MEDIA
Parkland Survivor Criticizes Laura Ingraham For Only Apologizing After Advertisers Fled
The list of advertisers pulling ads from the Fox News host’s program continues to grow.
Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg on Friday pilloried Fox News host Laura Ingraham, declining to accept her apology after she mocked him for getting rejected from several colleges ― one of several right-wing attacks against the student activists of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
“She’s only apologizing after a third of her advertisers pulled out, and I think it’s really disgusting, the fact that she basically tried promoting her show after apologizing to me,” Hogg, 17, said on CNN’s “New Day.” “If she really wants to do something, she could cover inner-city violence and the real issues that we have in America.”
On Wednesday night, Hogg called on his Twitter followers to pressure advertisers to cut ties with Ingraham’s TV and radio shows. By Friday evening, at least 14 companies had announced they were pulling their ads or had otherwise sought to distance themselves from Ingraham:
- Nutrish
- TripAdvisor
- Wayfair
- Expedia
- Nestlé
- Johnson & Johnson
- Stitch Fix
- Hulu
- Jos. A. Bank
- Office Depot
- Jenny Craig
- Miracle-Ear
- Liberty Mutual
- Principal
Some of the companies did not specify whether their decision was directly tied to Ingraham’s comments. But a number of them did criticize the host’s remarks.
“As a company, we support open dialogue and debate on issues,” a spokeswoman for the home goods retailer Wayfair said. “However, the decision of an adult to personally criticize a high school student who has lost his classmates in an unspeakable tragedy is not consistent with our values.”
Ingraham apologized Thursday afternoon, attributing her apology to “reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week.” She also invited Hogg to appear on her show “anytime for a productive discussion.”
"I think it's great that corporate America is standing with me," David Hogg says of his call for advertisers to boycott Laura Ingraham's Fox News show, "They cannot push us around, especially when all we're trying to do here is save lives" cnnmon.ie/2pSaKDu
“We will no longer advertise with The Laura Ingraham Show moving forward,” a representative for Office Depot told HuffPost on Friday. A representative for Duracell, meanwhile, said the company “does not comment on media buys and placements.”
A spokesman for Jos. A. Bank told HuffPost the company did not specifically have ad spending on Ingraham’s Fox News show, “The Ingraham Angle.” Ads that aired on Wednesday night were likely “bonus ads” from the network.
Principal told HuffPost, “We are distancing ourselves by removing our advertising from ‘The Ingraham Angle’ show at this time.”
Also on Friday, Hogg praised “corporate America” for “standing with me and the rest of my friends,” and accused Ingraham of creating a distraction.
“It is important that we stand together as corporate and civic America and show them that they cannot push us around, especially when all we’re trying to do here is save lives,” he said. “And when people try to distract, like what Laura is trying to do right now, from what the real issue is, which is gun violence in America, it’s not only sad, it’s just wrong.”
“I am not the issue here,” Hogg went on. “The issue is gun violence in America, but she is trying to distract from that, and I hate it.”
Hogg also told CNN that he may take a gap year in order to continue his activism through the midterm elections and work with candidates who support gun control measures.
Other than her apology on Twitter, Ingraham did not address the matter Thursday evening on her Fox News show. A representative for the network declined to comment beyond Ingraham’s apology.
Clarification: Language has been amended to note that Jos. A. Bank did not have ad spending on Ingraham’s show. This article has also been updated with comments from more advertisers.
Republican pundit mocks the rich asshole’s staff turnover: ‘The kid pushing the lawnmower’ will be the next Interior Secretary
11-year-old Frank Giaccio gets to mow lawn at the White House after sending a letter earlier this year making request (Photo: Screen capture)
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In a panel discussion over President some rich asshole’s decision to replace staff with long-term loyalists, the commentators couldn’t help but joke.
Conservative commentator Alice Stewart tried to justify why the rich asshole’s former golf caddy would make a good communications director, analysts Ryan Lizza and Matt Lewis called balderdash.
“Oh! Alice! With all due respect –” Lizza said before being cut off by host Don Lemon.
“The caddy also lies about your score and tells you that you’re great,” Lemon said.
“This is the other sort of pattern here,” Lewis noted. “the rich asshole is now replacing people with these longtime loyalist friends. Dan [Scavino] was his caddy. He had — yesterday, some rich asshole’s personal White House physician is now going to probably head the VA., this huge bureaucracy!”
Lizza said that it seems to be “long-time sycophant or people who were obsequious if their acclaim for the rich asshole.”
“Remember the kid who was pushing the lawn mower, that 11-year-old?” Lewis asked.
“He’ll replace [chief of staff John] Kelly soon,” Lizza said.
Lewis noted the child would probably replace Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke soon. The comment prompted Lemon to crack up laughing.
Watch the hilarity below:
Congressman calls BS on Scott Pruitt big spending: ‘His misuse of taxpayer dollars over and over’ is a big deal
EPA AdministratorScott Pruitt of Oklahoma speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
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Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), who serves on the Natural Resources Committee and vice-chairs the Science, Space, Technology Committee, agreed that there were questions about EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s apartment deal with the wife of an energy lobbyist. However, Beyer’s biggest problem he’d like to see the media pay attention to is the constant “misuse of taxpayer dollars.”
Friday it was revealed that Pruitt’s security detail broke the door of his condo when he didn’t answer the door. He was found napping. The EPA reimbursed the cost of the door. It prompted a conversation about taxpayer dollars being spent on Pruitt as he travels around Oklahoma, attended the Rose Bowl and took his family to Disney.
In an interview with CNN’s Brianna Keilar, Beyer rattled off the laundry list of concerning spending from the new EPA chair.
“I look at all the other cabinet secretaries, secretary of state and people like that and no one had this kind of security now or before,” Beyer explained. “I look at 535 members of Congress and, you know, we have the armed guards and all but everyone goes home unsecured every night or weekend. It’s unprecedented to spend more than $2 million on the security, not only that, to do it to the Rose Bowl or Disneyland. Places where, you know, no one knows who he is.”
While the ethics administrators have said that nothing improper is happening, Beyer noted that the condo next door to Pruitt is renting for $5,000 monthly. Pruitt’s cost is only $1,500.
“It is a massive gift to him, especially from a couple that are energy lobbyists,” Beyer said. “I think we have a $15 limit on gifts we can accept.”
Pruitt is in good company, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has been under fire for his extravagant spending on private planes and military helicopters, some for nongovernment trips. At the same time, he replaced six historical doors in his office for $139,000 on the taxpayer dime.
Zinke is one of several in the rich asshole’s cabinet who’ve gotten caught with spending concerns. HUD Secretary Ben Carson had to cancel plans to spend $31,000 on a dinning room table and chairs and $165,000 on lounge chairs for his office.
“I want to focus on Pruitt for a minute because Zinke made the argument that historical requirements require those expensive doors,” he continued. “Nothing required Pruitt to give a no-bid contract of $120,000 to a PR firm to investigate the e-mails and Facebook posts of EPA employees. Nothing required him to do $43,000 for a secret phone booth in his office when there’s the same he could use on a different floor in the EPA. His misuse of taxpayer dollars over and over again is what’s concerning.”
Pruitt was also caught spending over $100,000 on first class plane seats alone.
He said it was for that reason he thinks Pruitt should resign. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow has a horserace going on who will be shoved out first, Pruitt or Zinke, for their spending
Watch the full video below:
Joy Reid slams Republicans ‘seeking the South African solution’ for whites to control people of color
Joy Reid photo via Facebook
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MSNBC anchor Joy Reid penned a powerful warning that Republicans “stifle the democratic process” in order to preserve the “plutocratic status quo.”
Writing in The Daily Beast, Reid cautioned that “the GOP is desperately seeking to build a wall around its power, fearing its imminent erosion as a host of forces: demographic, cultural and political, come barreling its way.”
“The multiracial future isn’t coming, it’s here. Millennials and post-Millennials are the most diverse demographics in American history,” Reid explained.
“These younger cohorts, in large part because they are chock full of people of color, are far more liberal than their parents or grandparents’ generation; more accepting of LGBT rights, less interested in where trans people go to the bathroom, more attuned to the realities of white privilege, police brutality and economic inequality, frankly, more moral and less relativistic, and now, thanks to Parkland, more determined than ever to vote out the politicians who serve corporate masters rather than the popular will,” she continued.
This is terrifying for Republicans.
“In response, some Republicans are throwing out democracy itself in an all-out bid to cling to power,” Reid explained.
“Other Republicans, led by the president of the United States, are seeking the South African solution to their coming super-minority status,” she continued. “Having already tried to use a phony electoral integrity commission to delete the votes of millions of non-white Americans, the the rich asshole administration announced this week that it will seek to game the Census by adding a citizenship question, with the clear goal of producing an undercount in states with heavy immigrant populations, and disproportionate power for states that are mostly rural and white.”
“All over America, you can almost feel the sense of panic. The Republican Party, which now almost exclusively represents a handful of uber wealthy, ideologically extreme donors like the Mercers, the Kochs, the Adelsons and the Bradley Foundation plus conservative white Christian men and about half of white women, is fighting to maintain control of a country that will soon be majority non-white, that is already majority urban, and that is increasingly secular,” Reid explained. “Rather than seek an accommodation with the future, they are laying the groundwork for minority rule.”
The attacks on democracy go hand-in-hand with the rich asshole’s authoritarianism.
“Against the increasingly authoritarian and morally shallow backdrop of Trumpism, the Republican Party is scrambling to find ways to stifle the democratic process before November, spewing at its cultural opponents and rushing to erect an American feudalism that locks in the plutocratic status quo,” she concluded.
Also on Friday, Forbes reported that Reid’s show, AM Joy, “just finished the first quarter of 2018 with the highest quarterly ratings in 10 a.m. to noon time slot in MSNBC’s history.
Read the entire column
McCabe has emails proving Republicans lied about him misleading Comey: report
Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and billionaire conservative activist David Koch. Photo by Gage Skidmore.
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Two Republican congressmen appear to have been caught in a lie about former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Mark Meadows (R-NC) told Fox News on Thursday night that the FBI’s disciplinary office found that McCabe lied to then-Director James Comey about leaking information to the press.
Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Mark Meadows (R-NC) told Fox News on Thursday night that the FBI’s disciplinary office found that McCabe lied to then-Director James Comey about leaking information to the press.
Jordan claimed that the FBI’s disciplinary office found that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lied to then-Director James Comey.
But Michael Bromwich, McCabe’s attorney, told The Washington Post that claims of email evidence “clearly show that Mr. McCabe advised Director Comey that he was working with colleagues at the FBI to correct inaccuracies before the stories were published, and that they remained in contact through the weekend while the interactions with the reporter continued.”
Bromwich also slammed Republicans for “attempting to create a false narrative” about McCabe’s ouster.
“We deeply regret being compelled to respond to this selective leaking with any comment at all,” Bromwich added.
“Nevertheless, one thing is clear: Mr. McCabe never misled Director Comey. Director Comey’s memory of these interactions was equivocal and speculative, while Mr. McCabe’s recollection is clear, unequivocal and supported by documentary evidence,” Bromwich concluded.
the rich asshole wants out of Syria, Pentagon has no idea what he’s talking about
But one thing is for sure: Leaving Syria now or in the next couple of years will leave the field wide open for an ISIS resurgence.
Totally countering his Secretary of Defense, Gen. James Mattis, President the rich asshole on Thursday said the United States is on its way out of Syria.
“We’ll be coming out of Syria, like very soon. Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon. Very soon. We’re coming out,” said the president, while giving a speech in Ohio.
ABC reported that the Pentagon did not see this coming, referring all questions on the statement to the White house. Gen. Mattis has been pretty clear that in his opinion, the United States has an open-ended mission in Syria.
The State Department was also blindsided, with spokeswoman Heather Nauert saying: “I have not seen the president’s comments myself, I don’t know the context in which his comments were said, but I can say that, as a general matter, this administration looks to other countries to help out.”
Tapped to be the next Secretary of State (pending Senate approval) Mike Pompeo told CBS’s Face the Nation earlier this month that while he would “leave policy to others,” but countering Iran’s influence in Syria was crucial.
Iranian and Russian support of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have been vital to the regime, with the United States increasingly viewing its presence in Syria as an anti-Iran operation as much as anything else.
His predecessor, Rex Tillerson, was also in favor of remaining in Syria for the same reason, and was no stranger to being caught off guard by President the rich asshole’s tweets: He mused in January that he had his staffers print out the president’s tweets and would read them, trying to figure out if they constituted foreign policy issues. (Tillerson was also fired this month via a tweet).
Nicholas Heras, Fellow at the Center for a New American Security working in the Middle East Security Program, told ThinkProgress that the rich asshole will have a hard time pulling away from Syria — in the interest of not giving his political opponents anything to use against him — while trying to expanding the range of U.S. activities against Iran in the broader Middle East.
The the rich asshole administration might walk away from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, impose more sanctions, and increase pressure on European and Gulf Arab allies to cut off Iifelines and to take a tougher stance against Iran.
“But fundamentally, all of those activities avoid the big contradiction, which is: Iran’s influence in the Middle East isn’t necessarily because of it’s ballistic missile program [sanctioned by the U.S.], it’s because of the activities of the Quds Force [special forces unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard] and its ability to mobilize either partners or proxies in a range of countries in the Middle East region,” said Heras.
“The the rich asshole administration isn’t offering anything new…it wants to do something, militarily, against Iran, but it wants U.S. partners to do something, militarily, against Iran. But those partners, such as Israel and the Gulf Arab states, won’t do that unless the U.S. is there with them, in the trenches,” said Heras, “so it’s a circular type of rhetoric.”
He said that leaving Syria now would “mean the complete collapse of the counter-ISIS effort, and, particularly, the preventative counter-terrorism effort, which has to do with stabilizing the areas that have been [taken back] from ISIS.”
The U.S. and coalition presence, he added, is what is giving the Syrian Democratic Forces Coalition the support to stand its ground — now, against the pockets of ISIS controlled-areas that remain, or in the future.
“You’ll see a resurgence of ISIS because the Assad government and its partners are still in a largely weakened position [beyond winning battles with “besieged and starving opposition], and their ability to exert security, control, government administration much beyond western-central Syria is quite limited,” said Heras.
So as the rich asshole worries about the Syrian war becoming his Iraq war, if he pulls U.S troops out, Syria might well become his Afghanistan, when a U.S. troop withdrawal in the 80s gave rise to the Taliban.
Still, Heras thinks that most of what the rich asshole was saying was campaigning/signalling to his his base that he didn’t want to spend more money on the war in his signature “rhetorical,” “off-the-cuff” way. And, he points out, the president’s use of “very soon” as a timeline leaves things vague.
If the the rich asshole administration is still banking on the “pendulum theory” (or the shifting momentum between Assad and his allies and the opposition), and the U.S. isn’t there to secure the gaps created by the pendulum swinging away from Assad, another actor will step in to do so.
It won’t be Turkey, said Heras, because it lacks the capability, as do local local partners. So large areas will be once again open to an ISIS resurgence.
“This is where there’s no easy ‘Give it to Assad’ answer,” said Heras.
Conservatives fume after Sessions declines to appoint new special counsel
BY JONATHAN EASLEY - 03/30/18 05:04 PM EDT
Conservative are boiling with anger at Attorney General Jeff Sessions for declining to appoint a second special counsel to investigate alleged abuses at the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ).
In a Thursday letter to senior GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate, Sessions explained that he had appointed John Huber, a U.S. attorney from Utah who was first appointed by former President Obama, to work with DOJ’s inspector general to determine whether a second special counsel is necessary.
While Sessions says he will accept Huber’s recommendation on whether to appoint a second special counsel, the attorney general set a high bar for an independent investigation, saying it would require “extraordinary circumstances.”
Conservatives are apoplectic, believing there is more than enough evidence of wrongdoing at the FBI and widespread conflicts of interest within the DOJ to justify an outside prosecutor.
“If he’s not going to appoint a second special counsel then he should step down,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
Sessions’s letter of explanation satisfied a trio of GOP leaders — Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) — who had sent letters to the attorney general requesting a second special counsel.
In a statement, Goodlatte and Gowdy praised Huber, saying he has a strong reputation and will “conduct an independent and thorough investigation.”
They said that, by appointing Huber, Sessions had demonstrated his “commitment to this investigation,” while noting that the attorney general “reserves the right to appoint a special counsel in the future.”
“While we continue to believe the appointment of a second special counsel is necessary, this is a step in the right direction,” Gowdy and Goodlatte said.
But there is widespread frustration among conservatives, who have been sounding the alarm about allegations of anti-the rich asshole bias at the FBI and DOJ for months.
There is a sense on the right that Sessions is getting pushed around by career law enforcement officials who are seeking to protect their own.
In a Thursday night interview on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, accused the DOJ of ignoring congressional subpoenas and of omitting material facts in the documents provided to lawmakers probing allegations of FBI misconduct.
“We need to have the special counsel,” Meadows said. “I disagree with the attorney general. … The Justice Department is not complying with the subpoena and oversight responsibility we have in Congress, so for the attorney general to say there’s not enough there is extremely disappointing.”
Republicans have alleged that the so-called Steele dossier, which was paid for by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, was improperly used to obtain a warrant to spy on a rich asshole campaign official. They say the FBI and DOJ hid from the surveillance court that the information had been paid for by Democrats.
Former FBI Director James Comey, whose firing by the rich asshole prompted the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is now overseeing Mueller’s probe, are among those who signed off on the warrant applications.
Republicans also believe former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe has lied to investigators under oath about his contacts with the media, which may have contributed to his firing.
Jordan said he’d seen evidence that McCabe had lied four times about his authorization to speak with the media, including to Comey, the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), and twice under oath to the FBI’s inspector general. Sessions fired McCabe earlier this month after the OPR recommended he do so.
McCabe, who is friends with Comey, was previously at the center of controversy for leading the investigation into the Clinton matter, even after his wife received a sizable political donation from former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), a Clinton ally.
After the firing, it was revealed that McCabe had launched an investigation into Sessions over whether the attorney general had lied about his contacts with Russians.
A report from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who is now working with Huber, is coming soon and expected to be highly critical of McCabe. The Horowitz report is expected to be the definitive take on the FBI and DOJ’s handling of the Clinton investigation.
But Republicans are also eager to investigate FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Strzok was a key agent involved in the separate probes into Clinton and the rich asshole. He interviewed the rich asshole’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who later plead guilty to lying to the FBI.
In private text messages, Strzok and Page — who were having an extramarital affair — were critical of the rich asshole, as well as other politicians. Both were removed last year from Mueller’s team.
And Republicans want to look into Bruce Ohr, a senior DOJ official who is married to a woman who worked for Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that paid a former British spy to compile the anti-the rich asshole dosser.
“If this doesn’t represent extraordinary circumstances, then what the heck does, Mr. Sessions?” Jordan said.
Still, some legal experts are calling on Republicans to pump the brakes on their criticism of Sessions.
They say that Huber will bring subpoena and grand jury power to Horowitz’s investigation, potentially laying the groundwork for actions against current and former DOJ and FBI officials, or even a second special counsel down the road.
“What [Sessions] did is he essentially combined the powers of the inspector general with the powers of a line prosecutor,” Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and contributor for The Hill, said on Fox News Channel.
“This prosecutor does have not just the experience and training to look for a criminal case, he has the ability to move a case of that kind. Moreover, if he finds that crimes were committed and many people of the FBI might be implicated, Sessions reserved the right to go ahead and appoint a special counsel," Turley said. "That's a powerful combination.”
But conservatives are fed up by what they see as inaction and feckless leadership by Sessions, who they blame for exposing the president to rogue actions by law enforcement officials.
“Sessions is trying to take the pressure off of himself by appointing Huber, but Huber was appointed by Obama and nobody believes he’s going to take strong action against his own agency,” said conservative lawyer Larry Klayman. “This is a charade. As Woody Allen said, 'it’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham,' except it’s not funny.
In a Thursday letter to senior GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate, Sessions explained that he had appointed John Huber, a U.S. attorney from Utah who was first appointed by former President Obama, to work with DOJ’s inspector general to determine whether a second special counsel is necessary.
While Sessions says he will accept Huber’s recommendation on whether to appoint a second special counsel, the attorney general set a high bar for an independent investigation, saying it would require “extraordinary circumstances.”
Conservatives are apoplectic, believing there is more than enough evidence of wrongdoing at the FBI and widespread conflicts of interest within the DOJ to justify an outside prosecutor.
“If he’s not going to appoint a second special counsel then he should step down,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
Sessions’s letter of explanation satisfied a trio of GOP leaders — Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) — who had sent letters to the attorney general requesting a second special counsel.
In a statement, Goodlatte and Gowdy praised Huber, saying he has a strong reputation and will “conduct an independent and thorough investigation.”
They said that, by appointing Huber, Sessions had demonstrated his “commitment to this investigation,” while noting that the attorney general “reserves the right to appoint a special counsel in the future.”
“While we continue to believe the appointment of a second special counsel is necessary, this is a step in the right direction,” Gowdy and Goodlatte said.
But there is widespread frustration among conservatives, who have been sounding the alarm about allegations of anti-the rich asshole bias at the FBI and DOJ for months.
There is a sense on the right that Sessions is getting pushed around by career law enforcement officials who are seeking to protect their own.
In a Thursday night interview on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, accused the DOJ of ignoring congressional subpoenas and of omitting material facts in the documents provided to lawmakers probing allegations of FBI misconduct.
“We need to have the special counsel,” Meadows said. “I disagree with the attorney general. … The Justice Department is not complying with the subpoena and oversight responsibility we have in Congress, so for the attorney general to say there’s not enough there is extremely disappointing.”
Republicans have alleged that the so-called Steele dossier, which was paid for by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, was improperly used to obtain a warrant to spy on a rich asshole campaign official. They say the FBI and DOJ hid from the surveillance court that the information had been paid for by Democrats.
Former FBI Director James Comey, whose firing by the rich asshole prompted the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is now overseeing Mueller’s probe, are among those who signed off on the warrant applications.
Republicans also believe former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe has lied to investigators under oath about his contacts with the media, which may have contributed to his firing.
Jordan said he’d seen evidence that McCabe had lied four times about his authorization to speak with the media, including to Comey, the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), and twice under oath to the FBI’s inspector general. Sessions fired McCabe earlier this month after the OPR recommended he do so.
McCabe, who is friends with Comey, was previously at the center of controversy for leading the investigation into the Clinton matter, even after his wife received a sizable political donation from former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), a Clinton ally.
After the firing, it was revealed that McCabe had launched an investigation into Sessions over whether the attorney general had lied about his contacts with Russians.
A report from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who is now working with Huber, is coming soon and expected to be highly critical of McCabe. The Horowitz report is expected to be the definitive take on the FBI and DOJ’s handling of the Clinton investigation.
But Republicans are also eager to investigate FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Strzok was a key agent involved in the separate probes into Clinton and the rich asshole. He interviewed the rich asshole’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who later plead guilty to lying to the FBI.
In private text messages, Strzok and Page — who were having an extramarital affair — were critical of the rich asshole, as well as other politicians. Both were removed last year from Mueller’s team.
And Republicans want to look into Bruce Ohr, a senior DOJ official who is married to a woman who worked for Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that paid a former British spy to compile the anti-the rich asshole dosser.
“If this doesn’t represent extraordinary circumstances, then what the heck does, Mr. Sessions?” Jordan said.
Still, some legal experts are calling on Republicans to pump the brakes on their criticism of Sessions.
They say that Huber will bring subpoena and grand jury power to Horowitz’s investigation, potentially laying the groundwork for actions against current and former DOJ and FBI officials, or even a second special counsel down the road.
“What [Sessions] did is he essentially combined the powers of the inspector general with the powers of a line prosecutor,” Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and contributor for The Hill, said on Fox News Channel.
“This prosecutor does have not just the experience and training to look for a criminal case, he has the ability to move a case of that kind. Moreover, if he finds that crimes were committed and many people of the FBI might be implicated, Sessions reserved the right to go ahead and appoint a special counsel," Turley said. "That's a powerful combination.”
But conservatives are fed up by what they see as inaction and feckless leadership by Sessions, who they blame for exposing the president to rogue actions by law enforcement officials.
“Sessions is trying to take the pressure off of himself by appointing Huber, but Huber was appointed by Obama and nobody believes he’s going to take strong action against his own agency,” said conservative lawyer Larry Klayman. “This is a charade. As Woody Allen said, 'it’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham,' except it’s not funny.
"I think the rich asshole has had it with Sessions and will fire him soon. He’s just pushing everything down road to a point Mueller will have a green light to bring indictments or write impeachment reports. It’s time for the rich asshole to take strong action. Sessions is leading him down the primrose path to destruction.”
Report: the rich asshole’s citizenship question in 2020 census could undercount 24 million people
Immigrant families are nervous. States could lose billions of dollars. So why are we asking about citizenship?
A new 2020 decennial census policy means some 24.3 million people could skip answering the critical form if they believe their names and other personal information could be shared with law enforcement, according to a Brookings Institute analysis released Friday.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced late Monday that it will restore a question about citizenship to the 2020 census questionnaire, at the behest of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“In so doing, Ross and Sessions explicitly tied the collection of 2020 Census information to federal law enforcement,” says Brookings’s Robert Shapiro. “That’s what makes his directive so remarkable and so dangerous.”
Federal law, specifically Title 13 of the federal code, requires census information be kept confidential, meaning neither the DOJ nor the Department of Homeland Security can access this information. During World War II, the Bureau did give Secret Service the names and addresses of some Japanese-Americans, which was used to help the military relocate them to internment camps. But in 1978, the law was changed and now prohibits the Census Bureau from sharing this data with other government agencies.
Shapiro, who was the Under Secretary of Commerce overseeing the 2000 decennial Census, noted in his analysis that even in an instance where a respondent threatened President Bill Clinton’s life in their census form, the Bureau did not provide this information to the Secret Service.
“But most Americans have never heard of Title 13,” says Shapiro. For that reason, millions of people — who are either undocumented, have a loved one who is undocumented, or are just members of groups who have been given cause to be fearful under this administration — could skip answering the decennial census this time around. Plenty of people are already nervous, which the Bureau knows all too well.
“The possibility that the Census could give my information to internal security and immigration could come and arrest me for not having documents terrifies me,” one respondent told Mikelyn Meyers, a researcher at the Census Bureau, last year. Another told Meyers, “Particularly with our current political climate, the Latino community will not sign up because they will think that Census will pass their information on and people can come looking for them.”
ThinkProgress reached out to the Department of Commerce (DOC) about the Brookings report. “Because a lower response rate would lead to increased non-response follow up costs and less accurate responses, this factor was an important consideration in the decision-making process,” said a spokesperson. “Secretary Ross found that the need for accurate citizenship data and the limited burden that the reinstatement of the citizenship question would impose outweigh fears about a potentially lower response rate.”
Undercounting people in the decennial census has serious implications. As many as 1.5 million people of color were unaccounted for in 2010 census, a problem that could be further exacerbated by the decision to restore a question about citizenship.
This decennial census data is perhaps best known as the means by which congressional seats, electors in each state, and how voting districts are drawn. It’s also used in most national surveys. “If a change to the Census causes problems, that effect will ripple through subsequent attempts to measure pretty much everything,” said Huffington Post polling editor Ariel Edwards-Levy.
Inaccurate decennial census counts will also affect federal assistance programs, like Medicaid (health insurance for low-income and people with disabilities), Section 8 housing, and food assistance. For 12 states whose undocumented populations account for more than 3.5 percent of the national average, this means a smaller share of roughly $800 billion in annual federal funds, according to Brookings. This will “hurt red states as much or more than blue states,” says Shapiro.
The rich asshole the rich asshole campaign already is capitalizing on the citizenship question. But one immigrant leader in Texas, which is one of twelve states subject to lose a lot of federal dollars through further undercounting, says she’ll be answering the 2020 census — but she intends to leave citizenship question blank. She is encouraging others to do the same.
“I am not afraid of him or of his immigrant-hating supporters,” Jessica Azua of the Texas Organizing Project told Dallas News. “My family and I will answer the census. We will not answer the citizenship question. I will urge everyone who can hear my voice to not answer the citizenship question.”
ThinkProgress asked DOC about the implications of this tactic and the spokesperson said “[a]ll residents are required by law to respond but DOJ, not Commerce, is responsible for enforcement. Please direct further questions to DOJ.”
Given the implications of undercounting, many lawmakers are concerned. Four Democratic senators announced Friday that they are calling for a hearing on the 2020 census questionnaire, first reported by NPR. Sens. Kamala Harris (CA), Tom Carper (DE), Gary Peters (MI) and Claire McCaskill (MO) are calling on the Commerce secretary to testify. Already, California is suing over the citizenship question, arguing it’s unconstitutional.
Scott Pruitt’s housing arrangement raises concerns about favorable treatment from industry lobbyist
When he wasn't wining and dining with industry, EPA chief went home to lobbyist's luxury townhouse.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt rented a luxury apartment in Washington, D.C. from a lobbyist friend for $50 a night in a pricey Capitol Hill neighborhood, amounting to $6,100 over a six-month period in 2017.
Many one-bedroom apartments in the same Capitol Hill neighborhood rent for twice as much as Pruitt would pay for his apartment if he rented it for an entire month, according to a ThinkProgress analysis of rental sites.
Norm Eisen, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Washington think tank Brookings Institution and chairman of the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said the $50-per-day rate is “way below market” rate.
The apartment’s co-owner is a health care lobbyist named Vicki Hart. Her husband, Steven Hart, is chairman and CEO of Williams and Jensen PLLC, a lobbying firm with several energy industry clients regulated by the EPA. The firm’s clients include ExxonMobil and Oklahoma Gas & Electric Co., which paid the firm $400,000 in 2017, according to data compiled by Bloomberg that was provided by the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit watchdog group.
Government ethics officials will have to decide whether the renting of the apartment at a likely below-market rate constitutes a gift.
Government ethics rules generally prohibit executive branch employees from accepting gifts from outside the government if the gifts are given because of their official positions or by prohibited sources. Prohibited sources include those who seek official action by the employees’ agencies, do business or seek to do business with their agencies, or conduct activities regulated by their agencies.
In the case of Steven Hart, his energy industry lobbying clients are clearly impacted by rules and regulations issued by the EPA. One of his other major fossil fuel clients is Cheniere Energy, a developer of liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals in the United States. Cheniere built the first LNG export terminal in the continental United States. Each of the LNG export shipments in 2017 from the U.S. originated from Cheniere’s Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana.
In December, Pruitt and members of his staff spent about $40,000 in taxpayer funds to fly to Morocco to urge the North African country to import LNG from the United States.
Scott Pruitt spent almost a year living in a townhouse co-owned by the wife of a top lobbyist. Could it constitute an improper gift? We have an ongoing FOIA request concerning Pruitt’s ethics advice. abcnews.go.com/Politics/exclu…
Steven Hart also serves as an outside counsel for the National Rifle Association.
CREW on Thursday questioned whether Pruitt’s living arrangements at the lobbyist’s townhouse could constitute an improper gift. The watchdog group said in a tweet that has “an ongoing FOIA request concerning Pruitt’s ethics advice.”
Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) said Friday that Pruitt “must immediately make clear the terms of his housing agreement with energy lobbyist Steven Hart, clarify whether he received any favorable treatment, and publish all correspondence with Hart or his associates related to Pruitt’s work at the EPA.”
.@EPAScottPruitt must immediately make clear the terms of his housing agreement with energy lobbyist Steven Hart, clarify whether he received any favorable treatment, and publish all correspondence with Hart or his associates related to Pruitt's work at the EPA. twitter.com/RepDonBeyer/st…
The EPA had not responded to a request for comment from ThinkProgress about whether Pruitt plans to release more information about the housing arrangement.
Pruitt’s family does not live with him in Washington. His wife, Marlyn Pruitt, lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Pruitt’s daughter McKenna Pruitt, attends law school at the University of Virginia. His son, Cade Pruitt, graduated from Cascia Hall High School in Tulsa in 2017.
Pruitt’s tenure as EPA administrator has been marked by controversy and questionable ethics. He’s made no secret that one of his primary goals as EPA chief is to create fewer regulatory roadblocks for the nation’s top polluters. During his first year as administrator, Pruitt gave dozens of speeches to industry groups whose members are regulated by the EPA.
The revelation about Pruitt paying only $50 a night for housing in Washington, first reported by Bloomberg, comes on the heels of news about Pruitt’s expensive travel habits.
Over a six-month period in 2017, Pruitt and his staffers billed taxpayers nearly $200,000 for his trips over six months last year, including 10 visits to Pruitt’s home city of Tulsa, according to travel receipts obtained by the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit watchdog group.
One of the pricey trips was an official visit by Pruitt and his staff to Italy that cost $120,249. On the trip, Pruitt met with international ministers at a G-7 summit in Bologna. Pruitt also went to Rome for a briefing at the US Embassy, a meeting with business leaders, and private tours of the Vatican and St. Peter’s Basilica.
ABC News first reported Thursday that Pruitt had been living in the townhouse building on a street near the U.S. Capitol.
In a statement to the Associated Press, Steven Hart said Pruitt is a casual friend from Oklahoma who moved into the building in early 2017. Hart said he has had little contact with Pruitt over the past several months aside from a brief exchange at a National Prayer Breakfast in February.
“Pruitt signed a market based, short-term lease for a condo owned partially by my wife,” Hart said, according to a statement released by his firm to the AP. “Pruitt paid all rent owed as agreed to in the lease. My wife does not, and has not ever lobbied the EPA on any matters.”
Pruitt’s security team broke down his condo’s door last year: report
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt’s security detail broke down his apartment’s door last year when they believed he was unconscious, ABC News reported Friday.
Citing police radio and sources familiar with the matter, ABC said EPA security workers detailed to Pruitt could not reach him by phone or by knocking on the door of the condo where he was living at the time, which was owned by a health lobbyist married to an energy lobbyist.
The security detail called 911, and dispatchers sent a fire engine and ambulance to the Capitol Hill property.
Security officers then broke down the door and went up to Pruitt’s bedroom, ABC said.
Pruitt was found groggy and getting up from a nap, and he declined medical treatment, sources told ABC. The EPA later reimbursed the landlord, Vicki Hart, for the cost of the door.
The incident in the afternoon of March 29 is the latest in a series of reports over the last two days about Pruitt’s rental arrangement in the Capitol Hill condo.
Earlier reporting by ABC and Bloomberg found that Pruitt paid $50 for each night he stayed in the two-bedroom property, and the EPA initially said he only used one bedroom.
ABC later reported that Pruitt’s daughter, McKenna, had lived in the apartment too for a period of time last year.
Hart told ABC that she had not allowed a second resident to live there.
“The rental agreement was with Scott Pruitt,” she said. “If other people were using the bedroom or the living quarters, I was never told, and I never gave him permission to do that.”
Former federal ethics officials said they are concerned that Pruitt’s arrangement may have violated ethics rules.
The senior counsel for ethics at the EPA said she didn't consider the arrangement "a prohibited gift at all." She later told a BuzzFeed reporter Friday that she didn't know Pruitt’s daughter was renting the second bedroom in the condo when she gave her initial statement.
Oligarch’s jet made suspicious visit to US hours before Manafort met with Russian ex-spy — and Congress wants to know why
Paul Manafort speaks to NBC News (screen grab)
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Congressional investigators are looking at an August 2016 landing of a private jet linked to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska in New Jersey as part of their probe of U.S. election interference.
The private jet arrived in Newark within hours of a meeting in nearby Manhattan between then-the rich asshole campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his longtime associate Konstantin Kilimnik, and that timing has attracted the attention of lawmakers, reported Vice News.
A few weeks earlier, Manafort had emailed Kilimnik — his translator and fixer for more than a decade in Ukraine — and asked him to extend an offer of “private briefings” to Deripaska.
The Gulfstream G550 (registration M-ALAY) landed shortly after midnight and flew back to Moscow the same afternoon, according to publicly available flight records.
A spokesperson for the 50-year-old Deripaska, an aluminum magnate and Kremlin ally, told Vice News the trip had nothing to do with Manafort’s offer to provide briefings, which the representative said never took place.
“The passengers of the flights during the time period in early August 2016 were Mr. Deripaska’s family only,” wrote the spokesperson, who asked not to be named. “As it was previously stated, Mr. Deripaska had no communications, meetings, briefings, or other interaction with Mr. Manafort during, after, or in the run-up to the 2016 Presidential Election. Thus, we repeat that any publications implying that Mr. Deripaska directly or indirectly communicated with Mr. Manafort in 2016 would be a false statement of fact.”
Prosecutors working for special counsel Robert Mueller released a court filing Tuesday night showing that one of Manafort’s associates has ties to Russian intelligence, and that Manafort’s longtime lieutenant Rick Gates said he and the rich asshole’s former campaign chairman were aware of his connections when they met with that former Russian intelligence officer.
The associate isn’t identified in court filings, but the detailed description provided by investigators matches Kilimnik’s background.
Gates has pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with Mueller, whose team has indicted Manafort on 32 counts related to back fraud and money laundering.
Atlantis pulls ads from Laura Ingraham's show
BY JACQUELINE THOMSEN - 03/30/18 12:18 PM EDT
The Atlantis, Paradise Island resort said Friday that it would be pulling its advertisements from Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s show over her comments about a Parkland, Fla., high school shooting survivor.
“Atlantis does not support or agree with the recent comments made by television broadcaster Laura Ingraham,” a spokesperson for the Bahamas resort said in a statement to The Hill.
“Although we are an organization that believes in freedom of expression, we do not condone discrimination, bullying, mockery or harmful behavior of any kind. As a result of these events, we have decided to remove all brand advertising tied to the program,” the statement read.
Atlantis is at least the 10th advertiser to pull support from Ingraham’s program.
Ingraham faced criticism after she mocked Parkland student David Hogg on Wednesday for being rejected by some colleges.
Hogg quickly hit back by targeting Ingraham’s advertisers.
David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA...totally predictable given acceptance rates.) dailywire.com/news/28770/gun…
Pick a number 1-12 contact the company next to that #
Top Laura Ingraham Advertisers
1. @sleepnumber
2. @ATT
3. Nutrish
4. @Allstate & @esurance
5. @Bayer
6. @RocketMortgage Mortgage
7. @LibertyMutual
8. @Arbys
9. @TripAdvisor
10. @Nestle
11. @hulu
12. @Wayfair
Top Laura Ingraham Advertisers
1. @sleepnumber
2. @ATT
3. Nutrish
4. @Allstate & @esurance
5. @Bayer
6. @RocketMortgage Mortgage
7. @LibertyMutual
8. @Arbys
9. @TripAdvisor
10. @Nestle
11. @hulu
12. @Wayfair
The Fox News host apologized Thursday as companies began to pull ads from her show.
However, Hogg has rejected her apology, saying that Ingraham had only done so because she was losing advertisers.
Any student should be proud of a 4.2 GPA —incl. @DavidHogg111. On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland. For the record, I believe my show was the first to feature David...(1/2)
... immediately after that horrific shooting and even noted how "poised" he was given the tragedy. As always, he’s welcome to return to the show anytime for a productive discussion. WATCH: youtu.be/K0v7yxczipo (2/2)
I 100% agree an apology in an effort just to save your advertisers is not enough. I will only accept your apology only if you denounce the way your network has treated my friends and I in this fight. It’s time to love thy neighbor, not mudsling at children. twitter.com/fred_guttenber…
Roger Stone slurs ex-the rich asshole aide Sam Nunberg as a liar and cokehead in bizarre reaction to Mueller testimony
Roger Stone speaks to ABC News (screen grab)
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Longtime the rich asshole ally Roger Stone came unglued this week at Sam Nunberg, a former the rich asshole campaign official who testified before Robert Mueller’s grand jury earlier this month — where he may have delivered potentially incriminating information about Stone.
The Daily Beast reports that Stone unloaded on Nunberg on his personal Instagram account this week, and wrote a post in which he called out Nunberg for being a “lying assh*le” and a “psycho.”
In a separate video posted on Instagram, Stone said that Nunberg’s claims that he made about Stone’s connection with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange were the result of rampant drug abuse.
“Sam Nunberg is a cocaine addict,” Stone said. “And any news organization that takes anything he said seriously is courting a serious lawsuit. Coke head.”
Earlier this month, Nunberg said that he warned Stone about getting too close with Assange, with whom Stone allegedly exchanged messages during the 2016 presidential campaign.
“I warned Roger repeatedly during the 2016 summer, ‘do not associate yourself with Julian Assange,” he said on CNN. “For two reasons: one, at that point it seemed pretty obvious that Hillary Clinton was going to win and there was surely going to be a special counsel into these matters.”
Watch the video of Stone below.
US commanders fighting ISIS slam dysfunctional the rich asshole White House
By
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March 30, 2018
the rich asshole's daily White House chaos is hurting the U.S. military's ability to fight ISIS.
the rich asshole might relish fostering a culture of chaos inside the White House, as he continues to dismantle his Cabinet and summarily dismiss top advisers. But that dysfunction has real-world implications, particularly for U.S. commanders who complain the rich asshole’s team is distracted and non-responsive.
Specifically, U.S. commanders battling ISIS in Syria insist they’re losing crucial ground because of the lack of guidance from the White House.
“Some U.S. commanders say what they perceive as a lack of guidance from the White House — which sent Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster packing in a 9-day span — is threatening their mission to destroy ISIS,” NBC News reports.
“We send memos. We tell them [the White House] what is going on. I’m not sure they’re listening, or if they even know what we’re doing out here,” said one senior officer. “I don’t think anyone is home right now.”
Adds another: “We’re on the two-yard line. We could literally fall into the end zone. We’re that close to total victory, to whipping out the ISIS caliphate in Syria. We’re that close and now, it’s coming apart.”
During the turbulent month of March, the rich asshole seemed to turn the White House into a reality TV show, with a laundry list of characters exiting and new ones being brought in. All the while, scandals continue to plague the administration.
the rich asshole’s abrupt firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and then national security adviser H.R. McMaster have been seen as especially disruptive, since the two men held extremely sensitive positions. The two, in comparison to the rest of the rich asshole’s radical team, were also seen as somewhat moderating forces.
Not only does that kind of roiling personnel carousel create chaos inside Washington, D.C, it drastically affects policy, to the point where commanders don’t know where to look for leadership while ISIS regroups.
That same crisis is unfolding on the diplomatic front, where the rich asshole’s State Department has been gutted.
This week, more than 200 retired career diplomats signed a letter sounding the alarm about the corrosion of the State Department, warning that the rich asshole administration’s neglect of the institution has “crippled” its capacity.
To date, eight of the nine senior leadership positions in the State Department are unfilled, while 50 ambassadorships are vacant, as are 16 of the 22 assistant secretary positions.
the rich asshole’s erratic behavior continues to make dangerous times even more dangerous.
Pruitt paid $50 a night to live at condo co-owned by top energy lobbyist’s wife
BY MAX GREENWOOD AND MIRANDA GREEN - 03/30/18 08:20 AM EDT
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt paid $50 a night to live in a condo co-owned by the wife of a lobbyist with clients regulated by the agency.
Pruitt paid to rent the room in the two-bedroom condo only on nights when he actually slept there, Bloomberg News first reported Thursday.
Over the course of roughly six months, Pruitt paid $6,100 for the room. Those payments, however, came on sporadic dates and in different amounts, unlike traditional monthly rent payments, the EPA confirmed to The Hill.
“While transitioning to Washington, Administrator Pruitt signed a lease to rent a bedroom in a condo and he moved out at the end of July," EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said in a statement.
A lease agreement reviewed by Bloomberg showed that Pruitt was charged $50 a night "based on days of actual occupancy."
The living arrangement was not reviewed by the EPA in advance, and the agency had to seek documentation from the building's owners to prove that Pruitt paid for the room, Bloomberg reported.
Pruitt himself was not able to provide the agency with any documentation of his lease or payments.
Justina Fugh, the senior counsel for ethics at the EPA, said the living arrangement did not present an ethics issue.
“I don’t conclude that this is a prohibited gift at all. It was a routine business transaction and permissible even if from a personal friend,” Fugh said in a statement.
ABC News first reported the living arrangement on Thursday. The condo is reportedly owned by a company that counts Vicki Hart as an owner. Hart is married to J. Steven Hart, an energy lobbyist who represents clients in industries regulated by the EPA.
Scott Pruitt is paying rent to the wife of an attorney representing the NRA in Russia probe
EPA AdministratorScott Pruitt of Oklahoma speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
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Scott Pruitt may have to recuse himself from overseeing the Russia probe if he slides over to attorney general, as President some rich asshole reportedly would like him to do.
The Environmental Protection Agency administrator has been renting a room in a Washington, D.C., townhouse partially owned by an oil lobbyist’s wife, and that connection could complicate the rich asshole’s rumored plan to replace Jeff Sessions.
According to Bloomberg Politics, Pruitt has been paying $50 a night for one bedroom in the townhouse owned through a limited liability corporation by Vicki Hart, a lobbyist who specializes in health care.
Hart is married to J. Steven Hart, chairman of the Williams & Jensen lobbying firm that represents energy industry clients such as Oklahoma Gas & Electric Co. and Cheniere Energy Inc.
Steven Hart also serves as outside legal counsel for the NRA, and he issued a media statement related to the Russia investigation this week on behalf of the gun manufacturers lobbying group.
“We have one contribution from a Russian,” Steven Hart told ABC News on Wednesday.
Hart said Russian politician Alexander Torshin had made a “life membership payment” to the National Rifle Association’s nonprofit parent organization, which is not required by law to disclose the contribution.
“The donation was the person’s membership dues,” Hart said, adding that the money was not used for election-related activities in the U.S. “That was not a major donor program.”
The FBI is reportedly investigating whether Torshin, deputy governor of the Bank of Russia, illegally funneled money to the NRA to assist the the rich asshole campaign in 2016.
Torshin has boasted numerous times on his frequently updated Twitter account that he methodically cultivated ties with NRA leaders over six years to gain deeper access to U.S. politics, according to a report earlier this month by NPR.
The former deputy speaker of Russia’s parliament has tweeted that he knows the rich asshole personally through his NRA connections, and he reportedly met with some rich asshole Jr. at a May 2016 NRA convention in Louisville, Kentucky.
Torshin also tried repeatedly to meet with the Republican candidate himself at that convention, but there’s no evidence such a meeting occurred.
Pruitt’s connection to Steven Hart has raised the interest of ethics watchdogs, and it could also complicate the president’s reported plan to move him from the EPA to oversee the Department of Justice — and the special counsel probe of Russian election interference.
Two Republicans in regular contact with the White House told Vanity Fair that the rich asshole has discussed replacing Sessions, who has recused himself from overseeing the Justice Department probe due to his own ties to Russia, with Pruitt.
The new attorney general would presumably be able to fire special counsel Robert Mueller or otherwise wind down the probe, which has reached into the rich asshole’s inner circle.
Pruitt, as an agency chief and former Oklahoma attorney general, might be able to bypass Senate confirmation to take over for Sessions, who has fallen out of favor with the rich asshole since stepping away from overseeing the Russia probe.
GOP candidate who wanted the rich asshole investigated didn’t really mean it
By
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Republican candidate Debbie Lesko said the Stormy Daniels allegations should be investigated. Then she changed her mind.
Former Arizona state Sen. Debbie Lesko, the Republican candidate in the special election for Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, almost took a principled stand on the rich asshole’s misconduct — but then she caught herself.
In a radio debate last weekend, Lesko said the charge that the rich asshole paid off and threatened Stormy Daniels into silence “needs to be investigated.”
But a few days later, when Lesko spoke to the New York Times, she backtracked, saying, “I didn’t mean a formal investigation by government or something like that,” adding she found Daniels “a little hard to believe,” because “the business that she’s in — I’m sorry.”
Lesko, who is squaring off against progressive candidate Hiral Tipirneni in a special election, obviously fears the consequences of appearing disloyal to the rich asshole. In 2016, the rich asshole won the district by 21 points.
But her attempt to downplay a cover-up of sexual misbehavior is galling. The only reason the seat is open is that the Republican who held it, Trent Franks, resigned after he was caught bribing female staffers to have his baby.
Lesko’s cowardice is part of a broader pattern. Republicans are only able to take a stand against the rich asshole’s behavior when they think there is some benefit to them.
In 2016, after the release of the Access Hollywood tape of the rich asshole boasting about sexual assault, many Republicans pretended to renounce the rich asshole. Then-congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) said he would not be able to look his 15-year-old daughter in the eye and say he supported the rich asshole. And Mitt Romney called the rich asshole’s remarks “vile degradations” that “demean our wives and daughters.”
Flash forward to today. Chaffetz is now a Fox News commentator who regularly praises the rich asshole and condemns everyone investigating him. Romney, now running for Senate in Utah, claims he is actually even more Trumpish than the rich asshole. And pretty much all Republicans in Congress and most Republican voters do whatever the rich asshole says.
For Republicans like Lesko, staying in the good graces of the party means cheerleading for the rich asshole in any and all circumstances. She just had to remind herself of that.
House GOP’s own intel report shows Jared Kushner may have misled Congress on Russia meeting
Jared Kushner (Photo: Screen capture)
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During his testimony before Congress, the rich asshole son-in-law Jared Kushner tried to give lawmakers the impression that he did not know that he was attending a meeting in June 2016 to meet with Russian officials offering up dirt on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
However, a new analysis written by New York University School of Law professor Ryan Goodman at his Just Security website shows that the report issued by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee completely contradicts this impression.
In short, the GOP’s own report states plainly that “some rich asshole Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort attended a June 9, 2016 meeting at the rich asshole Tower where they expected to receive” dirt on Clinton from Russian sources.
Goodman compares this to Kushner’s written statement, where he goes out of his way to give the impression that he had no idea what the the rich asshole Tower meeting would be about — and suggested that he only knew it involved the rich asshole Jr.
“That email was on top of a long back and forth that I did not read at the time,” Kushner said in his written testimony. “As I did with most emails when I was working remotely, I quickly reviewed on my iPhone the relevant message that the meeting would occur at 4:00 PM at his office. Documents confirm my memory that this was calendared as ‘Meeting: Don Jr.| Jared Kushner.’ No one else was mentioned.”
According to Goodman, this contradiction between Kushner’s account and Republican lawmakers’ report may mean Kushner could be prosecuted for lying to Congress if investigators find that he “knowingly and willingly” misled them about what he knew of the meeting.
House staffer remained in his role for months after sending death threats to former aide
Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D-CT) says she failed to protect her staffer, but also blames the congressional reporting system.
In May 2016, Rep. Elizabeth Esty’s (D-CT) former chief of staff, Tony Baker, left a voicemail for a former aide to the congresswoman, threatening her with death if she didn’t respond. “You better fucking reply to me or I will fucking kill you,” he told the aide, a woman he had once dated.
Although Esty soon learned of the death threat and of claims that Baker had “punched, berated and sexually harassed” the aide during her 2014 tenure as a senior adviser in the congresswoman’s Washington office, he was allowed to remain on staff for three months, a Washington Post report revealed on Thursday night.
Esty claims that a flawed congressional reporting system allowed the staffer to remain in her office for as long as he did.
After an internal investigation stemming from the incident, Esty reportedly provided the chief of staff with a letter of reference and signed a non-disclosure agreement. Baker received $5,000 in severance out of House funds, though the congresswoman says she has since repaid the funds to the U.S. Treasury out of her own pocket.
Following initial reporting by the Connecticut Post, Esty released a statement apologizing for her handling of the situation. “I am sorry that I failed to protect [the former aide] and provide her with the safe and respectful work environment that every employee deserves,” she wrote. “I am sorry that I hurt her, her friends, family, and co-workers, and many of my present and former staffers.”
Esty vowed to “do better,” and proposed that survivors and allies have a conversation “about how to implement the changes necessary both in Congress and more broadly to prevent this from happening again.”
In a troubling twist, the congresswoman also told the Post that the Office of House Employment Counsel had allegedly pressured her to sign the non-disclosure agreement, which she said delayed her then-chief of staff’s exit, and noted that the system helps shield those who misbehave.
“Clearly that’s what it’s all set up to do — to protect the member of Congress whose bad behavior caused the problem,” Esty told the outlet. “It felt wrong to me. …When I’m reading the documents and these drafts, it kept going through my mind, ‘This is not right. This is not what happened.'”
The Office of House Employment Counsel told the Post that it does not respond to media questions.
The reporting system to which Esty was likely referring has been at the center of several high profile accusations stemming from the “Me Too” movement on Capitol Hill. As ThinkProgress previously reported, prior to last fall, the process members of Congress utilized to deal with any sexual assault or harassment allegations within their offices was long and arduous, capping the statute of limitations for complaints at just 180 days. If a staffer ended up reporting an incident within that time frame, it was generally handled through counseling or mediation, frequently ending in a confidential settlement from congressional coffers.
In February, the House voted to change some of its decades-old rules to revise the process somewhat, preventing members of Congress from having sexual relations with their staffers and offering the staffers legal resources if they chose to file any complaints. The new rules also prohibit members from using their budgets to pay any settlements.
Since the rise of the #MeToo movement, numerous members of Congress and staffers have been accused of sexual misconduct. Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) have all resigned their seats after accusations against them, while Reps. Blake Farenthold (R-TX), Ruben Kihuen (D-NV), and Patrick Meehan (R-PA), have all said they will not seek re-election after allegations of misconduct against them surfaced.
UPDATE, 10:35 am: In a letter to House Democrats on Friday, Esty addressed the controversy over her former chief of staff, writing, “How did I not know? How did I not see it? What I do know is that wasn’t an isolated incidence on Capitol Hill and that we can and must do better to ensure a safe environment for our employees. As Members of Congress, we are all responsible for ensuring that we provide a safe and supportive environment for our staff. I can’t rewrite the past – but I can help right the future”
Ex-Whitewater prosecutor calls on Rosenstein to appoint separate special counsel to investigate Stormy Daniels payoff
Stormy Daniels/Screenshot
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In an interview with Yahoo News, former White water prosecutor Ken Starr said that revelations by the attorney for some rich asshole’s attorney that the president was not aware of a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels opens up a legal can of worms that the Justice Department needs to look into.
Appearing on CNN on Wednesday, David Schwartz, the attorney who represents some rich asshole’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen, stated the rich asshole didn’t know about the $130,000 payment made Cohen, saying, “[the rich asshole] was not aware of any of it, wasn’t told about it.”
“Michael Cohen left the option open,” Schwartz elaborated.”That’s why he left that signature line, the option open to go to him. He chose not to. He chose to bind the LLC, EC LLC and Stormy Daniels into the contract.”
Starr said Schwartz’s comments raised a “serious and difficult question” about the the rich asshole administration and suggested that the Justice Department appoint a second special counsel to investigate.
In the interview, Starr stated, ““That’s a serious question,” about the payoff and the way it was secretly handled and whether it was an illegal campaign contribution.
“What did the president know? Did he authorize it? All those things have to be sorted out,” Starr explained.
“This becomes an issue for Rod Rosenstein,” Starr continued referring to the assistant attorney general responsible for appointing special counsel Robert Mueller. “But Rod may very well say [to Mueller], ‘You need to stick to the issue. Let’s get through with this issue of collusion. You stick to that and lets now appoint [somebody else] as special counsel.’”
Daniels’s allegations about the payoff need “to be considered and assessed,” Starr continued, calling for, “The equivalent of a preliminary investigation. That’s the way these things are done.”
According to Starr, Rosenstein would have to walk a proposal before another special counsel by his boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“As in law school, I’m issue-spotting and discussing the kind of things that Rod Rosenstein would probably sit down with the attorney general” and raise. “He’d take that elevator from the fourth floor [of the Justice Department] to the fifth floor and say, ‘Gen. Sessions, we need to talk and this is the issue of the day, ” Starr explained.
You can listen to the interview here
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March 30, 2018
A federal judge ruled that 'overtly bigoted statements' from the rich asshole the candidate suggest he might be overtly bigoted in the Oval Office too.
A federal judge cited the rich asshole’s on-the-record racism as a reason for allowing a lawsuit challenging immigration policy to proceed.
The Justice Department has been trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to preserve DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that was put in place by President Barack Obama to allow immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to remain in their homes.
the rich asshole rescinded DACA last September, throwing the lives of 800,000 recipients and their families into needless and cruel chaos. The administration was immediately buried in lawsuits over the decision.
In rejecting the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss this particular lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis blasted the rich asshole’s “racially charged language” and “slurs,” saying such overt racism gets in the way of the administration’s attempts to undo DACA and allowed the lawsuit to go forward.
In his ruling, Garaufis said that the rich asshole’s “racial slurs” and “epithets” about Latinos, on the campaign trail and in the White House, created a “plausible inference” that the anti-DACA actions violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause.
“One might reasonably infer that a candidate who makes ‘ on the campaign trail might be more likely to engage in similarly bigoted action in office,” he wrote.
Most presidents do not have to worry about their racism being cited in federal court, but the current occupant of the Oval Office has changed that.
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the rich asshole’s attempt at implementing an anti-Muslim travel ban, noting his Executive Order “drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.” The court then cited the rich asshole’s own statements that showed his clear bigotry toward Muslims.
While the administration argued that the attempted Muslim ban was not discriminatory, the court merely had to point to the rich asshole’s own hateful rhetoric as evidence of his intent to discriminate against Muslims.
A short time later, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals took a similar approach. The administration tried to argue that the travel ban was not a travel ban, but the court simply cited the rich asshole’s own all-caps tweet calling it “a TRAVEL BAN.”
the rich asshole is a racist who campaigned on racist ideas and who, using the bully pulpit of the White House, has advanced racist and discriminatory rhetoric and ideas.
His wholehearted embrace and promotion of noxious and un-American ideals are so complete that the normally staid courts have said his rhetoric cannot be ignored while assessing the legality and intent of his policies.
the rich asshole’s racism infects his policies, and the two have become inseparable and equally toxic.
White House ‘growing dismayed’ after the rich asshole’s EPA chief busted for renting $50 room from oil lobbyist’s wife
Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
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The the rich asshole White House is reportedly not happy about news that Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt rented a room in a high-priced Washington D.C. condo that is owned by a top energy lobbyist’s wife.
According to Bloomberg, “White House officials are growing dismayed about the questions surrounding Pruitt’s living arrangement, including his initial inability to produce any documentation about his lease or his actual payments” for the room.
Records obtained by Bloomberg show that Pruitt paid $50 per night that he stayed in the room in the condo, while also noting that the lease stipulates that he would not have unlimited access to the full condo’s living space, which was primarily used by the condo’s owner, health care lobbyist Vicki Hart, who is married to energy lobbyist J. Steven Hart.
Although the EPA has defended Pruitt by noting that he is paying a fair price for what amounts to a single room, Environmental Integrity Project director Eric Schaeffer says that Pruitt should have known better than to rent out a room from someone who is married to a lobbyist for the industry he’s supposed to be overseeing.
“At the very least, it doesn’t look good for the administrator of EPA to have rented an apartment from the wife of an energy industry lobbyist who represents companies regulated by EPA,” he says.
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March 30, 2018
A new complaint from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse alleges Scott Pruitt takes his expensive government security detail on personal and family trips.
EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is in trouble yet again for misusing taxpayer resources — this time to take personal trips, including a family trip to Disneyland, a visit to the Rose Bowl and a stop in Lexington for a University of Kentucky basketball game.
According to a letter sent by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) to the EPA Office of the Inspector General, Pruitt kept his multimillion-dollar government security detail with him on personal vacations. No previous EPA administrator has ever demanded 24-hour security detail even while not on official business.
Per Whitehouse’s letter, “significant agency resources are being devoted to administrator Pruitt’s round-the-clock security, even when he is traveling on non-official business,” and Pruitt “frequently requested per diem lodging expenses in excess of the federal government’s established daily rate.”
These revelations follow a controversy in which Pruitt was caught billing the government $90,000 for first-class air travel. Pruitt insisted this, too, was a security measure, because someone in the economy seats might try to beat him up.
It was subsequently revealed that among the “security incidents” prompting all of this excessive taxpayer spending was a passenger who hurt Pruitt’s feelings by yelling, “You’re fucking up the environment!”
Pruitt’s lavish government spending on his own comfort is a pattern.
Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was forced to resign after spending roughly $1 million on military and charter flights. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke allegedly used a military jet to go to a Republican fundraiser, and even took a $40,000 helicopter ride with money designated for fighting wildfires.
the rich asshole has assembled one of the richest Cabinets in American history. The sum total of all his original Cabinet members’ wealth was greater than that of the bottom 33 percent of U.S. households combined. They ought to have been more than capable of paying their own way when going about their business.
And yet somehow, they can’t even take their families on vacation without the taxpayers getting stuck with a bill.
Wall Street Journal warns the rich asshole’s ‘political’ attacks on Amazon and Jeff Bezos could lead to impeachment
some rich asshole at at the rich asshole International in New Jersey (Shutterstock)
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The conservative editorial board of the Wall Street Journal took President some rich asshole to task for his bizarre Thursday tweet attacking Amazon.com, saying the assault on the popular company appeared to be political in nature and that he could face impeachment should he decide to sic government agencies on the company.
In the piece published on Friday morning, the WSJ board noted that the rich asshole appears to be going after Amazon because it was founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, which has been highly critical of the the rich asshole administration.
On Thursday, the rich asshole tweeted: “I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!”
The Journal noted that the rich asshole got his facts wrong about the relationship between Amazon and the U.S. Post Office writing, “some rich asshole’s other big gripe is that taxpayers are on the losing end of Amazon’s deal with the U.S. Postal Service. But that story is also more complicated. The Post Office has often operated at a net loss, but package volumes grew in fiscal 2017 by more than 11%, making it a rare growth market. Many of the additional 589 million boxes delivered last year came from Amazon.”
“Though imperfect, the deal is mutually beneficial,” the editorial continued. “The Post Office arguably needs Amazon more than Amazon needs the Post Office. The Post Office could drop Amazon as a delivery partner, but it would likely have to raise prices elsewhere or endure higher losses. Would some rich asshole take credit for that?”
As for the possibility that the rich asshole might try to compel officials in his administration to inflict damage on the company, the Journal warned the rich asshole he might be flirting with disaster and impeachment.
“some rich asshole could try to unleash the Internal Revenue Service, though that would be a scandal that could be an impeachable offense,” the editorial cautioned. “The press and prosecutors would not give the the rich asshole IRS the pass they gave Lois Lerner during the Obama years for targeting conservative nonprofits with extra scrutiny.”
“some rich asshole can rail against anyone he wants, but America is still a nation of laws, as Mr. Obama also discovered,” the editors concluded. “This is a lesson some rich asshole’s critics forgot as they cried wolf over a fascist takeover. The political reality is that the more some rich asshole publicly assails Amazon, the harder it will be to take regulatory action, deserved or not.”
You can read the whole piece here (subscription required).
A pharmaceutical executive will lead the the rich asshole administration’s effort to lower drug prices
Daniel Best previously worked for CVS and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals.
The rich asshole administration announced Thursday that it was appointing a former corporate executive to lead the Department of Health and Human Service’s efforts to lower the price of prescription drugs.
Daniel M. Best, who spent 12 years working at Pfizer Pharmaceuticals and also recently helped fashion CVSHealth’s prescription drug plans, will be a senior adviser to the secretary for drug pricing reform.
“Daniel Best recognizes what President the rich asshole and I, and every American know: prescription drugs prices are too high,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement. “[Daniel] has the deep experience necessary to design and enact reforms to lower the price of medicines that health Americans live healthier and longer lives.”
Best is not the first pharmaceutical executive to be drafted in by the rich asshole administration. After serving in HHS under President George W. Bush, Azar worked for Lilly USA, an affiliate of the drug maker Eli Lilly, from 2012 to January 2017. During that time, Eli Lilly tripled the price of insulin as well as raising the cost of other key drugs that treat conditions like osteoporosis and heart disease.
the rich asshole has repeatedly pledged that one of his main goals as president is to reduce the price of prescription medication. Prior to his inauguration, the rich asshole said that Big Pharma “has a lot of lobbies, a lot of lobbyists and a lot of power,” and that they were “getting away with murder.”
But despite the rhetoric, the rich asshole administration is following a policy route that is extremely friendly to big pharmaceutical companies — the addition of another corporate executive is only the latest instance.
Last June, Kaiser Health News and Politico revealed that the administration was discussing solving the drug price crisis with a list of Big Pharma-friendly policies, including ending discounts for low income hospitals, speeding drug approvals through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and strengthening monopoly rights of pharmaceuticals overseas. The last point is particularly important, because it would threaten to drive up drug prices as it thwarts competition in the global marketplace.
the rich asshole’s initial promises to bring down drug prices were described at first as “nightmare” by Big Pharma. However, according to Politico, major companies were quickly assured that the White House’s interests aligned with them and the industry receded from full-blown panic.
“The folk [the rich asshole’s] brought in tend to be free market folks,” health policy expert Kim Monk told Vox. “[They’re] industry folks who don’t like the government negotiating drug prices because they don’t believe it would work.”
Former business executives are hardly an anomaly in the rich asshole administration. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was a former Goldman Sachs executive before joining the White House. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, meanwhile, was a former investor — who also put money in a shipping firm tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Pentagon says White House helped draft transgender military ban, contradicting White House’s claim
Defense Department spokesperson says it "was a coordinated effort with the White House as well as the Department of Justice."
In a statement Thursday, the Department of Defense admitted that the White House did play a role in drafting President the rich asshole’s newest ban on transgender people serving in the military. This directly contradicts White House statements that it was not involved and further reinforces reporting that Vice President Pence intervened, overruling recommendations from Defense Secretary James Mattis.
The Washington Blade’s Chris Johnson shared the statement on Twitter Thursday afternoon. According to department spokesperson Dana White, both the Department of Justice and White House were involved in crafting the policy.
It would make sense that the Department of Justice was involved, as it is currently litigating the many lawsuits challenging the ban. The new policy only became public because it was included in one of the government’s court filings Friday night.
But as Johnson notes, this directly contradicts what the White House has saidabout its involvement. A Pence official told Johnson it was “patently false” that the vice president had imposed his own report, insisting that he was not involved in a major way.
Likewise, when Johnson specifically asked the White House if the rich asshole, Pence, or any other White House officials were involved, White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah responded, “The Department of Defense’s panel of experts was comprised of senior uniformed and civilian leaders who considered the issue based on data and their professional military judgment, without regard to any external factors.”
This language seemingly rejecting any White House involvement is suspiciously taken almost verbatim from the memo Mattis sent to the rich asshole in February:
That memo was also only made public Friday night. At the time it was sent, it was widely reported that Mattis would recommend continuing to allow transgender people to serve. But that memo — the apparent source of that White House statement — recommended a ban with only a narrow exception for those who are already serving openly.
As ThinkProgress and Slate reported this weekend, multiple sources contend that Pence formed his own “working group” separate from the military panel that Mattis set up that included anti-LGBTQ activists like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation. This working group then reportedly overruled the recommendations made by Mattis’ military panel. Tellingly, the memo and the report explaining the recommendation contain the same anti-trans junk science that Perkins and Anderson regularly promote. So it looks like the very language the White House used to dismiss Johnson’s question about White House involvement came from a document the White House itself wrote.
White’s quote that the White House was part of “a coordinated effort” on the ban is also notable because there is not a single mention of any White House consultation in either the memo or the report. Indeed, it wouldn’t even make sense that the White House would consult on a report that was supposed to result in a recommendation for the White House. That is, of course, unless the White House — through Pence — dictated what it wanted the report to say.
This Defense Department statement is a telling admission that the White House was involved in doubling down on the ban.
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March 29, 2018
If the rich asshole was hoping the Russia probe was winding down, he's about to find out he was sorely mistaken.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators have turned to their attention to the 2016 Republican National Convention, questioning witnesses about two events attended by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, as well as the circumstances surrounding a pro-Russia change made to the GOP platform.
According to Reuters, Mueller’s team has been asking detailed questions about conversations that took place between Sessions and Kislyak at a convention-related event in July 2016.
Mueller is also reportedly looking into “how and why” the Republican Party platform deleted language calling for the U.S. to provide “lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine’s armed forces” — a pro-Russia change that came without explanation.
Around the time the change was made, the rich asshole foreign policy adviser J.D. Gordon reportedly told a member of the platform committee’s national security subcommittee that the rich asshole directed him to support the weakening of the platform language.
The rich asshole campaign, however, has denied that it was involved in watering down the party’s stance on Ukraine.
In addition to the events in July 2016, Mueller is also reportedly investigating whether Sessions had any private conversations with Kislyak during a campaign event several months earlier at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC.
During questioning last year, Sessions told congressional investigators that he could not recall having any conversations with Russian officials at the April 2016 Mayflower Hotel event, but that he could not rule out the possibility that a “brief interaction” with Kislyak may have taken place.
It was previously reported that congressional investigators are looking into the Republican National Convention as part of their investigation into Russian interference and potential coordination with the rich asshole campaign, but this is the first indication that the special counsel probe is also zeroing in on the 2016 event.
As Reuters noted, despite the rich asshole’s frequent claims that collusion has been taken off the table, Mueller’s focus on the events that transpired at the Republican convention indicates “that the rich asshole campaign contacts and actions related to Russia remain central to the special counsel’s investigation.”
On Tuesday, Mueller’s team made the most direct link yet between the the rich asshole campaign and Russia, revealing in a court filing that former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates knew that the Russian operative with whom he was communicating at the height of the 2016 campaign was actually a Russian intelligence agent.
That revelation came just a week after it was reported that campaign adviser and longtime the rich asshole confidante Roger Stone had been in extensive contact with a Russian military intelligence officer working out of the agency’s headquarters in Moscow.
Stone claims he didn’t know Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian intelligence agent, but the fact remains the same: Multiple the rich asshole campaign aides had sustained contact with Russian spies during the 2016 presidential election.
No matter how much the rich asshole may want to deny it, his campaign is squarely in the crosshairs — and collusion is still very much on the table.
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March 29, 2018
The American people have the fired deputy FBI director's back.
Andrew McCabe, the former Deputy Director of the FBI who the rich asshole and Attorney General Jeff Sessions vindictively fired days before retirement to prevent him from earning full pension benefits, has rapidly turned into a martyr for the rich asshole’s pattern of interference in law enforcement.
Nothing illustrates this better than what happened when a GoFundMe was set up on Thursday to help McCabe pay the legal expenses to contest his firing.
The campaign initially sought to raise $150,000. But in a matter of hours they blew past that number and had to up the goal to $250,000. As of 8:30 pm ET, the campaign had raised over $250,000.
“The support for Mr. McCabe has been overwhelming, humbling, and deeply appreciated,” says the campaign. “He and his family continue to deal with the very public and extended humiliation that the Administration, and the President personally, have inflicted on them over the past year.”
And the GoFundMe is not the only showing of support for McCabe. Some congressmen, like Minnesota Democrat Rep. Tim Walz, who happens to be the highest-ranking soldier in Congress, and Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan have offered McCabe a job to save his pension.
the rich asshole has had it out for McCabe since taking office, demanding “loyalty” from him and at one point demanding to know whether he voted for him. For months, the rich asshole scapegoated and baselessly smeared McCabe former FBI Director James Comey’s decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her email server.
Throughout his presidency, the rich asshole has been trying to make himself out a victim of supposed FBI “Deep State” spying abuse. But the charges are so baseless that even Sessions has rejected the call to appoint a special counsel to look into it.
“Andrew McCabe’s FBI career was long, distinguished, and unblemished,” the GoFundMe says. “He embraced the most daunting, difficult, and important challenges that the FBI and the country could assign to him over the past 21 years. He served the United States with courage and distinction in the days following the President’s summary dismissal of former Director James Comey, in one of the most tumultuous periods in the Bureau’s history.”
“His reward for that,” continues the page, “has been a termination that was completely unjustified, amidst repeated ad hominem attacks by the President of the United States.”
The American people know that McCabe was given a raw deal. And that is why they are stepping up for him.
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March 29, 2018
Eight of the nine top positions in the State Department are vacant, as are 16 of the 22 assistant secretary positions and 50 ambassadorships.
More than 200 retired career diplomats have signed a letter sounding the alarm about the corrosion of the State Department, warning that the rich asshole administration’s neglect of the institution has “crippled” its capacity.
The letter is addressed to Sens. Bob Corker and Robert Menendez — the Republican chairman and top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — and comes just ahead of the confirmation hearing for Mike Pompeo, the rich asshole’s new pick for Secretary of State.
Signed by more than 200 senior diplomats who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the letter urges lawmakers to “focus public attention on the urgent need to restore the power and influence of American diplomacy,” which has suffered under the rich asshole administration.
The letter’s signatories express alarm over the current state of diplomacy, which has been hampered by an understaffed and underfunded State Department. Morale among employees has also sunk to a new low, further hindering the State Department’s work.
Former diplomat William Burns, who served under 10 secretaries of state and five presidents, described the letter as “a product of profound concern about the broad attitude of dismissiveness to diplomacy, the marginalization of professional diplomats and the corrosion of the institution” under the current leadership.
The rich asshole administration’s disregard for diplomacy has resulted in a mass exodus of career diplomats, with 60 percent of the State Departments’ top-ranking career diplomats leaving during the rich asshole’s first year in office. And qualified applicants aren’t exactly lining up to replace them. New applications to join the foreign service have fallen by half since the rich asshole took office.
Currently, eight of the nine senior leadership positions in the State Department are unfilled. Additionally, 50 ambassadorships are vacant, as are 16 of the 22 assistant secretary positions.
The list of vacant posts spans a slew of critical positions, including coordinators for cyber issues and sanctions policy, as well as the lead coordinator overseeing implementation of the Iran nuclear deal.
The top diplomatic post overseeing North Korea policy is also empty, as are senior positions involving nuclear nonproliferation, arms control, and conflict stabilization.
Other notable vacancies include the Special Envoy on climate change, the Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, the Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, and the U.S. Representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Perhaps most tellingly, the position of White House Liaison is currently listed as vacant.
While all of this would be alarming under normal circumstances, it is particularly concerning given the chaos and constant turnover in the rich asshole White House. In just the past month, the rich asshole has fired three of his Cabinet secretaries — on Twitter.
The White House says the rich asshole “came to Washington to drain the swamp” and “make America great.” Instead, he’s purging career officials, leaving key positions vacant, and making America weaker on the global stage.
POLITICS
some rich asshole Jr. Gets In A Snit Over Accurate BBC Headline About Ronny Jackson
He can’t handle the truth.
For a guy who likes to accuse media outlets of pushing fake news, some rich asshole Jr. doesn’t really like facts or accuracy.
On Wednesday, the BBC posted the following tweet to promote a story about presidential physician Rear Adm. Ronny L. Jackson, President some rich asshole’s pick for the new Secretary of Veterans Affairs.
The VA position was left open after the Wednesday firing of David Shulkin, who’d held the job since January 2017. President the rich asshole tweeted that he was nominating the “highly respected” Jackson in Shulkin’s place.
For some reason, Junior claimed the headline was misleading ― even though it was accurate. Jackson served as the rich asshole’s physician before being nominated for the VA gig.
You mean ADMIRAL Ronny Jackson who BTW was also Obama’s doctor? Just so we are clear and eliminate any of what your conveniently misleading headline suggests. twitter.com/bbcworld/statu…
Luckily, many Twitter users were there to help Junior understand he was making a big deal about nothing.
Guess you didn’t read the article huh Donny? Not really anything wrong with a headline stating a fact, you know. It’s a fairly standard core idea for proper journalism.
How is it misleading? They spoke the truth, something you very rarely do....
Didn’t realize personal doctors without management experience were qualified to oversee an agency that employs nearly 400,000 people. No one is saying he’s not an outstanding physician but this role is out of his league. Kinda like you and Aubrey O’Day.
One man pointed out that, yes, Jackson was also Barack Obama’s physician during some of his time in office, but the former president never offered him a job running a huge governmental agency.
Um, Obama didn't nominate him, your Daddy did. Can I get a sweet gig too if I say he's taller and weighs less than he actually does?
nsway
One person also reminded the rich asshole Jr. that Jackson has no experience running huge government agencies at all.
Yeah, that one...the one who has no experience as an administrator of anything, let alone the second largest bureaucracy in the U.S. government. Not good for veterans, only good for your father. Bad for the country. You are and will always remain a knee-jerk moron.
Some tried to explain what the word “misleading” really means.
Misleading would be like someone saying that they met with the Russians to discuss adopting Russian children, but discussing a completely different subject.
Others wondered if the rich asshole Jr. should talk to Jackson about his tendency to post simplistic tweets.
I see that Grandpa Spouting Off Disorder is genetic on his father's side. Maybe ADMIRAL Jackson can prescribe him something for that.
POLITICS
the rich asshole Has No Idea Why He Gets To Fill So Many Empty Court Seats
He should be thanking Mitch McConnell. He thinks Obama just mysteriously left him 100+ court vacancies. 🤦
WASHINGTON ― President some rich asshole marveled Thursday at all the federal court vacancies he gets to fill and wondered why President Barack Obama left him so many ― apparently unaware that Senate Republicans blocked Obama’s judicial nominees to those seats for years in hopes that a GOP president would fill them.
“You know, when I got in, we had over 100 federal judges that weren’t appointed,” the rich asshole said at an infrastructure event in Ohio. “I don’t know why Obama left that. It was like a big beautiful present to all of us. Why the hell did he leave that? Maybe he got complacent?”
The whopping 108 court vacancies the rich asshole inherited when he took office was a present ― that’s double the number that Obama inherited when he became president ― but it wasn’t from Obama. It was from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), whose record of blocking Obama’s judicial nominees will go down as his greatest legacy.
Under McConnell’s leadership, Republicans leaned on every procedural rule in the book to stop Obama’s court picks. They refused to recommend judicial nominees to Obama’s White House. They slow-walked committee hearings. If a nominee cleared the committee, Republicans made the person wait three times longer for a Senate confirmation vote than did President George W. Bush’s nominees. Their efforts to deny judicial nominees the ability to even get a vote on the Senate floor ultimately led Democrats to change the rules in order to make it easier to advance nominees.
When Republicans won control of the Senate in the fall of 2014, it got even harder for Obama’s judicial nominees. By the fall of 2015, the GOP was confirming judges at the slowest rate in more than 60 years and had left the federal bench emptier than it had been in decades. By the end of Obama’s presidency, Republicans had driven up the number of judicial emergencies ― when a court is so overburdened it can barely function ― from 12 to 43 in the span of two years.
McConnell, of course, also prevented Obama from filling a Supreme Court seat in early 2016. the rich asshole’s first major achievement as president was confirming Neil Gorsuch to that seat ― the final step in a plan that McConnell had set in motion a year earlier.
This was the strategy all along by McConnell: hold open as many court seats as possible under Obama so a future Republican president could fill them. It worked.
But for now, the rich asshole is just mystified at how he got so lucky.
“We were left a present!” he told the Ohio crowd. “It was like the gift from heaven. We were left judges .... Amazing. It was the gift. Thank you very much, President Obama. We all appreciate it. What happened? How did he do that? How did he do that?”
POLITICS
the rich asshole Lawyer’s Lawyer Issues Absurd Defense Of Client’s Threats To Megyn Kelly
An attorney for Michael Cohen insists there’s “another side” to vicious messages sent by the notorious the rich asshole defender.
Megyn Kelly grilled the lawyer representing President some rich asshole’s personal attorney Michael Cohen on Thursday morning over Cohen’s “vulgar and ... arguably threatening comments” as well as the threats he allegedly made against Stormy Daniels.
Kelly first brought up an incident from 2015 when Cohen laid into reporter Tim Mak over a Daily Beast story about Ivana the rich asshole accusing her former husband of “violating” her.
“You write a story that has some rich asshole’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up,” Cohen told Mak. “For as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet.”
About his client’s rhetoric, lawyer David Schwartz told Kelly: “When your boss is being threatened like that? Everybody should want an employee like this. Who would be so loyal, so loyal to your boss that you would protect that person.”
The “Today” show conversation continued with Schwartz saying that Cohen had never threatened anyone, specifically former adult film star Stormy Daniels; that Cohen “doesn’t do that”; and that if he were going to do that, “he does it to someone’s face.”
Daniels, who took hush money in 2016 to hide an alleged affair with some rich asshole a decade earlier, claims that Cohen ordered a threat against her in a Las Vegas parking lot in 2011.
Schwartz insisted, “He would never do something like that.”
Kelly fired back that “Michael Cohen does have a history of making vulgar and allegedly or arguably threatening comments.”
“I myself have been on the receiving end of those, as you know,” said Kelly.
She then pointed to one instance, after a 2016 election debate, in which Cohen retweeted a series of threatening messages ― one of which included a call to “gut” Kelly.
“So you’re not Michael’s favorite person,” said Schwartz. “It’s not a love connection, OK, so all right.”
“Michael Cohen does have a history of making vulgar and allegedly or arguably threatening comments, and I myself have been on the receiving end of those.” @megynkelly to Michael Cohen's attorney, David Schwartz
Kelly didn’t like that response. “You make light of it now,” she said, “but I’m telling you, in response to that allegation that I received death threats, I had security guards following me around and that my old boss called Michael Cohen directly to say, ‘If Megyn Kelly gets killed, it’s not going to help your client some rich asshole get elected.’ And Michael Cohen didn’t care.”
Schwartz suggested that Cohen was actually “trying to help.”
“He was trying to help me!?” said Kelly. “He was trying to help me? By suggesting that I should be gutted?”
Schwartz then tried the two-sides-to-every-question approach.
“I don’t accept everything that you’re saying, because he has another side to the story. Maybe one day you guys can talk this out,” he said.
“Because there are two sides to every story,” he added. “It’s not just Megyn’s side of the story. There are other sides.”
“It’s not just my side,” said Kelly. “Read Twitter!”
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