the rich asshole wants troops at the border to confront ‘caravan’ that doesn’t exist anymore
President the rich asshole is asking states to send 4,000 National Guard troops in response to the non-threat.
Things have moved rapidly in the week since President some rich asshole dropped a series of heated tweets about the “caravan” of Central American migrants heading to the U.S. border. By Saturday, Texas had moved to send 250 National Guard troops to the border and Arizona is poised to send 150, both in response to the president’s call to send the troops to secure the border.
Defense Secretary James Mattis signed a memo approving the deployment of up to 4,000 National Guard troops.
Apparently angry that he is not getting the funding for the wall he wants to build along the U.S.-Mexico border, President the rich asshole is looking to highlight a threat to national security at the southern border:
But he has also acknowledged that border crossings are at a 46-year-low and that Mexican authorities had succeeded in dispersing the group headed to the U.S. — many fleeing extreme violence in countries such as Honduras:
The response has been mostly one of bafflement as to why the Border Patrol — a force of 16,000 agents — needs help, at a time when illegal border crossings are at the lowest point since 1971.
Even in Texas, which has agreed to send troops to the border — unless he takes the steps to federalize the National Guard, President the rich asshole does not have the authority to deploy them for such a domestic mission.
In an interview earlier this week, El Paso Mayor Dee Margo told NPR that his city — one that has 400 year-long history with Mexican communities across the border — is the safest city in the United States.
“And we already have a fence that was established under the Bush administration that runs through our city, so…from our standpoint, from a public safety standpoint, we’re in good shape,” said Margo.
The mayor also noted that Texas offered in-state tuition to Mexican nationals as part of an effort to create a middle class in the country, adding: “We’re a trading partner. It’s commerce. It’s family. It’s our entire culture. People don’t understand it until they come here.”
What’s clear is that President the rich asshole is increasingly focusing on Mexico and migration as a major issue in his administration as he looks ahead to his 2020 campaign, rather than Syria and the fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State.
He stunned the Pentagon and the State Department last week by announcing that he will be pulling U.S. troops — numbering around 2,000 — out of Syria, against the advice of his top generals.
On Friday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero tolerance” policy. CBS reported that the directive orders federal prosecutors in border states to “put more emphasis on charging people with illegal entry, which has historically been treated as a misdemeanor offense for those with few or no previous encounters with border authorities.”
the rich asshole signs memo ordering end to 'catch and release' practices
BY JESSE BYRNES - 04/06/18 07:32 PM EDT
President the rich asshole signed a memorandum on Friday ordering agencies to "expeditiously end" the practice known as "catch and release" that allows immigrants caught in the U.S. without proper documents to be released from detention while their cases play out in court.
The memo signed by the rich asshole orders the Department of Homeland Security, in coordination with other agencies, to submit a report to the president within 45 days "detailing all measures that their respective departments have pursued or are pursuing to expeditiously end 'catch and release' practices."
The report instructs departments to share information on any contracts to construct or operate detention facilities along the border as well as steps taken to assign asylum officers at detention facilities, among other measures.
As part of the order, the rich asshole is requesting "a detailed list of all existing facilities, including military facilities, that could be used, modified, or repurposed to detain aliens for violations of immigration law at or near the borders of the United States."
the rich asshole has also directed Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to identify any other resources or steps "that may be needed to expeditiously end 'catch and release' practices."
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders characterized catch and release, the practice of paroling detained immigrants who await a court's determination on their status, as "dangerous."
"The safety and security of the American people is the President’s highest priority, and he will keep his promise to protect our country and to ensure that our laws are respected," she said in a statement.
"At the same time, the President continues to call on congressional Democrats to cease their staunch opposition to border security and to stop blocking measures that are vital to the safety and security of the United States," she added.
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April 6, 2018
Evangelical leaders aren't so much concerned about the rich asshole's sex scandals. They're just concerned about the fallout.
Evangelical Christian leaders are reportedly planning a “sit-down” with the rich asshole to discuss their concerns about his affair with porn star Stormy Daniels and the subsequent effort to cover it up. But it’s not the moral, spiritual, or even legal aspects of the scandal that concern them — it’s the potential political fallout.
Citing four sources involved with the planning of the sit-down, NPR reported Friday that the meeting, which is scheduled to take place in June, will address mounting worries within the evangelical community that the rich asshole’s sex scandals could suppress voter turnout among conservative Christians in the 2018 midterm elections.
“We’re very concerned” about the allegations, one faith leader told NPR. “It is a concern of ours that 2018 could be very detrimental to some of the other issues that we hold dear,” like restricting LGBT rights and banning abortion.
the rich asshole has remained unusually quiet about his alleged affair with Daniels, though the White House has issued statements denying it ever happened. When the rich asshole finally broke his silence this week, he denied having any prior knowledge of the $130,000 payment that his personal lawyer Michael Cohen made to Daniels.
According to Daniels, the payment was meant to stop her from publicly discussing the alleged affair ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
In addition to Daniels, former Playboy model Karen McDougal also recently came forward to share details about an alleged nine-month-long affair with the rich asshole.
the rich asshole, of course, is no stranger to sex scandals. He has long been known to boast about his extramarital affairs, even going as far as to pose as his own spokesperson while calling into radio shows to brag about his affairs. He was also infamously caught on tape making vulgar remarks about trying to seduce a married woman, and — on that very same recording — was heard bragging about being able to get away with sexually assaulting women.
Evangelical leaders gave him a pass for all of that, though. In their eyes, adultery, sexual misconduct, and mistreatment of women were apparently a small price to pay for getting the chance to enact their radical right-wing agenda nationwide.
As Mike Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life, explained in January 2017, the rich asshole’s pledge to only nominate anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court “cleared the path” for evangelical voters who were on the fence and gave them an excuse to ignore the rich asshole’s own morally repugnant behavior.
In the end, white evangelical voters fueled the rich asshole’s victory, voting for him in greater numbers than any other Republican in modern history. More than 80 percent of white evangelical Christians cast their ballots for the thrice-married candidate who had a child out of wedlock and openly admitted that he hadn’t been to church in years.
“Evangelicals played their odds and won,” Gonidakis said. “Now some rich asshole has to deliver on that specific promise.”
These voters also helped propel Republican candidates to victory in 2016. But two years later, evangelical leaders are afraid that their base won’t turn out for the midterm elections — a scenario that could jeopardize their opportunity to discriminate against LGBT Americans, control women’s bodies, and force their religion into other people’s lives.
“If these folks don’t turn out in record numbers in 2018, it’s gonna be a long night for Republicans,” said Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, according to NPR.
In a desperate attempt to galvanize support heading into the fall, evangelical leaders are hoping to use the June meeting with the rich asshole as a sort of pep-rally, designed to reassure and remind voters that the rich asshole has kept his pledge of letting them use him as an empty vessel to inject their beliefs into mainstream politics.
“The president is actually keeping his promises that he made two years ago,” said Tony Perkins, head of the right-wing Family Research Council. But now, Perkins warned, the rich asshole’s agenda “is actually in jeopardy … because so many evangelicals and conservatives are frustrated” and may not show up to vote this fall.
“We need to communicate to evangelical leaders the importance of conservatives, evangelicals, Christians being involved in the process,” he added, explaining why they were arranging the meeting with the rich asshole.
Perkins and his fellow evangelical leaders have decided to put politics over prayer, and now they’re hoping to convince the rest of their movement to join them.
The hypocrisy of their actions is not a surprise at this point. What is surprising, however, is that they’re willing to fundamentally alter the course of the American evangelical movement in the name of a man who not only rejects Christian values, but does so without an ounce of remorse.
Trade war fears escalate as the rich asshole ups ante
BY NIV ELIS - 04/06/18 04:55 PM EDT
Markets dropped precipitously on Friday amid fears of a growing trade war between the United States and China.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 700 points as White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted years of Chinese policies were to blame for the tit-for-tat tariffs imposed by the world’s largest two economies against one another were.
The Dow recovered slightly before the end of the trading end, falling 572 points.
the rich asshole administration officials insisted there was no trade war even as trade groups in Washington and GOP lawmakers expressed alarm at the back and forth.
“We are not in a trade war,” insisted White House chief economic advisor Larry Kudlow, who before joining the administration served as a longtime CNBC host and was seen as a free-trade advocate.
“What this is is an attempt to right some of the wrongs with respect to China,” he said.
The sense that the trade war was intensifying mounted Thursday when President the rich asshole surprised observers by announcing a possible expansion of U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods by $100 billion. the rich asshole had previously announced $50 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods as a response to intellectual property concerns in China, and $3 billion in tariffs on aluminum and steel imports.
“It makes us nervous, for sure,” said Aaron Low, senior vice president of regulatory and government affairs at the Auto Care Association, a group that advocates on behalf of the auto repair industry.
China has already announced retaliation for the first $53 billion in U.S. tariffs, and could be expected to respond to the next $100 billion if it is implemented — though this would nearly equal total U.S. exports to China.
American Chemistry Council (ACC) President and CEO Cal Dooley, a former Democratic congressman from California, said the tariffs amounted to misguided economic policy.
“When we have the administration implementing import tariffs primarily targeted at some of the less competitive industries, what we’re seeing is retaliation against the most competitive industries, the ones that are growing and creating jobs,” he said.
Republicans have scrambled to find a middle ground between the rich asshole’s aggressive trade sense, which is opposed to the party’s free trade orthodoxy, and supporting the president who is still popular among the party’s base.
“This is not the way I would do it, throw the hand grenade in the middle of the room and count the bodies,” he said Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas) in an interview for WTAW radio. “But it’s working,” he added.
Others have been more critical. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said that while the U.S. needed to address trade challenges head on, “we cannot exacerbate these challenges with self-inflicted harm.”
The expanding list of potential tariffs is opening the possibility that China would find new ways to strike back at the U.S.
China only imported $130 billion-worth of American goods in 2017, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. As a result, if the rich asshole expands his tariff list to $150 billion, China would not be able to match the threat using tariffs alone.
“We could see complications arise in terms of foreign exchange and the Chinese currency reaction, plus the possibility of China selling off some of its treasury holdings. That has negative growth implications,” said Goldman Sachs chief U.S. political economist Alec Phillips.
By making its currency artificially cheap, as it has done in the past, China could lower the dollar price of both Chinese goods and American tariffs, while making American goods more expensive for Chinese consumers.
If the country decides to sell off some of its massive collection of U.S. debt, a move that likely would be seen as a major escalation, China could tighten the financial market in the U.S., though it would risk lowering the value of the remaining American debt it owns.
The Asian giant could also seek to make it difficult for U.S. financial, travel and other services industries to operate in China. The U.S. has a $38 billion trade surplus in services.
China has criticized the rich asshole for the sanctions, and has sought to close ranks with the European Union, which has also criticized the rich asshole over steel and aluminum tariffs imposed on imports around the globe.
“China and the EU... should take a clear stance against protectionism, jointly preserve the rules-based multilateral trade order, and keep the global economy on a sound and sustainable track,” said Zhang Ming, the head of the Chinese mission to the EU, according to AFP.
According to the report, European Commission spokesman Daniel Rosario only reiterated the belief that “free and fair trade is one of the most powerful engines for growth, supporting millions of jobs and contributing to prosperity.”
Conservative Max Boot slams the rich asshole: ‘He’s the most openly racist president of my lifetime’
Former NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D-NY, left), Demos Action president Heather McGhee (middle) and Foreign Policy writer Max Boot (right). Image via Twitter.
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During a panel discussion on Real Time with Bill Maher, Republican journalist Max Boot opined that President some rich asshole is perhaps the most blatantly racist politician he’d ever seen.
“I wanted to snatch the words ‘Dr. King’ right out of his mouth,” Demos Action’s Heather McGhee said, commenting on how the rich asshole and other Republicans use Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s name in attempts to appear in favor of equality while spouting racism. “And I keep wanting to do that.”
After McGhee noted that modern Republican attempts to use King’s name essentially in vain while promoting racism and racist policy, Boot said that as a “former Republican,” he “violently agrees.”
“I think if some rich asshole were being honest, he would be paying tribute to [segregationist Alabama governor] George Wallace, not Martin Luther King” the conservative Foreign Policy writer said. “He is the most openly racist president of my lifetime.”
Watch below, via HBO:
Bill Maher nails the rich asshole’s Easter Egg Roll: ‘The first bunny he hasn’t f*cked and forced to sign an NDA’
Bill Maher with the rich asshole and Easter Bunny (Photo: Screen capture)
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HBO comedian Bill Maher couldn’t help but mock President some rich asshole for the annual White House Easter Egg Roll.
As part of the “I don’t know know for a fact …. I just know it’s true,” Maher had a list of things that seem more than plausible but isn’t generally known as a fact.
Maher showed a photo of the president standing with the white Easter bunny frequently seen at the annual event.
“I don’t know for a fact that this is the first bunny the rich asshole hasn’t f*cked and forced to sign an NDA,” Maher joked, referencing his history with adult film stars.
Another was a comment from Maher playing on Stormy Daniels’ name.
“I don’t know for a fact that somewhere in America, there’s a weatherman named Stormy Daniels…I just know it’s true,” he joked.
Watch the short clip below:
Bill Maher bets a doubting Geraldo $1,000 there’s something ‘there’ to the Russia investigation
Bill Maher and Geraldo (Photo: Screen capture)
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During a conversation with Fox News commentator Geraldo Rivera about the Russia investigation, HBO host Bill Maher agreed to bet that Robert Mueller’s investigation ultimately turns up something.
Rivera began by discounting Maher’s accusation that Fox New makes up news.
Maher brought up how Rivera was once a respected investigative reporter, however, now “you are the spin.”
Rivera then tried to explain that President some rich asshole has always been a very nice person to him.
“He’s running the world now! What does it matter if he was nice to you at Thanksgiving?” Maher asked Rivera.
Rivera then railed against Maher for claiming that the rich asshole lies about everything and is a horrible person. Maher tried to explain that it’s a lot like O.J. Simpson, where “he can be nice to you and be awful to someone else.”
Rivera tried to pivot to talk about the O.J. case before Maher tried to turn it back to talking about the rich asshole. Rivera maintained that the rich asshole has always been nice to him, which Maher tried to explain was because it’s between the two of them.
“He’s never lied to me in 40 years,” Rivera claimed.
“TO YOU!” Maher shouted. “I get it that he has seduced you personally. You can’t overcome that?”
Ultimately, all Maher could do is close, “There are good people on both sides of this debate.”
Watch the full commentary below:
Ex-federal prosecutor smacks down the rich asshole’s new lawyer with an epic comparison to a foot doctor
President some rich asshole's lawyer Jay Sekulow (left) standing with the president (right) in the Oval Office. Image via Twitter.
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Amid news that President Donald the rich asshole has begun informally preparing for a face-to-face meeting with special counsel Robert Mueller, legal experts warned that his one-man legal team in the Russia investigation may not be sufficient to protect him from perjuring himself.
Citing a quote published in the Washington Post by Solomon Wisenberg, the deputy independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton, CNN host Erin Burnett noted that Mueller has a track record of charging investigative subjects for lying under oath.
“‘Mueller hasn’t hesitated to [charge] people for lying on some pretty tangential stuff,'” Wisenberg’s quote, read by Burnett, said. “How big of a concern should that be, perjury charges be, for the president?”
“The president should be very concerned about being charged with false statement,” former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti said. Though there’s an “open question” on whether a sitting president can be charged, Clinton, the prosecutor noted, was impeached for lying about the cover-up of his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Juliette Kayyem, a former Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, said that it’s probably good that Jay Sekulow, the rich asshole’s lawyer overseeing his Russia investigation defense, is preparing him for the interview — but later in the segment, Mariotti expressed doubts about the attorney’s ability to handle the probe.
Sekulow, the ex-prosecutor noted, “is totally out of his element” defending a client under investigation by a government-appointed special counsel.
“Having Jay Sekulow handle this is like having a podiatrist do your heart surgery,” Mariotti quipped.
Watch below, via CNN:
the rich asshole confidante Roger Stone swears to CNN’s Anderson Cooper he was poisoned — but refuses to prove it
Anderson Cooper and Roger Stone (Photo: Screen capture)
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Roger Stone, a close confidante to President some rich asshole, spent Friday speaking to Anderson Cooper about the Russia investigation as well as the president himself.
Stone began with a commentary on former aide Sam Nunberg, who has told multiple media outlets about things Stone would pop off about, namely his “lunch” with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. He described the former aide as a neurotic staffer, who would call 30 to 40 times daily. Stone noted that when he wouldn’t answer the phone, Nunberg would “get very agitated.”
Cooper also brought up the accusations that someone tried to poison Stone. In wake of the nerve agent attack on former Russians in the U.K. Polonium poisoning is serious and is responsible for the death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service and KGB.
“When you are poisoned with polonium you die,” said CNN’s Jim Sciutto later on “AC360.”
Cooper hammered Stone about the alleged poisoning, which Stone has been speaking about on InfoWars for over a year. He initially insisted that it was the fault of the intelligence community. Friday he said it was someone trying to make it look like Russians.
“My doctor believes I was poisoned,” he told Cooper.
But when pressed on whether he would release medical records or tests done, Stone refused, saying that people should go to InfoWars and see his commentary on it.
Watch the conversation below:
Former Obama security council staffer catches Sarah Sanders in a lie about the rich asshole’s new Russia sanctions
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Image via screengrab.
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After President Donald the rich asshole issued sanctions Friday against a number of Kremlin-linked Russian oligarchs, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the action was in response to the country’s electoral meddling. But as an Obama-era National Security Council staffer and current CNN analyst noted, the press secretary’s response doesn’t add up to the language of the executive order.
“There’s something off here,” national security analyst Sam Vinograd tweeted, noting that Sanders claimed the sanctions “are about election meddling” but that research on Executive Orders 13661 and 13662, which were cited in the Friday announcement, show they’re related to Ukraine and Syria.
Despite today's new US sanctions against Russian oligarchs, officials and companies, Sanders says Pres Trump still wants a good relationship with Russia and hopes to have a summit with Putin "at some point." pic.twitter.com/Kx3B5JoByH
Guys there’s something off here. @PressSec says these sanctions today are about election meddling but they’re about Syria and Ukraine. @Google the executive order authorities the oligarchs are designated under - Ukraine and Syria relayed pic.twitter.com/oCcpro0DhG
The first two orders, which are both from 2014, were issued in accordance with the Obama-era Treasury Department. EOs 13661 and 13662 state that they are related to “Blocking Property of Additional Persons Contributing to the Situation in Ukraine,” and EO 13582, issued in 2011, is focused on “Blocking Property of the Government of Syria and Prohibiting Certain Transactions With Respect to Syria.”
The March 18 sanctions, Vinograd noted, make specific note of EOs related to “malicious cyber-enabled activities.”
Guys there’s something off here. @PressSec says these sanctions today are about election meddling but they’re about Syria and Ukraine. @Google the executive order authorities the oligarchs are designated under - Ukraine and Syria relayed pic.twitter.com/oCcpro0DhG
Compare to March 18 sanctions under malicious cyber attacks and election interference EO pic.twitter.com/LZHRsZZaU7
Though both the March 18 and April 6 orders reference the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, signed by the rich asshole in 2017, the cited authority for the one issued Friday about Russian oligarchs have nothing to do specifically with Russia.
Ivanka the rich asshole’s clothing company will be spared from tariffs, thanks to her dad
A convenient omission from the administration's threat of costly new tariffs.
The steel and aluminum industries in China will soon be slapped with tariffs up to $50 billion by President some rich asshole. On Thursday, after China announced their intentions to retaliate against the United States with $50 billion in tariffs of their own against U.S. goods, the rich asshole warned that his administration would respond with another set of tariffs, this time targeting $100 billion worth of Chinese goods.
Exempt from the proposed tariffs against China, however, is the clothing manufacturing industry.
U.S. officials say they used an algorithm to determine which goods to exclude from new tariffs. According to the Washington Post, the list was drafted to achieve “the lowest consumer impact,” ensuring goods like clothing and toys were excluded so as not to raise the cost on domestic consumer goods.
Exempting clothing from the tariffs provides a big break to American clothing companies that hold trademarks in China. One of those clothing companies belongs to the First Daughter of the United States, Ivanka the rich asshole.
A recent report by the Huffington Post found that the president’s daughter and closest adviser rakes in a total of $1.5 million a year from the rich asshole Organization while still working at the White House.
Her dual role as adviser to the president and private business executive has continuously raised ethical red flags. No one can be entirely sure that public policy by this administration isn’t being driven by business motives, or whether countries may pursue business deals with the rich asshole family as a means to curry political favor with the administration.
The clearest example of this ethical line-blurring comes from early in the rich asshole presidency, when Ivanka dined with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the rich asshole family’s resort in West Palm Beach on the same day China approved three new trademarks for Ivanka’s company.
Ivanka has, on multiple occasions, ducked behind her White House job to avoid legal responsibilities associated with her brand.
The First Daughter was hit with a copyright lawsuit from another fashion label last year, alleging Ivanka stole the design for one of her Ivanka the rich asshole-branded shoes. A rich asshole Organization lawyer argued that Ivanka’s position as a “high ranking government official” should excuse her from having to submit a deposition.
Ivanka also used her position in the White House to avoid having to comment on labor violations at one the rich asshole-linked factory in China that manufactures her line. Over the summer, three Chinese activists were arrested for attempting to expose the labor conditions the factory. The group for which the activists worked, China Labor Watch, issued a report on the factory and alleged that the employees were forced to work 12-hour days, at least six days a week, at a monthly salary of about 2,500 yuan, or $365. The workers had been given no safety training, even though many came into contact with dangerous hot oils and glues regularly.
Similarly, in Bangladesh, where many of the Ivanka the rich asshole-branded denim is manufactured, garment workers earn a minimum wage of about $70 a month, according to the Washington Post.
Ivanka’s attorney, Jamie Gorelick, argued that because of her role in the White House she “has been advised that she cannot ask the government to act in an issue involving the brand in any way, constraining her ability to intervene personally.”
All the while Ivanka has worn pieces of her own line in public to help promote her personal brand of #WomenWhoWork, and has championed herself as an advocate for working women across the globe.
Both Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner have been repeatedly advised by government watchdog groups to either divest their assets, establish an honest blind trust, or recuse themselves from their government work. So far, they have done neither.
President some rich asshole himself owns a number of trademarks in China through the rich asshole Organization and also faces a wide range of conflicts of interest stemming from the business. the rich asshole has at least 123 registered and provisionally approved trademarks in China. The rich asshole Organization says that the Chinese trademarks under his name have been transferred to DTTM Operations — a holding company — and that they “have nothing whatsoever to do with some rich asshole,” according to a rich asshole Organization lawyer.
As revealed by ProPublica, lawyers for the rich asshole confirmed that the president can pull funds from his blind trust — managed by his two adult sons, who have been entrusted with the day-to-day operations of the rich asshole Organization — whenever he chooses, without disclosing it to the public.
Here are 20 of the top promises President the rich asshole made to his supporters — that he’s already broken
U.S. President some rich asshole speaks at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S., August 22, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
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the rich asshole Voters: One Year in, and he’s Broken 20 Big Promises He Made to You
1. He told you he’d cut your taxes, and that the super-rich like him would pay more. You bought it. But his new tax law does the opposite. By 2027, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the richest 1 percent will have got 83 percent of the tax cut and the richest 0.1 percent, 60 percent of it. But more than half of all Americans — 53 percent — will pay more in taxes. As the rich asshole told his wealthy friends at Mar-a-Lago just days after the tax bill became law, “You all just got a lot richer.”
2. He promised to close “special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors but unfair to American workers,” especially the notorious “carried interest” loophole for private-equity, hedge fund, and real estate partners. You bought it. But the new tax law keeps the “carried interest” loophole.
3. He told you he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “beautiful.” You bought it. But he didn’t repeal and he didn’t replace. (Just as well: His plan would have knocked at least 23 million Americans off health insurance, including many of you.) Instead, he’s doing what he can to cut it back and replace it with nothing. The new tax law will result in 13 million people losing health coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
4. He told you he’d invest $1 trillion in our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. You bought it. But after his giant tax cut for corporations and millionaires, there’s no money left for infrastructure.
5. He said he’d drain the Washington swamp. You bought it. But he’s brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses, and he’s filled departments and agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are crafting new policies for the same industries they recently worked for.
6. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it. But he has created the most dysfunctional, back-stabbing White House in modern history, and has already fired and replaced so many assistants (one of them hired and fired in a little more than a week) that people there barely know who’s in charge of what.
7. He told you he’d “bring down drug prices” by making deals with drug companies. You bought it. But now the White House says that promise is “inoperative.”
8. He told you he’d “stop foreign lobbyists from raising money for American elections.” You bought it. But foreign lobbyists are still raising money for American elections.
9. He told you “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” You bought it. But he and House Speaker Paul Ryan are already planning such cuts in order to deal with the ballooning deficit created, in part, by the new tax law for corporations and the rich.
10. He promised “six weeks of paid maternity leave to any mother with a newborn child whose employer does not provide the benefit.” You bought it. But the giant tax cut for corporations and the rich doesn’t leave any money for this.
11. He said that on Day One he’d label China a “currency manipulator.” You bought it. But then he met with China’s president Xi Jinping and declared “China is not a currency manipulator.” Ever since then, the rich asshole has been cozying up to Xi.
12. He said he “won’t bomb Syria.” You bought it. Then he bombed Syria.
13. He said he’d build a “wall” across the southern border. You believed him. But chief of staff John Kelly says it is “unlikely that we will build a wall, a physical barrier, from sea to shining sea.”
14. He promised that the many women who accused him of sexual misconduct “will be sued after the election is over.” You bought it. He hasn’t sued them, presumably because he doesn’t want the truth to come out.
15. He said he would not be a president who took vacations, and he called Barack Obama “the vacationer-in-Chief.” You bought it. But since becoming President he has spent nearly 25 percent of his days at one of his golf properties for some portion of the day, according to Golf News Network, at a cost to taxpayers of over $77 million. That’s already more taxpayer money on vacations than Obama cost in the first 3 years of his presidency. Not to mention all the money taxpayers are spending protecting his family, including his two sons who travel all over the world on the rich asshole business.
16. He said he’d force companies to keep jobs in America, and that there would be “consequences” for companies that shipped jobs abroad. You believed him. But despite their promises, Carrier, Ford, GM, and the rest have continued to ship jobs to Mexico and China. Carrier (a division of United Technologies) has moved ahead with plans to send 1,000 jobs at its Indiana plant to Mexico. Notwithstanding, the federal government has rewarded United Technologies with 15 new contracts since the rich asshole’s inauguration. GE is sending jobs to Canada. IBM is sending them to Costa Rica, Egypt, Argentina, and Brazil. There have been no “consequences” for sending all these jobs overseas.
17. He promised to revive the struggling coal industry and “bring back thousands” of lost mining jobs. You bought it. But coal jobs continue to disappear. Since the rich asshole’s victory, at least 6 plants that relied on coal have closed or announced they will close. Another 40 are projected to close during the president’s four-year term. Utilities continue to switch to natural gas instead of coal, and renewable energy is cheaper than ever.
18. He promised to protect steel workers. But according to the American Iron and Steel Institute, which tracks shipments, steel imports were 19.4 percent higher in the first 10 months of 2017 than in the same period last year. That import surge has hurt American steel workers, who were already struggling against a glut of cheap Chinese steel.
19. He said he’d make America safer. You believed him. But according to Mass Shooting Tracker, there have been 377 mass shootings so far in the rich asshole administration, including 58 people killed and hundreds injured at a concert in Las Vegas, and 26 churchgoers killed and 20 injured at a church in Texas. the rich asshole refuses to consider any gun control legislation.
20. He said he’d release his taxes. “I’m under a routine audit and it’ll be released, and as soon as the audit is finished it will be released,“ he promised during the campaign. He hasn’t released his taxes.
the rich asshole-loving radio host boasts he’s preparing to ‘ram a hot poker up David Hogg’s ass’
Jamie Allman (Facebook)
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the rich asshole-loving radio host Jamie Allman says he’s preparing to “ram a hot poker” up Parkland survivor “David Hogg’s ass” in a Twitter post following the March for Our Lives rally in Washington D.C.
“I’ve been hanging out getting ready to ram a hot poker up David Hogg’s ass tomorrow,” Allman wrote on Twitter. “Busy working. Preparing.”
As the weekly St. Louis newspaper Riverfront Times reports—Allman, a conservative commentator with a morning radio show on 97,1 FM and a television program that runs on the St. Louis ABC affiliate network owned by Sinclair—has been a vocal critic of Hogg after the 17-year-old Parkland student lead advertisers in boycott of Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
A screenshot of his comment “began circulating in recent days that’s drawn new attention to the adult man casually joking about how he’d like to assault a teen shooting-survivor’s butt,” the Riverfront Times reports.
Local politicians have begun taking notice of Allman’s rhetoric. In a Facebook post Thursday, state Rep. Stacey Newman demanded advertisers abandon his shows.
“We demand advertisers stop being complicit,” Newman wrote. “Stop supporting an adult who spews such hate.”
Putin has ‘a lot’ of dirt on the rich asshole from his 2013 Moscow trip: Russian human rights lawyer
Russian human rights lawyer Ivan Pavlov, via HRW.
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A Russian human rights lawyer believes the Kremlin has “a lot” of dirt on President some rich asshole.
Ivan Pavlov made the charges in an interview with SBS News in Australia. Pavlov was visiting as a winner of Human Rights Watch’s Alison Des Forges Award for Extraordinary Activism.
Pavlov spoke about the infamous Steele Dossier, which refers to salacious allegationsreferring to a 2013 night at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow involving prostitutes.
“I don’t know what they have on him, but I’m sure they have a lot from his visit,” he concluded.
He also addressed the hard line policies of Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin.
“War time, which we have now, dictates war rules,” Pavlov explained. “When the whole country lives with a militaristic rhetoric, somehow everybody knows who is the enemy. United States is first enemy, Ukraine is second, and [the rest of the] world is third.”
He also slammed state propaganda.
“The government hires a lot of experts and promoters, producers, journalists, show makers,” he explained. “People become zombies.”
Pavlov has been praised for his resistance in Russia.
“Ivan has relentlessly faced down the Russian security services, Kafkaesque courts, and media smear campaigns to provide a lifeline to some of Russia’s most vulnerable defendants,” said Rachel Denber, a deputy director of Human Rights Watch. “It’s impossible to overstate the courage and stamina that Ivan’s work takes, and that Ivan has and has demonstrated over and over.”
the rich asshole Tweets ‘America Is Open For Business’ As Dow Plummets And Awful Jobs Report Is Released
some rich asshole is busy once again tweeting about ‘jobs, jobs, jobs,’ amid his calls for billions in tariffs on imports. China has retaliated in the trolliest way possible, targeting farming areas that went big for the rich asshole in the 2016 election. While the Dow Jones has been plummeting due to the tariff war he started, the rich asshole claims that “lots of money” is coming to the U.S. and that means more jobs.
“Despite the Aluminum Tariffs, Aluminum prices are DOWN 4%,” Mr. Dummy Pants tweeted. “People are surprised, I’m not! Lots of money coming into U.S. coffers and Jobs, Jobs, Jobs!”
Later, President Exclamation Mark tweeted that “AMERICA IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS!”
Welp, the jobs report just came in and it doesn’t look good. The U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs in March, well below expectations, as the rich asshole calls for billions in tariffs on imports raises concerns about their effects on the nation’s steady expansion. Economists had predicted 185,000 jobs. The unemployment rate remains at 4.1 percent.
The Dow tumbled again today as the rich asshole sends U.S stocks sinking even lower amid escalating fears of a trade war between the U.S. and China.
The Dow Jones industrial average had lost 437 points just after noon on Friday; a 1.8 percent drop, while the Nasdaq and S&P 500 index lost 1.3 percent and 1.4 percent each.
The Hill reports that all three indexes opened with steep losses Friday following the former reality show star’s latest threat of more tariffs on China.
On Friday morning, the rich asshole retweeted his post from April 4th in which he insisted “We are not in a trade war with China.”
Whatever the rich asshole says, the opposite is true.
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
Internet roasts Sarah Sanders for insisting the rich asshole is ‘the best negotiator’: ‘Clinton’s blowjob didn’t cost him $130,000’
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Screenshot)
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White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Friday raised some eyebrows when she insisted that President some rich asshole still believed a trade war with China would be “easy” to win because “if he is in charge of those negotiations… he’s the best negotiator at the table.”
This claim quickly drew ridicule from across Twitter, as users pointed out that the supposed “master negotiator” was unsuccessful in negotiating a deal to silence a porn star with whom he allegedly had an affair.
Check out some of the top reactions below.
Press Sec. Sanders tells @jonkarl that Pres. Trump "absolutely" still believes trade wars are easy to win "if he is in charge of those negotiations...he's the best negotiator at the table." abcn.ws/2JqpO4r pic.twitter.com/c0Je4qVInO
mer
The best negotiator? Who is paying for the wall?? #NoWall #FakePresidentTrump pic.twitter.com/qygQ0lQIGB
Best negotiator? Clinton's blowjob didn't cost him $130,000.
#FBPE"He's the best negotiator at the table" if he's the ONLY negotiator at the table. Then, yes.
Oh well, America had a good run.
And William Shatner thought it was a great idea to record an album....
“Best negotiator at the table”
Stormy and Michael Avenatti don’t seem to agree, lmao
By
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April 6, 2018
The whole world knows the rich asshole's White House is a chaotic mess, but press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is pretending that's just how it works.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is defending the daily chaos and dysfunction generated by the rich asshole himself as simply “how civics works.”
Unlike his predecessors, the rich asshole team has often lurched from crisis to crisis, with almost all of it resting on the rich asshole’s unpredictable and erratic whims and tweets.
At Friday’s press briefing, NPR reporter Ayesha Rascoe asked Sanders to address the issue.
“There seems to be a perception, that at times the president makes announcements and then the White House has to come up with policies to match what the president said,” Rascoe noted.
She cited the rich asshole’s abrupt announcement of sending troops to the southern border, and the many unanswered questions of how much military will be deployed, what they will do there, and whether anybody in the government knew the announcement was coming.
“I think that’s a perception of completely — people that don’t understand I guess how civics works,” Sanders said.
She then claimed that when the rich asshole makes announcements, “He’s carrying out the duties that he was elected to do and it’s up to his staff to implement those policies that he announces.”
The answer, as has been typical with Sanders, was nonresponsive and laced with rancor.
In the past, she dismissed those who called out the rich asshole team’s disinterest in domestic abuse, lied about the rich asshole’s attempts to purge the FBI, attacked civil rights heroes who wouldn’t back the rich asshole, and said a reporter had “interrupted” her as he attempted to get a straight answer on gun violence.
Her default mode is always on the attack, refusing to acknowledge reality and the concerns expressed by millions.
the rich asshole is erratic. The press knows it, other politicians know it, the markets know it, and average Americans know it.
But to acknowledge reality is seen by the White House as an admission of weakness. So instead, Sanders lashes out and tries to obscure the truth.
Sarah Sanders: the rich asshole still believes trade wars are ‘easy’ to win because ‘he’s the best negotiator’
Sarah Huckabee Sanders speaks from the White House briefing room (CNN/screen grab)
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White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Friday that President some rich asshole still believes it will be “easy” to win a trade war with China because he is the world’s greatest negotiator.
When asked by ABC News’ Jon Karl about whether he was still confident about his ability to beat China in a trade war, Sanders said he “absolutely” was because “if he is in charge of those negotiations… he’s the best negotiator at the table.”
Despite his past boasts of his “deal-making” skills, the rich asshole so far has been unable to get a Congress that is run by his own party to fully fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, which was his single biggest campaign promise.
the rich asshole’s threats to slap heavy tariffs on China have roiled global financial markets for the last week, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Friday was down by more than 600 points at the time of Sanders’ press conference.
Watch the video below.
It was reported last month that the rich asshole had considered firing Mr Kelly and not naming a successor
· Alexandra Wilts Washington DC
· 04-06-2018
some rich asshole is said to be freezing out his White House chief of staff John Kelly, excluding him from meetings and important discussions.
Mr Kelly, who was tasked with bringing order to the chaotic West Wing last July, has now receded from view, the Associated Press reported.
For months, Mr Kelly made it a practice to listen in on many of the president's calls, especially with world leaders. But he reportedly was not on the line when the rich asshole acted against his advice by congratulating Vladimir Putin on the Russian’s leader’s re-election.
Additionally, the retired four-star Marine general reportedly opposed the rich asshole’s hiring of John Bolton, a neo-conservative diplomat, as National Security Adviser. But rather than listening to his chief of staff, the rich asshole tapped Mr Bolton for the role anyway and told Mr Kelly about it later, the AP said.
In recent weeks, the rich asshole is said to have made an array of decisions without consulting Mr Kelly, apparently preferring to govern alone with breakneck speed.
the rich asshole recently told one confidante that he was “tired of being told no” by his chief of staff, a source told the AP.
Mr Kelly last year had made moves to control what information the rich asshole saw and who had access to the president. But the US leader is now said to be rebelling against those restrictions.
In March, NBC News reported that the rich asshole had considered firing Mr Kelly and not naming a successor.
Citing three people familiar with the discussions, the news outlet said the rich asshole threw out the idea to his close associates that he could run the West Wing by serving as his own chief of staff, similar to how he ran his own business empire.
The President appears to have tabled the proposal for now, NBC said.
Mr Kelly is the rich asshole’s second chief of staff in the year and four months that the real estate mogul has been president.
There have been multiple reports that Mr Kelly has considered resigning from his gatekeeper role - but he has debunked those rumours.
By
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April 6, 2018
In reality, the rich asshole's as unpopular as ever, but he's very pleased with the approval rating he invented for himself.
From ignoring his top military advisers on Syria strategy, to tossing aside his prepared tax cut statements to wallow in anti-immigration hate rhetoric, to telling supporters on AM talk radio that his real approval rating actually hovers around 60 recent, the rich asshole seems to have retreated even further into a misinformation cocoon within the White House.
Fresh off firing two senior advisers, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, the rich asshole is reportedly relishing the fact that fewer aides now contradict his erratic pronouncements.
If this truly is the let-the rich asshole-be-the rich asshole stage of his presidency, it means madness reigns.
Those two high-profile firings came as chief of staff John Kelly’s Oval Office influence is reportedly in steep decline.
“the rich asshole recently told one confidant that he was ‘tired of being told no’ by Kelly,” the Associated Press reported.
Instead of listening to counsel, he’s turning more and more to on-air cable news chatter to gain his incoherent policy insights.
“Aides sometimes plot to have guests make points on Fox that they have been unable to get the president to agree to in person,” an administration source told the Washington Post. “He will listen more when it is on TV.”
Last weekend, the rich asshole surrounded himself with Fox News misfits, such as Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro, which seemed to spark the xenophobic campaign against immigrants he unleashed this week.
Among the people brought aboard is television personality Larry Kudlow to serve as a top economic adviser. But Kudlow comically spent the week not knowing what the rich asshole was saying or doing about launching a reckless trade war with China. (Like everybody else, Kudlow finds out about radical policy initiatives by reading the rich asshole’s tweets.)
Nowhere was the rich asshole’s growing delusions of grandeur more apparent than when he called into radio morning wake-up show on Friday and claimed that his historically awful approval rating of approximately 40 percent actually stands at 59 percent.
“A poll just came out now, Rasmussen, it’s now 51,” the rich asshole said, referring to the perennially GOP-friendly polling firm that always posts outlier numbers in his favor. “They say that it’s 51, but add another 7 or 8 points to it,” he continued.
That’s right, the rich asshole thinks his approval rating is just shy of 60 percent. Even though based on science and data and everything else we know it’s 20 points lower than that.
The punchline is that even the daily, the rich asshole-happy Rasmussen poll had him down from 51 percent to 47 on Friday. But he still thinks the real number is close to 60 percent — just because.
CNN analyst brutally mocks lawyer Michael Cohen as the rich asshole’s ‘Minister of Disgruntled Mistresses’
CNN legal Paul Callan -- screenshot
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CNN analyst Paul Callan on Friday brutally mocked lawyer Michael Cohen for his role in paying off women who have allegedly had affairs with President some rich asshole.
In discussing the rich asshole’s declaration this week that he didn’t know that Cohen had paid off adult film star Stormy Daniels in exchange for silence over their alleged affair, Callan said the rich asshole was using his lawyer as something of a human shield.
“He’s setting up the defense that Cohen was sort of his minister of disgruntled mistresses,” he said. “In other words, he had his lawyer acting as an agent to go out and negotiate settlements with people who might cause problems for him, and he might have given him that general authority. Maybe he even said you can spend up to $130,000 to get rid of one of these problems legally, and Cohen is out doing this, because we know it happened in two cases.”
Essentially, Callan believes that the rich asshole could have his legal bases covered if he gave Cohen broad authority to negotiate on his behalf without having to know all the details about what he was negotiating. This, in turn, could make the nondisclosure agreement signed by Stormy Daniels legally binding despite the fact that the rich asshole himself did not personally sign it.
Watch the video below.
John Kelly warned the rich asshole last week to fire embattled Scott Pruitt — but the president continues to ignore him
President some rich asshole (left) and WH chief of staff John Kelly (right). Image via Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP.
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White House chief of staff John Kelly urged President some rich asshole last week to dump his embattled EPA chief — but Scott Pruitt remains on the job for now.
Kelly and other White House aides have decided Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency, had become a liability amid a widening ethics scandal, but the president isn’t ready to remove him, reported the Wall Street Journal.
the rich asshole defended Pruitt in a tweet Friday, saying the EPA chief was doing a “great job” despite being “TOTALLY under siege.”
A White House official told the Journal that the rich asshole wasn’t ready to fire Pruitt because he likes his deregulation measures and thinks the EPA chief is a strong advocate for his agenda.
Kushner family real estate business secures loan amid White House probe
Jessica Kwong
Posted with permission from Newsweek
Jared Kushner’s family-owned real estate business has reportedly secured a hefty loan to construct a luxury residential tower in the Brooklyn area of New York City, despite a recent debate over a White House investigation into previous loans to his company.
Related: Lawsuit Claims Saudis Bought Out Jared Kushner, White House Is Compromised
JPMorgan Chase & Co. has agreed to loan about $600 million to an investor group that includes Kushner Companies, the Los Angeles-based private investment firm CIM Group, and LIVWRK, a developer that has worked with Kushner’s company various times in the past, people with knowledge of the deal told Bloomberg in a report published Friday.
Kushner Companies and the group sought out the investment in October and the lender has agreed to the terms pending underwriting approvals, the sources told Bloomberg. The project at 85 Jay Street in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood will have 21 floors and 737 apartments, according to plans unveiled in August.
The loan arrives as Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, comes under scrutiny for loans Kushner Companies received after he met with lenders in his official capacity as a senior White House adviser. In a letter last month, the Office of Government Ethics informed Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that the White House had begun a probe into more than $500 million in loans that Citigroup and Apollo Management Group reportedly made to Kushner Companies after executives met with Kushner.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders denied the account, stating that White House attorneys were “not probing whether Jared Kushner violated the law.” Kushner’s lawyer Abbe Lowell previously told Newsweek in an email that “the White House counsel concluded there was were no issues involving Jared.” Kushner Companies spokeswoman Chris Taylor referenced Sanders’ comment that “they weren’t investigating.”
Taylor, JPMorgan Chase & Co., CIM Group and LIVWRK could not immediately be reached for comment by Newsweek on Friday.
Related: Lawsuit Claims Saudis Bought Out Jared Kushner, White House Is Compromised
JPMorgan Chase & Co. has agreed to loan about $600 million to an investor group that includes Kushner Companies, the Los Angeles-based private investment firm CIM Group, and LIVWRK, a developer that has worked with Kushner’s company various times in the past, people with knowledge of the deal told Bloomberg in a report published Friday.
Kushner Companies and the group sought out the investment in October and the lender has agreed to the terms pending underwriting approvals, the sources told Bloomberg. The project at 85 Jay Street in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood will have 21 floors and 737 apartments, according to plans unveiled in August.
The loan arrives as Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, comes under scrutiny for loans Kushner Companies received after he met with lenders in his official capacity as a senior White House adviser. In a letter last month, the Office of Government Ethics informed Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that the White House had begun a probe into more than $500 million in loans that Citigroup and Apollo Management Group reportedly made to Kushner Companies after executives met with Kushner.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders denied the account, stating that White House attorneys were “not probing whether Jared Kushner violated the law.” Kushner’s lawyer Abbe Lowell previously told Newsweek in an email that “the White House counsel concluded there was were no issues involving Jared.” Kushner Companies spokeswoman Chris Taylor referenced Sanders’ comment that “they weren’t investigating.”
Here's my statement in reaction to the White House's assertion that the White House counsel's office is not investigating whether Senior Advisor Jared Kushner violated the law bit.ly/2GgwDHV
Taylor, JPMorgan Chase & Co., CIM Group and LIVWRK could not immediately be reached for comment by Newsweek on Friday.
POLITICS
Internet Enjoys Sarah Sanders’ Claim That the rich asshole Is ‘The Best Negotiator At The Table’
People were skeptical. Very skeptical.
We’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one.
That’s how some internet users felt on Friday after White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested that President some rich asshole would easily best China in a trade war because “he’s the best negotiator at the table.”
the rich asshole is currently threatening China and other countries with tariffs, and China has retaliated with tariffs of its own.
Press Sec. Sanders tells @jonkarl that Pres. Trump "absolutely" still believes trade wars are easy to win "if he is in charge of those negotiations...he's the best negotiator at the table." abcn.ws/2JqpO4r
As you might expect, many people were skeptical about Huckabee Sanders’ claim. Very skeptical:
"He's the best negotiator at the table" if he's the ONLY negotiator at the table. Then, yes.
Sarah Says: In talks with China, Trump will be "...the best negotiator at the table." The problem is, China won't be sitting at the kids' table. #ifhermouthismoving
Some based their opinions of the rich asshole’s negotiating skills on his previous negotiations.
Let’s see how far the “great negotiator” (aka Stable Genius) has gotten us with his promise of a “terrific” replacement for ACA, Gun Control (if they are unstable you just go in and take their guns!), DACA and then, Infrastructure Week. Now he’s working his magic with Tariffs!
Others expressed their doubt in the form of GIFs:
And then things got Stormy.
Many people argued that the rich asshole hadn’t done so well when his lawyer negotiated a nondisclosure agreement with porn star Stormy Daniels, who alleges that she and the rich asshole had an affair in 2006 and that the rich asshole’s lawyer paid her to keep quiet about it. Daniels has spoken at length about the alleged affair.
Most of the tweets were NSFW, but the one below gives you the picture.
@RajShah45 @POTUS the great negotiator, the best deal maker in history who won’t settle, simply decided to settle #StormyDaniel “false claims” on the eve of the 2016 election
‘Sloppiest thing I’ve ever seen’: MSNBC’s Velshi and Ruhle blast the rich asshole and Kudlow for scaring investors with lies
Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle (MSNBC)
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MSNBC’s Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle ripped President some rich asshole and White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow for rattling the markets with disjointed and conflicting statements on the trade policy.
Kudlow made several appearances Friday morning on TV news programs, where he complained about China, and the president said the U.S. had already lost a trade war — and the markets reacted skittishly.
“This is the sloppiest thing I’ve seen,” Velshi said. “He says there’s more tariffs — China says there is, Kudlow says there isn’t. Market is down 1.65 percent.”
Ruhle said neither official’s statements were accurate.
“Larry Kudlow said we want the least pain possible — down 400 is painful,” she said. “Markets reacting to this and the jobs report.”
Velshi agreed the president was circulating bad information about the economy.
“The president keeps doing this and we keep pointing out it’s wrong,” Velshi said. “He says we have a $500 billion deficit with China — it is $375 billion, still a lot of billions of dollars. I just don’t know why the president keeps lying about this. We know we’re on a TV set in the White House, so anybody in the White House who is watching this right now, please stop telling the president — or tell the president to stop lying about the size of the trade deficit with China, then we can move on to other topics.”
Ruhle said the president was also misrepresenting the price of aluminum and steel.
“He went on Twitter this morning saying, this is so great, we have jobs coming in, the price of aluminum is going down,” Ruhle said. “Let’s make something clear — it went up in January in preparation for the it go down slightly last month because the aluminum and steel tariffs excluded our allies. No, sir, the price hasn’t gone down — it’s up.”
POLITICS
Interior Secretary Now Says ‘No One Was Exempted’ From Offshore Drilling Plan
In January, Ryan Zinke took Florida’s coastal waters off the table. They appear to be back on.
WASHINGTON — Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Friday walked back previous statements about the rich asshole administration’s offshore drilling plans, indicating Florida’s coastal waters are in fact still on the table.
“No one was exempted,” he said, according to The Associated Press.
The comment came at an offshore wind energy forum in Plainsboro, New Jersey, where Zinke spoke about American’s energy potential and the rich asshole administration’s all-of-the-above approach to powering America.
In January, the rich asshole administration released a sweeping plan to boost America’s fossil fuel production that would open nearly all U.S. waters, including huge swaths of the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific oceans, to oil exploration. Less than a week later, just two days into a 60-day public comment period, Zinke traveled to Florida, where he announced that, at the recommendation of Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), he was withdrawing the state’s coastal waters from the areas that could be leased.
“I support the governor’s position that Florida is unique and its coasts are heavily reliant on tourism as an economic driver,” Zinke said at the time.
Zinke faced intense criticism over the decision, which many saw as arbitrary and political. Democratic governors, lawmakers and other officials demanded that their states be granted the same exemption. And Republicans from Atlantic coastal states, including some who support offshore drilling, said the decision to allow it in coastal waters ultimately should be made by local officials.
Muddying the situation, Walter Cruickshank, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, told lawmakers at a congressional hearing in mid-January that Zinke’s statement on Florida “stands on its own” and “is not a formal action.” But Zinke later defended his exemption, indicating it would stand.
“The coastal currents are different, the layout of where the geology is,” he told CNN in late January.
Adding to the confusion, The Associated Press reported that at Friday’s event Zinke “specifically noted that Florida has not been exempted.”
During his public comments Friday, Zinke acknowledged that there has been “a lot of opposition” to new offshore drilling, in particular off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts.
“Our plan takes into consideration the local communities, the voice of the governors,” he said.
the rich asshole tells staffers to celebrate the press after latest anti-media tirade
Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders will attend the White House Correspondents' Dinner in the rich asshole's place.
The White House on Friday announced that President the rich asshole will not be attending the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 28, and will instead “actively encourage” his staff to attend to honor press freedom.
“The White House has informed us that the president does not plan to participate in this year’s dinner but that he will actively encourage members of the executive branch to attend and join us as we celebrate the First Amendment,” White House Correspondents’ Association president Margaret Talev said in a statement. “In keeping with tradition, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders also will represent the administration at the head table.”
This is the second year in a row that the rich asshole will be skipping the WHCD dinner. Last year, he became the first president to skip the dinner in 36 years.
“I will not be attending the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this year,” he tweeted last February. “Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!”
“This wasn’t a president that was elected to spend his time with reporters and celebrities,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders explained in an interview with ABC’s This Week at the time, adding that it would be “kind of naive” to assume there wouldn’t be any tension between the two sides.
the rich asshole’s rocky relationship with the press likely would have been more evident than ever this year, had he decided to go: Just this week, amid rumors that he might attend the dinner, the president slammed the media as “so fake” in an interview with WABC’s Bernie and Sid in the Morning.
“I sort of feel that the press is so bad,” he said. “It’s so fake, it’s so made up. I mean, ‘sources say’ and they have no sources. They’re like novelists. I call them novelists. […] In many cases they literally make up sources.”
Earlier in the week, the rich asshole called out several major media networks by name, blasting them as “fake,” “sick,” and “biased,” after a leaked script from the right-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group was published online by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The script, written for one of the many “must-run” segments that Sinclair forces its news stations to air — which are often full of misinformation and White House propaganda — required anchors to denounce the spread of “false news” and claimed that certain journalists were injecting their “personal agenda[s]” into their reporting.
“So funny to watch Fake News Networks, among the most dishonest groups of people I have ever dealt with, criticize Sinclair Broadcasting for being biased. Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke,” the rich asshole tweeted shortly after the script went public.
One day later, he added, “The Fake News Networks, those that knowingly have a sick and biased AGENDA, are worried about the competition and quality of Sinclair Broadcast. The ‘Fakers’ at CNN, NBC, ABC & CBS have done so much dishonest reporting that they should only be allowed to get awards for fiction!”
Earlier in March, the rich asshole also called out the Washington Post, claimingconfusingly that it needed to register as a “lobbyist” because its owner, Jeff Bezos, is also the CEO of Amazon. A few days prior, he also claimed that there was “so much fake news” and that it had “never been more voluminous or more inaccurate.”
This year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner will be held on Saturday, April 28 and will be hosted by comedian and former Daily Show correspondent Michelle Wolf. Awards are expected to be presented to CNN for its January 2017 report on the information contained in the notorious Steele dossier (before the document was later published by BuzzFeed News), and to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman for her reporting on the rich asshole White House.
the rich asshole has called out both CNN and Haberman by name on several occasions, frequently labeling CNN “fake news” and tweeting last year that Haberman was a “Hillary flunky,” Politico notes.
the rich asshole defends EPA chief and denies plotting to replace Sessions in latest Twitter freak-out
President some rich asshole (Photo: Screen capture)
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President some rich asshole on Friday lashed out at media speculation that he planned to name current Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt as his new attorney general.
“Do you believe that the Fake News Media is pushing hard on a story that I am going to replace A.G. Jeff Sessions with EPA Chief Scott Pruitt, who is doing a great job but is TOTALLY under siege?” the president wrote. “Do people really believe this stuff? So much of the media is dishonest and corrupt!”
Pruitt for the past couple of weeks has been beset by multiple scandals, including his decision to rent a room at a luxury condo for $50 a night from the wife of an oil lobbyist, his alleged decision to bypass White House recommendations while giving two top aides massive pay increases, and his alleged punishment of EPA staffers who questioned his spending priorities.
As for Sessions, the president has not been shy about ripping into his own attorney general for not doing enough to investigate his political foes. Earlier this year, the rich asshole on Twitter told his followers to ask Sessions — whose name the president initially misspelled as “Jeff Session” — why Democrats weren’t being investigated for “crimes” related to Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
And last summer, the rich asshole called Sessions “beleaguered” and “weak” because he was not sufficiently investigating former Democratic rival Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.
POLITICS
the rich asshole Resists Mounting Pressure To Fire Scandal-Struck EPA Chief Scott Pruitt
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly has been urging the president to oust the EPA administrator.
President some rich asshole signaled his support for Scott Pruitt on Friday, resisting mounting pressure week to fire the embattled head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
In a tweet, he blamed the reporters who this week broke a series of stories detailing Pruitt’s living arrangements, spending and management of the agency, intensifying accusations of corruption and government waste. Pruitt, he said, was “under siege.”
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times published reports detailing White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s efforts over the past two weeks to convince the rich asshole to fire Pruitt over the ongoing scandals. But, at a White House briefing that afternoon, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders noted that “no one other than the president has the authority to hire and fire members of the his cabinet.”
“Right now I don’t have any personnel announcement,” she added.
At least three Republican House members joined Democrats and environmental groups this week to demand Pruitt’s ouster amid a firestorm over his $50-a-night sweetheart deal to rent a room in a luxury Capitol Hill townhouse linked to a lobbyist whose clients had business before the EPA. The EPA ethics office retroactively approved the arrangement, but struggled to defend the administrator as new details rapidly emerged.
Criticism of Pruitt intensified after reports published Thursday accused the administrator of trying to abuse his vehicle’s emergency sirens to cut through traffic and of reassigning, demoting or forcing out EPA officials who challenged his “unusually large spending.” Other reports this week accused Pruitt of using a loophole in the Safe Drinking Water Act to give two political appointees raises after the White House rejected his original request. Pruitt denied the reports in a blistering Fox News interview.
The latest scandals follow months of scrutiny into the cost of Pruitt’s first-class travel. He routinely spent more than $2,000 on flights to his home state of Oklahoma, and to interviews and events in New York City.
But Pruitt’s conservative allies mounted a vigorous defense. On Wednesday, Mollie Hemingway, a senior editor at the right-wing Federalist, called Pruitt “the rich asshole’s biggest asset” in a column, and warned the president that “ousting him would be a huge victory” for his opponents. On Thursday, FreedomWorks, the libertarian campaign group founded by fossil fuel billionaires Charles and David Koch, launched a dial-in effort, urging supporters to call the White House and champion Pruitt against a “smear campaign” by “the radical left.” On Friday, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board advised the president to “show some loyalty to his leading reformer,” calling his decision on the administrator’s future “the rich asshole’s Pruitt Test.”
It helps that, on Monday, Pruitt outlined plans to rollback a landmark Obama-era regulation to limit carbon dioxide emission from vehicle tailpipes. The announcement burnished Pruitt’s reputation as the speartip of the rich asshole’s deregulatory agenda. But, as The New Republic’s Emily Atkin laid out, Pruitt’s effectiveness is overstated. At least 10 of the roughly 30 regulatory rollbacks Pruitt has proposed are on hold due to lawsuits, and several have been overturned in federal court.
Still, his efforts to scale back the United States’ climate change efforts ― he helped convince the rich asshole to withdraw from the Paris climate accord ― and disqualify huge bodies of research to favor industry-backed studies in crafting regulations have bolstered his favor with the rich asshole. That may be why the president is averse to forcing Pruitt out.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price resigned last September just one week into a scandal over his costly use of chartered flights. But Price lost the rich asshole’s favor months earlier, with the failure of his campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Pruitt also benefits from Republican control of both houses of Congress. Anne Gorsuch Burford, the last EPA administrator to resign in disgrace, faced fierce criticism during her time as President Ronald Reagan’s first head of the agency. Like Pruitt, she contracted the agency’s budget to historic lows and drastically eliminated environmental regulations with an ideological fervor. But she only stepped down in 1983 because the Democratically controlled House cited her for contempt of Congress for refusing to turn Superfund records over to a subcommittee.
To Liz Purchia, who served as the EPA’s communications director under President Barack Obama, the White House’s doubling down of support for Pruitt echoes the rich asshole’s repeated endorsement of former Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. The president continued to back the former judge’s campaign last year for the Heart of Dixie’s open Senate seat amid a deluge of reports detailing Moore’s history of sexual predation of teenage girls. the rich asshole’s support for Moore divided Republicans, though the president quickly distanced himself after Democrat Doug Jones eked out a victory in the special election.
“Like with Roy Moore, despite the overwhelming calls for the rich asshole to disown and condemn Pruitt’s actions, he’s doubling down,” Purchia told HuffPost. “Ethics or moral scandals aren’t an issue for the rich asshole. He’ll only act if the constant drip of negative headlines continue for Pruitt like we saw with Roy Moore.”
Fox News host forced to look up ‘oligarchy’ on live TV to explain latest Russia news
"Fox and Friends" Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade
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Fox News conservative political commentator Ainsley Earhardt on Friday offered “Fox and Friends” viewers a definition lesson on the word “oligarch,” wondering if her fellow co-hosts “have ever used the word before the last few months.”
Earhardt was discussing a series of sanctions imposted on Russian oligarchs and government officials, including Oleg Deripaska—the Russia oily tycoon who was offered “private briefings” by former some rich asshole campaign chairman Paul Manafort during the 2016 presidential election.”
“We were just saying, have you ever used the word oligarch before the last few months?” Earnhardt asked. “It is a ruler in an oligarchy—which doesn’t explain much—but a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence.”
Indeed, Deripaska and six other oligarchs linked to Russia President Vladimir Putin, along with 12 companies they control, were sanctioned by the Treasury Department in response to Russian interference in the presidential election and the poisoning of a former Russian spy in England last month.
Earhardt and “Fox and Friends” have largely ignored coverage of Russian meddling in the U.S. election. Earlier this year, she dismissed reports on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation as “un-American” and wondered if viewers “even care” about the rich asshole’s reported attempt to fire Mueller or the Russia probe in general.
Last year, Earhardt claimed the media’s interest in the Russia investigation is misplaced because “most people don’t even know where Russia is on the map.”
Watch “Word of the week with Ainsley Earhardt” below:
POLITICS
A former top CIA official who served as the agency’s station chief in Moscow is sharply criticizing his former boss, John Brennan, accusing him of doing Vladimir Putin’s “bidding” through his harsh attacks on President the rich asshole.
In an interview on the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery,” CIA veteran Daniel Hoffman charged that Brennan’s public comments and tweets in recent weeks have played into Putin’s hands, helping the Russian leader stoke political divisions within the country and thereby undermine U.S. national security.
“I don’t think we’ve ever seen something like this,” said Hoffman about Brennan’s public comments about the president. “Gosh, I can’t remember ever seeing an instance of this in our history where a retired director of the CIA went as far as he did.”
Hoffman was reacting to a series of tweets and public statements the former CIA director has made in recent weeks after signing a contract to be a commentator for NBC News.
In one tweet on March 17, Brennan reacted to the rich asshole’s apparent gloating about the firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (the president called it a “a great day for Democracy”) by writing about the president: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history.”
Then, in a March 21 appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Brennan said of the rich asshole: “I think he is afraid of the president of Russia. One could speculate as to why. The Russians may have something on him personally that they could always roll out and make his life more difficult.”
Brennan declined to comment for this story. But shortly after his “Morning Joe” comments, he emphasized to the New York Times that he had no hard evidence that the Russians had blackmail material on the rich asshole, notwithstanding the contents of a still-uncorroborated dossier prepared by former British spy Christopher Steele making similar allegations. “I do not know if the Russians have something on some rich asshole that they could use as blackmail,” he told the Times.
But Hoffman, who served as CIA station chief in Moscow during President Barack Obama’s first term and later worked under Brennan as chief of the agency’s Near East operations, was not dissuaded.
Download or subscribe on iTunes: “Skullduggery” by Yahoo News
“Sometimes, the president can bring out the worst in his enemies or his opponents, for all that entails,” said Hoffman in his “Skullduggery” interview. Even though Brennan appeared to back away from his “Morning Joe” comments, “the damage is done.”
“I found it quite disconcerting that he went as far as he did,” Hoffman said on the podcast. “Basically, accusing the president of being subject to blackmail by Vladimir Putin is an extraordinarily strong statement to make and carries with it a lot of damage.
“The people hearing that — the viewers, not just in our country but worldwide — would presume that John Brennan, based on his former position, would actually know the answer to that [Russian blackmail] question.”
“There’s no speculation there. He was the director of the CIA. He knows a lot. The nuance is lost on those who heard John Brennan’s statements.”
Hoffman first detailed his discomfort with Brennan’s public comments in an article he wrote this week for the Cipher Brief, a website that specializes in coverage of the U.S. intelligence community. The article got attention because Hoffman is the first CIA insider to publicly call out Brennan over his postgovernment comments. He wrote in the piece that Brennan’s tweets were “cringe worthy” and that, in his public statements, “partisanship reached a new low — and they were shocking to intelligence officers, who expect former and sitting CIA directors to carefully parse their words, especially when speaking to the media.”
Hoffman expanded on the critique in his “Skullduggery” interview, saying that the former CIA director appears to have been “blinded by his antipathy towards the president.”
To be sure, Brennan is not the only former U.S. intelligence official to publicly criticize the rich asshole. Many of these officials were offended when, in one of his first acts as president, the rich asshole visited CIA headquarters and, while standing in front of the Hall of Stars honoring former officers who died in the line of duty, devoted much of his talk to boasting of the crowd size at his inaugural speech.
“Look, freedom of speech is something we all value in this country,” Hoffman said. “But I think, if I could be so presumptuous to say, that as a retired director of the CIA — and Russians like to say there’s no such thing as a former intelligence officer, that just doesn’t exist for them — you almost want to say that you almost take the Hippocratic Oath of doing no harm to our national security when you’re exercising your freedom of speech.”
Hoffman noted that a principal goal of Putin’s influence operations against the United States was to stoke partisan tensions within the country and undermine the public’s faith in the government, including the intelligence community. In that sense, he argued, Brennan inadvertently aided Putin in his goals.
“What Vladimir Putin wants is what John Brennan delivered,” said Hoffman. Brennan, he said, “drove the partisan wedge between the two parties that much deeper. Democrats and Republicans are at each other’s throats over just about everything. It’s hard for them to agree on anything. When you have a retired director of the CIA immersing himself in this dialogue in a not-so-productive way, … that’s going to drive that partisanship to a new low.”
And, he added, it will “cause the president, frankly, to be concerned, and his team to be concerned, that maybe, yes, the Obama administration intelligence community team was in some ways biased against him.”
What Brennan should have done, he said, is hold his fire and “trust the process.”
“Go to the special counsel [Robert Mueller] and explain to the special counsel what your concerns are, if there are any, and avoid the damage that you would cause by the public statement that he made against the president.”
More “Skullduggery” from Yahoo News:
- Episode 1: A look back at the Lewinsky scandal
- Episode 2: Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg on ‘The Post’
- Episode 3: Who did you vote for?
- Episode 4: The spy, the reporter and the memo
- Episode 5: The FBI under siege
- Episode 6: Michael Cohen’s ‘stormy’ screwup
- Episode 7: The troll farm hiding in plain sight
- Episode 8: The incredible shrinking Jared Kushner
- Episode 9: Who poisoned the Russian double agent in England?
- Episode 10: The inside story of ‘Russian Roulette’
- Episode 11: Do not congratulate
- Episode 12: Ken Starr on Stormy Daniels
‘Concerned’ evangelical leaders finally want to confront the rich asshole over porn star payouts: report
Christian leaders praying over some rich asshole in the Oval Office (Photo: Screen capture)
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A group of evangelical leaders is reportedly planning to confront President some rich asshole about the payouts his attorney made to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
NPR reports that some evangelical leaders have scheduled a June meeting with the rich asshole to talk about a variety of topics — and they’re likely to broach the subject of the rich asshole’s multiple extramarital affairs.
“There’s things that are like fingernails on the chalkboard to people of faith,” one source told NPR of the rich asshole’s alleged affair with Stormy Daniels. “That’s not who we are; that’s not a ‘fruit of the Spirit’; that’s not leading with humility.”
Another leader of a religious organization told NPR that some evangelicals are “very concerned” about the president’s alleged behavior, and they warned that it could dampen evangelical voter enthusiasm for the 2018 midterm elections.
“If these folks don’t turn out in record numbers in 2018, it’s gonna be a long night for Republicans,” Christian activist Ralph Reed tells NPR.
POLITICS
Mick Mulvaney Doles Out Fat Raises To New CFPB Staffers Amid Push To Cut Costs
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau head slammed his own agency as “far too powerful” earlier this week.
Mick Mulvaney, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, oversaw the hiring of two senior aides with salaries topping $230,000 ― a major boost from their previous government jobs ― as he criticized the agency for overspending, The New York Times reported.
Kirsten Sutton, the CFPB chief of staff as of January, makes $259,500 per year, documents obtained by the newspaper show. Her predecessor earned $212,324. Sutton’s new salary is a raise of more than 50 percent from her previous job working for Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas).
Brian Johnson, hired as a CFPB senior adviser, makes $239,595. He was sent an offer letter on Dec. 1 with a starting salary of $220,000, but his pay was increased by more than $19,000 by the end of the month.
The high pay scale isn’t unusual for the CFPB. Financial regulators offer higher salaries than other Washington agencies ― but both Mulvaney hires are making more than their predecessors and most of their colleagues, the Times said.
Disclosure of the fat paychecks comes after President some rich asshole and Republican lawmakers have repeatedly advocated reshaping the agency, arguing it has imposed too many regulations on the financial industry, and have tried to cut the amount it pays employees. The latest White House budget proposal recommended a $150 million funding cut.
Mulvaney himself, who was White House budget director before the rich asshole installed him at the CFPB in November, submitted a report to Congress on Monday encouraging lawmakers to curb the agency’s powers.
“The bureau is far too powerful, and with precious little oversight of its activities,” he said in the report.
Mulvaney requested a CFPB budget for the quarter of $0, and said he would fund operations with reserves.
Can EPA chief Scott Pruitt, once a the rich asshole favorite, save his job?
Evan Halper
Tribune Washington Bureau
Posted with permission from Tribune Content Agency
WASHINGTON — Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt once seemed immune from the Trump Cabinet chaos. No more.
Questions are dogging Pruitt over first-class plane trips at taxpayer expense, a housing deal from a lobbyist's wife and big government payouts for his friends. The anti-regulatory crusader's days in the Trump administration may be numbered.By midweek, even Pruitt looked rattled by how fast things were unraveling as he struggled to explain on national television how two aides he recruited from his home state of Oklahoma came to receive immense pay hikes — one of almost $57,000 — that the White House had refused to authorize. He bristled when asked how accepting a below-market room-rental from the wife of a Washington lobbyist whose company does business before the EPA fit with President Donald Trump's vow to "drain the swamp."
Worse, the on-air shaming came from the president's favorite conservative cable channel, Fox News.
Pruitt has found little refuge at the White House. Asked Wednesday whether Trump was comfortable with the alleged ethics lapses swirling around Pruitt, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was unexpectedly frank. "The president's not," she said. "We're reviewing the situation."
On Thursday, the White House repeated its concern. "We expect that administrator Pruitt (will) answer those questions," said deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley.
But Pruitt, who denies any ethical lapses or abuse of taxpayer money, may yet hang onto his job at the EPA. As Trump boarded Air Force One Thursday, he was asked if he had confidence in Pruitt: "I do," he said.
Later Trump told reporters he would "look at" the reports about Pruitt and "make that determination." But he added, "I think he's done a fantastic job. I think he's done an incredible job. He's been very courageous. It hasn't been easy."
Still, Pruitt's abrupt transformation into the black sheep of the Cabinet has Washington abuzz. Buffered by the adoration that oil and coal industries heap upon him as he dismantles Obama-era environmental policies, Pruitt had avoided the turbulence and turnover gripping Trump's inner circle. His supporters had once even floated his name as a possible attorney general replacement.
An unapologetic skeptic of climate change, Pruitt takes an approach that's unnuanced and unyielding. The myriad actions he launched against clean air and water rules, and limits on greenhouse gas emissions — such as this week's attack on the fuel economy standards championed by California — have won him approval from conservatives. Even if the courts ultimately block most of his rollbacks, as environmentalists predict, the legal frenzy and protests that Pruitt's actions have created in liberal states delight Trump allies.
Some of those allies are rushing to Pruitt's defense as he confronts charges that he abused his office and showed poor ethical judgment. But even before the controversies over pay hikes and housing deals, White House confidence in Pruitt was eroded by headlines about Pruitt's penchant for flying first-class at taxpayer expense. He insisted security concerns mandated first-class tickets, but vowed to scale it back in the future.
Pruitt's luxury plane travel, demands for a large personal security detail and other spending at the agency triggered alarms for some of the EPA staffers who managed such things. Several of them, according to The New York Times, were reassigned or demoted when they brought their concerns to Pruitt. The head of Pruitt's security detail was reportedly reassigned soon after refusing Pruitt's request to use a government vehicle's sirens and flashing lights to cut through Washington traffic during a nonemergency trip. EPA officials said Pruitt had no role in when sirens were used.
Pruitt says the cascade of allegations about his ethics is part of a conspiracy against him and the Trump policy agenda. The former Oklahoma attorney general is confronting it the way he has confronted most every issue during his short tenure in Washington: by avoiding the mainstream media and taking his story to conservative outlets like Fox and The Washington Examiner. As those calling for his resignation grew midweek to include two House Republicans, Pruitt told the Examiner it was all much ado about nothing.
"It's toxic here," he said of Washington. "There are people that have long in this town done business a different way and this agency has been the poster child of it," Pruitt said. "And so, do I think that because we are leading on this agenda that there are some who want to keep that from happening? Absolutely. And do I think that they will resort to anything to achieve that? Yes."
The drama around Pruitt is reviving another storyline the White House hoped to move past. The trade publication Inside EPA reported Thursday that a key source of the damaging information circulated about Pruitt is former White House staffer Rob Porter, who resigned amid allegations he had been physically abusive with women, including two ex-wives.
The report cites anonymous sources. Porter has not commented. But one of Pruitt's top confidants is an ex-girlfriend of Porter's who informed the White House about his alleged history of violence against women. That Pruitt aide, policy adviser Samantha Dravis, resigned from the EPA last week.
Just before she left the agency, Sen. Thomas R. Carper, D-Del., had begun raising questions about Dravis' work history. Last week, he asked the EPA's inspector general to investigate reports he had heard that Dravis was absent from work for much or all of November, December and January.
Pruitt and the EPA did not respond to requests for comment from the Los Angeles Times.
Whether the White House will have his back for long is far from certain. Top officials there are making known their frustration that Pruitt's controversies are undermining the president's promise to root out corruption in Washington.
If the EPA chief hangs on, it may be because Trump can't afford to add yet more turmoil to a Cabinet already filled with it.
He abruptly dismissed his secretary of State and his Veterans Affairs chief over Twitter in recent weeks. And since Trump's appointment of CIA Director Mike Pompeo to the secretary of State job leaves the CIA post to be filled, that means three Senate confirmation battles are looming as the Republican-led Congress tries to hang on to power in this year's midterm elections. A contentious fight over EPA leadership would create more problems for the party.
There were already three open EPA inspector general investigations into Pruitt before this week, involving his first-class travel, his hiring practices and his installation of a $43,000 phone booth in his office to deter eavesdroppers. And the inspector general is now considering the launch of a fourth investigation, this one into the deal he negotiated for a condo owned by the wife of Washington lobbyist J. Steven Hart, whose practice incudes energy and transportation issues.
Under the arrangement, first reported by ABC News and Bloomberg, Pruitt spent $50 a night to lease a bedroom in the Capitol Hill unit for the first half of 2017. Pruitt paid only for the nights he stayed.
"This was like an Airbnb situation," Pruitt told Fox. "When I was not there, the landlord, they had access to the entirety of the facility. When I was there, I only had access to a room."
But most people wanting to stay a block from the Capitol for $50 a night are more likely to end up on a pullout couch. Pruitt said the EPA ethics office was OK with the arrangement. But the office issued a written clarification pointing out that it was only OK with the facts it was informed about. It did not consider, for example, the propriety of the landlord also providing housing for no additional charge to Pruitt's daughter, who reportedly stayed in the unit while interning in Washington.
While many Republicans are defending Pruitt, some say it has all become too much.
"Major policy differences aside, @EPAScottPruitt's corruption scandals are an embarrassment to the administration, and his conduct is grossly disrespectful to American taxpayers," tweeted Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla. "It's time for him to resign or for @POTUS to dismiss him."
Pruitt, meanwhile, has some explaining to do to the White House about how two of his confidantes came to get giant pay raises against its instructions. After getting turned down by the White House, the EPA granted the raises by invoking a provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act that allowed Pruitt to make up to 30 hires without White House or congressional approval. The salary of one of the aides was boosted to $164,200 from $107,435. The other saw their salary go to $114,590 from $86,460.
Soon after The Atlantic broke the story Tuesday, Pruitt rescinded the raises. He said he had no idea they had been given and that it was not appropriate. Pruitt revealed all this on Fox News.
The network was unimpressed. Its reporter followed up with scolding questions and suggested Pruitt should be embarrassed.
POLITICS
Scott Pruitt Reportedly Lied About Knowledge Of Staff Raises
The report adds to a growing mountain of ethical issues dogging Pruitt’s tenure.
Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt both knew about and supported massive raises for two of his longtime aides, despite denying having any knowledge of the action, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Citing two EPA officials familiar with the decision and a White House official, the Post said Pruitt instructed agency officials to give a $56,765 raise to Sarah Greenwalt and a $28,130 raise to Millan Hupp. Both women worked with Pruitt in Oklahoma where he served as attorney general and followed him to Washington, according to The Atlantic, which first reported the salary bumps.
Just a day earlier, Pruitt was subject to a blistering line of questioning from Fox News’ Ed Henry, who asked if the EPA administrator had any knowledge of the pay increases, which were carried out through a provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act after the White House rejected them.
“I found out this yesterday and I corrected the action, and we are in the process of finding out how it took place and correcting that going forward,” Pruitt said after attempting to duck the question several times. Henry later asked if the EPA chief was “embarrassed” by the size of the raises.
The report adds to a growing mountain of ethical issues dogging Pruitt’s tenure, ranging from his sweetheart rental of a condo on Capitol Hill to the ongoing inquiry into his first-class air travel. On Thursday, the Post and the Times reported that several high-ranking EPA officials have been reassigned or demoted for questioning the administration’s spending.
One of Pruitt’s top advisers, Samantha Dravis, resigned on Wednesday and his chief of staff has also considered leaving as pressure grows and lawmakers increase calls for his resignation, the Times also reported this week.
“The president thinks that he’s done a good job, particularly on the deregulation front,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Wednesday when asked about Pruitt’s future. “But again, we take this seriously and we’re looking into it, and we’ll let you know when we’re finished.”
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