 million people each year and the construction industry 6.3 million. GRAPHIC: tmsnrt.rs/2Fc94hU
IRONY
Miller said tariffs will also force NLMK to shelve planned $600 million investments in plants in Pennsylvania and Indiana, around $400 million of which was earmarked for upgrading antiquated equipment at its Farrell plant.
the rich asshole has stood by the tariffs, despite resistance from his fellow Republicans and other countries, which have vowed to respond with levies of their own. On Thursday, the rich asshole pressed ahead with the imposition of 25 percent tariffs on steel imports and 10 percent for aluminum.
Some steel executives such as Miller say this is the ultimate irony: by acting ostensibly to protect U.S. steel jobs with sweeping tariffs, the rich asshole will also kill off some steel jobs.
“The workers here in Farrell are on the front line,” Miller said. “This policy is picking winners and losers and unfortunately, we are the losers.”
The tariffs are good for steel producers that melt and produce their own steel. But for those like NLMK, which is reliant on imported raw materials, they could prove catastrophic.
The mill is the largest employer in Farrell and accounts for more than one fifth of the town’s tax base. Mercer County has a poverty rate that is nearly double the national average.
The area was America’s steel heartland, with mills dotting the landscape until the industry’s decline began in the 1970s because of an increase in global competition. The mill owned by NLMK has existed since the beginning of the 20th century, but experienced two lengthy shutdowns and mass layoffs in the 1990s.
Its blast furnace was sold for scrap and instead of producing steel, its current crop of workers heat 25-ton imported steel slabs to a glowing-orange temperature of 2,400 degrees fahrenheit (1,316 Celsius) before rolling them down in some cases to as thick as a few sheets of paper.
Amid blasts of steam, intense heat, dirt and noise, the mill’s 600 union-represented workers earn up to $27 per hour, a solid middle-class wage.
Terry Day, local president for the United Steelworkers union, said the 1990s shutdowns convulsed the community and resulted in a spate of suicides and divorces.
“This time it will be much worse,” said Day, 53, who experienced both shutdowns. “Back then there were other jobs to go to, but now there’s nothing else here.”
“It would be devastating.”
Steel customers ranging from automakers General Motors Co - which makes its Cruze sedan in Lordstown, Ohio, around 20 miles west of Farrell - and Ford Motor Co to soup maker Campbell Soup Co and brewer Molson Coors Brewing Co are expected to lose, as tariffs will allow domestic steel producers to raise prices.
But likely job losses within the steel industry run counter to the rich asshole’s professed aims of bringing back manufacturing jobs.
“There is a substantial number of people in the steel industry that could lose their jobs as a result of tariffs,” said metal analyst Charles Bradford of Bradford Research.
Farrell can ill afford to lose its NLMK steel jobs.
The town’s population of under 5,000 is less than a third of what it was in 1920. As of June 2017, there were around 11,000 steel jobs in Pennsylvania, 2 percent of the state’s 546,000 manufacturing jobs. Mercer County had 5.5 percent unemployment in December - above the state rate of 4.8 percent and the national rate of 4.1 percent.
The Farrell mill was originally owned by a U.S. firm that went bankrupt in 1992 and was subsequently owned by British and Swiss companies before the Russians bought in back in 2006. Since then, NLMK has invested around $1 billion in its U.S. operations, U.S. CEO Miller said.
Miller is working to lobby the rich asshole administration to follow the precedent of former Republican President George W. Bush’s administration, which allowed quotas for slab steel in 2002 rather than applying tariffs as it did for products that were domestically produced.
Those quotas allowed the Farrell plant to keep operating and Miller hopes the rich asshole administration will follow suit.
The mood in Farrell is grim and fearful. Truckers coming to pick up coils of rolled steel ask when the mill will go out of business and plant manager Bill Benson says workers keep asking him: “What on earth is the rich asshole thinking?”
Reporting by Nick Carey; additional reporting by Jessica Resnick-Ault; editing by Grant McCool
JURISPRUDENCE
By KATE BRANNEN
MARCH 09, 20185:01 PM
This piece was originally published on Just Security, an online forum for analysis of U.S. national security law and policy.
Where have I heard that story before?
Friday night, NBC will air an hourlong special featuring a sit-down interview between Megyn Kelly and Russian President Vladimir Putin. A preview for it shows Putin putting his own spin on what happened during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He tells Kelly the Russians who supposedly interfered in the U.S. election could have been Americans, or they could have been Russians working for an American company. Who knows. “These are not my problems,” he says.
Here’s the full exchange:
Kelly: Why would you allow an attack like this on the United States?
Putin: Why have you decided the Russian authorities, myself included, gave anybody permission to do this? Nothing has changed since you and I talked last time in St. Petersburg. Some names have—popped up. So what? They could just as easily have been the names of some Americans who are sitting here and—interfering in your own political—process.
Kelly: But it wasn’t—Americans. It was Russians. And it was hundreds of people, a monthly budget of $1.25 million all designed to attack the United States in a cyberwarfare campaign. You’re up for re-election right now. Should the Russian people be concerned that you had no idea this was going on in your own country, in your own hometown?
Putin: Listen, the world is very large. And very diverse. And there is a fairly complicated relationship between the United States and the Russian Federation. And some of our people have their own opinion about this relationship. You mentioned a number of names … some individuals. And you’re telling me that they’re Russians. So what? Maybe being Russians they are actually working for some kind of American company. Perhaps, one of them used to work for one of the candidates. I have no idea. These are not my problems.
His remarks echo those made by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska (yes, the same Deripaska to whom Paul Manafort supposedly owes a ton of money) in an op-ed published by the Daily Caller, a conservative American news site, this week. In his piece, Deripaska suggests the story around Russian interference in the election has been fabricated and manipulated by a conspiracy of “Deep State” American insiders with “military-industrial commercial interests.”
This version of events rang a bell. I had just watched (for a separate piece) a public lecture Carter Page gave during a December 2016 trip to Moscow and his words were still ringing in my ear when I listened to the Putin interview.
When asked by NBC News’ Richard Engel about the CIA’s assessment that Russia had intervened to help the rich asshole win the election, Page said he’d seen no hard evidence to support that claim and even suggested that someone—unclear who—could have framed it to look like a Russian operation.
“The security experts, having worked in the Pentagon and knowing a lot of people both from a technology standpoint but also a national security standpoint, and discussing these issues with them, it’s very easy to make it look like it was country X, in [this] case Russia, that did this,” Page said.
the rich asshole himself continues to muddy the waters on whether Russia was even responsible for interfering in the election.
Now, all of this is just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the story the rich asshole supporters on the right—like Fox News’ Sean Hannity and others—tell about what happened during the election. They describe a vast anti-the rich asshole conspiracy involving corrupt actors at the FBI and CIA, in cahoots with the Hillary Clinton campaign, trying to bring down President some rich asshole through the collusion story.
For the most part, they walk right up to the line but don’t cross it when it comes to saying: Russia didn’t even interfere in the election. Like, the rich asshole, they will reluctantly acknowledge that Russia may have meddled in the election, but they will not accept that a Kremlin-directed disinformation campaign had any effect on the election results. And of course, the rich asshole campaign had nothing to do with it.
But the rich asshole himself continues to muddy the waters on whether Russia was even responsible for interfering in the election. As recently as this week he said:
The Russians had no impact on our votes whatsoever. But, certainly, there was meddling and probably there was meddling from other countries and maybe other individuals.
To believe any of this, you have to disbelieve the U.S. intelligence community and also the evidence laid out in special counsel Robert Mueller’s recent indictment of 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies. You also have to take Putin at his word, something the rich asshole has been willing to do in the past.
“Every time he sees me he says I didn’t do that and I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it,” the rich asshole said in November.
Sitting across from Putin, Megyn Kelly is less willing to give the Russian president the benefit of the doubt. And for the rest of us, as we struggle to understand what exactly happened during the election, it’s important to keep track of who’s telling the same story.
More from Just Security:
One more thing
The rich asshole administration poses a unique threat to the rule of law. That’s why Slate has stepped up our legal coverage—watchdogging Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department, the Supreme Court, the crackdown on voting rights, and more.
Our work is reaching more readers than ever—but online advertising revenues don’t fully cover our costs, and we don’t have print subscribers to help keep us afloat. So we need your help.
If you think Slate’s work matters, become a Slate Plus member. You’ll get exclusive members-only content and a suite of great benefits—and you’ll help secure Slate’s future.
Kate Brannen
Kate Brannen is the deputy managing editor of Just Security and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council.
Analysis
TOKYO — Just by sitting down with President the rich asshole, Kim Jong Un would get what he craves the most: legitimacy.
He wants to be treated as an equal by the global superpower, and a photo opportunity with the most powerful leader in the free world would go a long way to helping him achieve that.
“This is what his father and his grandfather wanted: to be on the same footing as the world’s greatest power,” said Van Jackson, a former Pentagon official who now teaches at Victoria University in New Zealand.
“A meeting with the American president has for decades been considered the prize at the end of a successful denuclearization process, not an incentive to get the process started, and neither Kim’s father nor grandfather made it to that finish line,” he added. “So I have to grudgingly take my hat off to him because he’s played a very poor hand brilliantly to get there.”
Since inheriting power from his father at the end of 2011, when he was 27, Kim has been seeking ways to stake his claim to be the rightful heir to the world’s only communist dynasty.
In North Korea, he has played up the notion of having a divine blood right to the leadership, and he has crowed about how strong the nation has become under his leadership, with all those missiles and nuclear weapons.
Now within a matter of months, Kim’s propagandists could fill the front pages with news of a meeting between what they doubtless will describe as the two most powerful men in the world.
“Kim wants to portray himself as the bold leader of a normal, peace-loving nuclear power who can meet an American president as equals,” said Duyeon Kim, a senior fellow at the Korean Peninsula Future Forum in Seoul.
the rich asshole on Thursday quickly accepted Kim’s invitation to talks — much more quickly than South Korean President Moon Jae-in, accused in Washington of being too soft on North Korea, accepted his own summit invitation. Preparations are now underway for a meeting between the rich asshole and Kim before the end of May, on the heels of an inter-Korean summit due to be held in the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas at the end of April.
That meeting would be a battle between two mercurial and unorthodox leaders, only one of whom has called the other a “pretty smart cookie,” as the rich asshole did last year.
“The thing that they have in common is that both of them think that they can outsmart the other,” said Ralph A. Cossa, president of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum CSIS think tank and a regular interlocutor with North Korean officials. “We’ll have to wait to see who’s right.”
The North Koreans will go into this process with several advantages. For one, they know a lot more about the rich asshole than the United States knows about Kim.
“I’m sure they’ve done their psychological profiles of some rich asshole, just like the CIA has profiled Kim Jong Un,” said Cossa. “The difference is that Kim Jong Un is a much harder nut to crack than some rich asshole, who’s much more transparent. So they’re probably going to have a much better idea of how to play him.”
Dennis Rodman, the former basketball star who has made repeated visits to Pyongyang since Kim rose to power, took a copy of “The Art of the Deal,” some rich asshole’s book on negotiating skills, as a gift for the North Korean leader during his last trip.
the rich asshole’s tactics, as outlined in the 1987 book, include not seeming to be desperate to cut a deal — “that makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead” — and using “truthful hyperbole.”
Chances are the North Koreans have read it. They definitely have been poring over “Fire and Fury,” the explosive book by Michael Wolff about how the rich asshole’s White House is run, according to people in touch with North Korean officials.
A second advantage: The rich asshole administration has few people with experience in dealing with North Korea, while the apparatchiks in the North Korean Foreign Ministry have been working on little else but the United States.
Ri Yong Ho, North Korea’s foreign minister, was involved in talks that resulted in the “Agreed Framework” denuclearization deal with the United States in 1994.
Choe Son Hui, who was director of the Americas division in the Foreign Ministry until being recently promoted to vice minister, served as an interpreter and close aide to lead negotiator Kim Kye Gwan during the six-party talks in the 2000s.
“They’ve certainly been around the block a few times since then,” said Robert L. Gallucci, who was the lead U.S. negotiator for the 1994 agreement. “And we’ve given North Koreans lots of practice in talking to us since then,” he said, referring to rounds of “track 1.5” talks that have taken place in recent years.
In those talks, North Korean officials — including Ri and Choe — have met with Gallucci and other American former officials who dealt with North Korea-related issues while in government.
The talks, which took place in locations including Mongolia, Norway and Malaysia, have given North Koreans an opportunity to present ideas and test the American response to them, according to participants.
But no serving U.S. officials have attended the talks, and, while aware of them, they have generally pooh-poohed the idea that the talks can serve any purpose in the nuclear standoff.
The talks have, however, served a purpose for the North Korean officials. “They’ve become substantially more sophisticated over the years,” said Gallucci, who last met them in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the end of 2016.
During talks near Geneva this past September — attended by officials from all of the six parties except the United States, which was represented only by former officials — the North Korean participants stunned their counterparts with their encyclopedic knowledge of the rich asshole’s tweets and familiarity with the U.S. legislative process.
“They are going to be supremely prepared for this,” said Cossa, who was at the meeting near Geneva.
The fact that Kim is prepared to go ahead with two summits — one in April with Moon, and one in May with the rich asshole — while huge joint military exercises take place in the South is revealing, analysts say.
“What Kim Jong Un wants is very clear,” said Ryoo Kihl-jae, a former South Korean minister of unification who now teaches at Ewha Womans University. “In the short run, sanctions relief is one of his goals.”
the rich asshole has been pushing a “maximum pressure” campaign against North Korea to force it into talks, and those sanctions, both direct and through the United Nations, now appear to be hurting.
But sanctions relief is just part of Kim’s ultimate goal: ensuring the safety of his regime.
“Kim wants the threats from the U.S. to be resolved, and he is ready to engage in ‘give-and-take’ negotiations with neighboring countries,” Ryoo said.
That is where things are bound to get tricky.
the rich asshole is talking about denuclearization, but North Korea is talking about “the peace and security of the Korean Peninsula” — a phrase that it has used in the past when insisting the United States should withdraw its troops from South Korea.
Pyongyang previously has insisted that its nuclear weapons — which it considers key to the regime’s survival — are not on the table, while Washington has insisted that denuclearization is the end goal.
But those challenges are still to come. For now, with one invitation, Kim has deftly moved all talk of military options and “bloody noses” to the back burner.
“He’s short-circuiting all this war talk going around in Washington, and he’s buying time to create a stable security environment, and he’s also checking a box on symbolism,” said Jackson of Victoria University. “And all without having to give up anything for it.”
Min Joo Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.
the rich asshole lawyers seek to offer Mueller an interview in exchange for wrapping up probe: report
BY JOSH DELK - 03/09/18 03:32 PM EST
Attorneys for President the rich asshole are reportedly considering asking special counsel Robert Mueller to set a hard end date for his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election as one of the preconditions for an interview with president.
While the rich asshole's lawyers remain split on the terms of such a deal, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, they also want Mueller to agree to parameters on the scope of such an interview.
One idea being floated is that Mueller would agree to wrap up the probe within 60 days of interviewing the rich asshole.
Conversations between Mueller and the rich asshole’s attorneys are reportedly only just beginning.
the rich asshole has said he is "looking forward" to speaking with the special counsel's team, but his lawyers have repeatedly emphasized that he would only agree under certain conditions.
Legal experts interviewed by the Journal expressed skepticism Mueller would agree to the idea.
“You can’t put a timeline on these things,” said former federal prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg. “Someone could walk in the door on the day before their proposed deadline and say, ‘I’ve got some information that’s going to blow your minds.’ … [And] Mueller’s going to say, ‘Oh, too bad, the deadline’s tomorrow?’”
On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that the rich asshole has asked as least former witnesses interviewed by the special counsel about their experiences and what they discussed.
The scope of Mueller's probe has reportedly expanded to included possible obstruction of justice, as well as the business ties of the rich asshole and members of his family.
The Journal reports that the rich asshole lawyers expect any questions for the president to focus on the firings of former FBI Director James Comey and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who in December pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators.
Comey says he was fired after the rich asshole asked him to back off a Justice Department investigation into Flynn.
the rich asshole has on multiple occasions derided Mueller's probe as a "witch hunt" that has the world "laughing" at the U.S.
‘He doesn’t give a f*ck’: the rich asshole plans to oust Kelly, Ivanka and Jared — and then go ‘Full MAGA’
President some rich asshole addresses violence in Charlottesville -- screengrab
DON'T MISS STORIES. FOLLOW RAW STORY!
Anew report from Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman claims that President some rich asshole is about to perform a massive housecleaning at the Oval Office that will bring down chief of staff John Kelly and national security adviser H.R. McMaster — before eventually consuming Ivanka the rich asshole and Jared Kushner as well.
According to Sherman’s sources, the rich asshole’s recent defiance of his top economic advisers over steel tariffs show that he is no longer afraid of doing things that anger Republican Party leaders — an approach that Sherman describes as going “full MAGA.”
“He knows how the levers of power work,” one Republican told Sherman. “He doesn’t give a f*ck.”
A the rich asshole friend similarly told Sherman that the rich asshole’s decision to enact tariffs were his way of giving a middle finger to both outgoing economic adviser Gary Cohn and to chief of staff Kelly.
“It was like a f*ck-you to Kelly,” the source said. “the rich asshole is red-hot about Kelly trying to control him.”
Sherman’s sources said they expected McMaster and Kelly to soon be out of jobs — and one source said the president will interview candidates for both men’s jobs next weekend at Mar-a-Lago.
As for Jared and Ivanka, Sherman’s sources said the rich asshole hopes to give them a “soft landing” outside the White House, perhaps by putting them to work on his 2020 reelection campaign.
Read the whole story at this link
Read the whole story at this link
POLITICS
his article was originally published on Yahoo News and Mother Jones.
This is the second of two excerpts adapted from Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of some rich asshole (Twelve Books) by Michael Isikoff, Chief Investigative Correspondent for Yahoo News, and David Corn, Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones. It will be released on March 13.
CIA Director John Brennan was angry. On Aug. 4, 2016, he was on the phone with Alexander Bortnikov, head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the intelligence agency that succeeded the KGB. The phone call was one of their regularly scheduled ones, the main subject once again the horrific civil war in Syria. By this point, however, Brennan had had it with the Russian spy chief. For the past few years, Brennan’s pleas for cooperation in defusing the Syrian crisis had gone nowhere. And after they finished discussing Syria — again with no progress — Brennan brought up two other issues not on the official agenda.
First, Brennan raised the problem of Russia’s harassment of U.S. diplomats — an especially pressing matter at Langley after an undercover CIA officer had been beaten outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow two months earlier. The continuing mistreatment of U.S. diplomats, Brennan told Bortnikov, was “irresponsible, reckless, intolerable and needed to stop.” And, he pointedly noted, it was Bortnikov’s own FSB “that has been most responsible for this outrageous behavior.”
Then Brennan turned to an even more sensitive issue: Russia’s interference in the American election. Brennan was now aware that at least a year earlier Russian hackers had begun their cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee. We know you’re doing this, Brennan said to the Russian. He pointed out that Americans would be enraged to find out Moscow was seeking to subvert the election — and that such an operation could backfire. Brennan warned Bortnikov that if Russia continued this information warfare, there would be a price to pay. He did not specify the consequences.
Bortnikov, as Brennan expected, denied Russia was doing anything to influence the election. This was, he groused, Washington yet again scapegoating Moscow. Brennan repeated his warning. Once more Bortnikov claimed there was no Russian meddling. But, he added, he would inform Russian President Vladimir Putin of Brennan’s comments.
This was the first of several warnings that the Obama administration would send to Moscow. But the question of how forcefully to respond would soon divide the White House staff, pitting the National Security Council’s top analysts for Russia and cyber issues against senior policymakers within the administration. It was a debate that would culminate that summer with a dramatic directive from Obama’s national security adviser to the NSC staffers developing aggressive proposals to strike back against the Russians: “Stand down.”
*****
At the end of July — not long after WikiLeaks had dumped over 20,000 stolen DNC emails before the Democratic convention — it had become obvious to Brennan that the Russians were mounting an aggressive and wide‑ranging effort to interfere in the election. He was also seeing intelligence about contacts and interactions between Russian officials and Americans involved in the rich asshole campaign. By now, several European intelligence services had reported to the CIA that Russian operatives were reaching out to people within the rich asshole’s circle. And the Australian government had reported to U.S. officials that its top diplomat in the United Kingdom had months earlier been privately told by the rich asshole campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. By July 31, the FBI had formally opened a counterintelligence investigation into the rich asshole’s campaigns ties to Russians, with sub-inquiries targeting four individuals: Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman; Michael Flynn, the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief who had led the crowd at the Republican convention in chants of “Lock her up!”; Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser who had just given a speech in Moscow; and Papadopoulos.
Brennan spoke with FBI Director James Comey and Adm. Mike Rogers, the head of the NSA, and asked them to dispatch to the CIA their experts to establish a working group at Langley that would review the intelligence and figure out the full scope and nature of the Russian operation. Brennan was thinking about the lessons of the 9/11 attack. Al-Qaida had been able to pull off that operation partly because U.S. intelligence agencies — several of which had collected bits of intelligence regarding the plotters before the attack — had not shared the material within the intelligence community. Brennan wanted a process in which NSA, FBI and CIA experts could freely share with each other the information each agency had on the Russian operation — even the most secret information that tended not to be disseminated throughout the full intelligence community.
Brennan realized this was what he would later call “an exceptionally, exceptionally sensitive issue.” Here was an active counterintelligence case — already begun by the FBI — aiming at uncovering and stopping Russian covert activity in the middle of a U.S. presidential campaign. And it included digging into whether it involved Americans in contact with Russia.
*****
While Brennan wrangled the intelligence agencies into a turf-crossing operation that could feed the White House information on the Russian maneuver, Obama convened a series of meetings to devise a plan for countering whatever the Russians were up to. The meetings followed the procedure known in the federal government as the “interagency process.” The protocol was for the deputy chiefs of the relevant government agencies to meet and hammer out options for the principals — that is, the heads of the agencies — and then the principals hold a separate (and sometimes parallel) chain of meetings to discuss and perhaps debate before presenting choices to the president.
But for this topic, the protocol was not observed. Usually when the White House invited the deputies and principals to such meetings, they informed them of the subject at hand and provided “readahead” memos outlining what was on the agenda. This time, the agency officials just received instructions to show up at the White House at a certain time. No reason given. No memos supplied. “We were only told that a meeting was scheduled, and our principal or deputy was expected to attend,” recalled a senior administration official who participated in the sessions. (At the State Department, only a small number of officials were cleared to receive the most sensitive information on the Russian hack; this group included Secretary of State John Kerry; Tony Blinken, the deputy secretary of state; Dan Smith, head of the department’s intelligence bureau; and Jon Finer, Kerry’s chief of staff.)
For the usual interagency sessions, principals and deputies could bring staffers. Not this time. “There were no plus ones,” an attendee recalled. When the subject of a principals or deputies meeting was a national security matter, the gathering was often held in the Situation Room of the White House. The in‑house video feed of the Sit Room — without audio — would be available to national security officials at the White House and elsewhere, and these officials could at least see that a meeting was in progress and who was attending. For the meetings related to the Russian hack, Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, ordered the video feed turned off. She did not want others in the national security establishment to know what was under way, fearing leaks from within the bureaucracy.
Rice would chair the principals’ meetings — which brought together Brennan; Comey; Kerry; Director of National Intelligence James Clapper; Defense Secretary Ash Carter; Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson; Treasury Secretary Jack Lew; Attorney General Loretta Lynch; and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — with only a few other White House officials present, including White House chief of staff Denis McDonough; homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, and Colin Kahl, Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser. (Kahl had to insist to Rice that he be allowed to attend so that Biden could be fully briefed.)
Rice’s No. 2, deputy national security adviser Avril Haines, oversaw the deputies’ sessions. White House officials who were absent from the meetings were not told what was being discussed. This even included other NSC staffers — some of whom bristled at being shut out. Often the intelligence material covered in these meetings was not placed in the President’s Daily Brief, the top-secret document presented to the president every morning. Too many people had access to the PDB. “The opsec on this” — the operational security — “was as tight as it could be,” one White House official later said.
*****
As the interagency process began, there was no question regarding the big picture being drawn up by the analysts and experts assembled by Brennan: Russian state-sponsored hackers were behind the cyberattacks and the release of swiped Democratic material by WikiLeaks, Guccifer 2.0 (an internet persona suspected of being a Russian front), and a website called DCLeaks.com. “They knew who the cutouts were,” one participant later said. “There was not a lot of doubt.” It was not immediately clear, however, how far and wide within the Russian government the effort ran. Was it coming from one or two Russian outfits operating on their own? Or was it being directed from the top and part of a larger project?
The intelligence, at this stage, was also unclear on a central point: Moscow’s primary aim. Was it to sow discord to delegitimize the U.S. election? Prompting a political crisis in the United States was certainly in keeping with Putin’s overall goal of weakening Western governments. There was another obvious reason for the Russian assault: Putin despised Hillary Clinton, blaming her for the domestic protests that followed the 2011 Russian legislative elections marred by fraud. (At the time, as secretary of state, Clinton had questioned the legitimacy of the elections.) U.S. officials saw the Russian operation as designed at least to weaken Clinton during the election — not necessarily prevent her from winning. After all, the Russians were as susceptible as any political observers to the conventional wisdom that she was likely to beat the rich asshole. If Clinton, after a chaotic election, staggered across the finish line, bruised and battered, she might well be a damaged president and less able to challenge Putin.
And there was a third possible reason: to help the rich asshole. Did the Russians believe they could influence a national election in the United States and affect the results? At this stage, the intelligence community analysts and officials working on this issue considered this point not yet fully substantiated by the data they possessed. Given the rich asshole’s business dealings with Russians over the years and his history of puzzling positive remarks about Putin, there seemed ample cause for Putin to desire the rich asshole in the White House. The intelligence experts did believe this could be part of the mix for Moscow: Why not shoot for the moon and see if we can get the rich asshole elected?
“All these potential motives were not mutually exclusive,” a top Obama aide later said.
Obama would be vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard until Aug. 21, and the deputies took his return as an informal deadline for preparing a list of options — sanctions, diplomatic responses, and cyber-counterattacks — that could be put in front of the principals and the president.
*****
As these deliberations were under way, more troubling intelligence got reported to the White House: Russian-linked hackers were probing the computers of state election systems, particularly voter registration databases. The first reports to the FBI came from Illinois. In late June, its voter database was targeted in a persistent cyberattack that lasted for weeks. The attackers were using foreign IP addresses, many of which were traced to a Dutch company owned by a heavily tattooed 26-year‑old Russian who lived in Siberia. The hackers were relentlessly pinging the Illinois database five times per second, 24 hours a day, and they succeeded in accessing data on up to 200,000 voters. Then there was a similar report from Arizona, where the user name and password of a county election official was stolen. The state was forced to shut down its voter registration system for a week. Then, in Florida, another attack.
One NSC staffer regularly walked into the office of Michael Daniel, the White House director of cybersecurity, with disturbing updates. “Michael,” he would say, “five more states got popped.” Or four. Or three. At one point, Daniel took a deep breath and told him, “It’s starting to look like every single state has been targeted.”
“I don’t think anybody knew what to make of it,” Jeh Johnson later said. The states selected seemed to be random; his agency, the Department of Homeland Security, could see no logic to it. If the goal was simply to instigate confusion on Election Day, Johnson figured, whoever was doing this could simply call in a bomb threat. Other administration officials had a darker view, and believed that the Russians were deliberately plotting digital manipulations, perhaps with the goal of altering results.
Michael Daniel was worried. He believed the Russians’ ability to fiddle with the national vote count — and swing a national U.S. election to a desired candidate — seemed limited, if not impossible. “We have 3,000 jurisdictions,” Daniel subsequently explained. “You have to pick the county where the race was going to be tight and manipulate the results. That seemed beyond their reach. The Russians were not trying to flip votes. To have that level of precision was not feasible.”
But Daniel was focused on another parade of horribles: If hackers could penetrate a state election voter database, they might be able to delete every 10th name. Or flip two digits in a voter’s ID number, so when a voter showed up at the polls, his or her name would not match. The changes could be subtle, not easily discerned. But the potential for disorder on Election Day was immense. The Russians would only have to cause problems in a small number of locations — problems with registration files, vote counting, or other mechanisms — and faith in the overall tally could be questioned. Who knew what would happen then?
Daniel even fretted that the Russians might post online a video of a hacked voting machine. The video would not have to be real to stoke the paranoids of the world and cause a segment of the electorate to suspect — or conclude — that the results could not be trusted. He envisioned Moscow planning to create multiple disruptions on Election Day to call the final counts into question.
The Russian scans, probes and penetrations of state voting systems changed the top-secret conversations under way. Administration officials now feared the Russians were scheming to infiltrate voting systems to disrupt the election or affect tallies on Election Day. And the consensus among Obama’s top advisers was that potential Russian election tampering was far more dangerous. The Russian hack-and-dump campaign, they generally believed, was unlikely to make the difference in the outcome of the presidential election. (After all, could the rich asshole really beat Clinton?) Yet messing with voting systems could raise questions about the integrity of the election and the results. That was, they thought, the more serious threat.
Weeks earlier, the rich asshole had started claiming that the only way he could lose the election would be if it were “rigged.” With one candidate and his supporters spreading this notion, it would not take many irregularities to spark a full‑scale crisis on Election Day.
Obama instructed Johnson to move immediately to shore up the defenses of state election systems. On Aug. 15, Johnson, while in the basement of his parents’ home in upstate New York, held a conference call with secretaries of state and other chief election officials of every state. Without mentioning the Russian cyber-intrusions into state systems, he told them there was a need to boost the security of the election infrastructure and offered the DHS’s assistance. He raised the possibility of designating election systems as “critical infrastructure” — just like dams and the electrical grid — meaning that a cyberattack could trigger a federal response.
Much to Johnson’s surprise, this move ran into resistance. Many of the state officials — especially from the red states — wanted little, if anything, to do with the DHS. Leading the charge was Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, an ambitious, staunchly conservative Republican who feared the hidden hand of the Obama White House. “We don’t need the federal government to take over our voting,” he told Johnson.
Johnson tried to explain that DHS’s cybersecurity experts could help state systems search for vulnerabilities and protect against penetrations. He encouraged them to take basic cybersecurity steps, such as ensuring voting machines were not connected to the internet when voting was under way. And he kept explaining that any federal help would be voluntary for the states. “He must have used the word voluntary 15 times,” recalled a Homeland Security official who was on the call. “But there was a lot of skepticism that revolved around saying, ‘We don’t want Big Brother coming in and running our election process.’”
After the call, Johnson and his aides realized encouraging local officials to accept their help was going to be tough. They gave up on the idea of declaring these systems critical infrastructure and instead concluded they would have to keep urging state and local officials to accept their cybersecurity assistance.
Johnson’s interaction with local and state officials was a warning for the White House. If administration officials were going to enlist these election officials to thwart Russian interference in the voting, they would need GOP leaders in Congress to be part of the endeavor and, in a way, vouch for the federal government. Yet they had no idea how difficult that would be.
*****
At the first principals’ meeting, Brennan had serious news for his colleagues: The most recent intelligence indicated that Putin had ordered or was overseeing the Russian cyber operations targeting the U.S. election. And the intelligence community — sometimes called the “IC” by denizens of that world — was certain that the Russian operation entailed more than spy services gathering information. It now viewed the Russian action as a full-scale active measure.
This intelligence was so sensitive it had not been put in the President’s Daily Brief. Brennan had told Obama personally about this, but he did not want the information circulating throughout the national security system.
The other principals were surprised to hear that Putin had a direct hand in the operation and that he would be so bold. It was one thing for Russian intelligence to see what it could get away with; it was quite another for these attacks to be part of a concerted effort from the top of the Kremlin hierarchy.
But a secret source in the Kremlin, who two years earlier had regularly provided information to an American official in the U.S. Embassy, had warned then that a massive operation targeting Western democracies was being planned by the Russian government. The development of the Gerasimov Doctrine — a strategy for nonmilitary combat named after a top Russian general who had described it in an obscure military journal in 2013 — was another indication that full-scale information warfare against the United States was a possibility. And there had been an intelligence report in May noting that a Russian military intelligence officer had bragged of a payback operation that would be Putin’s revenge on Clinton. But these few clues had not led to a consensus at senior government levels that a major Putin-led attack was on the way.
*****
At this point, Obama’s top national security officials were uncertain how to respond. As they would later explain it, any steps they might take — calling out the Russians, imposing sanctions, raising alarms about the penetrations of state systems — could draw greater attention to the issue and maybe even help cause the disorder the Kremlin sought. A high‑profile U.S. government reaction, they worried, could amplify the psychological effects of the Russian attack and help Moscow achieve its end. “There was a concern if we did too much to spin this up into an Obama‑Putin face‑off, it would help the Russians achieve their objectives,” a participant in the principals’ meeting later noted. “It would create chaos, help the rich asshole and hurt Clinton. We had to figure out how to do this in a way so we wouldn’t create an own goal. We had a strong sense of the Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm.”
A parallel concern for them was how the Obama administration could respond to the Russian attack without appearing too partisan. Obama was actively campaigning for Clinton. Would a tough and vocal reaction be seen as a White House attempt to assist Clinton and stick it to the rich asshole? They worried that if a White House effort to counter Russian meddling came across as a political maneuver, that could compromise the ability of the Department of Homeland Security to work with state and local election officials to make sure the voting system was sound. (Was Obama too worried about being perceived as prejudicial or conniving? “Perhaps there was some overcompensation,” a top Obama aide said later.)
As Obama and his top policymakers saw it, they were stuck with several dilemmas. Inform the public about the Russian attack without triggering widespread unease about the election system. Be pro‑active without coming across as partisan and bolstering the rich asshole’s claim the election was a sham. Prevent Putin from further cyber aggression without prompting him to do more. “This was one of the most complex and challenging issues I dealt with in government,” Avril Haines, the NSC’s No. 2 official, who oversaw the deputies meetings, later remarked.
The principals asked the Treasury Department to craft a list of far‑reaching economic sanctions. Officials at the State Department began working up diplomatic penalties. And the White House pushed the IC to develop more intelligence on the Russian operation so Obama and his aides could consider whether to publicly call out Moscow.
*****
At this point, a group of NSC officials committed to a forceful response to Moscow’s intervention started concocting creative options for cyberattacks that would expand the information war Putin had begun.
Michael Daniel and Celeste Wallander, the National Security Council’s top Russia analyst, were convinced the United States needed to strike back hard against the Russians and make it clear that Moscow had crossed a red line. Words alone wouldn’t do the trick; there had to be consequences. “I wanted to send a signal that we would not tolerate disruptions to our electoral process,” Daniel recalled. His basic argument: “The Russians are going to push as hard as they can until we start pushing back.”
Daniel and Wallander began drafting options for more aggressive responses beyond anything the Obama administration or the U.S. government had ever before contemplated in response to a cyberattack. One proposal was to unleash the NSA to mount a series of far-reaching cyberattacks: to dismantle the Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks websites that had been leaking the emails and memos stolen from Democratic targets, to bombard Russian news sites with a wave of automated traffic in a denial-of-service attack that would shut the news sites down, and to launch an attack on the Russian intelligence agencies themselves, seeking to disrupt their command and control nodes.
Knowing that Putin was notoriously protective of any information about his family, Wallander suggested targeting Putin himself. She proposed leaking snippets of classified intelligence to reveal the secret bank accounts in Latvia held for Putin’s daughters — a direct poke at the Russian president that would be sure to infuriate him. Wallander also brainstormed ideas with Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs and a fellow hard-liner. They drafted proposals to dump dirt on Russian websites about Putin’s money, about the girlfriends of top Russian officials, about corruption in Putin’s United Russia party — essentially to give Putin a taste of his own medicine. “We wanted to raise the cost in a manner Putin recognized,” Nuland recalled.
One idea Daniel proposed was unusual: The United States and NATO should publicly announce a giant “cyber exercise” against a mythical Eurasian country, demonstrating that Western nations had it within their power to shut down Russia’s entire civil infrastructure and cripple its economy.
But Wallander and Daniel’s bosses at the White House were not on board. One day in late August, national security adviser Susan Rice called Daniel into her office and demanded he cease and desist from working on the cyber options he was developing. “Don’t get ahead of us,” she warned him. The White House was not prepared to endorse any of these ideas. Daniel and his team in the White House cyber response group were given strict orders: Stand down. She told Daniel to “knock it off,” he recalled.
Daniel walked back to his office. “That was one pissed-off national security adviser,” he told one of his aides.
At his morning staff meeting, Daniel matter of factly said to his team it had to stop work on options to counter the Russian attack: “We’ve been told to stand down.” Daniel Prieto, one of Daniel’s top deputies, recalled, “I was incredulous and in disbelief. It took me a moment to process. In my head I was like, Did I hear that correctly?” Then Prieto asked, “Why the hell are we standing down? Michael, can you help us understand? “Daniel informed them that the orders came from both Rice and Monaco. They were concerned that were the options to leak, it would force Obama to act. “They didn’t want to box the president in,” Prieto subsequently said.
It was a critical moment that, as Prieto saw it, scuttled the chance for a forceful immediate response to the Russian hack — and keenly disappointed the NSC aides who had been developing the options. They were convinced that the president and his top aides didn’t get the stakes. “There was a disconnect between the urgency felt at the staff level” and the views of the president and his senior aides, Prieto later said. When senior officials argued that the issue could be revisited after Election Day, Daniel and his staff intensely disagreed. “No — the longer you wait, it diminishes your effectiveness. If you’re in a street fight, you have to hit back,” Prieto remarked.
*****
Obama and his top aides did view the challenge at hand differently than the NSC staffers. “The first-order objective directed by President Obama,” McDonough recalled, “was to protect the integrity of election.” Confronting Putin was necessary, Obama believed, but not if it risked blowing up the election. He wanted to make sure whatever action was taken would not lead to a political crisis at home — and with the rich asshole the possibility for that was great. The nation had had more than 200 years of elections and peaceful transitions of power. Obama didn’t want that to end on his watch.
By now, the principals were into the nitty-gritty, discussing in the Sit Room the specifics of how to respond. They were not overly concerned about Moscow’s influence campaign to shape voter attitudes. The key question was precisely how to thwart further Russian meddling that could undermine the mechanics of the election. Strong sanctions? Other punishments?
The principals did discuss cyber responses. The prospect of hitting back with cyber caused trepidation within the deputies’ and principals’ meetings. The United States was telling Russia this sort of meddling was unacceptable. If Washington engaged in the same type of covert combat, some of the principals believed, Washington’s demand would mean nothing, and there could be an escalation in cyberwarfare. There were concerns that the U.S. would have more to lose in all-out cyberwar.
“If we got into a tit-for-tat on cyber with the Russians, it would not be to our advantage,” a participant later remarked. “They could do more to damage us in a cyberwar or have a greater impact.” In one of the meetings, Clapper said he was worried that Russia might respond with cyberattacks against America’s critical infrastructure — and possibly shut down the electrical grid.
The State Department had worked up its own traditional punishments: booting Russian diplomats — and spies — out of the United States, and shutting down Russian facilities on American soil. And Treasury had drafted a series of economic sanctions that included massive assaults on Putin’s economy, such as targeting Russia’s military industries and cutting off Russia from the global financial system. One proposal called for imposing the same sorts of sanctions as had been placed on Iran: Any entity that did business with Russian banks would not be allowed to do business with U.S. financial institutions. But the intelligence community warned that if the United States responded with a massive response of any kind, Putin would see it as an attempt at regime change. “This could lead to a nuclear escalation,” a top Obama aide later said, speaking metaphorically.
After two weeks or so of deliberations, the White House put these options on hold. Instead, Obama and his aides came up with a different plan. First, DHS would keep trying to work with the state voting systems. For that to succeed, the administration needed buy‑in from congressional Republicans. So Obama approached Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan to try to deliver a bipartisan and public message that the Russian threat to the election was serious and that local officials should collaborate with the feds to protect the electoral infrastructure.
Obama and the principals also decided that the U.S. government would have to issue a public statement calling out Russia for having already secretly messed with the 2016 campaign. But even this seemed a task fraught with potential problems. Obama and his top aides believed that if the president himself issued such a message, the rich asshole and the Republicans would accuse him of exploiting intelligence — or making up intelligence — to help Clinton. The declaration would have to come from the intelligence community, which was then instructed to start crafting a statement. In the meantime, Obama would continue to say nothing publicly about the most serious information warfare attack ever launched against the United States.
Most of all, Obama and his aides had to figure out how to ensure the Russians ceased their meddling immediately. They came up with an answer that would frustrate the NSC hawks, who believed Obama and his senior advisers were tying themselves in knots and looking for reasons not to act. The president would privately warn Putin and vow overwhelming retaliation for any further intervention in the election. This, they thought, could more likely dissuade Putin than hitting back at this moment. That is, they believed the threat of action would be more effective than actually taking action.
A meeting of the G-20 was scheduled for the first week in September in China. Obama and Putin would both be attending. Obama, according to this plan, would confront Putin and issue a powerful threat that would supposedly convince Russia to back off. Obama would do so without spelling out for Putin the precise damage he would inflict on Russia. “An unspecified threat would be far more potent than Putin knowing what we would do,” one of the principals later said. “Let his imagination run wild. That would be far more effective, we thought, than freezing this or that person’s assets.” But the essence of the message would be that if Putin did not stop, the United States would impose sanctions to crater Russia’s economy.
Obama and his aides were confident the intelligence community could track any new Russian efforts to penetrate the election infrastructure. If the IC detected new attempts, Obama then could quickly slap Russia with sanctions or other retribution. But the principals agreed that for this plan to work, the president had to be ready to pull the trigger.
*****
Obama threatened — but never did pull the trigger. In early September, during the G-20 summit in Hangzhou, China, the president privately confronted Putin in what a senior White House official described as a “candid” and “blunt” talk. The president informed his aides he had delivered the message he and his advisers had crafted: We know what you’re doing. If you don’t cut it out, we will impose onerous and unprecedented penalties. One senior U.S. government official briefed on the meeting was told the president said to Putin, in effect: “You f*** with us over the election and we’ll crash your economy.”
But Putin simply denied everything to Obama — and, as he had done before, blamed the U.S. for interfering in Russian politics. And if Obama was tough in private, publicly he played the statesman. Asked at a post-summit news conference about Russia’s hacking of the election, the president spoke in generalities — and insisted the United States did not want a blowup over the issue. “We’ve had problems with cyber-intrusions from Russia in the past, from other counties in the past,” he said. “Our goal is not to suddenly, in the cyber arena, duplicate a cycle escalation that we saw when it comes other arms races in the past, but rather to start instituting some norms so that everybody’s acting responsibility.”
White House officials believed for a while that Obama’s warning had some impact: They saw no further evidence of Russia cyber-intrusions into state election systems. But, as they would later acknowledge, they largely missed Russia’s information warfare campaign aimed at influencing the election — the inflammatory Facebook ads and Twitter bots created by an army of Russian trolls working for the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg.
On Oct. 7, the Obama administration finally went public, releasing a statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Department of Homeland Security that called out the Russians for their efforts to “interfere with the U.S. election process,” saying that “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” But for some in the Clinton campaign and within the White House itself, it was too little, too late. Wallander, the NSC Russia specialist who had pushed for a more aggressive response, thought the Oct. 7 statement was largely irrelevant. “The Russians don’t care what we say,” she later noted. “They care what we do.” (The same day the statement came out, WikiLeaks began its month-long posting of tens of thousands of emails Russian hackers had stolen from John Podesta, the CEO of the Clinton campaign.)
In the end, some Obama officials thought they had played a bad hand the best they could, and had succeeded in preventing a Russian disruption of Election Day. Others would ruefully conclude that they may have blown it and not done enough. Nearly two months after the election, Obama did impose sanctions on Moscow for its meddling in the election — shutting down two Russian facilities in the United States suspected of being used for intelligence operations and booting out 35 Russian diplomats and spies. The impact of these moves was questionable. Rice would come to believe it was reasonable to think that the administration should have gone further. As one senior official lamented, “Maybe we should have whacked them more.”
President some rich asshole's personal attorney used his the rich asshole Organization email while arranging to transfer money into an account at a Manhattan bank before he wired $130,000 to adult film star Stormy Daniels to buy her silence.
The lawyer, Michael Cohen, also regularly used the same email account during 2016 negotiations with the actress — whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford — before she signed a nondisclosure agreement, a source familiar with the discussions told NBC News.
And Clifford's attorney at the time addressed correspondence to Cohen in his capacity at the rich asshole Organization and as "Special Counsel to some rich asshole," the source said.
Stormy Daniels lawyer: We're ultimately going to trace this to the rich asshole 6:18
Cohen has tried to put distance between the president and the payout, which has been the subject of campaign finance complaints.
In a statement last month, Cohen said he used his "personal funds to facilitate a payment" to Clifford, who says she had an intimate relationship with the rich asshole a decade ago.
"Neither the rich asshole Organization nor the rich asshole campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly," Cohen said in that statement.
But an email uncovered in the last 24 hours and provided to NBC News by Clifford's current attorney, Michael Avenatti, shows First Republic Bank and Cohen communicated about the money using his the rich asshole company email address, not his personal gmail account.
"I think this document seriously calls into question the prior representation of Mr. Cohen and the White House relating to the source of the monies paid to Ms. Clifford in an effort to silence her," said Avenatti, who is representing Clifford in a lawsuit against the rich asshole.
"We smell smoke."
Porn star Stormy Daniels sues President the rich asshole 2:47
The email, dated Oct. 26, 2016, was sent to Cohen by an assistant to First Republic Bank senior managing director Gary Farro. The email appears to have been a reply to Cohen; the subject was "RE: First Republic Bank Transfer" and the message confirmed that "the funds have been deposited into your checking account."
The email did not provide any more details about the accounts the money was transferred from or to, and it was not clear whether they were personal accounts or corporate accounts. It also did not specify the amount.
According to a 2017 financial disclosure form, the rich asshole has a checking account at First Republic with between $15,001 and $50,000 at the time of the disclosure — though there is no indication that account is connected to the Clifford payment.
The day after the email, Cohen wired money from First Republic to the City National Bank account of lawyer Keith Davidson, who was representing Clifford at the time.
Cohen used the rich asshole Org. email for Stormy Daniels arrangements 2:55
"The $130,000 question, however, is from whose account was the money transferred on Oct. 26, 2016." Avenatti said.
He said the email "suggests" it might have been a rich asshole Organization account since the correspondence was through Cohen's the rich asshole email. He said it was "curious" that after Cohen got the email, he immediately forwarded it to his personal gmail and then used gmail to forward it to Davidson, presumably to show the money was ready to be wired.
"Mr. Cohen should immediately provide the prior emails [between him and the bank] to show exactly where the money came from," Avenatti said.
Cohen and Davidson did not respond to requests for comment from NBC News. First Republic Bank declined to comment.
Avenatti is representing Clifford in the lawsuit she filed this week, which alleged the nondisclosure agreement she signed days before the election is void because the rich asshole never actually signed it.
In court documents, Clifford says she and the rich asshole, who married Melania the rich asshole in 2005, had an "intimate relationship" that lasted from the summer of 2006 "well into the year 2007" — which the rich asshole's representatives have repeatedly denied.
the rich asshole lawyer tries to silence Stormy Daniels 2:09
Clifford gave an interview about the rendezvous with the rich asshole to In Touch magazine in 2011 but it wasn't published at the time. Former employees of the magazine have told The Associated Press it was held after Cohen threatened legal action.
Fast forward a decade to 2016, when the rich asshole was a candidate for the White House battling allegations of sexual misconduct. Clifford, according to her lawsuit, began making moves to tell her story to the media.
Negotiations between Cohen and Clifford ensued. With the election looming, Cohen registered a company called Essential Consultants in Delaware that could be used for the payment.
When he wired the $130,000 to Clifford's lawyer, something about the transaction led First Republic to file a suspicious activity report with the Treasury Department, The Wall Street Journal has reported. The timing of the report or the reason for it are not clear.
A year later, City National Bank's interest in the transaction was also piqued. Officials asked Clifford's then-attorney for information about the source of the money, without revealing why they wanted to know, The Washington Post has reported.
In January, news of the payment broke, putting Clifford in the spotlight. Now, Avenatti said, she wants to tell her story.
"She believes it's important that the public learn the truth about what happened," he told NBC's "Today" this week. "I think it's time for her to tell her story and for the public to decide who is telling the truth."
As NBC News first reported, late last month Cohen seized on a clause in the nondisclosure agreement and got a private arbitrator to issue a secret restraining order barring Clifford from publicly releasing "confidential information" about the agreement.
The agreement uses pseudonyms, referring to Clifford as Peggy Peterson and another individual as David Dennison. In one of the documents, the true identity of Dennison is blacked out, but Avenatti told NBC News the individual is the rich asshole.
Clifford signed both the agreement and a side letter agreement using her professional name on Oct. 28, 2016. Cohen signed the document the same day, but blank spaces where "DD" was supposed to sign are empty.
That means the agreement is invalid and Clifford is free to talk, Avenatti contends. Her lawsuit asks a court to affirm their position.
A day after the lawsuit was filed Cohen hit back. His attorney, Lawrence Rosen, fired off an email warning Clifford that she had violated the 2016 agreement and would be subject to penalties and damages if she continued to disclose information about it.
"The designated judge from the arbitration tribunal found that Ms. Clifford had violated the agreement and enjoined her from, among other things, filing this lawsuit," Rosen said in a statement to media outlets.
But Avenatti said that because the 2016 agreement was never signed and never in force, the arbitration clause it contains is also invalid and the gag order is meaningless.
"We do not take kindly to these threats, nor we will be intimidated," he told NBC News.
The suit also says that the rich asshole must know that Cohen is trying to silence Clifford, since rules for the New York bar, of which Cohen is a member, require him to keep his client informed at all times.
"It strains credulity to conclude that Mr. Cohen is acting on his own accord and without the express approval and knowledge of his client some rich asshole," the suit says.
What to consider before celebrating the rich asshole’s meeting with North Korea
This won't be easy.
On Thursday evening, the White House announced President some rich asshole accepted an invitation to meet with North Korea leader Kim Jong Un to have direct talks before May. The meeting has potential to thaw icy relations between the two countries, but a failure in talks could also push the two countries closer to war and be disastrous for the Korean Peninsula.
South Korean National Security Adviser Chung Eui-yong, who met with Kim earlier this week and made the announcement at the White House Thursday, said North Korea promises to “refrain from any further nuclear or missile tests.” He said Pyongyang also is committed to denuclearization, and will allow the United States and South Korea to conduct their annual joint military exercises on the Korean Peninsula. The Foal Eagle exercise — which North Korea has often condemned and used as an excuse for provocative missile and nuclear tests — will begin on March 31 and last for two months, ABC News reported.
The exact timing and location has not yet been confirmed, but this will be the first meeting between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader — a major diplomatic breakthrough. This also may be one of the greatest U.S. foreign policy challenges, and there are a lot of obstacles in the way.
First, May is only two months away. That’s not a lot of time to determine what U.S. strategy will be in the meeting, and whether it will be part of a longer series of negotiations.
On a background call Thursday night, a senior the rich asshole administration official did not clarify the timeline or how long the United States is committed to talking with North Korea. “At this point we’re not even talking about negotiations, right?” the official said, after a question about whether talks would include inspections of North Korean nuclear facilities. “What we’re talking about is an invitation by the leader of North Korea to meet face to face with the President of the United States.”
Diplomacy is hard, and it takes a lot of time. Direct talks can help, but everything won’t be solved in one meeting. Take a look at the Iranian nuclear negotiations under former President Barack Obama as just one example. A historic phone call between Obama and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani took place in September 2013. The final Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) tackling Iran’s nuclear program — more commonly known as the Iran deal — was finalized in August 2015. That’s nearly two years of talks.
The rich asshole administration hasn’t made any indication that it’s willing to invest that amount of time in tackling North Korea, having rebuffed past opportunities for outreach. During the Olympic Games, Vice President Mike Pence refused to shake hands with Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s sister, and scheduled talks between the two of them were canceled.
Second, there are a lot of questions about what the United States is demanding and what it is willing to give up in the push and pull of diplomacy. As Victor Cha — a former the rich asshole administration candidate to be ambassador to South Korea — pointed out, the next steps are determining what the United States is willing to put on the table in diplomatic talks. “Sanctions? Normalization? Peace treaty?”
“In years of dealing with North Korea, I have learned that the regime never gives anything away for free,” he wrote in the New York Times. “To the extent that this administration has thought about diplomacy during its first year in office, it went no further than listing the things that the United States would not do in future negotiations — for example, not give up sanctions, not pay for meetings, not make the mistakes of past negotiations. Yet, what was distinct about the South Korean statement on Thursday was its description of conciliatory measures that Mr. Kim appears willing to take — a missile-test freeze, no response to American military exercises, and an invitation for a summit — but no detail on what some rich asshole would be willing to offer in return.”
Cha’s right. A senior the rich asshole administration official said on Thursday that the United States will continue applying “sanctions and maximum pressure” on North Korea. To date, that seems like the bulk of U.S. strategy on North Korea, in addition to the overheated rhetoric. Don’t forget that during his first speech at the United Nations General Assembly last September, the rich asshole threatened to “totally destroy” the entire country. Referring to Kim Jong Un, he said, “Rocket man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”
What does North Korea want in exchange for denuclearization? And what is the rich asshole willing to offer? How should the United States address denuclearization and also address North Korea’s human rights abuses? Without a more robust U.S. strategy in place, this meeting simply won’t be fruitful.
Another big obstacle: there are key diplomats missing in the State Department.
There has been no U.S. ambassador to South Korea for more than a year. Cha, whose nomination for the position was withdrawn in January, has vocally opposed a pre-emptive U.S. “bloody nose” strike against North Korea. Joseph Yun, the U.S. special representative for North Korea policy, who has helped implement U.S. strategy and maintained limited bilateral relations between the two countries, also announced his surprise retirement late last month. Yun helped to secure the release of Otto Warmbier, an American college student detained by North Korea security services on a visit to the country. the rich asshole officially nominated Susan Thornton as the assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, where she’s been serving in the role in an acting capacity for a year, but the Senate has yet to confirm her.
These are a lot of obstacles for a president who, despite insisting he is good at making deals, is actually much better at demolishing them. To date, the rich asshole has left the Paris climate accord, threatened to undo the Iranian nuclear agreement, called for a withdrawal from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and on Thursday, announced new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, to the dismay of U.S. allies.
With additional reporting from Esther Yu Hsi Lee.
‘Campaigns of fear worked’: Neurotic people were particularly vulnerable to the rich asshole and Brexit, study shows
some rich asshole speaking at Value Voters Summit in 2015 (Screenshot)
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A new Social Psychological and Personality Science study published Thursday found that “neurotic traits positively predicted” shares of voters who opted for some rich asshole in the 2016 presidential election or to “leave” in the Brexit vote that same year.
According to University of Austin psychology professor Sam Gosling—one of the study’s co-authors—of the Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism), ”regions highest on neuroticism are particularly receptive to political campaigns that emphasize danger and loss and that previous campaigns have not tapped into these themes as strongly as we saw in 2016.”
The study, spearheaded by Queensland University of Technology psychologist Martin Obschonka, analyzed personality data from 17,217 Britons and over 3 million U.S. participants, testing for “regional prevalence of neurotic personality traits”—including anxiety, and depression.
The researchers them compared those traits with models previously used to predict voting behavior, namely openness and conscientious. As ZMEscience notes, “past studies have shown that low openness and high conscientiousness are good indicators of conservative political views.”
“The models traditionally used for predicting and explaining political behavior did not capture an essential factor that influenced people’s voting decisions in 2016,” Obschonka said.
Researchers found higher levels of anxiety in regions that voted for the rich asshole and Brexit, and Science Daily reports those traits were even stronger “when considering the rich asshole gains since the 2012 election, when Mitt Romney was the Republican candidate.”
In England, rural areas “and the industrialized centers have higher neurotic traits, and higher Brexit votes,” the report notes. “the rich asshole gains (over Romney’s level of support) and higher neurotic traits overlap. The ‘rust belt’ shows a concentration of both neuroticism and the rich asshole gains.”
The researchers say the rich asshole’s gains on Romney in these regions “underscores our initial assumption” that neurotic individuals were drawn to the rich asshole’s “Make American Great Again” message.
Obschonka’s team said their findings are “consistent with the idea that populist campaigns played on the fears of the voters,” adding “campaigns that draw on fear should be particularly compelling to people already prone to being anxious.”
But why did neuroticism win out in these regions, as opposed to openness and conscientiousness—the Big Five personality traits more frequently associated with voter behavior?
“We propose a kind of ‘sleeper effect,’” Obschonka said. “Under normal conditions these traits have no influence, but in certain circumstances, widespread anxiety and fear in a region have the potential to profoundly impact the geopolitical landscape.”
“Both campaigns traded on themes of fear, lost pride and loss aversion which tap into fear-prone personalities; a construct not previous associated with the behavior of voters,” the researched added. Obschonka described this voting behavior as “irrational” because “it was not predictable by means of rational models.”
“So the campaigns of fear worked,” Obschonka said.
They just can't get over her, can they?
GOP candidate says Hillary Clinton is deadlier than gun used in mass shootings
The latest from Prince William County Board Chairman Corey Stewart (R)
Corey Stewart, chairman of the of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors and current U.S. Senate candidate, has a long history of extremist statements. His latest may take the cake.
The man who raffled off an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle last January and praise the weapon as “a good rifle” tweeted on Thursday night that the gun — which was used in the horrific Parkland mass shooting last month as well as in deadly massacres at Sandy Hook Elementary School, an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, a Las Vegas concert, and an Orlando gay night club — was actually less deadly than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
You're more likely to be killed by @timkaine running mate @HillaryClinton than you are by an AR-15. #guncontrol
The tweet attempts to tie Clinton, who has killed no one, to incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine (D), who also has killed no one. Stewart is seeking his party’s nomination to challenge Kaine in November, a year after narrowly losing the GOP gubernatorial nomination.
Stewart has previously made national news for his defense of Confederate “heritage,” for blaming the left for anti-Semitism, for pushing Arizona-style anti-immigrant policies, and for losing his position as some rich asshole’s 2016 Virginia chairman after attacking the campaign for writing-off the state.
The tweet actually echoed another made by a campaign official for one of Stewart’s 2018 primary opponents. Two days earlier, the chairman of Students for Nick Freitas (a Virginia state legislator also seeking the GOP Senate nomination), made almost the same comment.
You’re more likely to be killed by @HillaryClinton than an AR-15.
He later clarified that while Clinton has “not personally killed anyone,” neither has the AR-15.
Iowa professor explains why alt-right racists are history’s losers: ‘The United States fought a war about this’
Richard Spencer, seconds before being punched in the face. (Photo: Screen capture)
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An Iowa history professor warned students that white nationalists try to exploit the fundamental principles of campus life to promote their twisted views.
Jeremy Best, an assistant professor of history at Iowa State University, told students at Des Moines Area Community College that racist groups target colleges because they promote free speech, tolerance and social justice, reported the Daily Times Herald.
“They say they are for the dignity of white or European Americans,” Best said. “They say they are for restoration of America’s economic, intellectual and cultural greatness. They say they’re for the defense of western civilization.”
The professor was invited to speak at the community college during Diversity Week, and he compared the current political climate to Germany during the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party.
Best said today’s white nationalists, like their Nazi forebears, complained that whites faced a mortal threat from Jews and other minority groups — and he warned students not to fall for their deceitful claims to patriotism.
“White nationalists are not American, at least not American in the most hopeful and idealized sense of the word,” Best said. “White nationalist movements reject the inherent equality of all people, it rejects the justice of represented democracy.”
The professor said the Nazi ideology had already been defeated and rejected before.
“The United States fought a war about this — you may have heard of it,” Best said. “It was called World War II. White nationalists said they care about America, but I’m here to tell you I don’t think they do.”
Tariff-loving adviser was stuck in a tiny office outside the White House – but won over the rich asshole by going on TV
Peter Navarro, an economic adviser to some rich asshole on MSNBC (Screen capture)
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President some rich asshole’s sharp turn toward protectionism over the last week has been a victory for advisers such as Peter Navarro and Wilbur Ross, who had been pushing the president to slap tariffs on foreign goods.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Navarro in particular had to claw his way to relevance inside the administration, and he did it by infiltrating the president’s most trusted source of advice: Cable TV news.
“Although confined to a small office across the street from the White House without even an administrative assistant, he had found a new way to get his message to the president — through television,” the Journal reports. “A month ago, some rich asshole picked up the phone and called an aide to say he had just seen Mr. Navarro on TV and was impressed.”
the rich asshole notoriously consumes hours of cable TV news every day, and he regularly live-tweets about stories he watches on the “Fox & Friends” morning program on Fox News. Because of this, many advisers have found that the best way to get their messages across isn’t by talking to him directly, but by appearing on cable news shows.
“He liked the way Peter presented the issues on TV, and he wanted Peter to represent the president on TV,” one aide tells the Journal
POLITICS
U.S. Allies Sign Landmark Trade Pact As the rich asshole Announces Tariffs
the rich asshole pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership last year.
By Dave Sherwood and Felipe Iturrieta
SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Eleven countries including Japan and Canada signed a landmark Asia-Pacific trade agreement without the United States on Thursday in what one minister called a powerful signal against protectionism and trade wars.
The deal came as U.S. President some rich asshole vowed earlier in the day to press ahead with a plan to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, a move that other nations and the International Monetary Fund said could start a global trade war.
The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) will reduce tariffs in countries that together amount to more than 13 percent of the global economy - a total of $10 trillion in gross domestic product. With the United States, it would have represented 40 percent.
“Today, we can proudly conclude this process, sending a strong message to the international community that open markets, economic integration and international cooperation are the best tools for creating economic opportunities and prosperity,” said Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.
Heraldo Munoz, Chile’s minister of foreign affairs, said he expected Chile’s trade with China, its top trading partner, to continue growing alongside trade with CPTPP countries.
Even without the United States, the deal will span a market of nearly 500 million people, making it one of the world’s largest trade agreements, according to Chilean and Canadian trade statistics.
The original 12-member agreement, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), was thrown into limbo early last year when the rich asshole withdrew from the deal three days after his inauguration. He said the move was aimed at protecting U.S. jobs.
The 11 remaining nations finalized a revised trade pact in January. That agreement will become effective when at least six member nations have completed domestic procedures to ratify it, possibly before the end of the year.
“We are very hopeful like others that we will see the CP TPP coming into effect about the end of the year or shortly thereafter,” said Australia Trade Minister Steven Ciobo.
‘THE WAY FORWARD’
The revised agreement eliminates some requirements of the original TPP demanded by U.S. negotiators, including rules to ramp up intellectual property protection of pharmaceuticals. Governments and activists of other member nations worry the changes will raise the costs of medicine.
The final version of the agreement was released in New Zealand on Feb. 21. The member countries are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.
“We’re proud ... to show the world that progressive trade is the way forward, that fair, balanced, and principled trade is the way forward, and that putting citizens first is the way forward for the world when it comes to trade,” Canadian Trade Minister Francois-Phillippe Champagne said.
In January, the rich asshole, who also has threatened to pull the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, told the World Economic Forum in Switzerland that it was possible Washington might return to the TPP pact if it got a better deal. However, New Zealand’s trade minister said that was unlikely in the near term, while Japan has said altering the agreement now would be very difficult.
On Thursday, Munoz said CPTPP was not an agreement against anyone and several governments had said they want to join it.
the rich asshole vowed on Thursday to impose a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and 10 percent tariff on aluminum imports, although he said there would be exemptions for NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada.
He announced the plan for tariffs last week, rattling financial markets.
Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo, in Santiago for the CPTPP signing, told Reuters he would not allow the United States to use the tariffs to pressure it in the NAFTA talks. Champagne told Reuters that Canada would not accept duties or quotas from the United States.
By
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March 9, 2018
The White House has no coherent explanations for their ongoing porn star scandal.
In a move that increases public pressure on the White House, Stormy Daniels’ attorney on Friday suggested they already have evidence to prove that the rich asshole knew about a hush-money payment that was made to the porn actor on the eve of the 2016 election.
It was a payment formulated by the rich asshole’s personal attorney Michael Cohen and designed to keep quiet the fact that the rich asshole had reportedly cheated on his new wife with Daniels in 2006 and 2007.
“We have substantial evidence and facts that were not included in the complaint,” Michael Avenatti told CNN’s Chris Cuomo, when asked why he was so confident about the Daniels lawsuit that was filed this week. “When that evidence and those facts come to light, the American people are going to conclude that attorney Cohen and the White House have not shot straight with them on this issue.”
Earlier in the interview, Avenatti stressed the idea that the rich asshole was unaware of the Daniels payment is “absolutely laughable.”
He added that as the lawsuit progresses, “We’re going to be able to obtain discovery and documents and testimony that’s going to show, I am highly confident, that at all times some rich asshole knew exactly what was going on.”
Daniels reportedly received a $130,000 hush money settlement just weeks before the 2016 election. The settlement blocked her from discussing her affair with the rich asshole.
On Tuesday, Daniels filed a lawsuit claiming that the agreement is invalid because the rich asshole never signed it. His personal attorney did sign the non-disclosure pact. Cohen has claimed that he alone knew about the hush-money payment and that he arranged it all without the rich asshole’s knowledge, just days before the election.
If the court agrees with Daniels about the non-disclosure agreement, she will then be free to speak publicly about her relationship with the rich asshole. In her lawsuit, Daniels is not seeking any money from the rich asshole, just the chance to tell her story without the fear of being sued by the rich asshole or his attorney for breaking her word.
Meanwhile, the story continues to tie the rich asshole’s team in knots.
At Wednesday’s White House press briefing, Sarah Huckabee Sanders tried to wave the controversy off. But in the process she confirmed she had spoken to the rich asshole about the Daniels scandal. She also tried to suggest the legal action had been settled because the rich asshole’s attorney had recently won an arbitration ruling on the case.
But that was a hearing and a ruling that Daniels’ attorney said they were never even told about. It certainly doesn’t appear to be blocking Daniels’ lawsuit from going forward.
This story will only get worse for the White House.
Poll: Dem leads by 4 points in Pennsylvania House race
BY JOSH DELK - 03/09/18 10:18 AM EST
Democrat Conor Lamb has a four-point lead over Republican Rick Saccone in a new poll released Friday, days before a special election for the House seat in Pennsylvania,.
Lamb, a former federal prosecutor and Marine veteran, leads the GOP state legislator by 48 percent to 44 percent in the new RABA Research poll. It was first published by Talking Points Memo.
If Lamb wins, it would be an upset given the fact that the Pittsburgh area district was taken by President the rich asshole in the 2016 election by nearly 20 points.
Recent polls have shown Lamb with a consistent lead, however, and the RABA poll gives him his biggest lead yet.
Other polls have shown his support growing in recent weeks despite the millions of GOP dollars being poured into his opponent's campaign.
The two are campaigning for former Rep. Tim Murphy's (R-Pa.) seat. Murphy resigned in October.
The moderate Democrat's campaign has bested Saccone's in fundraising, and has outspent the mild-mannered Air Force veteran on radio and television ads. Saccone has taken heat from the House GOP's campaign wing for his tepid fundraising efforts in a district that party leaders thought they had in the bag.
The poll surveyed 707 likely voters in the district from March 6 to 8. Forty-one percent of those polled identified as Democrats, while 40 percent identified as Republica. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.
MSNBC’s Mika mocks the rich asshole’s negotiation with Kim Jong-un: He can’t even make a deal with a porn star
Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough (MSNBC)
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MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said President some rich asshole had agreed to meet with Kim Jong-un as a distraction from the Stormy Daniels scandal — and his co-host said the porn star payout showed why he could not reach a deal with the North Korean leader.
The “Morning Joe” co-hosts warned that nothing would come from the verbal invitation the rich asshole accepted without consulting the State Department or diplomacy experts, because the move was one of his impulsive reactions to the news cycle.
“He just makes a decision on tariffs because of Hope Hicks, and he makes a decision on North Korea because of Stormy Daniels,” Scarborough said. “People can deny that all they want, but if you’re doing that, you’re in the tank for some rich asshole, because it is painfully obvious that that is what’s going on.”
He said the meeting was a short-term decision that carries potentially devastating long-term consequences.
“He did not want the Washington Post to have the words ‘Stormy Daniels’ on the front page today,” Scarborough added. “Guess what? He succeeded, and he succeeded by lying about a letter that didn’t even exist, and now he’s telling the truth, and fools rush in.”
Scarborough believes the meeting will actually take place, but he has no confidence in the president’s ability to reach any sort of agreement with North Korea on its nuclear program or any other issue of substance.
“We’ve been seeing this guy on the national stage now long enough to know that so often it’s just all talk, it’s all bluster,” he said. “He talks about the art of the deal, the deal never comes through. All bluster about the wall — there’s not going to ever be a deal for the wall.”
Scarborough said the president would likely walk into the meeting unprepared and treat it as another television spectacle or business opportunity.
“He’ll do what is easy, he won’t read a one-sheet on North Korea, he won’t figure out how the United States has been fooled the past four presidents have been fooled, since 1994, or the past three presidents,” Scarborough said. “He does the easy things, and if he can get him at Mar-A-Lago, even better.”
He is horrible at making deals,” Scarborough added. “That’s why the man ended up $9 billion in debt.”
Brzezinski stepped in to twist the knife.
“He can’t even make a deal with a porn star,” she said. “He doesn’t even sign the papers of the deal that he struck. Think about that.”
The Memo: Dangers multiply for Trump in Mueller probe
BY NIALL STANAGE - 03/09/18 06:05 AM EST
The waters of Robert Mueller’s investigation are rising higher by the day, putting President Trump and his inner circle in increasing legal and political danger.
A series of recent revelations “have, at least, indicated that there is fire amid all that smoke,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI special agent who was also detailed to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from 2012 to 2014.
New disclosures have come at a dizzying speed in recent days.
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Mueller had gathered evidence suggesting a meeting in the Seychelles shortly before Trump’s inauguration was an attempt to create a back channel between his team and the Kremlin.
The special counsel is also said to be investigating whether Jared Kushner’s family business dealings influenced U.S. foreign policy.
In addition, Mueller’s team has reportedly secured the cooperation of a hitherto-marginal figure, Lebanese-American businessman George Nader, who was stopped and questioned by the FBI at Washington’s Dulles Airport in January.
And Nader’s emails are purported to reveal a push by a Republican fundraiser with links to the United Arab Emirates to get Secretary of State Rex Tillerson fired.
There have also been a number of other intriguing, if more marginal, developments.
A New Yorker profile of Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored a contentious dossier alleging Russia had compromising material on Trump, included the detail that British intelligence services had intercepted “a stream of illicit communications between Trump’s team and Moscow” during the 2016 campaign. “The content of these intercepts has not become public,” the author, Jane Mayer, added.
Put it all together and experts agree the perils for Team Trump are multiplying.
Mueller’s team is “digging deep into [every] element of a very complicated story,” said Harry Litman, a former deputy assistant attorney general.
“When they meet in the middle and complete the puzzle, it’s likely that a number of additional people will be going to jail and that Trump’s criminal conduct on one or more levels will be apparent."
Trump and his allies vigorously insist that he has done nothing wrong.
The president has said again and again that the Mueller probe is a “witchhunt,” confected by Democrats and other anti-Trump forces to assuage their embarrassment about Hillary Clinton’s shock loss in the 2016 election.
The president’s most fervent backers, in both politics and the media, have suggested that Mueller’s probe might be derailed by allegations of political bias.
Those hopes reached their peak with the publication of the so-called “Nunes memo,” in early February. The memo, written by members of staff for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) alleged misdeeds by the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ).
But with every new revelation, it has become harder to undercut the investigation in any fundamental way. In mid-February, Mueller indicted 13 Russians over alleged cyber efforts to influence the 2016 election.
“Despite President Trump’s continuing claim that there is ‘no collusion, no collusion,’ ironically it could be the case that, even if there is no collusion, Trump would still be exposed to criminal jeopardy based upon these other investigations,” said Jimmy Gurulé, a former assistant attorney general who has served in senior positions under Republican and Democratic presidents.
“The broader investigation is fanning out into greater jeopardy and greater potential liability.”
Some law enforcement veterans warn that Trump’s critics are in danger of getting ahead of the evidence.
James Gagliano, who spent more than two decades in the FBI, said that he had yet to see anything that proved there was “an underlying scheme” to collude with Russia to influence the election.
But he nonetheless acknowledged that the probe was now spreading beyond that specific question.
“To say that [Mueller] is not going to bring more charges, I think would be folly,” Gagliano said. “I think there will be more charges.”
Former DOJ veterans say that the recent revelations simply underline what some experts have pointed out repeatedly: that Mueller’s team knows far more than is in the public arena, and can reveal it at a time of their choosing.
“It’s not Mueller who is discovering new things all the time, as much as it is that we are learning about areas Mueller has been investigating all along,” said Joyce White Vance, who served as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama throughout the Obama administration.
“The system is not designed for us to know everything prosecutors are investigating and the tip of the iceberg we are seeing is far from the whole picture,” Vance added. “But we do seem to be seeing more of the tip over time.”
Opinion is almost unanimous that there are more bombshells to come. That could be very bad news for the president and those close to him.
The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage, primarily focused on Donald Trump’s presidency.
Gun-owning journalist dares ‘laughingstock’ Dana Loesch to back up her NRA ‘bullsh*t’: ‘You don’t have the guts’
Dana Loesch and Linda Tirado
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Author and journalist Linda Tirado challenged Dana Loesch to back up her threats against people in her line of work — but she warned that she’s as skilled with guns as the NRA spokeswoman claims to be.
Tirado, the author of Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America and the viral essay “This Is Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense,” called out Loesch as a phony and a “shill” who’s making America worse in a devastating Daily Beast article.
“You don’t scare me, and nor do your crazed fans,” Tirado wrote. “You’re real used to being the armed one in a conversation, and that’s a reasonable assumption. Most journalists who call out your bullsh*t aren’t gun owners. Nor are they from an NRA family. Most journalists don’t live near the holler. Most of us didn’t come from the bottom. But I am, and I do, and I did.”
“I’m not afraid of you, or your single percent of the population, or the money of the people who pay you, or your clenched fists,” she added.
She mocked Loesch as a racist “ghoul” and a “laughingstock,” and she dared her to back up her “posturing and empty rhetoric” in NRA TV videos encouraging violence against journalists.
“Let me answer your most recent ‘ad’ quite directly: Come for me. No, really,” Tirado said. “Are you not just a shill? Do you believe the words you are happy to say, or is it just the paycheck that keeps you on air? You said my time was running out, and as far as science is concerned your hourglass is finite. I’m waiting for you, since you issued your vague challenge. Maybe that’s another difference between where we come from; in my mountains we don’t issue ultimatums we don’t mean to follow up on. It would be a sign of weakness to issue an empty threat.”
“Because I live in this world you have helped to create, I should be very clear here that I make no threat,” Tirado added. “I just don’t think you have the guts to follow through on yours, even should you search the darkest corners of your stunted mind and shriveled soul and find a shred of intellectual consistency.”
She told Loesch that she had sold her soul to the NRA for nothing, because the Parkland teens she insulted would eventually destroy the “dystopia” she helped create.
“When you are old, you will consider your life and find it ash in your mouth while you watch today’s children systematically undoing your life’s work,” Tirado wrote. “They don’t fear you any more than I do, and they will win.”
the rich asshole’s VA secretary so fearful of his own staff that he posted an armed guard outside his office
Dr. David J. Shulkin testifies before the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee on February 1, 2017. VA photo by Robert Turtil.
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Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin is now in an all-out war with his own staff.
The Washington Post reports that Shulkin’s relationship has now gotten so toxic with some of his staff members that “an armed guard now stands outside his office.”
The Post’s report claims that Shulkin, who is a holdover from the Obama administration but who was renominated by the rich asshole at the start of his term, has become paranoid that his own staff is trying to get him fired from his job, and the secretary’s “10th-floor executive suite was recently revoked for several people he has accused of lobbying the White House to oust him.”
Shulkin came under fire from members of his own department earlier this year when an inspector general’s report found that he improperly accepted tickets to a tennis tournament during a government trip to the United Kingdom in 2017.
According to the Post, this report so infuriated some veterans that they began issuing threats against Shulkin — which was what led him to place an armed guard outside his office.
Given this atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust, one senior VA manager tells the Post that needed reforms at the agency are being stalled.
“Things have come to a grinding halt,” the source said. “It’s killing the agency. Nobody trusts each other.”
the rich asshole meeting is a win for North Korea’s Kim: analysts
President some rich asshole and Kim Jong-un (driver Photographer/Flickr)
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Nuclear-armed North Korea has outplayed a diplomatically naive US president with the agreement to hold a summit, analysts say, and has no intention of giving up its atomic weapons.
some rich asshole hailed the planned meeting with Kim Jong Un as “great progress” on the road to denuclearisation.
But analysts warn that agreeing to a sit-down so early in the process gives Pyongyang something it desperately wants without extracting meaningful concessions in return.
“North Korea has been seeking a summit with an American president for more than 20 years,” pointed out arms control specialist Jeffrey Lewis, of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
“It has literally been a top foreign policy goal.”
The US needs to talk to North Korea, he tweeted, but Kim was not seeking the meeting “so that he can surrender North Korea’s weapons”.
“Kim is inviting the rich asshole to demonstrate that his investment in nuclear and missile capabilities has forced the United States to treat him as an equal.”
No sitting US president has ever met any of the North’s leaders, much less gone to Pyongyang.
Kim’s father Kim Jong Il invited Bill Clinton to come after the first North-South summit in 2000, but Clinton demurred; he visited the North only after leaving the White House to secure the release of detained Americans.
Jimmy Carter, another former president, also carried out a similar mercy mission, and other trips to try to broker peace.
If the summit goes ahead — and the rich asshole’s White House is marked by a tendency to perform sudden about-faces — it will certainly be historic, and not to be sniffed at, argues John Delury of Yonsei University in Seoul.
“Engaging (North Korea) is very hard work,” he said. “This is the beginning, not the grand solution. But it’s a very good start.”
– ‘Really harsh sanctions’ –
Months of raging tensions between the US and North Korea, involving personal insults and threats of war from both sides, gave way suddenly this year to diplomacy, much of it centred on the South’s hosting of the Winter Olympics.
Experts say Pyongyang was driven to make overtures to the US by the looming impact of ever-tightening sanctions on the North Korean economy and the oft-repeated warning of military action by the rich asshole administration.
The North’s major trade partner China was implementing “really harsh sanctions” for the “first time ever”, Andrei Lankov of the Korea Risk Group told AFP, and the economy was set to “start crumbling” within a year.
“More important is a fear of possible military operations by the US,” he added. “North Koreans don’t want to be shot at.”
But Pyongyang will play for time for as long as it can, he said. “North Koreans are going to talk about denuclearisation a lot without any intention to ever surrender their nuclear weapons.”
According to the South Korean envoys who carried the message from Kim to the rich asshole, the North Korean leader said he was “committed to denuclearisation” and expressed his willingness to meet the rich asshole as soon as possible.
And he promised to halt nuclear and missile tests while talks are underway.
But the North already possesses rockets capable of reaching the US mainland, and last year detonated what it said was an H-bomb. It has long described itself as a full-fledged nuclear power, and Kim has already declared the development of his nuclear forces complete.
– ‘Strategic gamble’ –
the rich asshole’s sudden decision to meet Kim was “a major strategic gamble”, said Evan Medeiros, the former Asian affairs director of the National Security Council under president Barack Obama.
There had been no clear indication Kim was willing to abandon his nuclear weapons, he said, adding the North had long been “a skilful manipulator”.
“Kim was likely able to secure the meeting with the rich asshole by taking advantage of the rich asshole’s vanity as the self-professed world’s best dealmaker and South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s fervent desire to achieve peace with North Korea through dialogue.”
The White House, which is short on regional expertise — there has been no ambassador in Seoul for more than a year — will be going into any eventual summit without even rudimentary diplomatic groundwork in place.
“However skillful a negotiator the rich asshole believes himself to be, there are few people in his administration with experience managing such a complex process with such a wily counterpart,” said Medeiros.
Abraham Denmark, director of the Wilson Center’s Asia programme, predicted: “Kim will accomplish the dream of his father and grandfather by making North Korea a nuclear state, and gain tremendous prestige and legitimacy by meeting with an American President as an equal.
“All without giving up a single warhead or missile.”
The more the Dems win, the better off we are.
It was a bad election night for Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas’ best-funded Tea Party group
Greg Abbott speaking at FreePac, hosted by FreedomWorks, in Phoenix, Arizona (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
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Republican incumbents who dared to buck their party leaders or supposedly influential activist groups had a target on their backs in the 2018 primaries.
Nearly all of them won anyway.
Even when Republican Gov. Greg Abbott put his own campaign money and clout on the line, he mostly came up empty-handed, failing to defeat maverick Republican Reps. Sarah Davis of Houston and Lyle Larson of San Antonio.
Perhaps no group got spanked harder Tuesday night than Empower Texans, a conservative group known for using hardball tactics and waging aggressive campaigns against legislators like Davis and Larson who buck the Tea Party orthodoxy. Its political action committee, fat with oil money, spent more than any other PAC in Texas as of late January, a Texas Tribune analysis showed, but when the smoke cleared from the 2018 Republican primaries, the group could claim only a small handful of scalps.
Of the 16 sitting state House members the group went after in the GOP primaries, only two were defeated — Rep. Jason Villalba, a Dallas Republican carrying self-inflicted wounds from his Twitter and Facebook rants, and Rep. Wayne Faircloth, R-Galveston, who was also opposed by Abbott and lost to a businessman who largely self-funded.
Villalba represents a district Democrats are targeting as a prime pickup opportunity in November, so interior designer Lisa Luby Ryan, the more conservative candidate who beat him, won’t be a shoo-in.
Empower Texans can take some credit for helping to unseat incumbent GOP state Sen. Craig Estes of Wichita Falls, but he was opposed by his own lieutenant governor and had been underwater in the polls for months. GOP state Sen. Kel Seliger of Amarillo, meanwhile, beat back Empower Texans’ preferred candidate, narrowly escaping a runoff.
The group’s top target — state Rep. Charlie Geren of Fort Worth — also cruised to an easy re-election Tuesday night even though the hundreds of thousands of dollars Empower spent to oust him made his race the state’s most expensive House contest. The Empower-endorsed candidate, Bo French, who also ran against Geren in 2016, improved his performance from two years ago by 1.4 percentage points. He still lost 57-43.
“The forces of extremism, like Empower Texans … overplayed their hand, turned voters off and experienced significant losses in the March primaries,” said GOP consultant Eric Bearse, who helped Davis and three other candidates win amid an onslaught from Empower and other critics. “It started to become clear in some of these races that it really was a choice between our local representative and someone who is wholly owned by outside groups and outside money.”
In a tweet Tuesday night, Empower Texans CEO Michael Quinn Sullivan declared victory by pointing out that the organization helped re-elect all of the conservative “Freedom Caucus” House members on the ballot while knocking off Faircloth and helping to snag an open state House seat in staunchly conservative Montgomery County with the election of Steve Toth, who had formerly served in the Legislature.
Sullivan did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment, but in a subsequent tweet Wednesday he took note of firebrand Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick‘s big re-election margin and pointed to runoffs in open seats formerly held by “RINOs” — a political slur meaning “Republicans in Name Only.”
“House & Senate have moved right. GREAT!” he wrote.
Abbott, who crushed no-name opponents in his own primary, glossed over the losses of two of his three hand-picked House candidates in a Facebook Live event Tuesday evening, though he acknowledged that in all the primary races he got involved in, “some didn’t win.”
The governor said he took sides in primaries because he wanted Republican voters to have alternatives, and now that they have spoken he’s ready to move on to November, when the GOP will be fighting to stop a feared “blue wave” that could sweep some of their candidates out of the heavily-Republican Legislature.
“The important thing is getting involved, giving primary voters a choice, to choose the candidate they support,” Abbott said. “Now that we turn the corner and head toward November, it’s important that Republicans come together. Sure we may have differences in our family. But we are one family in the Republican Party.”
An Abbott campaign official said regardless of the election night results, the governor’s willingness to back challengers will make other Republicans think twice before taking on the governor in the Legislature or straying too far from the conservative orthodoxy.
“I don’t think anyone can say that we didn’t send a message. What candidate wants to spend half a million dollars in a primary where they are the incumbent?” said the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “Additionally, it is clear that the governor’s coattails continue to be the most effective and sought after in the state. In the vast majority of contested races, the victors used the governor’s messages and images during the primary.”
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